In a post entitled, “You’re Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie,” Rebecca Makkai writes:
You want to set your movie in a futuristic New York where every building has a flying car port on top and there are highways through the air and half the people are genetically modified to be 7 feet tall and the sky is red and everyone’s left hand is a phone and all the police are robots? Cool—that will take you all of about ten seconds to get across onscreen.
You want to do all that stuff on the page? You’ve got tougher options. Some writers think they’re going to get away with devoting about ten seconds worth of space to establishing the context, or not mention it at all until it’s way too late. Because it’s never mentioned in the movies, it just is! Other writers try to take the time necessary to let us see, in detail, everything we’d see on the screen in ten seconds, and that turns out to be around thirty pages—because on the page, everything needs to be explained. Readers will want to know exactly what those air highways look like and how they work and maybe even where they came from.
The trouble is, as Makkai says, “what might have been colorful texture onscreen just takes too much of a reader’s energy.”
She continues:
One thing they love to do in Hollywood is save money when possible. You need two people to have a conversation, and a coffee shop set that’s already built and on the lot is a lovely choice. It’s got nothing to do with the story, and it’s meant to be kind of invisible, and that’s great.
I do think that setting is one of our most underutilized tools on the page, and there’s absolutely no reason to limit yourself to the budget or visual language of film. You have, right now, no matter who you are, an unlimited budget. And you might want to do something more interesting with setting, like picking one that puts pressure on characters, or one that presents opportunities for dynamic interaction.
All of this is interesting, and it spurs two thoughts:
1. I’ve read a few of Makkai’s novels and liked them a lot. She’s a very visual writer and a very structural writer. Her plots have structure–perhaps too much structure sometimes, in a way that can seem more constructed than real–and they also have a strong, almost Tolkien-like sense of place. So much so that I’ve wondered whether she prepares architectural drawings or three-dimensional models of her settings. The different rooms and levels of the house in the Hundred-Year House, the Chicago neighborhood in The Great Believers, the buildings and hilly environs of the school in I Have Some Questions for You . . . all these places seemed real, they seemed physical in a way that I don’t usually feel in novels that I read. And I think this sense of physicality really helps the stories, it gives a grounding in the same way that a story can be grounded in character or science or connections to current events.
One way to interpret this is that Makkai has followed her own advice and recognized that, when writing a novel, the physical setting comes at no cost (except for the labor of the writer), and so she makes excellent use of this opportunity. Or we could look at it from the other direction and say that Makkai happens to have a very strong visual and spatial sense, giving her the ability to create vivid, three-dimensional settings in a way that would be much more difficult for most other writers to do.
2. I think it’s much harder to make a living by writing than it used to be. Even setting aside competition from chatbots, reading is no longer a mass entertainment medium. Sure, there are a few bestselling authors of fiction (in today’s newspaper, these are Callie Hart, Nora Roberts, James Patterson, John Grisham, and a few others), but I don’t know that even they sell so many copies, and it’s nothing like past decades, when mass producers like Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald sold millions of paperbacks and serious writers from John Updike to Anne Tyler could make a good living too. I get the impression that nowadays even a successful writer needs a full-time job. For example Gary Shteyngart is a Columbia professor, and Makkai herself seems to have multiple teaching positions.
So, if you want to be a serious writer, you need that other job, or else you have to write for TV or the movies, and I guess that would probably be TV. Indeed, the other day I finished Halle Butler’s novel, Banal Nightmare–I absolutely loved it, and my immediate thought was: Uh oh, she’s too good. She’ll get hired to write for TV–fair enough, that will give her a steady paycheck–and be reduced to writing novels as a hobby. Which I think is too bad: 80 years ago or even 40 years ago she could’ve looked forward to a successful career as a novelist, probably not enough to get rich from it (for that you need to get lucky and be in the right place at the right time) but enough to support a comfortable lifestyle as a full-time writer, someone like Peter De Vries. Nowadays, not so much. From a greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number perspective, that’s probably fine–more people watch TV than were ever going to read novels–; but from my perspective as a fan of written literature, I’m sad.
Anyway, I’m reading this long and interesting post by Makkai on the differences between the writing of fiction in books and for screens, and I’m thinking that the main economic function of novels is as low-cost prototypes for movies and TV shows. Literature is a sort of New Haven of the arts. So maybe Makkai’s advice would be good for writers who want to write novels, but then the successful ones will have to change gears once they move into TV writing. I’m not sure, it’s just a thought.
3. To return to Makkai’s original point: I think it’s interesting, the idea that, in a movie, the sets and backgrounds can be expensive, but they can be very quickly conveyed on screen. In contrast, when writing a book, you can construct an elaborate three-dimensional world at a cost of $0. But it can be tricky to explain it to the reader. In her novels, Makkai does a great job at both construction and explanation. I get the sense of there being a detailed three-dimensional world where the characters are moving, and Makkai conveys this through the development of the story in a way that works for the reader.
