Novels as Movies

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SampleGuy

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After I learned about the show don't tell rule, it seems like you have to write stories as if they are movies. You show what the characters do and what action they choose, just like in a movie. However, you can show what the characters are thinking to expand some details. Do you think novels are basically movies,except with just words?
 

Jack McManus

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After I learned about the show don't tell rule, it seems like you have to write stories as if they are movies. You show what the characters do and what action they choose, just like in a movie. However, you can show what the characters are thinking to expand some details. Do you think novels are basically movies,except with just words?

A well-written story, for me at least, is more than just a movie. It should create a fictional dream and play like a movie in my head, yes. What a film cannot do, however, is show me the character's thoughts and feelings as if I were experiencing them for myself. In my opinion, if the story says something like, "Joe panicked when he saw the car turn the corner," it is telling what Joe saw and felt.

Showing the scene might read like this: The same blue sedan that had followed him to the store, turned the corner and headed toward him. Joe's blood ran cold and his heart raced, etc.

As a fledgling writer, the challenge for me is to create and sustain a fictional dream for my reader.
 

Maryn

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Are novels word-movies? Not at all.

Movies are limited--and it makes for hard screenwriting--to what can be seen and heard at the present moment. If you need to reference something which happened before, you have to create a whole separate scene showing it. Your character's thoughts, hopes, fears, disappointments, emotions, memories, superstitions, tastes, knowledge, etc. cannot appear on the screen in their original form; instead s/he has to show them through the only means the medium has, what s/he says and what s/he does. This is really difficult, which is among the reasons many people's first several screenplays are both poor and unfilmable.

Maryn, preferring fiction
 

TheNighSwan

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myself. In my opinion, if the story says something like, "Joe panicked when he saw the car turn the corner," it is telling what Joe saw and felt.

Showing the scene might read like this: The same blue sedan that had followed him to the store, turned the corner and headed toward him. Joe's blood ran cold and his heart raced, etc.

Why does every example of telling vs showing has the showing sentence be longer, more pompous, more unwiedly and less efficient than the telling sentence :D?

Edit: I'm all for showing over telling in theory, but in practice, whenever people give examples in a don't do/do format, I find the "don't do" sentences better, clearer and much more efficient by their directness.
 
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Bufty

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Movie scripts are a totally different medium from novel manuscripts.

In a movie script if it can't be seen on the screen it isn't mentioned. 'Joe's blood ran cold and his heart raced' has no place in a script quite apart from the tense issue.
 

Jamesaritchie

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Why does every example of telling vs showing has the showing sentence be longer, more pompous, more unwiedly and less efficient than the telling sentence :D?

Edit: I'm all for showing over telling in theory, but in practice, whenever people give examples in a don't do/do format, I find the "don't do" sentences better, clearer and much more efficient by their directness.

Show isn't pompous, unless it's purposely written that way. Writing fiction isn't about efficeinch. If it were, we'd just write short, declarative sentences, use no description or exposition, and no story would be more than five pages.

It isn't about theory, it's about letting the reader see what's happening, and see it in exactly the same way the POV characters sees it. This is what fiction is all about.

What you call "unwieldy and inefficient" is what readers call wonderful writing because it lets them live the story, and lets them watch it all unfold just like a movie.

If you want efficiency, read science journals. If you want good writing that captures readers, the only way to make it happen is to use show over tell.

Tell certainly has its place in fiction, but that place is limited, and if you want readers to make it through your story without falling asleep, you need to know how to use show, and that show, not tell, is what separates good writers from poor writers.
 

Jamesaritchie

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A good novel is always a visual medium, and should play out in the readers mind just like a movie. In this sense, yes, you need to write novels just like it's a movie. Forget the movie script. That has nothing to do with it. It's that movie on the screen that a good novel imitates.
 

virtue_summer

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I think of show, don't tell as a guideline, not a rule.

Secondly, are novels movies? No. If we were comparing visual media to written fiction, I'd think the short story would be more like a movie. Note how when novels are adapted to film they generally have to undergo massive cuts. Even so, though, written fiction isn't a movie. I think you can write it like one if you focus purely on sights and sounds, and structure it in a similar way. But that's a possibility, not a requirement and lots of novels thrive on introspection and emotion or on being inside the character where you also get to know what they smell, taste, and feel (physically). Novels also depend upon the reader using their imagination to create images prompted by the words rather than giving those images directly like a movie, and I don't think this is a small difference. I think it's fundamental.
 

