Presented in CinemaScope!
A Defense of Cinematic Fiction
I. “You Keep Using That Word…”
In his craft talk “The Miserly Eye,” Brandon Taylor, a novelist and short-story writer, begins by describing “cinematic fiction” as that which frequently involves “inane physical action” or “long paragraphs in which nothing happens.” He thinks of it as prose “obsessed with blocking and stage direction and writing like a picture.” Although Taylor spends the rest of his talk thoughtfully, generously reconsidering “cinematic fiction,” his initial conception of the term echoes that of many fiction writers I’ve known, those who believe “cinematic” is synonymous with “visual.”
It isn’t.
Cinema is well-known for knowing little about the business of writing—how advances and royalties work, what actually qualifies as a bestseller—but writers are often as clueless about the mechanics of cinema. Novelists and short-story writers tend to think of film and television as their enemies, distractions for potential readers. They see cinema as a lesser art, even though they still see the movies and streamers that constitute such an art.
But cinema is just that, an art, one that is far more sophisticated than “visual” writing. Cinema is not a picture; it’s motion pictures. Cinema is made of pictures moving together, movement that’s a result and an amalgam of editing, cinematography, structure, and direction. All those various crafts work in collaboration to create the art of cinema.
Anyone interested in the craft of fiction writing can learn a great deal from other forms of art, and that’s especially true of an art form that happens to combine a variety of crafts.
II. The Double Lens of Third-Person
Screenwriters are generally advised not to include camera directions in their scripts, that those are for the director and the cinematographer to decide. Don’t add any ZOOM INS or ZOOM OUTS, screenwriters are told. Cut all your PAN UPS and DOWNS, your DISSOLVES, ANGLES, and DOLLIES.
To avoid breaking that rule, talented screenwriters use the tool of any talented writer: language. They direct the camera without explicitly directing the camera.
A classic example can be found in the produce aisle. “Stem of an apple” is a close-up; “apple” is a medium shot; and “bushel of apples” is a wide-shot. That sort of linguistic dexterity allows screenwriters to guide a reader’s mental eye through a scene. They use language like the lens of a camera. To pan the aisle, a screenwriter might note, “Apples are piled next to oranges, across from an overflowing bin of bananas.” To angle on a new element, they might write, “Someone’s hand picks up an orange, places it in a cart.”
In a film, the director and cinematographer consciously, purposefully decide if and subsequently how, why, and where the camera should move. They have the final say, but the screenwriter has already consciously, purposefully influenced their decision in the script. Fiction writers should be just as conscious and purposeful when using their camera lens of language. They need to consider static shots versus dynamic ones, where the focus lies, the tracking fluidity and the depth of field. Soft focus or sharp? Wide shot or long?
Fiction written in third-person features a second lens of language. Whereas the first lens is focused on the exterior, all that can be seen, the second concerns the interior. It depicts the point-of-view character’s point of view, not what they see but how they see it.
This second lens involves what is commonly known as “close-third,” prose in third-person that hews snugly to a character’s interiority, their thoughts and their feelings, as though the barrier between their personal “I” and the narration’s “he,” “she,” or “they” is porous. Close-third doesn’t break so much as slip through the wall between first-person and third-, delineating a character’s interiority without the scaffolding of clauses like “he felt” or “she thought,” “according to her belief,” “they would argue,” or “in his opinion.”
Let’s stay in the produce aisle: “apple” is distant third, objective and effaced, untethered to a character’s perspective; “another stupid apple” is close-third, portraying a character’s interiority via free indirect style.
Shifting between lens depths involves the manipulation of psychic distance.
III. Psychic Distance
In his book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner defines psychic distance as “the distance the reader feels between himself and the events of the story.” Careless shifts in psychic distance, Gardner remarks, are one of the most common errors made by aspiring fiction writers. He provides five examples of the concept, ranging from wide distance to close; from, to phrase it another way, classic omniscient narration to close third-person.
It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
Henry hated snowstorms.
