Writer's Workshop: This is Not a Film · 5:06pm Jun 23rd, 2016
These days, most people get their entertainment from audiovisual media: movies, TV shows, video games, anime, the occasional play. My master's thesis was about the methods by which writers change their writing style depending on the media they are working for. The truth is, audiovisual media and alphabetic media (like stories) use very different techniques to convey meaning. Using the movie ones for a novel, or vice versa, will just make it seem weird, like you don't really understand how you're writing. I'd like to talk today about what these techniques are and how you can take the fullest advantage of the alphabetic form. For simplicity's sake, I'll focus on film, but depending on the writer, it might be anime or video games or what have you they're accidentally emulating. (I had one writer who narrated every move and called attack the video game did. It felt like I was reading someone's account of somebody else playing a video game.) So let's talk about the differences between novels and films!
When films were first invented, nobody had any idea what to do with them. They were in black and white, and they didn't have sound, and manipulating the image was a huge chore. Still, people were astonished at how realistic the images were, so film lived almost entirely on spectacle. Over time, as more people worked with them, these creators began to develop a language of cinema--cinematography. Editors learned when to cut and when to sustain, cameramen learned which angles to use, sound mixers learned how to include sound effectively, and writers learned how to write dialogue that matched the medium. This means, when you walk into your local cineplex and watch the latest blockbuster, you're seeing a century-plus of refinement and fluency.
Now take that same century and multiply it by fifty. Humans have been writing since they first starting getting together in groups and keeping track of things. Hilariously, some people didn't think writing was a good idea, like Plato, who thought that--no joke--writing would wreck people's ability to remember things. (The same complaint we hear nowadays about phones, huh?) Anyways, despite the naysayers, writing has developed its own set of tricks and skills, which probably come as naturally to you as breathing. However, as I said at the start, you've been twisted up a bit thanks to the amount of movies you watch. You write as though you were watching a movie in your head and writing down what's happening. I can see how that makes sense, but it's not working to the full potential of the medium.
Here's the thing. Movies are audiovisual. There is a ton of information you can convey in a single frame or sound bite. You can dress up a character to tell us about their personality, or use lighting tricks to create a certain mood, or play the right type of music to put the viewer into the same mindset as the characters. You can tinge the screen green to make the world feel unnatural, or hide a heartbeat in the score to set the viewers on edge. You can have the actors speak quickly or slowly, happily or gloomily, with all the twangs and twinges that we pick up on with our lizard brain. Sight and sound are the two most powerful senses we have, so talented directors can pack all the information they need into the scene.
With writing, you lose all of that. All your readers get is a continuous line of text--no colors, no sounds. (Unless you're one of those writers that adds soundtrack links to your stories, but just so you know, I think that's tacky.) Rather than think of this as a detriment, you should think of it as a privilege. Why? Because that means you get a better ability to convey anything that isn't audiovisual. Let's start with the five classical senses. In addition to sights and sounds, stories can also convey smells, tastes, and touch. Movies can try and cheat (Ratatouille, for example, uses fireworks to represent food that tastes good), but in an alphabetic text, all senses are equal. How about sense of balance? Sense of timing? Proprioception? How about senses no human has? Twilight's sense of magic, Pinkie Pie's Pinkie Sense? Good writers can explain how these feel just as easily as the senses of sight and sound. Before you go on to the next paragraph, try imagining how you would write a story using the location you're currently at. (Better yet, actually write it down!) Now, do it again, but this time, you can't use a single sound or sight. What does the room smell like? What do things feel like? Convey the taste of any nearby food. (Or lick the doorknobs; I'm not gonna judge.)
But we can go one further. You know what else isn't audiovisual? Thoughts. Emotions. Metaphors. If I want to convey that a character is shocked in a movie, they have to gape and recoil and otherwise ham it up, then hope the viewer understands. In an alphabetic text, I can just write, "He was shocked." Boom. Done. The reader can fill in all the details. Quiz time: how would you go about filming "the garden was like a daydream?" Soft focus, light dappling through the trees? Sure, or you could just write "the garden was like a daydream" in an alphabetic text, and the reader immediately understands. This is what "show, don't tell" means. All those cues and tricks a film has to use to convey something to you can all be packed into a couple words. Trying to convert those cues into text just wastes precious ink or data.
Here's one more thing: information. Alphabetic text is perhaps uniquely good at this, because you can deliver information succintly and directly, in a way audiovisual media can't. Take names, for example. In a movie, if a character walks onto the set, we won't know that character's name until it's either visually depicted or aurally spoken. This is hidden information, information that every character knows but is currently stuck in limbo. In a story, you can just... say it. Or how about the distance between two places? If all the characters know that the location between A-town and B-city is five hundred miles, in a movie, you still have to have one character say, "That's five hundred miles away!" In a story, you can slip that into narration, or mention it off-handedly while you're doing your descriptions of the two cities, or put a reference map in the inside cover for the reader to look at. You have plenty of tricks to convey information that a movie just can't use. If you stick to character dialogue and physical descriptions, the only tools movies have, you're unnecessarily hamstringing yourself.
