From textbook to cinema

Ah, this is a great topic, @Daeus. I know EXACTLY what you’re talking about— only I never had to go through the transition you’re going through now. My books always started as movies in my head— a visual reference to set down on paper, and I wrote it as I saw it, not as I thought it ‘ought to be written’, if you know what I mean.

I don’t know how well I’m going to end up explaining this, but I’ll give it my best shot. You’re watching a movie, okay? If it’s a good movie, you’re not seeing the story— you’re feeling it. Say one of the characters in the movie punched someone in the face— as the viewer, you’re not like ‘Oh, horrifying, the guy just punched somebody in the face, how violent!’. You’re like ‘Oh man, that guy is angry.’ You feel it— you feel it without the annoyance of unnecessary words or actions, or little tidbits in the scene that don’t really contribute to the mood.
Irrelevant point number one.

To take your example and analyze it, the second example of your scene took what happened through Drake’s eyes, not through the reader’s eyes. There’s a difference. Drake (love the name by the way) was taking the progression of things point by point, how they pertained to him, how he saw them, how they affected HIM. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s RIGHT. That’s GOOD WRITING RIGHT THERE.
He’s living in the moment— and I guess that’s the key, really. Live in the moment. Make each little moment a complete moment in itself. You don’t necessarily have to try and make everything one seamless run of smoothly flowing… stuff. I’ve found it’s often better to isolate little moments that are important, then cut and go to the next. Like watching a movie. The captain has an apology to make? Good— bring us directly to the apology, then cut and bring us to whatever most important point comes next. Them boarding the ship, for example. Them setting sail. We don’t necessarily care about them loading the ship, or hauling up the anchor, or any of that unless it’s important. You can connect these different moments in a scene with brief explanatory or descriptive notes, but they should be like links in a necklace, to hold the beads together and serve no greater purpose themselves. They are links— not beads.
A scene is a linked, coherent body composed of little moments, not a long list of flowing material with unnecessary bits in it. Make sense?

Another helpful tip for pulling this whole technique off, I’ve found, is to really take the rule ‘show, don’t tell,’ at it’s most literal. Give us their emotions in their body language. Try to make your voice (as the author) as minimal as possible and let the reader concentrate fully on what’s happening between the characters. Let them figure things out for themselves. They’re smart. They can get it without your commentary. And when the commentary is absent, it is soooooooooooooooooooooooooo much easier to dive right into the story and experience it with all your might.

Your second example is much better— but let me take it and show you how it might be even more visual still. This is how you have it:

“The goods were loaded. Drake felt a tap on his shoulder and wheeled around. The captain was looking at him like a man who has an apology to make.”

This is how I would write it: The goods were loaded, Drake standing by and watching silently [assuming that’s what he’s doing, of course— hahaha]. He was just considering (insert here whatever it was this personality would be consider at this time) when he felt a tap on his shoulder and wheeled around. There stood the captain, looking at him with a slightly wry face like a man who has an apology to make’.

Another extremely simple but very important point— see it. See what it is you want your reader to see, and do your best to set that image down faithfully as you can. Watch your story in cinema format, analyze it to find where the important points lie and how those important points were made to stick out (a twitch of an eye, a little smile, a nervous picking of fingernails on the splintery railing, whatever) and set it down as you see it.

Who knows if that makes one iota of sense, but hey, it was fun! 😛

@kate-flournoy: Wow, that’s so cool your last name is a Huguenot one! I recently learned about the Huguenots in my French class. They were tough bunch of people. 😀

You are absolutely one hundred percent correct, @Daeus. Good thinking. 🙂

I had a new thought on this last night— sometimes it can still actually be good to step OUT of the moment to establish something dramatic. Now let me explain… let’s say we spend a lot of time building up in preparation for a dramatic climax for the scene. We could take the character ‘in the moment’ through that climax, but then it becomes somewhat anticlimactic. Eh… that didn’t come out too well.
Here, lemme use an example. The Count of Monte Cristo. One of the most terrifying moments in the story, if not the most terrifying, was taken ‘out of the moment’. The scene we have is Edmond Dantes tied in a dead man’s shroud and flung out into the emptiness of space when he thought he was going to be buried. We’ve accompanied him inside the sack for a while— hearing his thoughts, experiencing what he experienced, in short, being ‘in the moment’ with him.
But the moment he’s flung out into emptiness that contact cuts, and the climax was hammered home with only nine words: The sea is the cemetery of the Chateau d’If.
And that’s where we panic.

Make sense?

Hey… yeah, you’re right. That’s it— the author shouldn’t narrate. The author should simply make unconnected statements that embellish an already presented concept or event. Perfect. I love rules like that… they’re so simple. 😛

@Daeus