posted
I recently received a less-than positive review from someone who is an aspiring screen writer. Most of his criticisms, now that I look at it, are coming from his point of view that the dialogue and story motion should better resemble what would look good on screen. I'm not so sure that advice fits inside the novel format.
What are your thoughts? Should a book read like a movie plays? Or are they different?
For one thing, in the novel you can tell us what the character thinks and feels. Unless they're putting words in the mouths of babies or farm animals, a movie can't do that. We can only know what the actors are able to show us.
Novels can also afford to be longer--you don't have to be able to finish it in two to three hours. That means you can have more complexity. There can be more and more important subplots. We can see things that divert the MC away from his goals and the main plot line, like real life.
This is all obvious, of course. But how many times have you liked a book and then hated the movie they made from it? The movie just lost too much of what had made the novel rich.
posted
Specifically, in this case, he criticized the dialogue. He found it too close to "real life" and seemed to think that would be especially bad in general but on film in particular.
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posted
Well, in a movie, dialogue is one of the primary ways that the story moves along. Maybe try making sure that each piece of dialogue is necessary?
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posted
Meredith said what I wanted to say very concisely.
Also, description can, in a way, be more powerful in a novel. In a movie the description is generally viewed literally, showing exactly how things look. In prose, the descriptions are filtered through a character, so the things that are described are reflections of the character describing them.
I think a lot of beginners start their first stories trying to write them cinematically, showing everything that's visible, but not getting into the character's head.
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Every medium has unique qualities that distinguish or disavantage them. Visual media rules supreme with immediate visual and aural sensations, but interior introspection and psychic access are the dominion of written-word expression.
Spectators are by and large passively involved in visual performing arts, except in circumstances like where the fourth wall is violated with voiceover direct addresses to an audience. A good written-word story involves readers more intimately than a visual performance due to psychic access' more immediate sympathetic connection with a reader's thoughts. Either medium benefits from what a spectator or reader brings to the story, though.
Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, among other distinguishing characteristics, violates the fourth wall with impunity. Its first-person omniscient narration is deeply interior in access. It works well for involving readers intimately, and which was made into a movie released in 1999.
Scripts and treatments only represent a fraction on paper of what a stage or screenplay story's dramatic action is. Directors, actors, foley artists, musicians, set makers, location scouts, computer graphics designers, etc., each of a host of artists contribute their creative vision to a story on stage or screen. Jobs that a writer of written word dramas must do alone and fully.
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, its stage directions are bare, but better at imparting the sense of a set or scene than many. Some of Shakespeare's plays' acts open with a messenger chorus (voiceover) to establish backstory, setting, theme, and introduce the relevant action to the audience. The physical stage directions are "exuent" and "enter So-and-so" and actions like "[They fight] . . . [beats down swords] . . . [To servant, handing a paper]" Romeo and Juliet. Directors and actors bring such bald and empty directions to life. Written-word writers must fully imitate pertinent physical actions and meld backstory and introductions into a story's dramatic action.
Otherwise, every medium still must tell a compelling and fully-realized story.
In a parallel thread, Inarticulate Babbler notes that Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), its 1987 release in book form places the movie title in first position on the cover. Bladerunner is the title of a 1974 novel by Alan E. Nourse. William S. Burroughs wrote a treatment of Nourse's novel, which inspired Hampton Francher's retitling of Dick's novel for the movie. The mass market paperback Del Ray published in 1987 is a novelization of the seven movie versions, which are based on the original Dick novel. Talk about legs, back and forth between script writing and novel writing.
Crossovers between script writing and story writing makes it less of a versus situation and more of a knowing a medium's limitations and advantages.
In my opinion, a scriptwriter advising that a written-word story should resemble what would look good on stage or screen doesn't recognize the characteristics that distinguish written-word stories from visual performances.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited March 10, 2009).]
posted
I think screen writing and novel writing differ enough that you should be wary, unless it's advice related to the plot. Novels and movies both tell stories so if it's about how to tell the story it may be relevant. I would want my dialog to sound real life.
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quote:Specifically, in this case, he criticized the dialogue. He found it too close to "real life" and seemed to think that would be especially bad in general but on film in particular.
What does that mean, "too close to 'real life'"? Too droll, too urbane, too brittle, too chaotic, unnaturally commonplace, lacking passion, excessively passionate; too many discourse markers, dashed interruptions, faltering speech, italic emphases, not enough? I have few clues.
