You're Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie.
What film teaches us wrong about writing fiction
We’re in a golden age of TV (if not quite a golden age of full-blown cinema), so I don’t blame anyone for consuming a vast proportion of their narratives on screens. But so many issues I address with my writing students stem, I suspect, from subconsciously internalizing what works on the screen and trying to make it work on the page.
Here are 12 things that film teaches us wrong (and 4 that it teaches us right) about writing fiction or narrative nonfiction.
1) The most important thing is eyes!
Look at even the sappiest love stories of the 1900s, and eyes, eye color, and eye contact are barely mentioned. Jane Austen gives us the lovely dialogue “I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone gazing deeply into someone else’s brown eyes. Yet do a Control+F on “eyes” in any mediocre modern novel and you’ll get not only “I stared into his soft green eyes” but also a constant commentary on where someone is looking. (“He cast his eyes to the floor,” “Her eyes met Ralph’s,” “He glanced toward the audience,” etc.) So… What changed around 120 years ago to make us so obsessed with eyes?
Film happened. Specifically, two things: The closeup shot on an actor’s eyes to telegraph emotion (self-explanatory), and the “shot-reverse” shot, which might need some explanation. This is the film editing technique wherein a two-person conversation is filmed over the shoulder from one side, then the other side. In order for us to believe they’re really talking to each other, and for a sense of spatial continuity, the director makes sure characters are matching the “eyeline.”
That’s all fun stuff, but there’s no reason we need to bring that fixation to the page. It might be familiar from the screen, but is it really true to life? Is eye color honestly the first thing you notice about someone? Are you constantly tracking where someone else is looking? Really? (If so, stop doing that. It’s creepy.)
*Adding a week later: Enough people have taken the above to somehow mean “Never mention eyes!” that I feel compelled to say: Umm, of course that’s not what I’m saying. (?!?) I’m saying don’t use them like they’re the only tool you’ve got.
2) Scenes of people going about their daily lives with no real change are engaging and fun!
On screen, this might look like women around New York getting dressed in the opening montage of The Devil Wears Prada, or it might look like someone stuck in normal bad traffic on a normal bad day in Office Space. But onscreen, you’ve got music, camera cuts, closeups, colors, pretty faces… and the whole thing maybe takes one minute, tops. On the page, you’ve got none of those things, and a three-page scene will take people six long minutes to read (longer if they zone out and have to reread) and no one comes out happy.
3) You’re not allowed to tell us what’s going on!
In a movie, unless you have a voiceover narrator, this is true. You’re going to have to get all the context across through dialogue, little clues, maybe someone conveniently turning on the TV news at the exact right moment so the newscaster can give an update on the relevant situation. You want to show a lot of time going by? You have to show the seasons changing or all the calendar pages flipping. You want us to know it’s someone’s last day of high school, and this character is his older brother? You need for the older brother to say “Heyyy, little brother, congrats on your last day of high school!”
On the page, we have this amazing thing called exposition. The narrator can just tell people stuff. It’s the coolest trick. If you ignore that, and you teach us information by having a character say “Hi there, neighbor! Haven’t seen you since the funeral. How are you getting on without your wife, the big-shot lawyer? I hear the big 6-0 is coming up!” we’re going to kind of hate you.
4) You’re not allowed to tell us what people are thinking!
Quite similar to the above…
On film, we need to know that a character is lying, but kind of sad about it, and so the camera zooms in realll close, and lingers on Jodi Foster’s face doing its thing, and the music goes sad. That works really well! But you don’t have camera zooms or music or Jodi Foster’s face helping your story. So you need to tell us what someone’s thinking. Hey, here’s an entire series I wrote on interiority!
I don’t always blame this move on film consumption. Both journalists and lawyers, turning to fiction, have a hard time suddenly being allowed to put thoughts in someone’s head. This would be irresponsible journalism, and in a courtroom you’d get called out for speculation.
I also blame both this one and the one above on people hearing “show, don’t tell” and assuming it means they’re essentially supposed to write a screenplay. “Show, don’t tell” is largely applicable to emotion. If a student writes He displayed rage or She acted embarrassed, I’m likely to write Show this plz? in the margins. What it does not mean is that you’re not allowed to give us exposition or interiority. Neglect those tools at your peril.
5) It’s easy to acclimate people quickly to a complicated, unfamiliar setting!
You want to set your movie in a futuristic New York where every building has a flying car port on top and there are highways through the air and half the people are genetically modified to be 7 feet tall and the sky is red and everyone’s left hand is a phone and all the police are robots? Cool—that will take you all of about ten seconds to get across onscreen.
You want to do all that stuff on the page? You’ve got tougher options. Some writers think they’re going to get away with devoting about ten seconds worth of space to establishing the context, or not mention it at all until it’s way too late. Because it’s never mentioned in the movies, it just is! Other writers try to take the time necessary to let us see, in detail, everything we’d see on the screen in ten seconds, and that turns out to be around thirty pages—because on the page, everything needs to be explained. Readers will want to know exactly what those air highways look like and how they work and maybe even where they came from.
