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examining cinematic prose
i think a lot of writers, science fiction ones especially, take cues from movies and television. this has an effect, of course, on pacing and plot and tropes, but i'm particularly interested in what it does to prose.
the thing i'm going to call "cinematic prose" is dominated by showing rather than telling. it focuses on the details of the now: what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled. put simply, the POV character acts as a camera, and details are chosen from that frame. it can be very effective: immediate, visceral, and intimate.
however, writing can do things that film can't, especially with time and distance. in prose there is always the option to grasp a thought or detail that is out of the frame and seamlessly integrate it into the flow of narrative. an author can tell a reader many important, revealing things very quickly, one after another. telling, the bugbear of cheesy writing advice, is a versatile, useful tool.
for example, here's a paragraph from tolkein in the silmarillion:
this small passage is beautiful. you feel the cadence of it; it's like a dirge of grief as it lists beautiful thing after beautiful thing irreversibly marred by malice. there's no cinematography here. the picture is taken from a great distance, a brief collage of sorrow. telling can gather: it can pick five things out of a person's life and arrange them in a summoning circle to capture their spirit. here's the most memorable (and damning) description of a person i've ever read:
that last sentence -- he can't even fry a hamburger -- is perfect. we don't have to watch anyone eat a burnt hamburger; we never get closer to the man than the shape of a tower over yonder, and yet in two lines you know exactly who he is and how the speaker feels about him.
as an exercise, i tried writing the same moment several different ways, using differing levels of cinematic versus telling prose. to make it fun i used steve and tony, obviously.
the first set is tony having a miserable time at steve's funeral after civil war.
i'm curious which of the versions above people like best, and what y'all think are the pros and cons of cinematic versus telling prose. i have more thoughts about how this stuff affects pacing and reader experience, but it's late and i hope this is enough to start a conversation.
the thing i'm going to call "cinematic prose" is dominated by showing rather than telling. it focuses on the details of the now: what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled. put simply, the POV character acts as a camera, and details are chosen from that frame. it can be very effective: immediate, visceral, and intimate.
however, writing can do things that film can't, especially with time and distance. in prose there is always the option to grasp a thought or detail that is out of the frame and seamlessly integrate it into the flow of narrative. an author can tell a reader many important, revealing things very quickly, one after another. telling, the bugbear of cheesy writing advice, is a versatile, useful tool.
for example, here's a paragraph from tolkein in the silmarillion:
"[...] nonetheless the evil of Melkor and the blight of his hatred flowed out thence, and the Spring of Arda was marred. Green things fell sick and rotted, and rivers were choked with weeds and slime, and fens were made, rank and poisonous, the breeding place of flies; and forests grew dark and perilous, the haunts of fear; and beasts became monsters of horn and ivory and dyed the earth with blood."
- J. R. R. Tolkein, The Silmarillion
this small passage is beautiful. you feel the cadence of it; it's like a dirge of grief as it lists beautiful thing after beautiful thing irreversibly marred by malice. there's no cinematography here. the picture is taken from a great distance, a brief collage of sorrow. telling can gather: it can pick five things out of a person's life and arrange them in a summoning circle to capture their spirit. here's the most memorable (and damning) description of a person i've ever read:
“See that fire tower over there? The man in that tower—you take him fifty yards away from that tower and he’s lost. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know nothing. He can’t even fry a hamburger.”
- John McPhee, The Pine Barrens
that last sentence -- he can't even fry a hamburger -- is perfect. we don't have to watch anyone eat a burnt hamburger; we never get closer to the man than the shape of a tower over yonder, and yet in two lines you know exactly who he is and how the speaker feels about him.
as an exercise, i tried writing the same moment several different ways, using differing levels of cinematic versus telling prose. to make it fun i used steve and tony, obviously.
the first set is tony having a miserable time at steve's funeral after civil war.
