How Film Techniques Can Improve Your Writing

How Film Techniques Can Improve Your Writing

Peggy Lee

Peggy Lee

5 July 2023

Imagine you were brushing your teeth or daydreaming on the underground this morning when suddenly you were hit with an amazing story idea. How might that story first come to you – in words and sentences or as images, like a film?

You’ve probably discovered that you play out the scenes of your fictional narrative in your head. Novelist John Gardner call this willed hallucination “the fictive dream” and argued that the writer’s job is to choose the most accurate words possible to recreate and share this fictive dream with the reader. 

In his imagination, he [the writer] sees made-up people doing things, and in the act of wondering what they will do next, he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision.”

 John Gardner.

These movies of the mind are a kind of internal filmmaking. Consciously using film techniques can help us better craft our stories  specifically to avoid excessive telling. Therefore, it’s worth thinking of your story in terms of carefully structured scenes.

Here is a list of film techniques that might improve your writing:

1. Cuts and shots. shot is an uninterrupted flow of imagery. What shots compose your scene? A close shot of your main protagonist might be appropriate if, say, they are meeting their child for the first time. Or a long shot might be appropriate if your protagonist is spying on someone’s interactions from a first-floor building. However, freezing a character mid-action to give pages of backstory? Uh-uh, no. Boring. Show us, don’t tell us

Cuts and shots

2. Montage. Montage is creating meaning through the juxtaposition of images and scenes. For example, the shot of an elderly man with a walking stick slowly crossing the road then followed by the shot of a van of excited lawbreakers zigzagging too fast along a similar road will create a sense of imminent danger which isn’t present (or at least not to the same extent) without this juxtaposition. Carefully choosing the order in which your scenes play out will enrich your work. 

Photo courtesy of Alain Leonard

3. Varying your scenes. Every story should contain a mix of dramatic and static scenes. Relentless drama becomes foreseeable and implausible, whereas ordinary moments, while bringing verisimilitude and tension release when used occasionally, become boring when overused. Have you checked whether you favour one or the other?

 

4. Building a scene. Just like every story, each individual scene needs a recognisable dramatic shape. This can take the form of rising action/climax/falling action/resolution. Playing attention to structure can help you avoid drifting, unfocused scenes.

 

Hopefully these tips will guide your writing to become more visual and sensual, with more fluid transitions between scenes and even sentences.


It’s worth adding that even though these film techniques can improve your writing, they can’t replace what prose does best, which is to render the intricate workings of the inner mind and conjure up a powerful voice.

Feel like you need feedback to hone these skills? Email us at info@bluepencilagency.com to find out which of our editorial services would be suitable for your work-in-progress.

Peggy Lee

Peggy Lee

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