So what are we supposed to do? It helps to weave those descriptions in on a need-to-know basis (e.g., the first time a cop shows up we learn about the robots), and it helps to simplify. What might have been colorful texture onscreen just takes too much of a reader’s energy, and it turns out we don’t really need those robocops after all to make the story work.
6) Or! Settings are neutral backdrops!
One thing they love to do in Hollywood is save money when possible. You need two people to have a conversation, and a coffee shop set that’s already built and on the lot is a lovely choice. It’s got nothing to do with the story, and it’s meant to be kind of invisible, and that’s great.
I do think that setting is one of our most underutilized tools on the page, and there’s absolutely no reason to limit yourself to the budget or visual language of film. You have, right now, no matter who you are, an unlimited budget. And you might want to do something more interesting with setting, like picking one that puts pressure on characters, or one that presents opportunities for dynamic interaction.
7) It’s always best to throw people into a story with no context whatsoever!
Occasionally, a movie will start with a helpful voiceover or an effective establishing shot so we know what’s up, but usually we’re cast immediately in the role of the outside observer, just waiting and watching to see who everyone is and what their deal is. If you’ve ever watched a movie with someone who says “Now who is that?” five minutes into the film when a new character appears, you’ve probably found yourself saying things like “We’re not supposed to know yet,” or “We’ll find out.” And that’s part of the fun of watching movies; we’re both voyeur and detective, and since everything’s right there in front of us visually, we aren’t stuck not knowing what to picture.
On the page, though, a lack of context makes it very hard for readers to orient themselves. We don’t know what to picture, so we picture nothing, or the wrong things.
8) Once you’re in a scene, you’re locked in, beat per beat!
I once found an entire Reddit thread of people who grew up outside the US thinking that Americans end phone calls abruptly, without saying goodbye. They learned this from TV and movies, where you can’t really leap forward in time, but it would also be absolutely deadly to replicate the end of a realistic phone call. (“Okay, so I’ll talk to you on Tues—right, yeah, no, Wednesday.” Long pause… “Ten your time, or ten my time?” Long pause… “Oh, cause I’m on Pacific time till Friday.” Long pause… “Okay, tell your mom I said hi!” etc.) So what can a poor screenwriter do but have the character say “It’s a plan!” and just hang up the phone?
Fiction writers, not wanting their characters to be rude, are more likely to just give us the entire damn conversation, punctuated by He glanced out the window and …he said, tapping his cigarette. In other words, once the writer gets into a scene and starts to believe it’s real, and starts to picture it beat by beat, they write down the whole thing, cigarette tapping and all. This doesn’t just go for conversations… I’ve seen students needlessly replicate the entire process of going through airport security, the entire drive to the grocery store, someone’s entire nighttime routine.
We have two magical moves on the page that eliminate the need to do this. One is summary. You can write, “It’s a plan,” he said. They firmed up the details and then he hung up, finished his cigarette, and went to find Margot.
The other is just plain skipping ahead. “It’s a plan,” he said. Ten minutes later, he was on Margot’s doorstep, coughing from his cigarette-induced emphysema.
9) It’s fun to make people think they’re seeing one thing and then zoom out like “Ha ha, you fool, it was something else!” People totally love that!
I usually hate this even in movies. Someone is finally giving the heartfelt speech they need to give, but then we zoom out and Psych! they were only rehearsing it in the mirror. These are called visual reveal shots or pullback reveals, and when they work, that’s why they work—because they’re visual.
I do love a surprise narrative shift, as in Life of Pi, in which we learn the narrator hasn’t been entirely straightforward; or one like in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which the narrative turns out not to be what we thought it was. But both of those are fundamentally different than, say, learning that the person our point-of-view character has been dealing with throughout the novel is (surprise!) her daughter, and both of them knew it all along. That just becomes withholding, and it’s a point of view failure.
10) Everyone can hear the music in your head!
I love a great movie soundtrack. I particularly love modern TV ending an episode with the absolute dead-on perfect song. (Think “You Are Sixteen” ending that one episode of Mad Men.) But there are fiction writers out there trying so hard to give their novels a soundtrack for ambience or coolness, and it mostly doesn’t work.
And it’s one thing if you mention songs just about everyone can hear in their heads, like “Our Love is Here to Stay” or “Let It Be” (without quoting them, please, unless you want to shell out thousands of dollars, since those songs are not in public domain…) but it’s another if you can’t stop name-dropping your favorite fringe bands. (A notable exception would be when the story is about music and about those lesser-known bands or even made-up bands—e.g., Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.) Those songs are probably deeply evocative for the author, but most readers just feel nothing at best and excluded at worst.
11) A story is always made entirely of scenes, with very little summary!
