One of the most common things I have to call out to my writers is when the characters just look each other without giving any context to to what they are saying with those looks. Another influence of screen storytelling, when the actor has room to interpret what the script says (or doesn’t say). In prose, it’s all up to the writer.
Lincoln, what I see more often is stories written as though the writer is playing a game. 'He stood in the corridor, the door before him. It opened, and he walked through. He was standing in front of an altar, adorned with grinning skulls. Looking down, he saw a bag on the floor. He picked it up' etc. So there's something for you to look forward to!
Thank you for this post. Very well-observed. Back in 2007 in the debut issue of the journal DEAD RECKONINGS (see https://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/dead-reckonings/dead-reckonings-no.-1?zenid=s0cjjikus20jovpelp8rh8hjt7), in a review titled "Books into Film and Vice Versa," I criticized two newly published horror novels on the same grounds: that they appeared to approach their respective narratives more from a cinematic than a literary POV, in effect trying to be books that felt more like, and that served more as, movies, thus undercutting their inherent literary value. I drew on, e.g., Daniel Boorstin's observation in his classic book THE IMAGE about the trend of "dissolving forms" that has characterized the modern media age, and that is predicated on the false assumption that form doesn't matter, so that some abstract, stable "essence" of a literary work can be seamlessly translated from one form to another (e.g., book to movie.) as a simple matter of repackaging. Boorstin correctly and powerfully argues that, contra this assumption, reading a book and watching a movie are categorically different experiences, right down to, and owing to, the different sensory and cognitive channels or means by which a person engages with each specific medium. It's a matter of each medium's basic nature. A book is not a movie. A movie is not a book. The concerted attempt to deny and forget this causes problems.
I've long thought one of the most perceptive acknowledgments, and more than that, *implementations* of this point came from David Cronenberg when he was making his movie version of Burroughs NAKED LUNCH. Cronenberg said his goal was not to adapt the novel into a movie. Instead, it was an attempt to imagine what NAKED LUNCH would be if it had originally been conceived and created as a movie instead of a novel. Deep, true insight there.
Thank you! I JUST wrote a piece about this (cue spooky music) that looks at the overuse of cinematic description in contemporary writing--the kind of description that manages to be both hyper-realistic but at the same time 2-D and lifeless on the page. It's become one of my biggest pet peeves as a reader. I empathize with fiction writers who are desperate for those movie option dollars, but if you're trying to charm Netflix, please just write a screenplay.
You just nailed something that bothered me while reading Sally Rooney's book Beautiful World, Where Are You. The overuse of one of her characters touching their face over and over and over again. I think she did the same thing in Normal People too. Anytime these characters do this, it would just pull me out of the actual story and I thought, why is the author doing this and why did an editor allow it to be done. Maybe I'm wrong about it but it irked me.
There are definitely other examples of this and I'm not trying to single out Rooney here, I enjoyed both books. I just recalled this because it seems aligned with the focus on character's faces in a way that feels more like something a screenwriter/playwright would write in stage directions: "character touches face nervously, etc."
This post confirmed how I feel with many of the thriller/crime novels I’ve read recently. As if I’m watching a movie that never ends. The action scenes are exhaustive and...exhausting to read.
Nice job, and nicely done on the LitHub mention this week.
Excellent stuff. I've read far too many novels and short stories (including some by Raymond Chandler, one of the faces on my personal Crime Fiction Mt. Rushmore) who get carried away with physical descriptions. Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the time, after my initial reading, I can't remember nor do I care if a character has a "pointy, devil-like chin" or a "bulbous, fleshy nose" or "ears as wide as a pair of barn doors blown open in a Kansas tornado." Those details mean nothing to me, unless they somehow factor into the plot.
Loved this. And I notice that in some of my earlier drafts of fiction these days, I have that kind of cinematic visualization much more than I did when I was younger, when any visualization I drew from was from actual life. *slaps own hand*
"Cluttered visual detail" or "cluttered detail" is a technique that Hilary Mantel uses very efficiently in the Thomas-Cromwell series. You always get details, but they are from very different areas.
In one sentence, the former queen Katharina has died and as we follow Cromwell walking through the palace to Anne Boleyns residence, we readers see details of how the rumours of Katharinas dead spreads: from the lady Anne's maids dressing, kitchen boys dozing, looking into a brewery and a cooling room for fish, going through the parks to the galeries and empores up to the carpets of Annes rooms, where she sinks on her knees and thanks the God, to musicians somewhere in the palace that tune their instruments for whatever activities might follow.
This technique achieves two things, I feel: it creates a dense atmosphere, because not only do we see Cromwell walking up to Anne's rooms, but we see the entire palace and its surroundings, up to and through the parks around it. And while Cromwell walks, he hears instruments tuning, but it is actually not clear where the musicians really are. For sure they are not in Anne's rooms.
Since the book is told in a way that whenever Cromwell is mentioned, he is mentioned as "he does/says/...", it really feels like those descriptice details are not those of the narrator himself, but of what Cromwell is thinking. And Cromwell had to think about everything, from past to present to future, that happens in England. That's what his job is all about, but that's also what sees him still alive as a non-noble person with that position on a court with many, many nobles. He has many enemies that look down on him, and thus, he needs to take care of any detail whatsoever.
This is super-helpful. When I was writing my first novel, I kept rereading favorite books and struggling to understand how writers made decisions about what to summarize and what to keep in dialogue in scenes featuring long conversations. Your solution--summarize the boring parts--is the most succinct, useful answer to that long-held question. Thank you!
