In a post on DIY MFA, John Matthew Fox says paying too much attention to movie craft can sabotage your skill at writing prose. “Novelists can definitely learn storytelling techniques from movies, but you shouldn’t rely on movies too much,” he says. “After all, they are a different storytelling medium, and books can do things that movies can’t pull off.”
Fox identifies five big mistakes writers make when they use movies as a model for their fiction writing:
- Thinking Only in Scenes. Movies only work in scenes and can’t easily summarize long stretches of time. Books can.
- Over-Reliance on Visuals. Movies rely on sight and sound, but writers have access to all the senses. Visuals are important, but writers shouldn’t skip other sensory experiences, including taste, smell, and touch. In contrast, actors can convey a lot of information with a facial expression, but prose can’t. Fortunately, you have dialogue, body language, and interiority in your favor.
- Sticking to a Single Pace. Movies can only work in real-time. “Every second in real life is one second in the film,” Fox says. This pace can be deadly in prose. Instead, writers can condense a day, month, or even a year into a few sentences, or stretch out a moment of high emotion.
- Focusing on Characters Externals. Some writers can get away with focusing on externals – what their characters do and say – without diving into their thoughts. But you don’t have to. “Internals allow us to hear the thoughts and innermost emotions of characters, and this provides an intimacy with characters that is near impossible to achieve in the same way on the silver screen,” Fox writes.
- Limiting Your Scope. Movies are more like short stories than novels, Fox says. Novel adaptations regularly omit scenes, subplots, and entire characters. When writing a novel, don’t limit your timeline, setting, cast, or scope based on what you might see in a 2-hour movie adaptation. Explore your options and stretch the novel’s boundaries.
