I have a deep, dark secret that I’m going to share with you: I’ve watched many, many more movies than I’ve read books. The sacred rule is that writers must read – voraciously – and in so doing I’ve broken that rule. Often. More often than not, in fact. Which raises the obvious question: am I qualified to write?
Consider the following:
A script, writes David B. Coe, is little more than dialogue and plot. The meat of it belongs to the directors, actors, set designers, etc., who collaborate to give it life. In adapting a rigid screenplay into a novel, he discovered that the only way to personalize the project was to delve deeply into the minds of its protagonists. In so doing, he found a means to make the novelization his own.
Or, as I’d like to think, he discovered the gravy. That is, the actors’ ticks, mannerisms, and gestures, the film’s location, tone, and mood, its pacing, cues, and score, none of which exist in books, at least not in the same tangible, caught on camera, sense of the word. A novel, then, is not unlike a script. Our film crew is our boundless imagination, and our editing tools infinitely workable wordplay.
Am I qualified to write? I couldn’t tell you. What I can say is this: I know when writing is missing gravy. And I love gravy.
I like the analogy….writing with gravy. And yes, I think we instinctively know when the gravy is missing. I think a novel is almost always better than the movie made from it. I see your point about actors filling in the gaps with gestures and mannerisms but in novels we can see inside their heads. We ARE the mannerisms. We live inside a well-drawn character in a novel and enter their world. We, the reader, invent the image of a character in our minds, not just physically but their emotions too. I’m often disappointed at the actor chosen to play a favorite character in a beloved novel. I’m often disappointed in the movie. Prince of Tides being one exception that comes to mind.
Thank you for stopping by my blog and commenting. I’ll be back up shortly because I’m hosting the Festival of the Trees for July.
Thanks for a thoughtful post and interesting question.
You’re exactly right – which is why I enjoy writing so much. It’s the filling in of those gaps that makes it so stimulating. And it’s because of film that I have a better sense of what needs filling.
If this applies, Happy Mother’s Day. If not, Happy Sunday!
Mmm… As someone who studied screenwriting in college, I’m not sure I can agree that a script is just dialogue and plot. Scripts are, above all, images. That’s why silent movies worked, why they still had scripts. Because you have to tell the camera what it’s supposed to show. Dialogue is just another tool to show characterizations or unfold plot. Dialogue is not the *heart* of a script. (Or it shouldn’t be, anyway.)
That said, there is a lot more “gravy” in a novel, for sure. There’s more room for it. And you can write it more beautifully than you normally would in a script. (Well, a script can be beautifully written, but there’s less point in it, since no viewers will ever see that.)
Going along with that, it’s the overt absence of imagery that forces a writer to capture in words what is otherwise so powerfully conveyed on film.
I think it was destiny that brought me to your blog on this day. This post resonates with me so much. I watch at least a movie a week. Lately, I’ll read a story a week too, but I have to admit 1) that’s not that amazing considering these are short stories and 2) it’s not even something I do regularly.
But great movies can tell us a whole lot about how we should write our stories. Movies allow a different perspective. There’s no such thing as camerawork in a book, but as a writer, you can describe your subject from a certain “angle”. Movies are great. I mean, after all, movies are stories too.
Ugh. I don’t know why my name never links to my blog, but here:
http://dooblabox.wordpress.com/
Wow! Been a long time since I visited your blog. I’m guilty too of watching more shows than reading books. But in all honesty the Kill bill series inspired my book just as much as the book Relic from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.
Stephen Tremp
I feel like we’re all coming out of the (cinephile) closet. This is fantastic