Someone needs to write a doctoral dissertation about American literature coming of age with cinema and adopting a scene-scene-scene-scene structure that is of course not the only mode of storytelling. But in brief: Other traditions use more summary, more meandering exposition. And other eras in history relied far less on scene. Writing scene-based fiction is absolutely fine—it’s what I mostly love to read and write—but it’s important to know it’s not your only choice.
12) Memories are full transportations back in time that you need to be startled out of!
Of all these, this might be my biggest pet peeve. And this topic is complicated enough that it deserves its own post, which I’ll be doing soon. But in brief: When you have a memory, do you stare into space while you’re transported back in time, where you then relive the memory precisely, in full chronological order, until someone calls your name and “startles you out of your reverie”? No?? Then (with love) why the hell are you writing memory that way? And why, to begin with, are you assuming that every glimpse into the past has to come through the vehicle of character memory rather than just being offered in narration?
You’re doing it because you’re copying film and its limitations. For absolutely no reason at all. More on all that (and other options) soon.
BUT! There are some things we can absolutely learn from screenwriters, craft elements it’s often easier to observe onscreen.
Like for instance…
1) Clear, clear, clear stakes help hook people in.
Watch any cheesy reality show and they’ll remind you again and again what’s at stake and why it matters to people. Will Agatha pick the $500 more conservative wedding dress her conservative mother wants, or the $15,000 dress that makes her look like a deranged mermaid but will thrill her creepy fiancé and make her feel hot even if she can’t breathe in it? Find out after the break! When you see the interview portions of a show like Top Chef, you can tell the producers have asked questions like “Why can’t you go home this week?” and “Who would be proud if you won?” and “What are you afraid of right now?”
Fiction is often going to approach this much more subtly, but at any point in your story it’s helpful if both you and the reader have an understanding of what success would look like for your characters, and what the worst case scenario would be.
2) Every scene is there for a reason.
It’s quite hard to find a throw-away scene, or a redundant scene, on film… because everything costs a lot of money. If there’s a pointless scene that shows people doing stuff they’ve already done, someone is going to notice and cut it before millions of dollars get spent.
While you do have that lovely unlimited budget, theres a lot to learn here from those who don’t. You’re spending space and time, if not money. Don’t waste either of those.
3) Even then, amazing stuff gets cut.
We lost something beautiful when they stopped making DVDs with directors’ commentary and directors’ cuts. I (no joke) learned more about writing from a Darren Starr voiceover commentary on one Sex and the City episode than I learned in several writing classes. I’ll tell you about it another day. But it was always so useful to see the cut scenes, to see what they did spend big money to shoot and then still cut. The Gosford Park DVD had these gorgeous scenes with an entire cut storyline for Derek Jacobi’s character, a character that was reduced to a stolid, nearly dialogueless butler in the final cut. And they were amazing scenes! Starring Derek Frickin Jacobi!
The thing is, the better you get at writing, the better the content is that you have to cut—which hurts. Let’s assume Shakespeare cut a lot of beautiful lines that didn’t ultimately serve the play. Imagine Shakespeare balling up the page—a page that contained literal lines of Shakespeare!!—and tossing it into the fire. You can’t witness that firsthand, but you can see the scenes that took days of filming and passion and talent and money, and that ultimately weren’t essential.
4) Structural expectation can be a form of momentum.
Anyone who’s ever gotten hooked into a Top Ten Videos of 1992 countdown or a House Hunters episode or a season of Love is Blind knows the experience of not even really wanting to watch this, but feeling almost contractually obligated to see this thing through to the end of the promised setup. We could call that “structural momentum.”
Some writers make quite literal use of this force, writing stories structured like lists or ones that adhere to a formula (like the romance novel) with strong structural expectations. But there are other ways to harness this, too. For instance, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier begins: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” We’ve been promised something, and now we want to read not just for the intrinsic plot, but to see why it’s so sad. Or think of something like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which he uses two kinds of structural momentum: First there’s the promise that Scrooge will be visited by three ghosts, and so we can’t look away till we’ve met all three; and then there’s the countdown to Christmas morning, the structure of Christmas itself, another expected arrival we can’t look away from.
This is what the folks who produce reality shows are obnoxiously good at. (Only five days left till the weddings! Will they say ‘I do,’ or walk away forever?) The next time we’re sucked in, we can at least learn from it.
Let’s keep brainstorming…
In the comments, please tell me other things you’ve learned, or had to unlearn, from film. And please recommend some good movies to me… I’m about to have a long plane flight and need a well-written distraction.
I learned a cool timeline transition trick from watching a particular episode of THE WEST WING. Each time they needed to switch timelines, they had a character walking through a door. Then, voila!, that same character was walking out a door in a scene in the other timeline. It was elegant and it worked well because they only did this in that one episode. (If they'd done this in every single episode, it would have gotten pretty tedious pretty fast.) In terms of a connection to writing fiction, I'm thinking of scenes where a character is interacting with an object--and then that object transports them to a memory. Or something similar....
I learned that the scene of lovers frantically tearing off their clothes has become cliche, boring. Even if I wrote a graphic sex scene, I'd concentrate on touch.