God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul…
Note the escalating use of free indirect style as the camera zooms in. Gardner himself uses the language of cinema to describe the narrowing of psychic distance in his examples. “The camera dollies in,” he notes of the transition toward close-third. “In good fiction,” Gardner goes on to stress, “shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled.”
Controlled, I’d like to stress. Shifts in psychic distance shouldn’t be avoided, as some writers have been taught. They should be controlled.
Lessons on how to control shifts in psychic distance can be found in cinema. Typically, stories and novels, as with films, begin with long or medium shots and zoom in at strategic moments, those of great intimacy or high intensity. But sometimes a zoom out can be effective at such moments. When the scene gets hot, seasoned writers and film editors say, let the prose or the shot go cold; distant, clinical. To move between locations, time settings, or points of view, seasoned writers and film editors know, zoom out briefly and then slowly, gently zoom back in. But a smash cut can also be visceral and effective. “Variations of all kinds are possible,” Gardner notes, “and the subtle writer is likely to use psychic distance, as he might any other fictional device, to get odd new effects.”
It should be noted as well that the opposite of “boring” is “dynamic.” Psychic distance shouldn’t be static, especially over the course of a novel, slightly less especially over the course of a short story. Competent fiction, as with competent films, should vary its shots between wide, medium, and close, which is ultimately a matter of tempo. Think of it as a series of beats. Long, short. Fast, slow. A single, sustained note isn’t a beat. It’s noise. Fiction written in a single, sustained depth of psychic distance, like an old-timer’s idea of the music that kids listen to these days, is just noise.
If you were to graph a dynamic application of free indirect style along an X-Y axis, using Gardner’s range of one to five, you don’t want a straight line, nor do you want a uniform, consistent set of waves. You want an irregular set of waves, the kind drawn by a distracted toddler, with various, varying lengths and depths between the waves’ crests and troughs.
But you also don’t want it to look like an EKG, with sharp shifts in focus. I’d recommend not jumping more than two levels between sentences. In The Art of Fiction, Gardner provides an example of clumsy shifts in psychic distance, scalable to his range of five degrees (scale calculations mine):
Mary Borden hated woodpeckers [3]. Lord, she thought, they’ll drive me crazy! [4] The young woman had never known any personally [1], but Mary knew what she liked [3].
The most awkward shift? That leap from a four to a one. In cinematic terms, it would be called a “rack focus,” a camera move that, albeit useful, is difficult to get right.
IV. Cut to the Chase, the Drugstore, a Pizza Shop, the Kitchen Refrigerator
Cinema is a subtractive medium. Enter the scene late, the screenwriting adage goes, and leave it early. For phone conversations, according to another adage, don’t waste time with “Hello” or “Goodbye” or any variation of “How’s it going?” Cut to the chase.
All that advice is just another way of saying, Get rid of the boring parts.
The somewhat recent popularity of autofiction—novels and stories that lack narrative and imagination and are basically only the boring parts—may have reaffirmed the ridiculous notion that fiction should be “like life,” but filmmakers know better. They know how to make moonshine. “Life is a field of corn,” goes a line most often attributed to the novelist and short-story writer Lorrie Moore. “Literature is the shot glass it distills down into.”
In films, characters rarely leave their bedroom, walk down the hallway, walk down the stairs, and enter their kitchen. The film cuts from the bedroom to the kitchen. Fiction writers have that same power to teleport their characters. If a character is in their bedroom, all you need to do to get them into the kitchen is start the next paragraph with, “In the kitchen…” No need for a space break. If the transition seems to want more direct causation, have the character’s stomach growl while they’re in the bedroom, followed by a new paragraph: “In the kitchen, she opened the fridge. Only condiments. It figured.”
Depressingly, I often see people use the term “cinematic writing” to describe prose that’s the opposite. They use “cinematic” to call out overly diagrammatic, Google Maps writing that details in excess the transitions between locations. “He walked out his front door and down the driveway. He got in his car. He took E. Jackson to Highway 16, drove 4.2 miles to Exit 8, took a left, took a right, and pulled into the pharmacy parking lot.”