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It all comes down to creating a vivid mental image, which is kind of like a movie that's left to your own interpretation.

One thing though that I've heard people echo that I totally agree with, is that you shouldn't write your book in the fashion of a movie. For example, if you are writing a fantasy book with big fight scenes, you wouldn't wanna beat them to death describing every single action everyone is taking for forty pages straight. It can get boring for the reader and hinder flow.

The show-don't-tell principle is important, but remember everything in moderation! :D
 

TheNighSwan

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Jamesaritchie > As I said, I agree with the principle of show vs tell; my question is, why do the examples people come up with actually make tell appear better than show?

All these examples give me the impression that showing is synonymous with "making the sentence stuffy and the action less clear".
 

guttersquid

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Something a book can do that a movie cannot is what I will call the "high-concept tell." This is something that cannot be shown, neither on film nor in a book. It must be told.

The best example I can come up with at the moment is "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." There is simply no way to show that visually or with words.
 

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Jamesaritchie > As I said, I agree with the principle of show vs tell; my question is, why do the examples people come up with actually make tell appear better than show?

All these examples give me the impression that showing is synonymous with "making the sentence stuffy and the action less clear".

I get that, too.

Some time ago, I posted an excerpt of one my fight scenes over on Goodreads. Someone gave me this show-don't-tell advice, but if I were to apply her example, I feel it would slow down the pacing, which is something that should not be done in a fight scene.
 

DreamWeaver

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Even if one accepts the idea that a novel is like a movie, to me it's not like *a* movie: it's more like a special extended-edition 3-movie series including commentary and extras.
 

Jack McManus

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Some time ago, I posted an excerpt of one my fight scenes over on Goodreads. Someone gave me this show-don't-tell advice, but if I were to apply her example, I feel it would slow down the pacing, which is something that should not be done in a fight scene.

And that's the trick, isn't it? Move the scene along, showing what it's like to experience it, without bogging down the story. Telling can be as wordy as you like, It's still filtering and therefore not as satisfying.

Furthermore, watching a movie, or any other visual medium for that matter, is largely a passive experience.
 

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I tend to visualize scenes involving activity. I suspect this is a consequence of watching a lot of movies, but it's not a bad consequence. From that, I've evolved the rule-of-thumb principle that if it takes a reader longer to read the narrative of the activity than it does for the activity to take place, it's over-written. POV comes into play, also. But I truly hate violent action sequences (like fights) which go on for paragraphs, when I bloody well know that actual real-life fights (not counting staged sporting events) are almost always very quick affairs. It's even worse when every movement is choreographed, which is something nobody involved in an extemporaneous fight would notice or recall. You're too damn busy trying to survive.

caw
 

SampleGuy

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From his memoir, Stephen King explains that writing is telepathy. I guess it means you are using words to communicate to other readers by transferring your thoughts onto paper. Readers have to be able to understand your telepathy message in order to enjoy your story.
 

Roxxsmom

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After I learned about the show don't tell rule, it seems like you have to write stories as if they are movies. You show what the characters do and what action they choose, just like in a movie. However, you can show what the characters are thinking to expand some details. Do you think novels are basically movies,except with just words?

No.

Seriously, books and movies both tell and show things, but they do so very differently. Books allow you inside a character's head in a way that a movie cannot. Some books just don't translate well to movies for this reason, or if they do, the story has to be changed quite a lot.

But a movie can show visual details in a way that a book cannot.

Think of a movie where there are little hints or clues about something scattered about a room when the camera pans over it. You can't really do this in a novel, at least not in the same way, because you can only describe the things the pov character notices, or if in omni, you'd only describe things that are important in some way.

It doesn't surprise me that The Sixth Sense, for instance, was written originally as a movie and not as a novel.
 
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SampleGuy

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What if you write a novel like a movie? That is how I think, unless I am writing in first person of the main character.
 
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Jamesaritchie > As I said, I agree with the principle of show vs tell; my question is, why do the examples people come up with actually make tell appear better than show?