One of the most common things I have to call out to my writers is when the characters just look each other without giving any context to to what they are saying with those looks. Another influence of screen storytelling, when the actor has room to interpret what the script says (or doesn’t say). In prose, it’s all up to the writer.
Lincoln, what I see more often is stories written as though the writer is playing a game. 'He stood in the corridor, the door before him. It opened, and he walked through. He was standing in front of an altar, adorned with grinning skulls. Looking down, he saw a bag on the floor. He picked it up' etc. So there's something for you to look forward to!
Thank you for this post. Very well-observed. Back in 2007 in the debut issue of the journal DEAD RECKONINGS (see https://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/dead-reckonings/dead-reckonings-no.-1?zenid=s0cjjikus20jovpelp8rh8hjt7), in a review titled "Books into Film and Vice Versa," I criticized two newly published horror novels on the same grounds: that they appeared to approach their respective narratives more from a cinematic than a literary POV, in effect trying to be books that felt more like, and that served more as, movies, thus undercutting their inherent literary value. I drew on, e.g., Daniel Boorstin's observation in his classic book THE IMAGE about the trend of "dissolving forms" that has characterized the modern media age, and that is predicated on the false assumption that form doesn't matter, so that some abstract, stable "essence" of a literary work can be seamlessly translated from one form to another (e.g., book to movie.) as a simple matter of repackaging. Boorstin correctly and powerfully argues that, contra this assumption, reading a book and watching a movie are categorically different experiences, right down to, and owing to, the different sensory and cognitive channels or means by which a person engages with each specific medium. It's a matter of each medium's basic nature. A book is not a movie. A movie is not a book. The concerted attempt to deny and forget this causes problems.
I've long thought one of the most perceptive acknowledgments, and more than that, *implementations* of this point came from David Cronenberg when he was making his movie version of Burroughs NAKED LUNCH. Cronenberg said his goal was not to adapt the novel into a movie. Instead, it was an attempt to imagine what NAKED LUNCH would be if it had originally been conceived and created as a movie instead of a novel. Deep, true insight there.
Thank you! I JUST wrote a piece about this (cue spooky music) that looks at the overuse of cinematic description in contemporary writing--the kind of description that manages to be both hyper-realistic but at the same time 2-D and lifeless on the page. It's become one of my biggest pet peeves as a reader. I empathize with fiction writers who are desperate for those movie option dollars, but if you're trying to charm Netflix, please just write a screenplay.
I'm definitely guilty of skipping the summary. Thanks for the tip
This is such a good one. I will definitely be sharing it with the students in my next workshop!
You just nailed something that bothered me while reading Sally Rooney's book Beautiful World, Where Are You. The overuse of one of her characters touching their face over and over and over again. I think she did the same thing in Normal People too. Anytime these characters do this, it would just pull me out of the actual story and I thought, why is the author doing this and why did an editor allow it to be done. Maybe I'm wrong about it but it irked me.
There are definitely other examples of this and I'm not trying to single out Rooney here, I enjoyed both books. I just recalled this because it seems aligned with the focus on character's faces in a way that feels more like something a screenwriter/playwright would write in stage directions: "character touches face nervously, etc."
This post confirmed how I feel with many of the thriller/crime novels I’ve read recently. As if I’m watching a movie that never ends. The action scenes are exhaustive and...exhausting to read.
Nice job, and nicely done on the LitHub mention this week.
Excellent stuff. I've read far too many novels and short stories (including some by Raymond Chandler, one of the faces on my personal Crime Fiction Mt. Rushmore) who get carried away with physical descriptions. Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the time, after my initial reading, I can't remember nor do I care if a character has a "pointy, devil-like chin" or a "bulbous, fleshy nose" or "ears as wide as a pair of barn doors blown open in a Kansas tornado." Those details mean nothing to me, unless they somehow factor into the plot.
Loved this. And I notice that in some of my earlier drafts of fiction these days, I have that kind of cinematic visualization much more than I did when I was younger, when any visualization I drew from was from actual life. *slaps own hand*
"Cluttered visual detail" or "cluttered detail" is a technique that Hilary Mantel uses very efficiently in the Thomas-Cromwell series. You always get details, but they are from very different areas.
In one sentence, the former queen Katharina has died and as we follow Cromwell walking through the palace to Anne Boleyns residence, we readers see details of how the rumours of Katharinas dead spreads: from the lady Anne's maids dressing, kitchen boys dozing, looking into a brewery and a cooling room for fish, going through the parks to the galeries and empores up to the carpets of Annes rooms, where she sinks on her knees and thanks the God, to musicians somewhere in the palace that tune their instruments for whatever activities might follow.
This technique achieves two things, I feel: it creates a dense atmosphere, because not only do we see Cromwell walking up to Anne's rooms, but we see the entire palace and its surroundings, up to and through the parks around it. And while Cromwell walks, he hears instruments tuning, but it is actually not clear where the musicians really are. For sure they are not in Anne's rooms.
Since the book is told in a way that whenever Cromwell is mentioned, he is mentioned as "he does/says/...", it really feels like those descriptice details are not those of the narrator himself, but of what Cromwell is thinking. And Cromwell had to think about everything, from past to present to future, that happens in England. That's what his job is all about, but that's also what sees him still alive as a non-noble person with that position on a court with many, many nobles. He has many enemies that look down on him, and thus, he needs to take care of any detail whatsoever.
This is super-helpful. When I was writing my first novel, I kept rereading favorite books and struggling to understand how writers made decisions about what to summarize and what to keep in dialogue in scenes featuring long conversations. Your solution--summarize the boring parts--is the most succinct, useful answer to that long-held question. Thank you!
I love reading discussions on this topic, thank you! Will definitely add a lot of these to my revising checklist!