Cinematic Writing: Seeing With Your Mind's Eye by Connie Berry

 What is Cinematic Writing?

I first heard the term “cinematic writing” about twenty-five years ago. The wife of a casual acquaintance had published several books, and her publisher was known for signing authors who employed what they called “cinematic technique.”

Since I hadn’t heard the term, I looked it up and found the definition—writing that unfolds like a movie in the mind’s eye of the reader. Book coach C. S. Lakin describes it this way: Rather than explaining and summarizing the action in a scene, “writers play out the action moment by moment by ‘shooting’ the scene the way a filmmaker would. The reader watches the story unfold before their mind’s eye rather than being told what is happening in exposition.”

Two Examples of Cinematic Writing

One example is the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (2005). Interestingly, it was first written as a screenplay but turned into a novel when the film project failed to gain the interest of film producers. When the novel became a best-seller, it was made into a film that won four Academy Awards in 2007, including Best Picture.

Here’s an excerpt:

He lowered the binoculars and looked over the country at large. Then he raised them again. There looked to be men lying on the ground. He jacked his boots into the rocks and adjusted the focus. The vehicles were four-wheel drive trucks or Broncos with big all-terrain tires and winches and racks of roof lights. The men appeared to be dead. He lowered the glasses. Then he raised them again. Then he lowered them and just sat there. Nothing moved. He sat there for a long time.

One critic called it “essentially a script, minus the scene headers and transitions.

Another example is the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong. Written by a poet, it jumps between past and present to reveal a life told in stanzas. On critic called it “a series of Polaroid flashes in the dark, a collection of memories offered with the unease of someone else’s scrapbook.” In one scene, the narrator, a boy, watches his grandmother wake up.

The eye opened. Glazed by a milky film of sleep, it widened to hold my image. I stood against myself, pinned by the shaft of light through the window. Then the second eye opened, this one slightly pink but clearer. “You hungry, Little Dog?” she asked, her face expressionless, as if still asleep.

               I nodded.

               “What should we eat in a time like this?” She gestured around the room.

               A rhetorical question, I decided, and bit my lip.

               But I was wrong. “I said What can we eat?” She sat up, her shoulder-length hair splayed out behind her like a cartoon character just blasted with TNT.

Writer and editor Constance Hale says that cinematic writing “starts with a narrator who acts like an observing camera—we see landscapes, we watch people, we are carried along with the action.” The experience is like a journalistic “ride-along.”Should mystery writers employ the cinematic technique?

Should Mystery Writers Use Cinematic Writing Techniques?

Turns out it’s a trend that some look down on. If your goal is to write a novel that could be adapted into a TV show or movie, mastering the art of cinematic writing might be exactly what you need. It’s the classic “show, don’t tell.” But not everyone agrees.

I’m told that male authors use cinematic writing more than female authors and that male readers like the style because it’s heavy on action. The technique is also used more in literary fiction than other genres. Make of that what you will.

Upside vs Downside?

Cinematic writing employs third-person narration with little (or no) internal thought and a general lack of subjectivity. The reader sees what happens but must infer how the narrator actually feels about it.

That’s the downside. Books today compete with the visual arts—TV and movies. The benefit we novel writers have over visual media is showing the inner life of the protagonist. Readers aren’t just invited to view someone’s experience from the outside. We are invited into their minds and hearts.

I like to use cinematic techniques along with internal thought. The best of both worlds?

What do you think?