"Are you making a movie, or telling a story?"

So went a conversation I had with Kenneth (not their real name) during the course of pitching my novel through 2020. In the unforgiving world of commercial publishing, this question is often asked - who is saying what to whom, and is their internal world caught up in the jump cuts of talking heads?

A roving POV can lead to confusion which begs the question most authors face - are you making a movie, or telling a story?

I suspect that any author since 1920 thinks cinematically. It can't be helped, we have film ingrained from an early age. My earliest memory is Disney's 'Sleeping Beauty' when the Queen transforms into the dragon. The cinema was dark and I clutched my mother's hand in terror. My other cinema memory is the moment in 'The Sting' where the working girls get onto the carousel and it starts swirling with their dresses flowing on every turn and flashing lights and hurdy-gurdy music. (What were my parents thinking about taking an 8year old to it? It was obviously the days when babysitters were hard to come by.)

We are a visual species (those of us fortunate to have sight), it is our primary sense, yet limited to only seven colours on the spectrum and dependent on light - from fires in caves illuminating cave paintings to modern ceiling strobes and pulsing computer screens. Black type on white paper is the primary tool of the author. The page is a screen, we view on a screen we can now read on a screen.

Cinematic is almost a mantra but does the writer set the scene or the scene set the writing? A little of both I would suggest.

So, yes, I do write movies. I set the scene in my head and I populate the 'stage' with my cast. Then there comes the dialogue, the conversation, though sometimes it strays into Tin Ear Dialogue. I resolve this by contraction, but also, cutting phrases down. On first drafts, some dialogues run onto several lines, but then I review with a highlighter. And pare extraneous words down to several short sentences. I try to tell the story through dialogue.

In one chapter I attempted dialogue between a couple while at the same time having them thinking about their tasks and hopes for the day. It ran into five A4 pages, prompting Kenneth to observe in their feedback - 'A bewildering sequence of events that left me not caring and hoping the chapter would end'. It worked as a cinematic sequence but failed as a plotted storyline. I was blocking, directing, and acting out the scene without really writing it.

I got out the highlighter and went through the dialogue line by line and turned it into a simple exchange, removing the internal thoughts.

It came down to one A4 page.

Those five pages were like spinning five plates on five poles and I spent the time trying to keep them rotating dashing back and forth and ignoring the fact they were crashing around me with a cohesive thread. 

The thread is the story.

So I resolved it again by a single point of view and by unraveling the strands, found the thread, and started telling the story, leaving the cinema where it belongs - in my head, not the characters. 

to find out more about me and my writing journey, here's my website

https://www.robert-cravenauthor.ie/