1: Tony shifted his weight from foot to foot, brushing against Steve’s friends standing to either side of him. The gaze of the crowd clung to him like a water-soaked woolen blanket. They had to know this was his fault. Tony pressed his lips together and looked down at his program, already spattered with rain drops, and waited for Sam to finish the eulogy.
2: Tony had a rock in his shoe. It was driving him nuts. It pinched right in the arch of his foot, wedged in between two stitches in the leather lining the sole. He wanted to sit down and pull the shoe off but he couldn’t, not here. He was going to have to endure it. He had to stand there, listening to Sam give Steve’s eulogy, and let it dig in.
3: Tony felt trapped, listening to Sam give Steve’s eulogy. His guilt pinched and pulled at him, and he had to hide it, endure it in silence, until he could get away and grieve in private.
4: Tony watched them put Steve (not Steve, an LMD of Steve, everything about this was fake) in the ground. It rained. He hated it.the second is of steve having bad coffee memories.
1: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine,” Steve says, even though it goes down too smooth, sweet and rounded over his tongue, nothing like the sharp, narrow taste of coffee brewed in a hurry with a percolator over smokeless fire. The foam on top forms a delicate fern in white and tan, marred from the touch of his lips to the mug’s rim. He rotates the mug on its saucer until the handle points due north, then folds his hands in his lap.
2: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine.” It is fine — Steve can drink this. Not a big deal. He just doesn’t like how they serve coffee these days, that’s all. The first time he had a latte he’d thought now this is a hell of a lot better than the gritty burnt shit we get as rations usually, and then he’d realized that usually was gone forever. He’d tried going to a diner where kitchen grease shone in little glints of blue off the surface of their bitter, black coffee, but it turned out the familiarity was as bad as the change. Now Steve habitually orders water. It’s cheaper, besides.
3: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine,” Steve says, even though it isn’t. Modern coffee reminds him how much has changed. The stuff he was used to was burnt. The boys’d always spent the first hour on the march every morning picking grounds out from between their teeth.
4: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine,” Steve lies. Great job, Captain Rogers, you acted like a normal civilian for five minutes. Extra postage allowance for you!writing the same thing a bunch of different ways was really interesting. i tried for close cinematic (1), more distant cinematic (2), straightforward telling (3) and blunt as fuck (4). i liked 2 and 4 the best; they felt the most punchy to me; clear and hard-edged instead of mushy. i'm going to push my range harder in the future, because i want to give my reader not just what's happening in the present but also the context: how the character relates each moment to their past, their relationships, their factional knowledge and beliefs. my writing isn't there yet, but i have aspirations, yo, and i'm getting better all the time.
i'm curious which of the versions above people like best, and what y'all think are the pros and cons of cinematic versus telling prose. i have more thoughts about how this stuff affects pacing and reader experience, but it's late and i hope this is enough to start a conversation.
no subject
If I imagine that each of the Steve sentences is the first line of a story, I expect:
1 is a mission fic. Fury or Coulson is about to send Steve off somewhere and he doesn't feel ready but he's going to do it anyway. There'll be lots of action and probably some explosions.
2 is explicitly going to be about Steve finding his way in the modern world. There's going to be a lot of introspection, he'll probably wander off on his own for a while, and then Tony or someone will find him and they'll talk and have a Moment and then Steve will order a matcha and like it.
3 this one is also about finding his way in the present, but darker, it's going to be about dealing with trauma and there may be a therapist OC at some point. Bucky figures heavily.
4 is probably a team fic, more lighthearted with some funny bits, and it may not even be steve's story even though it's his POV. Maybe this is the one where Thor's buddies trash SHIELD HQ, or the one where Clint gets trapped in an Iron Man suit.
All of them somehow address Steve's relationship with his past, but to different degrees and with different focus.
