Why a book is not a movie

Oh, movies, movies. It’s so easy to get seduced by the damn things. There’s the lure of cash for one thing, the sweet unlimited cash of Fount Hollywood. But the seduction I’m thinking of is the way that examples from movies can pull sideways at our writing.

They pull at it when it comes to dialogue.

We imagine Clint Eastwood growling, “You’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” We imagine a bloke in a mask breathing, “No, I am your father” to a certain Mr Skywalker. We think of the iconic, “I’ll have what she’s having,” from When Harry Met Sally.

But we feel the pull at other levels too. There’s the level of scene: the climax of some Bond movie, the ‘You had me at hello’ scene in Jerry Maguire, the courtroom drama of Twelve Angry Men.

And the level of story architecture itself.

There’s a whole mini-industry that adapts the logic of the three-act structure of movies to the needs of the novel – and an industry which, by the way, generally argues that it’s teaching Universal Truth, rather than one option amongst many.

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’ll go all wobbly-kneed with her (albeit in a manly, restrained British way, of course.)

And of course, learning is learning. If movies inspire something useful, then good. The source doesn’t matter; the learning does.

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.

I picked the “Do I feel lucky” 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:

• La-dee-da, la-dee-da (Annie Hall)
• What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. (Cool Hand Luke)
• The stuff that dreams are made of. (The Maltese Falcon)
• Is it safe? (Marathon Man)
• There’s no place like home. (Wizard of Oz)
• After all, tomorrow is another day. (Gone with the Wind)

What’s 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, and that is a direct (mis)quote of Shakespeare. The last two quotes on the list above are simply clichés.

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.

What’s 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’ll be shocked at how baggy your dialogue suddenly looks.

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’s not just descriptive prose that’s being thrown overboard, it’s 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 – just that movies have their own logic. You need to play by the rules that apply to you. They’re different.

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’s more, screen-sequences can be sustained by magnificent panoramas and beautiful humans. Books can’t use special effects in quite the same way and you probably can’t afford Nicole Kidman.

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 ‘action’ 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 … 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’s brain and it was the interiority of the experience – not its cinematic quality – that gave those scenes their energy. If I’d tried to jazz those scenes up to meet Bond-style action standards, I’d have lost everything that made them special in the first place.

The same kind of warnings apply when it comes to plotting.

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’re going to copy them, I recommend Save the Cat by Blake Snyder which is the best of those books.)

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’re talking nonsense.

Yes, it’s 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’t look especially formulaic to me. Chinatown is often spoken of as the best screenplay ever – and it’s 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’re told to notice. It’s like eating a steak while being told all the time what a wonderful fish it is.

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. 

So they can get away with very little story (On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan), with tonnes of story (any big, epic novel), or with is-this-even-a-story? (Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders.) The idea that book plots have to map onto movie plots is just bananas. So much so, in fact, you’d have to assume the idea is generated by someone who’s never actually read very many books.

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.

The BBC’s iconic (Colin Firth in a wet shirt) production of Pride and Prejudice extended to six hour-long episodes. Their 2016 production of War and Peace ran to eight hours. With that much greater running time – equating to three, four or even five feature films – the novelist’s 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.

Oh yes, and since we’re 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 ‘sensibly priced car’ than ‘Hollywood villa complete with infinity pool’. It’s nice to have, of course, but probably not life-altering.

That’s it from me.

I have an apple in front of me. Do you think I should eat it? I’m thinking yes.