Books Are Not Movies

I am almost finished with Andor, and DANG this is good stuff. Talking about Andor might end up being next week’s Saturday Note (“Star Wars Without the Jedi”) or something like that? Stay tuned.

Presently, I’m reading Crown of Vengeance by Lackey and Mallory, which is, uh, longer than I expected. Also a lot of long elven names which is taking some getting used to. I have a trip this weekend so I should have time to get through a large chunk of it, though.

Books Are Not Movies

There’s a common complaint I see when people discuss movies, particularly adaptations of books, is that the average person assumes that the process of making a movie is just having a play, but on camera, or taking what’s on the page, and putting it on camera. Which yeah, there is not nothing to that, especially with some films, but that’s not all movies are. I think there are some problems when the reverse happens, too, and I suspect it might be becoming more common? That is, authors who write books thinking that they’re text descriptions of movies.

Spoiler alert: they’re not.

I know that “Movies you get to direct in your head” (which I think is a Jon Stewart quote) is a fun way to describe the experience of reading, but also books are their own experience and shouldn’t be viewed in comparison to or in relation to movies. Have you ever read a book in which the author goes way too far out of the way to describe what someone looks like? Like he’s probably trying to design the costume for characters in a live-action production, and possibly cast them for you, too.

Details aren’t bad in description, not really. But dumping them all at once, in a way that you’re meant to absorb everything at once? That’s not how to do it. Not only does it stop the action, it makes it sound like you’re trying to do everything you can to talk about the visuals of the scene or characters rather than what’s important, and letting the reader fill in the gaps in his or her own head.

[Obviously, there are exceptions to this, like if your character is sort of like Sherlock Holmes and scanning for minor details that might be important later.]

I bash on Rick Riordan a lot, but one thing that he does that I love is that he doesn’t give you too many details of appearances, while still giving you enough that your mind can imagine the rest. Other little details come in, like eye color, or jewelry or what-have-you, so that you can still know things, without the text coming to a dead stop.

More egregious than descriptions, though? When the author clearly has a soundtrack in mind, and not in the sense of writing in-text songs, like Tolkien did. There are a couple of scenes in Dresden Files in which Butcher talks about the song playing, or at the beginning of Cold Days, even describes what appears to be a montage set to music. That’s… not great.

[Butcher is otherwise pretty great as a writer, and there are bits where it seems he’s very aware that his books are not movies. For instance, swords make ‘snicker-snack’ sounds, an obvious reference to “The Jabberwocky” that doesn’t make a lick of sense for a live-action scene, as swords obviously don’t make that sound.]

Worse than that? Jump cuts–when the author is doing quick cuts that wouldn’t be too out of place in a movie or television show, but feel like cheap cop-out in text writing. James A. Owen’s “Thin Man and the Queen of Stars” skips an entire journey between worlds this way. The author had trouble coming up with material after announcing it, and it took years to come out, and yet I can’t help but think he never finished it.

The Witcher also has this issue in its novels. There are scenes where you get a description of what someone thinks of an important event that just happened, instead of just telling us that event, followed by a cut to either that event, or the aftermath of it. This would make interesting montages or flashbacks, especially when they’re all in a row like they sometimes are in the novels. For a book, though, they’re just…it feels all wrong, like the author would rather be a director.

Books can do so much with written language. That is the key! I am not going to pretend that I am an expert, because I’m really not. I’m not very good at descriptions. But recognize that you can do things with books that you can’t do in a movie, and that makes it okay. You can tell trains of thought, you can make similes and metaphors that illustrate rather than straight word-by-word descriptions, you can set the tone through adjectives instead of telling us what the weather was exactly. Or you can get to the core with the characters and action and let the reader do that work for you.

It’s not a movie, and it doesn’t have to be.

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