Maybe because showing takes more words than telling. I'm sure there are occasions when showing isn't any longer, but for the most part they are. That's just the nature of the beast.

Look at it this way ... why is that warm, comfortable bed so much larger and heavier than the cot? They both can be used to get a good night's sleep, and the cot is so much easier to handle when I have to clean the room, or when I have to move to a new home. I just don't see why anyone would want the inconvenience of that soft, cozy mattress.
 

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One vital difference between a film and a book: the book requires a reader in order to fully exist. A good novel co-opts the reader's own imagination, life experiences and desires to fill in the landscape. Therefore, every reading is unique, and not at all like a movie.

With a movie, the writer and director complete the creative partnership, then present viewers with their vision. Much like a realistic painting, little to no imagination is then required of the end user, beyond that which was orchestrated for effect. Except for variations in visceral, emotional reactions, which differ from person to person regardless of the source of stimuli, each viewing remains identical.

It's the reason most readers find themselves disappointed by the screen adaptation of the book they cherished. "They" are missing from it.



 

Roxxsmom

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What if you write a novel like a movie? That is how I think, unless I am writing in first person of the main character.

Do you mean you're just panning a literary camera over a scene? That's called the objective or cinematic pov, and I can't think of any novels that do that throughout, though I'm sure some exist. The short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is a textbook example of this kind of pov. Never gets into any characters' heads. I personally am not interested in reading an entire novel like this (will just go watch a movie instead), but anything can work if you do it well enough.
 

kuwisdelu

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Why does every example of telling vs showing has the showing sentence be longer, more pompous, more unwiedly and less efficient than the telling sentence :D?

Because it was a poor example.

"Joe panicked when he saw the car turn the corner."

vs.

"The same blue sedan that had followed him to the store, turned the corner and headed toward him. Joe's blood ran cold and his heart raced."

Meh, in the second example, the first sentence adds multiple details that the first example doesn't include, so they're not particularly comparable. A more comparable example might be something like "When the car turned the corner, Joe's heart leapt into overdrive."

It's that movie on the screen that a good novel imitates.

A good novel imitates a movie? That's utterly ridiculous. Novels have existed far longer than movies have, and the idea that one medium should imitate another to be successful is asinine.

One vital difference between a film and a book: the book requires a reader in order to fully exist. A good novel co-opts the reader's own imagination, life experiences and desires to fill in the landscape. Therefore, every reading is unique, and not at all like a movie.

With a movie, the writer and director complete the creative partnership, then present viewers with their vision. Much like a realistic painting, little to no imagination is then required of the end user, beyond that which was orchestrated for effect.

I don't think that's entirely true. Simply because a medium is more visual doesn't mean it requires less imagination.

Any movie also depends on a its viewer to be truly complete, and interpretation in film is just as important as in written fiction.
 

SampleGuy

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Do you mean you're just panning a literary camera over a scene? That's called the objective or cinematic pov, and I can't think of any novels that do that throughout, though I'm sure some exist. The short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is a textbook example of this kind of pov. Never gets into any characters' heads. I personally am not interested in reading an entire novel like this (will just go watch a movie instead), but anything can work if you do it well enough.

I never thought of that. One of the reviews I got stated that one of my stories sound like a script.
 

Jack McManus

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Because it was a poor example.

"Joe panicked when he saw the car turn the corner."

vs.

"The same blue sedan that had followed him to the store, turned the corner and headed toward him. Joe's blood ran cold and his heart raced."

Meh, in the second example, the first sentence adds multiple details that the first example doesn't include, so they're not particularly comparable. A more comparable example might be something like "When the car turned the corner, Joe's heart leapt into overdrive."

The examples were given to show the differences between the two approaches, not compare similarities. But thank you for reinforcing my point.
 

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You're disagreeing, but not actually backing up your statements.
I don't think that's entirely true. Simply because a medium is more visual doesn't mean it requires less imagination.
Of course it does. The landscape and action and characters are already visualized for you. In color.

Any movie also depends on a its viewer to be truly complete, and interpretation in film is just as important as in written fiction. I didn't say anything about "interpretation". I stayed away from that subject, because it involves a completely separate aspect of book/movie appreciation; an after the fact study, as opposed to the actual experience. Not applicable here.
 
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