Cinema elides such extraneous detail. With a new slugline, a screenplay and its subsequent movie cut from the house to the drugstore. Fiction writers should emulate that sort of elision. Stage directions are for stage plays. In fiction, writers have to be willing to break the laws of physics, moving characters between locations with a click of the return key, and they have to trust their readers to understand the laws of physics remain intact.
Writers also have to be willing on occasion to embrace the powers of a god.
V. Playing God
Over the past decade, simultaneous with and perhaps caused by the surge of politicians and pundits applying the term “fake news” to any piece of news, be it Fox or real, novelists and short-story writers, I’ve noticed, have grown to distrust omniscience.
They shouldn’t.
Film cameras have godlike power, but they don’t rule like a god. They don’t judge. They don’t punish. Cameras witness and record the world. Although filmmakers use various, innovative techniques to convey character subjectivity—point-of-view shots and impressionistic opticals, the cinematic equivalents of free indirect style—the camera is inherently objective. Wide shots are the most objective camera angle, particularly with the second lens of third-person. Many aspiring fiction writers, I’ve noticed, remember to use wide, objective shots with the visual lens, but they shy from using it with the interior one.
Fiction writers today have taken the once-useful dictum of “Show, don’t tell” to its ineffective extreme. Fiction writers today are so used to the Steadicam they forget they have a crane. Fiction writers today, in other words, are afraid of master shots.
Oftentimes, writers, too focused on conveying a character’s subjectivity, lose sight of the written word’s primary purpose: to provide information. Exposition does not have to be a flashback, nor does it have to be tethered to a point-of-view character’s point of view. Rather than begin a paragraph of backstory with, “Jessica thought back wistfully to her childhood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” be direct and objective: “Jessica grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.” To let readers know what time it is in a scene, you don’t need a clock striking two, and you especially don’t need a character to look at the clock and note the time. Just write, “It was two o’clock.” Writers don’t have to be the aloof love interest pined for by the protagonist in a rom-com. Writers can give their readers the time of day.
Consider the keyboard Mount Olympus. Like deities on high, writers have the triple privilege of insight, authority, and scope. Only writers know what will happen next. Writers alone are privy to the full interiority of their characters.
But should writers tell their readers everything? Of course not. Again, it’s about control. It’s also about artistry.
With artistry and control, writers can dip into any character’s perspective, as Wolitzer does in The Interestings, as Shteyngart does in Our Country Friends, as Jones does in The Known World. With artistry and control, writers can pull a Sunset Boulevard and employ flash-forwards, as Ng does in Everything I Never Told You, as Marra does in A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Authors are allowed to offer readers information not available to their characters, regardless of the common workshop axiom that they’ll either deflate the suspense by spoiling plot turns or come across as manipulative by withholding certain information. Was your suspense ruined by the voiceover in Y Tu Mamá También? Did you feel manipulated by One Hundred Years of Solitude?
I believe aspiring writers bristle at authorial omniscience not out of a distrust of the general concept of omniscience, nor from a misguided concern for the reader, but due to a lack of confidence. Playing god, the most analogous act to that of being an author, is frigging hard.
VI. “…I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means”
As is every cinematic technique that’s useful to writers of fiction. Writing is frigging hard. To master the second lens of third-person (psychic distance, free indirect style) and authorial omniscience (peripatetic points of view, elegant transitions, assured deployment of exposition) requires a comprehensive proficiency of craft, a formal rigor of formalities. Cinematic writing requires skill, and skill takes a hell of a lot of work.
Imagine that the human race used to have the power of flight. But, because the ability to fly was hard to learn, people stopped doing it and eventually forgot they could.
The techniques of cinema can help writers of fiction remember how to fly.
Every second of a movie contains 24 frames, and each of those frames is the result of dozens of crafts: directing, acting, editing, music, photography, costumes, set design, hair and makeup, special effects, choreography, and, of course, writing. Fiction writers who unconditionally criticize “cinematic writing” denigrate all crafts, including their own.
T.S. Eliot said that good writers borrow and great writers steal. Even if you believe cinema is a lesser art than literature, Hollywood has undoubtedly wider, deeper coffers, both financially and artistically. Only a fool would say no to that kind of heist.
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