How Movies Ruined Fiction Writers

One of my first fiction professors, Dr. Kate Haake, once said: “movies are better than fiction. Stop trying to make your fiction do what movies do,” and I was mad. I thought, no—I want my fiction to do what movies do—that’s why I got into fiction! I’d been writing screenplay after spec script for years to claw my way to becoming a mid-level television producer, and I wanted to make movies dammit. Trouble was, Hollywood had largely stopped buying original screenplays in favor of proven IP, and so I’d turned to fiction to create it.

Dr. Haake went on to argue that in order to survive as an art form, contemporary fiction strives to do what movies can’t do—experiment, fracture, linger, subvert. I didn’t buy it.

Then, the more contemporary fiction I read, the more I realized well, of course she was right. To even stand a chance at becoming “adaptable” into a movie, fiction must first succeed as fiction. Fiction is not a screenplay’s wordier stepsister. A screenplay is a skeleton to inspire the actors, the director, the cinematographer, the UPM, and all the hundreds of people who win Oscars, to put meat on its bones. Fiction is the whole body, and it has only the blank page to build it.

Seems obvious, right? But then, during my MFA, I started teaching fiction, and I realized that this was not so obvious to those attempting to write it.

Reading my students’ work, I’ve encountered the same desire I also had as a burgeoning fiction writer, and in some ways worse. Now, three years into my PhD and teaching fiction more often, I find I’m repeating Dr. Haake’s advice to students who’ve encountered screens since before they could even hold their own heads up. Who not only want their fiction to do what movies, TV, videogames, and short form content do—they expect it to.

Culturally, this generation has been raised on perspective shifts, rapid cuts, and multi-window attention, and so many of them assume that fragmentation itself creates richness. It doesn’t. More often, it creates chaos that never settles long enough to resonate.

I keep bumping against the same three major problems in their writing:

• The roving camera-eye POV
• Expecting “wide shots” to deliver atmosphere and emotion
• Opening with dialogue, and expecting dialogue to carry a story

I’ve found myself repeating the same feedback so often that I felt compelled to put it all here in one place. I hope this helps, whether you’re a fiction writer trying to create fiction that’s movie-adaptable, or a frustrated professor who is tired of these same mistakes by writers who have been inoculated by visual media.

Movies aren’t the enemy. Don’t get me wrong: I love movies. But fiction can’t do what movies do, so stop trying to force it to. It’s not the ugly stepsister—it’s the ugly duckling. Let it swim with the swans.

Keep Your Eye on Your POV

Everybody who attempts fiction thinks they understand everything there is to know about POV because they learned it in grade school. There’s first and third, second if you’re feeling risky. Boom, done.

No.

POV is one of the most important and difficult things for new fiction writers to accomplish well because they think they already know everything about it. And they think they know everything about it because when practiced fiction writers do it well, it disappears into the narrative. But guess what? That’s intentional. One of the main reasons stories fail is when POV is done poorly and without intention. I see this both in student stories and in slush pile stories I read for Five Points.

Whose story is it, and why is this story happening now? Fiction must know the answer to those questions.

Consider Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, a novel split into two close-third POV’s: the (arguably) insufferable Lotto, and his wife Mathilde. This book is a masterpiece of POV because that’s what it’s about—the secrets a marriage holds, the things that aren’t spoken. It takes two-hundred pages of Lotto’s voice…

He had never known her to be so angry that she would not look at him. Her face was so terribly closed. She looked older. Sad. Skinny. Her hair was greasy. She was browned, as if she’d been pickled in her loneliness.

…to get to Mathilde’s, and then the whole story world opens up. The context of all that she’s hiding:

Mathilde wanted to seize his words, roll them up in her fist, shove them down his throat.

What I’m trying to say is, POV isn’t just a random choice. It’s the WHOLE POINT. Sorry to shout. But I argue that we read stories to encounter POV, not plot. If you hand me a battle scene without any context as to why the characters are fighting, I’m bored. If you put it in one person’s POV, gave me enough backstory and interiority through POV to care about why this battle is important to them, then I might care.

Once I started investigating POV more closely, I became obsessed with all it can do. There’s different types of first person (singular, multiple, plural, peripheral), second (direct address, immersive, interactive), and third (limited/close, multiple, objective, omniscient). There’s conscious and unconscious narrators, varying degrees of unreliability. It isn’t just a random choice to say well, I’m going to write this in first person. What kind of first person? Are they aware they’re telling a story (Holden Caulfield) or unaware they’re inside a story (Kathy H.)? Are they a distant retrospective narrator with dramatic irony (Ava Bigtree) or are they in present danger (Offred)? These choices determine how the story lands, what the takeaway wants to be.

A mistake a lot of newer writers make is to just say, THIS IS OMNISCIENT and move around arbitrarily between the characters, because this is what visual media does. The effect is usually dreadful. In film, the scene can cut anywhere because the viewer can see everything instantly. In fiction, the reader builds the scene in their mind and POV holds the reader inside that experience.

Take this (fabricated) example I might see in student writing:

Sarah felt nervous. Dave wondered if she knew about the affair. Across the room, Maria hated both of them.

In a film, this kind of cutting works because the visuals provide continuity. In fiction, the reader has to rebuild orientation every time the consciousness shifts. Who do we care most about here: Sarah, Dave, or Maria? Is this a story about suspicion (Sarah), about lies (Dave), or about outsiderness (Maria)? The story itself doesn’t know yet.

Believe me or don’t, I’m not the boss of you. POV in fiction isn’t about what you’re allowed (or not allowed) to do. But when POV is inconsistent, the reader stops inhabiting the story and starts trying to figure out where they are. The less time a reader has to spend puzzling over what a story is about, or whose story it even is, the more immersive it’ll be.