I know you were probably bored out of your skull when your teacher tried to explain all of this in your last English class. You probably didn't care what the difference was between anaphora and anapest--or apostrophe and the other apostrophe--but the truth is, these are all your secret weapons to conveying all the things movies have spent a century trying to learn how to do. Shoot, I just brought up anapest and I haven't even mentioned how the meter and rhyme of your narration and dialogue can change the general feel of a chapter. But I think I'm at the point where I'm winding down now.
Here's why I'm sharing all this. When I write, I almost never give characters descriptions. In the very first paragraph of The Queen Beckons, I introduce a new character, Bronze Plate. I don't mention that his coat is brown, or that his mane is blue-gray. I don't mention that he's kinda tall, or even that he's a pegasus (until Rivet brings it up later). All I mention is that he is "shy" and "ill-suited to real combat." Those are the only two details that matter to his character. If I were to create an animation of him, then sure, I would need to know what color his coat and mane are, or how tall he is. But I'm writing a text, not an animation, so I have better things to do with my precious screen space. I don't even mention what Rivet looks like at all! I'm too busy trying to establish a tone, a feel, a presence. When I do give a physical description, it's because it's part of my message. The Sidereal Starbuck, for example, is described as "a tall, silver-coated pony in a long black cape that swirls wildly as he talks." I needed this description because I wanted you to understand his presence: he's tall, almost literally larger-than-life; he's silver, a color that speaks to me of magic, intrigue, and the paranormal; and he swirls a cape around, because he's a gigantic ham. Notice how everything I used conveys more than itself. If all I wanted to do was say he was tall, I wouldn't bother; it's only because I want to convey to the reader that he commands a huge presence that I mention it.
All this to say, don't write like you're describing a film. Trust your readers; all of those things movies have to work to include, your readers will create in their minds. In writing text, you have special insight into the minds of your characters, the information available to them, and the senses and outlooks they use to perceive the world. The magic of text, the art of writing, is exactly because text is not audiovisual. Don't pretend that it is.
A quick example: Harry Potter. If the movie had gone directly off the book, it would have been fourteen hours long and bombed. Books make lousy movies. Movies make lousy books. Books turned into movies can be works of wonder and joy in the hands of the right directors (or horrid nightmares like Starship Troopers if not).
Books can have long sections of fairly innocuous action where nothing is really happening other than Huck Fin drifting down the river on a raft. Try that on a movie and you get Star Trek: The Motion Picture with a thirty-minute stretch of the Enterprise just sitting there as the camera runs all around it. (Ok, I exaggerate a little. Six and a half minutes.)
Read everything Mark Twain ever did. He could capture a moment in text and wrap a bow around it. Example from Huck Fin that I'm using in Drifting Down the Lazy River:
I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some company.
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Yup. It works both ways. This is the magic behind adaptation. Details get shifted around or cut, characters act differently, plot points change subtly. See also: the musical version of Les Miserables.
As to Mark Twain, I'm with you there. Part of it is the honest writing style he uses, like the dialect, but hitched along for the ride in that respect is the sense of emotion and personal involvement we get from it. The way Huck narrates makes us understand his emotional state very clearly, which wouldn't be quite as easy in an audiovisual medium.
This is a very good blog post exactly because this is such a common problem. There are other plot elements and such that are often mis-learned from emulating games/movies, but I think this post does a good job of pointing to the main one: how a story is told.
This can be especially seen with book to movie translations that aren't very good. Compare the movie and books of, say A Scanner Darkly, or Blade Runner, or Johnny Got His Gun. Their prose is very dense, and it often goes on tangents. Ultimately, however, this is what makes those stories so good. The density is what gives important information to the reader, sets up moods, and even creates important reveals. The movies, meanwhile, can't and don't deliver information adequately. They're forced to cover a much smaller sequence of events, or to resort to awkward tricks that don't work as well in film (like an overwrought internal monologue).
That's not to say, however, that there is nothing that writers can learn from film. Some things do translate, to a degree. Scene transitions, for instance, can have some equivalency between book and movie. When to change points of view, when to switch locations, dramatic times to cut off a scene, and other such elements can often feel very similar between books and movies (though obviously, movies have a much smaller range of pacings/timings than books). But ofc, these sorts of exceptions were beyond the scope of this post.
Good essay, as usual.
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Thanks.
Good adaptations find a way to take what made the original great and redo it in the new medium. I just referenced Les Mis, so let's go with the next most famous good adaptation: Jurassic Park. What made that movie so good was that it took what made the book so interesting--the dinosaurs--and really cashed all its chips in on that.
4044788 I'm not sure I would agree with that as an exemplary adaption. The original Jurassic Park novel was more concerned with technobabble and scientific rigor than spectacle (like most Micheal Crichton works). The movie did a good job translating the tome into a good spectacle. Can something really be called a good adaption, however, if it transforms the original work so heavily?
Rants/tangents aside, I do agree with your point, if not your example.
I think the example I would use is Who Goes There?/The Thing. Both the story and movie focus on the same thing: paranoia. They take different approaches to it: the plots are different, and some of the thematic elements are covered differently. But the overarching pieces are very similar. They both focus on claustrophobia, isolation, and paranoia. The cast of characters is generally the same and fills similar roles (although the movie intentionally changed some of the character reveals to blindside readers of the story). They both use gross violence as a capstone of the suspense. And so forth.