Valkyrie Diaries writing guide for fanfiction: part 6

6. Novels are not movies in written form:

This one might not be immediately obvious in this day and age, but if you go back to 19t century literature like Dickens and Stoker, you will notice that the way things are described in a novel differs greatly with how a movie portrays them. With the advent of moving pictures, novel writing in itself changed. Descriptions of what people look like became sparser. Compare that to the rich description Bram Stoker serves us of Count Dracula, seen through the eyes of Jonathan Harker, a solicitor. Today we see characters in books as actors in a movie; we even compare them and see which actor fits best (was Viggo Mortensen such a good choice for Aragorn in Lord of the Rings?). Back in the 19th century, they were seen as people among us.

Furthermore, in a movie you take camera-pans into consideration. In a novel, you don't do this, although you do want the written story to be every bit as gripping as the epic on the silver screen, or rather liquid crystal in todays flat-screen era.
Cameras zoom in and out; even the "inner" human eye can't do that, at least not in the same way, unless we imagine it acting as a camera. What it means for writing is that usually you have to go about describing things in a rather "backwards" manner, in relation to how a movie script would.

As example, I have taken the liberty to re-write the first paragraph of Goodboy's Space Outlaws: Stuck on the Junkyard Planet. Colton's edit.


Original:
“The Rebellion group the, Space Outlaws, are fighting against the evil lord K’vlan to evacuate and free form his rule, a binary solar system’s people, with one dwarf star and two stars that are going to go super nova and collapse into a black hole,” Said a news woman “And here the forces of K’vlan come,” The screen zooms in onto a T.V. which shows on one side ships are staying around a planet and on the other side ships are coming out of a warp hole. “The battle has started now. Now on to you Dallas,”
“Thank you Ja-,”


Re-write á la Belazikkal:
"The Space Outlaw rebellion group, who are fighting against Lord K'vlan to evacuate, and free, from his rule, a binary solar system's people are not only fighting the alien overlord, but also time. The solar system is incredibly unstable, with one dwarf star and two super heavy stars on verge of supernova. Anything can set them off, and once that is over, they will most likely collapse into black holes."
The voice was that of a newsreader woman. She was calm, despite her distressing news.
"The forces of K'vlan are not giving the rebels any leeway though." The small TV screen showing the newslady switches over to show a video uptake of how on one side ships around a planet and being attacked by ships from the other side of the screen, the latter just having arrived out of a warp hole.
"The battle has begun," the newslady states coldly. It is however obvious where her sympathies are. "Now over to you, Dallas."
"Thank you, Ja-"

---

Both versions here are equally readable, yet the latter is written with a novel in mind. The former wants to be a movie script. It should be noted that my re-write does elaborate on some points, something that should be done when writing in novel style.

When it comes to the visual media (comics, cartoons and movies, even video games), the best writing is succinct and punchy. This does not hold equally true for the entirely written media of books. There, you can dwell on inner monologue and pursue more plot threads than in a movie. You can, simply put, add more depth in a novel than a movie, always! This is why Lord of the Rings don't really work half as well as some fans would want them to as movies. This is why the upcoming Atlas Shrugged movie is going to horrifically bad. It's not just the source material; it's the media itself.

Now, to write good description with a lot of information whilst maintaining the flow in them is entirely a practice thing. You won't get there in a day, not even a year. It has taken me 10 years of fanfiction-writing (mainly Space Outlaws) to get where I am now. It also takes a lot of reading.

Getting a dispassionate Beta-reader also does wonders to your writing.