{"id":1574,"date":"2023-05-29T17:58:29","date_gmt":"2023-05-29T22:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ldinmanbooks.com\/?p=1574"},"modified":"2023-05-29T17:58:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-29T22:58:32","slug":"on-cinematic-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ldinmanbooks.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/29\/on-cinematic-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"On Cinematic Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I once was at a talk given by S.E. Hinton in which she said that she wrote her fifth novel, Taming the Star Runner<\/em>, deliberately in such a way that no one would be tempted to try to make a movie out of it. As all four of her previous novels had been adapted to film with her involvement, she knew what kinds of things would put off filmmakers. Her first four novels<\/a> had been in first person POV, a perspective mode that (usually) evokes immediacy and excludes the author-as-narrator even from the margins; in her last book, the perspective is a distant, narrow-focus third person, built episodically on a hopscotch of flashbacks. Most of the plot takes place in the protagonist’s head. And while none of this is exactly a deterrent to filmmaking, the resulting story is something you’d have to have a lot of patience and leeway to turn into a viable screenplay.<\/p>\n\n\n

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For all that, I recall some moments in Taming the Star Runner<\/em> that are extremely<\/em> cinematic. How can that be? Because there is a vast difference between writing fiction that lends itself well to film adaptation, and writing fiction that operates cinematically<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a little bit of irony in claiming this, because as vlogger and filmmaker Patrick Willems points out in this video<\/a>, it’s the uniqueness of cinema as an art form that makes “cinematic” a useful term at all. Yet because we are all so steeped in movies from an early age, we are apt to mediate our encounters with other art forms — and indeed, our real lives — through the viewfinder of a moving picture camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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