So I think each type of prose has its uses and can be very important in setting the tone for the entire plot and progression of a story, but none of them is objectively better or worse. I'd read and enjoy all of those stories I just imagined.
no subject
Particularly interesting to me is what you got out of #4 -- if I was writing the story with that line it'd be the meanest one. To me a Steve who will admit he's lying and think stuff that sarcastically self-hating is pretty broken. (MCU Steve is the saddest Steve.)
no subject
It's harder to do this for the Tony sentences because they're all closely tied to one particular event, but they each set a different tone that leads me to expect different kinds of stories, too.
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Of course, you can't build an entire piece of writing out of only #4. Or, I don't think you can. Maybe that's why Hemingway's writing is still remembered.
#1 feels like....well, like an example of "how to write." It's technically very pretty. It's also...dull. It's the kind of writing that can get overused very quickly, which is how you end up in that whole mess of too many details without any one rising to focal importance, so the setting gets lost in too many frills. Losing the forest for the trees, etc etc. #1 is useful, i think, for jarring a reader out of the head of the character. Which, I guess, is useful from time to time! But a whole story written like that ends up feeling quite distant. I rejected a lot of stories for publication based on that too-distant POV.
...#1 is the mediocre valley of prose. Lol
no subject
i really like #4 for both of them (maybe the best) but i agree you can't make a story out of single-sentence sucker punches. i also wrote #4 after writing the other versions, so it's the most refined/distilled, i think.
someone at some point said about homestuck that its strength is never saying "this is sad." horrible things just happened and kept happening to children and the reader is left to stare in shock at how BAD things are. there's a lot of bullshit in the hellpit of that stupid comic, but it did that blunt shit so well. i think 17776 let the sorrow and horror float closer to explicitly stated, but the first part where ten is so so so lonely and can't talk or do anything is beautifully and sparsely sketched.
oh my god 17776 totally has an "i love you" that is more powerful than any other option! an example! wow! (i know you didn't like it as much as me but, you know, different strokes.)
no subject
The gaze of the crowd clung to him like a water-soaked woolen blanket.
and
He rotates the mug on its saucer until the handle points due north
(while we're doing praise, this isn't a character observation but I think it's also extremely strong observationally, so in fairness to #2: a diner where kitchen grease shone in little glints of blue off the surface of their bitter, black coffee)
There's definitely a lot of sort of throwaway detail in there too -- time just passing in the narrative, getting us where we need to go without much specific impact. But while I admire the bluntness of #2 and #4, I think they're still missing a certain...inexplicability of human experience which these details in #1 pull in. Or maybe another way to say this: #1 and #4 both force us to see a single emotional focal point...but while I think foregrounding a point is important, I don't think that protagonists always know which spike of unhappiness is strongest for them, and the directness here makes sure that the reader and the protagonist are in agreement about which one it is.
I'm also inclined to argue with the idea that #2 is more distant cinematic view! I think what you've actually written is (2) as internally focused (we only see what the pov character is thinking/feeling, the situation around them gets much less pagetime), vs (1) as more visual, "cinematic" in a real sense.
AND FINALLY, I want to pull this out of #3, which has not gotten much love: The boys’d always spent the first hour on the march every morning picking grounds out from between their teeth. -- this kind of embedded history I think can be really strong, and it's tough to get in there in any of the other styles. Of course it's dull to say that probably a real story needs all 4, but -- maybe that. (I do think that the Standard Advice tends to produce pure #1, which isn't great for anything. I wonder if Standard 1st Person Advice produces a different one though -- maybe #3 or #4?)
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I found out a while back that some folk, when they read do not have a physical response to what it is they are reading. There is no imagining of a scene, there is no lockstep of empathy. It's just... words.
It makes me wonder if stories that are more cinematic in nature help bridge that gap. And stories that are a bit more abstract appeal to those that are not interested in image-based narrative or are more interested in the complexities of things?
Couldn't be sure either way, but my own experience with reading is very somatic. if I can focus, sometimes my breathing and heartrate respond to the illusory threat of a book. I gasp, I hold my breath. It is strange to think about the fact that some folk do not have that kind of an immersive book-coma experience.