"Filmisms" in novels

A lot of us have grown up with at least four mediums, books, radio, tv, and video games. Now we've had about two generations start their lives wired to the internet.


All of these mediums have impacted us and molded the way we think of stories, how to process them and how to tell them.  Yet for all the ways people seem more savvy on how these related industries work, it's shocking how most are blissfully unaware of the limitations of each medium.

You've heard, "The book was better than the movie."*  On the flip side, a lot of film techniques suck for book writing.

My first sin in that regard was when I had a character close the door to her personal dojo. I described the sounds of  boards breaking, grunts, and mysterious chittering sounds. Then she opens the door and I went into the details of how things were sliced and diced, yet there wasn't a sword in the room or on her person.  I thought that sounded cool.

Everyone who read it thought it broke POV, and omniscient view broke the noir vibe I was going for. 

I've also tried ways of writing for flashes of vision when a character is getting trounced or spun around in a car. The closest I got to making that work was "And then he saw blue sky, then grass, then sky, then grass and then black." Any thing more elaborate was too jarring for a reader.

What got me thinking about this was a recent workshop meeting. Twice, a writer tried to pull of the literary trick of watching a desperate scene in the distance and evoke a feeling of doom and helplessness from the hero could only watch. His inspiration was a scene from a movie.

Now, there may be a way to do that in a book, but it will need internal dialogue. Just describing the visuals ain't gonna cut it. (stet. I wrote that way on purpose.)

The obvious moral to this story is that why you can have internal movies and visually stunning books, you need to know the techniques to pull those tricks off. Cutting and pasting from one medium is not the way to do it.

*Seriously, how can you not figure out that two hours are jamb packed when try to introduce,engage, and resolve the hero's dilemma.  All the time you get to know character in books (subplots and internal dialogue) comes with a budget you have to justify to the investors.

To short story or not to short story

There are some adages ing the writing biz that get consistent airplay. I’m going to tackle the one this week is that short stories you should start writing to hone your craft.

The wisdom is that you learn faster by writing short pieces. After that, things fall into place:

• You get those stories sold
• You get noticed
• You pitch your completed novel to an agent.

Then the agent sells novel for ludicrous advance, and the writer spends the rest of her days getting paid to write wonderful novels as she sits in her bathrobe while gnawing on a smoking pipe.

Cynicism aside, you should always take a story to the length that feels natural to you. Even the step child of story length, the novella, has gotten a new lease on life thanks to epublishing.

Actually selling a short, though, is still more alchemy and luck. Despite there now more online markets than ever, but it's still a tough market. I know pros who are still finding homes for stories that I critiqued years ago.

These days you need to either be a well-known author with a solid story or a new author that submits something that’s amazing and award-winning. So if you working on your stories for "exposure," you’ll be disappointed.

Even more confusing for me is that a lot of recently published stories aren’t stories with a plot. I'd classify these more as entertaining vignettes. They are good reading, but don’t have a true protagonist, real or metaphorical, no character arc, etc. Joe Hill's Last Breath is an example.

The talented Paolo Bacigalupi has his own anecdote about novels vs. Shorts. At first he tried shorts, but found himself writing a novel anyways, a huge sprawling novel.

In trimming down his Byzantine book, he found some nuggets that he polished into award winning stories and then put out a book that snagged a bucket of awards.

As for me, I tried to go the novel route for many years, but the biggest accomplishment of that project was to just finish it. Before that, I got very few stories done.

There were some other lessons that I got from that novel, but I seemed get more out of 6 months of short stories I wrote after that. Well, more like the year and half of rewrites after that round of first drafts.

My latest rough novel seems more confidant, yet more experimental than the last one.

I'm still frustrated that those shorts are still floating out there unsold and unloved by editors, but I don’t consider it a waste.