Cinematic Writing

There was a workshop on cinematic writing that I almost passed on when I went to the retreat in July. Then I read the session description. This wasn’t a class meant for screenwriters, it was for fiction writers. As strange as it initially seemed to me, the study of film can teach us a lot about good writing. With minor exceptions, movies are all show and no tell.

Films don’t and can’t use abstract descriptions, generalizations, summaries, analyses or interpretation to let us know how characters feel at any given moment. Narrators don’t tell us that a character is sad, angry, filled with passion, ecstatic, or depressed. Filmmakers have to show those things to us.

Can you picture characters in movies that have these feelings? Can you see, in your mind’s eye a woman who has been told in a staff meeting that she’s been chosen for a promotion? Can you feel the quickening of her pulse, the whooshing in her ears that is her own blood rushing, can you see her self-conscious physical tics, maybe she’s pushing her hair behind her ear or clicking a ballpoint pen, can you feel and see her attempts to control her excitement and her happiness? Can you describe the physical sensations she’s having and exhibiting, without using abstract words?

There is no voice over in a movie to tell us that a character is recently divorced or has been left by his lover and therefore drinks alone every night, orders in from the same Chinese take-out, pops pills to sleep and hasn’t opened his mail in a month, but films can show us all of that within a minute or two.

Do you see the inside of this man’s apartment? The overflowing trash can filled with unread newspapers, empty liquor bottles and Chinese take-out boxes? Did you watch him come in with his mail in his hand and dump it on top of a pile of unopened envelopes on the chipped Formica counter? Did you notice that he’s on a first name basis with the man who delivers his food? Did you see him swallow something from a prescription bottle before he gets into bed and surfs through all night infomercials?

Nobody has to tell us anything and we know a lot about this character.

We can learn a lot from movies.

The medium of film allows us partial participation in the characters world through what we can see and hear. We can see the sensual response on the outside of a character’s body through his or her posture, gestures and expressions. We can hear noises and we can learn things through a character’s tone of voice. Our words allow us to explore the story world on a deeper level. We can express emotions by the way they actually feel in very concrete terms. Grief feels like a pressure or palpable weight that literally makes it difficult to breathe. Fear releases adrenaline that tenses our muscles, makes us ready to run, and heightens our awareness of sight and sound. There are physical manifestations that accompany all human emotions.

In fiction, we can also describe smells and we can describe tactile sensations

I tend to think I’m showing and not telling a lot more than I really am. When I read over my work, I am usually surprised to see how many abstract adjectives I’m using and how much more I could show my reader through sensory description.

Do you consciously avoid using abstract descriptions, or are you still working on it, like I am? When you describe a character that is experiencing a specific emotion, do you sit down and mentally try to summon up all of the physical sensations that come with that emotion? How do you show emotion in your work?

For extra credit and my undying admiration (I can't think of an actual prize), can you name the movies these pictures come from?

Free Writing

Since I’d never taking a writing course or workshop until recently, I’d never been under the gun to put pen to paper for five or ten or fifteen minutes and write in response to a specific prompt. We did quite a few of these writing exercises at Grand Lake and each time, the goal was very specific and it was very often to write in a way that I might not typically do. I was surprised at some of the results.

An odd sensation, almost a feeling of being possessed would come over me in response to a free writing prompt. It was very different from sitting in front of my laptop at home, consciously deciding what to write next.

There is something to writing in a workshop environment that reminded me of the spinning classes I used to go to. A cyclist friend asked me why in the world anyone would need to go to a class to ride a stationary bicycle. Anyone who’s gone to one of these grueling classes will tell you that few people would ever maintain the insane riding pace for a fifty minute session if not surrounded by a roomful of people. The only thing that ever kept me on that bike was peer pressure and the desire not to be the person who slinked off to the locker room before the class was done.

The writing exercises triggered an automatic kind of writing where the inner editor was not present. The urgency I felt was to complete the initial idea before the time was over. I imagine it’s possible to replicate that sensation alone with some practice.

One of the many prompts was to create an establishing opener for a scene by using only the physical setting with no dialogue or internal narrative – all show and no tell. The goal was to lead the reader into a very specific moment within a story world.

I’m not sure where my establishing opener came from. It’s not Chekhov, but here’s the unedited version of what I came up with:

The girl slid down from the high brass bed, plastic pads from her footed pajamas scraping the plywood flooring. She ran to the kitchen, dragged a vinyl seated chair to the counter, climbed onto it and reached for the cereal box. Tumbling moons, stars and four leafed clovers rang out into the bowl and echoed throughout the room. She sidestepped old-fashioned glasses, half full with brown liquid and bobbing cigarette butts, carefully swiped an overflowing ashtray and several more glasses to one side of the Danish modern coffee table and crouched to her knees in front of breakfast. The glasses emitted a sharp smell that pushed at her face and nostrils each time she lowered her head to take a bite. A fur coat lay in a heap on the floor behind the sofa. She stepped across the room to the turntable perched on planks above grey cinder blocks. The colorful album covers lay scattered on the floor and a large stack of records revolved around and around, the faint pop coming through the speakers each time they made a full revolution. Carefully, she lifted the arm and guided the stylus to the outer edge of the record on top. Her eyes widened and she snatched at the black knob and turned all the way to the left. Slowly, she reversed the knob’s direction until weak strains of music came through the speakers. She lay belly down on the floor in front of one speaker on the thin carpet, the perfume of spilled drinks and overturned ashtrays at nose level, her ear pressed to the speaker.

This isn’t something I can use for my current work in progress, and I'd revise it quite a bit if I did want to use it, but I really enjoyed the exercise and this whole scene just seemed to pop into my head from out of nowhere. By focusing on establishing this scene and not using any more description than what an outside observer could see, not describing the thoughts of the girl or narrating, it forced me to think of as many meaningful details as I could to convey something about this person and her environment. It also illustrated for me how frequently we tend to write in back story or provide exposition that we might be able to more effectively convey with more show and less tell.

Do you consciously review your work to see how much telling you are doing versus showing? Do you have any tips, suggestions, ideas or anecdotes about the benefits of timed free writing exercises? If you are familiar with the psychology of how free writing seems to unleash something different than what our more disciplined writing routines do, please share your thoughts!