It's strange. In High school when I was sitting English class I remember thinking how awful writing ten whole pages for my term paper was. Man, how the times have changed.
I also remember thinking that there was no possible way I would ever like books more than movies. I can't say for sure what it was, but in the last five years something changed and now I can hardly stand movies. If anything give me a long T.V series where there's actually time to develop plots and characters. To me squeezing hundreds of intricacies into a 2 hour movie just seems wrong.
There are movies I still love, but for some reason I've grown less fond of them while novels are suddenly more alluring.
When I first started writing I didn't even read book. The only reason I wrote was because I wanted my book to be made into a movie. Now the thought almost makes me cringe. Would I be flattered? of course. Would I accept? Duh. I'm not an idiot.
Like I said when I started writing I had movies in mind, not books. That train of thinking lead me to write in a way that wouldn't necessarily make for a successful well written novel.
There are several structural differences that cant be ignored for aspiring writers. Each form of art has complexities that cannot be easily mirrored in the other. First and foremost is the point of view.
Movies have have the ability to begin things from the outside looking in. For instance a movie can begin with a nice landscape shot and then lead into the characters even if the landscape has no real bearing on the plot. A novel on the other hand shouldn't start with a long exposition on how beautiful a valley is and go one for three pages crafting how beautiful the moon looks. Novels need to start from the inside of the characters and work their way out.
Which leads me to the second differentiating factor between movies and novels. Novels have the unique ability to display the internal workings of a character. With words on a page we can see the inner turnings of our favorite characters mind and understand what makes them tick. Not to say this isn't possible with film, to me it just seems easier on a page.
My third and final differentiating factor between movies and novels is timing. Timing in either medium is everything. The scale of timing between film and novels is vastly different. An event that occurs over the course of hours will occur in the span of several minutes in a movie. Likewise its just as easy to bypass several years in a novel with several words.
As a child watching Lord of the Rings i had no idea that the entire adventure happened over the course of a year and some change (13 months). To me it was just a wild couple of days for Frodo and the other little munchkins. How was I to know the journey to Helms deep took months? They were only riding for like fifteen minutes.
That's the way it is though. In film the timing of scenes and events are viewed through a smaller window. However, in a novel scenes have time to develop. They can grow and shift in subtle ways that film has a harder time capturing. Viewing these scenes in film has a certain objectivity to it while novels are a bit more subjective. What you see in a movie is what everyone sees, but what you read in a novel might be very different then what your neighbor reads. I think in the end that's what gives novels the edge over film to me.
I get a say in what I see.
-B
No comments:
Post a Comment