Students sometimes bristle at the old cliché that you must know the rules to break them. I get it. And like Dr. Haake said, fiction needs to experiment in order to survive as an art form. Fiction should fracture and resist and constantly reinvent itself. But if you break the form without intention, the story won’t feel experimental. It’ll just feel confusing.

Narrow the Wide Shots

In film, a funeral can pass as a blur—black veils, tear-streamed faces, indistinct grief. The camera doesn’t need to name anyone. But fiction can’t get away with that. Fiction wants to know, who showed up? Was this dead guy loved, or just tolerated? Are there strangers in the back pew, or only one person who came? These details don’t slow the story. They build it.

Sometimes newer writers create wide shots to create the setting so they can get to the “main” point. I argue that the specificity is the point—we read fiction to notice what the character notices, to fixate on what they feel.

When writers rely on the blur, the story blurs too and it’s not only boring, it’s a wasted opportunity. Rather than relying on a movie structure which would cut from that wide battle scene I mentioned, what would be possible if the reader saw only what he saw, and built the danger through his mounting fear? Instead of your wide shot battle scene, what if he saw one of the corpses close up and recognized the face? What if his shoes were tattered, his feet almost giving out?

Suspense in fiction comes from the reader understanding the danger as it unfolds, not by being surprised by twists or things kept from the reader.

In a screenplay, the director and the cinematographer can create reveals and jump scares through visuals and sound. Sure, you can suddenly put a bear in the woods in fiction as you can in a movie. But how much creepier, how much more chilling in fiction, if the reader knew the bear was there all along and the protagonist didn’t?

I’d read the hell out of that.

That’s not to say that you need to bog down your scene with pages of unnecessary description and overly decorative prose. In fact, don’t do that.

A thing I like to tell my students once they have a draft, is to think of it like a painting. You’ve got the big picture. Now, fill in the necessary details with small brush strokes.

Dialogue with Discretion

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten, and I don’t remember who said it because it’s such ubiquitous advice: don’t open a story with dialogue.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. But this is a pretty good rule, as a rule, because nearly every new writer breaks it and fails.

Movies open with dialogue because movies have setting. Even if they don’t have setting—if they open with a black screen—they’ve got the actor’s voice. We know if it’s a man or woman (or a robot). We can get a sense of their emotions. Sometimes there’s ambient sound. Usually, the movie then fades up from black into setting. But here’s how a lot of student writers open a piece:

“I never really ever loved you.”

“How long does it take to feel anything?”

“Do you ever feel like we’re already dead?”

All of these seem on the surface like they could be great openings. If it’s a movie, yes. We’d get the person’s voice, a setting, a context clue. On the page, it’s just a piece of disembodied text. Nothing about these sentences tells me where we are or who is speaking. Do I care enough to read the next sentence? Not really. The first sentence is a promise the writer makes to the reader. These promises are mostly empty.

I sometimes start a semester of a fiction course by asking students to pick a favorite first sentence and explain why it’s working. Here’s mine:

The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot.

WHAT. Okay, so there’s genre and setting: a ship that sounds spacey, the Scopuli. There’s conflict: pirates. With guns. There’s POV: a character at her wits end and ready to face them. This is the first sentence from Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, which became the Amazon series The Expanse. The book—a detective noir space opera??!!—became a successful series because it first succeeded as fiction. And this first sentence makes a promise that the book keeps.

The American Book Review published a list of the 100 best first sentences in novels, and out of a hundred, only three of them begin with dialogue. And not empty dialogue. Take Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:

“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”

There’s so much in motion in this sentence: singing, tumbling, paradox. Even his name carries cultural and tonal specificity. This sentence is doing four other things than just speaking.

There are countless articles on how to write good dialogue and so I won’t keep talking. In general, I think that the less a newer writer relies on dialogue, the better. So many student pieces have that white room effect (or black room, depending on your tone). It’s a blank space with two people going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s hellish, and not even Satre or Beckett’s hell that tortures the characters. This tortures the reader, and not intentionally.

A conversation isn’t a story. A story is a collision, a turn, a change.

You want to bust me for saying that dialogue can’t make a story? Fine. Let’s look at Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything—a novel told almost primarily as conversations and it is riveting (and the POV’s shift because Strout has narrative control). But here’s the thing—Strout uses dialogue as her primary mechanism because, like Groff’s novel that’s really about POV, dialogue is really what her story is about. Neat trick, eh?

I love when a story does what it’s about.

And… Fade Out

I want to end by saying that these habits are not failures of talent or intelligence. They’re developed by ingesting far more visual media than fiction and then relying on visual storytelling as our primary story mechanisms.

Can we learn to tell stories by watching TV and movies? Yeah duh, it’s how most folks first encounter stories. But movies and TV teach us to value cutting between perspectives. To privilege spectacle and immediacy.

Fiction works best through sustained attention to one perspective, even if that perspective fractures or shifts. Like the Faulkner I’m reading now to prepare for my PhD comp exams, it establishes rules for how consciousness moves. In The Sound and the Fury, Benjy doesn’t suddenly enter Quentin’s consciousness, nor Quentin Jason’s. Even fragmentation has architecture.

So experiment, fracture, subvert, if you want. Just do it with intention and knowledge of what your story is doing and why. Grounding the reader in a stable POV can give you more room to fracture other elements. Make your story do what it’s about.

Because ultimately, we watch movies to experience humanity.

We read fiction to try to understand it.

Kelly Kurtzhals holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is currently pursuing a PhD in fiction at Georgia State. Her fiction has appeared in Utopia Science Fiction, Etherea, The Arcanist, Dream of Shadows, Flash Fiction Magazine, BULL Lit, Parsec Inc. Triangulation, and elsewhere.