If he means it's not a valid imitation of reality, maybe I understand.
Dialogue that's direct, like two tennis players volleying a ball back and forth without passion and fully understanding each other's meanings, isn't very authentic. However, dialogue like two badminton players volleying with a live handgrenade might be over the top.
In another parallel thread Shimiqua spoke of "Pinter pauses," which inspired me to read up on Pinter. The "Characteristics of Harold Pinter's work" Wikipedia article has several interesting insights into dialogue. One of Pinter's comments;
quote:We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'failure of communication' . . . and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
I am not suggesting that no character in a play can never say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.
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Well if you ... I mean, have you listened to some, you know, tapes of, like ... well do you remember the Nixon tapes? Watergate? I ... they talked in, well, they never seemed to complete a. Sentence.
They'd ... Sheesh! There was a time when Nixon started to -- then got distracted by another thought -- say something and now he's interrupting himself and then he's on a roll so he doesn't break it up with punctuation or pauses or anything 'cos he's excited and doesn't wanna be, sorry, want to be, interrupted by nobody not nohow.
So I can see how too realistic, too realistic dialogue, might be, like, you know, umm, I mean, waaay too much.
posted
Good point. I guess the review wasn't clear about that. I think there was a high volume of "so" and "well" maybe even an "um" here or there. But no strange pauses, jarring jumps in conversation, or strange punctuation. Maybe he thought people were too conversational?
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posted
Maybe what the critiquer is referring to is related to the fact that real life dialogue is often too meandering and meaningless to work well in fiction. In fiction it has to be boiled down to the essense and contribute to the story (while keeping the flavor of true dialogue).
Or, the critiquer could just be full of it.
Somehow, I don't think there's a fundamental disparity between good novel dialogue and good screen dialogue. Dialogue may be more important in a film, and a film may at times require more dialogue to cover for the medium's inability to convey a character's thoughts directly, but I'd bet in both cases, when done well, the dialogue is good story/fiction dialogue.
posted
In my work I encounter discourse markers frequently, roughly one word in ten. Personally, I find them annoying little nuisances because they have little meaning. Many people use them like one-word preambles to launch into a main point or as a spoken pause to gather their thoughts, sometimes as a way to soften or smooth the launch. Well is the worst of the lot as far as I'm concerned. Okay isn't much more palatable. Now and so discourse markers are a bit too much like browbeating, but then so can other discourse markers be. Like and you know (Valley-Girl Speak) I find vacuous. At least uh-huh, huh-uh, huh, hah, I mean, and oh have some meaning and potential relevance, but are still subject to interpretation. Two opposing counsel arguing in a colloquy or sidebar over the meaning of a witness' huh-uh response quoted from a deposition I find downright hilarious.
In story, excessive discourse markers are disruptive like excessive ellipsis points, dashed interruptions, italic emphases, bangs, and bolded text, even semicolons and colons. In face-to-face conversation discourse markers are mostly invisible but meaningful from the way they correlate to a speaker's tone and nonverbal communication.
Well--I mean--like, you know, uh-huh. Now, it was said, so . . .
posted
while many people say boring things in small talk like "how about this weather?" in real life, no one wants to read that in a story.
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posted
Do NOT take criticisms from an aspiring screenwriter too much to heart. Especially if the criticisms focus on dialogue or scenery.
What he was probably talking about is what aspiring screenwriters consider "OTN" (on the nose) dialogue. Message boards are full of debates on what exactly this means, but the previous posts in this thread are adequate in understanding what it means.
Today's screenwriting consists of "white space" and "verticality", which loosely translates into not much dialogue and not much scenery/direction.
All that to say that I'm sure the person who gave you the critique was honest, but take it with a grain of salt as it's filtered through that person's current writing endeavors.
posted
Well, there's a certain unreality in screenplays and the resulting filmed versions...what comes to my mind are how phone conversations are handled. The talking parties rarely say goodbye...the party on the other end from the protagonist seems to know just when to hang up...nobody mishears and asks anybody to say again.
The closest I've come to writing screenplays were some things I did for Internet Fan Fiction---a hybrid form, actually: a screenplay that was never meant to be filmed, only read, and then only by those in the know about the series.
About the only advice I can offer is: don't put every camera angle and shot into it. Toss in an occasional one, but not everything.
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