Oh, movies, movies. It\u2019s so easy to get seduced by the damn things. There\u2019s the lure of cash for one thing, the sweet unlimited cash of Fount Hollywood. But the seduction I\u2019m thinking of is the way that examples from movies can pull sideways at our writing.<\/p>\n
They pull at it when it comes to dialogue.<\/p>\n
We imagine Clint Eastwood growling, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to ask yourself, \u2018Do I feel lucky?\u2019 Well, do ya, punk?\u201d We imagine a bloke in a mask breathing, \u201cNo, I am your father\u201d to a certain Mr Skywalker. We think of the iconic, \u201cI\u2019ll have what she\u2019s having,\u201d from When Harry Met Sally<\/em>.<\/p>\n But we feel the pull at other levels too. There\u2019s the level of scene: the climax of some Bond movie, the \u2018You had me at hello\u2019 scene in Jerry Maguire<\/em>, the courtroom drama of Twelve Angry Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n And the level of story architecture itself.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a whole mini-industry that adapts the logic of the three-act structure of movies to the needs of the novel \u2013 and an industry which, by the way, generally argues that it\u2019s teaching Universal Truth, rather than one option amongst many.<\/p>\n And look. I watch movies. I like movies. I enjoy Clint Eastwood waving a .44 Magnum as well as anyone. If Renee Zellwegger goes all wobbly-kneed at a romantic speech from Tom Cruise, well, heck, I\u2019ll go all wobbly-kneed with her (albeit in a manly, restrained British way, of course.)<\/p>\n And of course, learning is learning. If movies inspire something useful, then good. The source doesn\u2019t matter; the learning does.<\/p>\n But I just want to wave a red flag of doubt around any idea that there might be easy, natural or inevitable parallels between books and movies.<\/p>\n I picked the \u201cDo I feel lucky\u201d quote from an American Film Institute list of the most memorable movie quotes of all time. Here are some of the other 100 quotes on their list:<\/p>\n What\u2019s striking about these examples is how utterly unmemorable when taken out of context. The only one of those quotes with a glimmer of writerliness is the one from The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, and that is a direct (mis)quote of Shakespeare. The last two quotes on the list above are simply clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n The fact is that if you put dialogue on a page and imagine that Tom Cruise or Meryl Streep is speaking it, you are quite likely deceiving yourself that the dialogue is a lot better than it is. The more you imagine the movie, the less you interrogate your actual writing.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, movie dialogue is fantastically compressed, compared with the stuff you and I put on the page. If you take a scene from one of your books and lay it out using scriptwriting software, you\u2019ll be shocked at how baggy your dialogue suddenly looks.<\/p>\n My books typically run to about 120,000 words. A movie script of the same thing might run to something closer to 12,000 words. It\u2019s not just descriptive prose that\u2019s being thrown overboard, it\u2019s most of the dialogue too. The extreme compression of screen dialogue explains why people walk off abruptly, hang up the phone without saying goodbye, make dinner dates without sorting out places and times. None of that means that movie dialogue is bad \u2013 just that movies have their own logic. You need to play by the rules that apply to you. They\u2019re different.<\/p>\n Much the same sort of thinking applies to scene-construction too. Novel scenes and sequences typically run to much greater length than those on screen. What\u2019s more, screen-sequences can be sustained by magnificent panoramas and beautiful humans. Books can\u2019t use special effects in quite the same way and you probably can\u2019t afford Nicole Kidman.<\/p>\n On the other hand, you can do what no movie director can properly do: you can directly access the interior world of the person experiencing the scene. My best \u2018action\u2019 scenes involving Fiona Griffiths have all been quite slo-mo affairs: Fiona slowly freezing on a Welsh mountain, Fiona stuck underground, Fiona slowly enjoying an unusual medieval religious practice \u2026 None of these things happened fast and that was kind of the point. The slowness of the scene allowed me to spend real time inside Fiona\u2019s brain and it was the interiority of the experience \u2013 not its cinematic quality \u2013 that gave those scenes their energy. If I\u2019d tried to jazz those scenes up to meet Bond-style action standards, I\u2019d have lost everything that made them special in the first place.<\/p>\n The same kind of warnings apply when it comes to plotting.<\/p>\n And look: you can use three-act plotting structures to help you with your novel. I know pro authors who do that and are helped by it. (If you\u2019re going to copy them, I recommend Save the Cat<\/em> by Blake Snyder which is the best of those books.)<\/p>\n But when those books claim, as they all do, that the three-act structure is somehow hewn by angels from a tree grown in the Garden of Eden, just remember that they\u2019re talking nonsense.<\/p>\n Yes, it\u2019s true that Hollywood venerates screenplays written in that mould, so they tend to acquire, develop and produce films that broadly follow the formula. But for one thing, a lot of screenplays that supposedly follow the formula don\u2019t look especially formulaic to me. Chinatown <\/em>is often spoken of as the best screenplay ever \u2013 and it\u2019s explained, in detail, how perfectly the script follows the formula. But if you actually read the thing, you notice more or less constant story-pressure, not just the beats you\u2019re told to notice. It\u2019s like eating a steak while being told all the time what a wonderful fish it is.<\/p>\n And novels are simply more flexible than films. Films, even little ones, are huge commercial affairs that have to attract an audience. Novels, with their tiny budgets, can afford to take any risk they want.\u00a0<\/p>\n So they can get away with very little story (On Chesil Beach<\/em>, by Ian McEwan), with tonnes of story (any big, epic novel), or with is-this-even-a-story? (Lincoln in the Bardo<\/em>, by George Saunders.) The idea that book plots have to map onto movie plots is just bananas. So much so, in fact, you\u2019d have to assume the idea is generated by someone who\u2019s never actually read very many books.<\/p>\n Indeed, if you do want to map books to screen, then it makes far more sense to look at the small screen not the big one.<\/p>\n The BBC\u2019s iconic (Colin Firth in a wet shirt) production of Pride and Prejudice <\/em>extended to six hour-long episodes. Their 2016 production of War and Peace <\/em>ran to eight hours. With that much greater running time \u2013 equating to three, four or even five feature films \u2013 the novelist\u2019s vision can express itself. Dialogue can play out, wrinkles of character can be explored, the pressure of story can move in a less artificial cycle than the (oftentimes predictable) three act one.<\/p>\n Oh yes, and since we\u2019re in the business of shattering illusions and breaking hearts, I may as well tell you that Fount Hollywood spews much less cash out to writers than you might think. Certainly, if you write a book that is already a big bestseller, then Hollywood will chuck cash at you. But if yours is a relatively unknown work and someone wants to adapt it, then the money in question is more like \u2018sensibly priced car\u2019 than \u2018Hollywood villa complete with infinity pool\u2019. It\u2019s nice to have, of course, but probably not life-altering.<\/p>\n That\u2019s it from me.<\/p>\n I have an apple in front of me. Do you think I should eat it? I\u2019m thinking yes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh, movies, movies. It\u2019s so easy to get seduced by the damn things. There\u2019s the lure of cash for one thing, the sweet unlimited cash of Fount Hollywood. But the seduction I\u2019m thinking of is the way that examples from movies can pull sideways at our writing. They pull at it when it comes to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":6630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n