Interesting! I enjoyed reading Michael C. Drout’s “The Tower and the Ruin” this year, it is about Tolkien’s writing. The book made me understand something about Tolkien’s writing, and writing in general, which I previously felt but did not understand. It argues one of Tolkien’s greatest skill is in navigating the trade-off between the 10 seconds of context, and the thirty pages of detail. In many cases, he places a ruin on the horizon or gives you a fragment of a story. Enough to give the impression there’s more to explore (and sometimes there is, in other works), but without getting bogged down in detail. Just like the set of a sitcom needs to look good and lived-in on screen, but does not actually need to be a functional living space.
Maybe also an important difference between fiction and non-fiction: in fiction it is enough for it to _feel_ like god’s in every leaf on every tree. It is enough to feel like the ruin has a story, and if so inclined, the reader can fill in the details. In non-fiction, God has to be in every leaf on every tree. Finding out the ruin (or story about the Chinese rowers) lacks a grounding in reality and was just there to make the argument more convincing can unravel a whole project.
Either way, excited to read some more Makkai over the summer!
Quote from above: “Enough to give the impression there’s more to explore (and sometimes there is, in other works), but without getting bogged down in detail.”
I am not a book reader myself, but I wonder whether there might be a role in this of the readers’ imagination and brain. I reason that it could be that there is some sort of sweet spot where the writer provides just enough, but not too much, information and details which in turn consciously or unconsiously lets the reader sort of fill in the blanks, and use their own imagination. I wonder whether it is that process that might in turn facilitate or cause some sort of immersive or captivating experience for the reader.
As a person with aphantasia I can also assure you that the ideal amount of descriptive detail varies wildly from reader to reader. Tolkien is practically unreadable to me. It feels like about 10 minutes of story and 36 hours of descriptive details that are approximately like reading the assembly language code of a 3D renderer.
Ah interesting, I had not heard of aphantasia. I just looked it up. I can imagine that the ideal amount of descriptive detail varies from reader to reader, and I was talking in very general terms and simple proposed mechanism or idea here.
As a result of your comment I looked up some things concerning reading and aphantasia and here are some findings I came across from Speed et al. (2024) “The role of visual imagery in story reading: Evidence from aphantasia”:
“Supporting a key contribution of visual imagery to story reading, we found that participants with aphantasia were less engaged with and absorbed in the story. This suggests that building a visual image of the details described in a story leads to greater absorption in a story world.”
and
“Interestingly, while there were differences in terms of being engaged and absorbed in the story, there were no differences in how much aphantasics liked the story. In fact, aphantasics reported to read on average slightly more fiction books than controls. This suggests that experiencing a story via visual imagery is not the only way in which stories can be enjoyed.”
The following section from the introduction of Speed et al. the following might further underline the possibility that involvement when reading is related to some mental processess that have to do with imagination and simulation (which might be influenced by a sweet spot of providing just enough details and descriptive material but not too much):
“Stronger perceptual activations were observed for people with high scores on the Fantasy scale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980), implying a link between mental simulation and the tendency to get mentally involved in stories. This finding suggests that individuals with aphantasia, who cannot visually image, may be less likely to become absorbed in stories.”
As a kid I would become so absorbed in reading people would comment on it, and have difficulty interacting with me. i wouldn’t notice them in the room, etc.
But long passages of visual description dont do it for me. Moderate quantities of visual description are OK.
Quote from the blog post: “In a post entitled, “You’re Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie,” Rebecca Makkai writes:”
For some reason this made me think of those social science papers with an introduction section that looks like a mini text-book, perhaps in line with Bem’s 2003 recommendations of writing an empirical journal article using the hourglass shape. I don’t like those kinds of introductions, as I reason they will likely contain way too general, and likely non-representative, information and references.
I think it is interesting to think about the optimal jumping-off point, so to say, regarding all of this in an introduction. Perhaps it’s a bit like setting the scene in a book or movie. I think it might be useful for several reasons to try and pick just the right level or specificity or jumping-off point or thing to zoom in on in the introduction, to 1) interest the reader, and 2) fit the rest of the paper and its main goal or purpose.
I wonder whether that might be an interesting blog post topic to possibly ponder. I searched just now and couldn’t find a post on here concerning the topic of the introduction of a paper, but I could find a few posts about titles and one about advice on writing a discussion of a published paper.
First, you just sold a copy of I Some Questions For You that your January post failed to sell for some reason. Second, “Literature is a sort of New Haven of the arts” deserves its own post, depending on whether you’re focusing on the surface reading of the old Broadway assembly line or some deeper point comparing East Coast academic citadels. Third, the novels that leave a bad taste are those that read too much like the movie the author desperately wants to get made from it. And even worse, they usually make bad movies when they do get made, So I agree with Makkai on a completely different level. I continue to believe that the best novels are unfilmable and the best movies resist novelization. So it’s not so much that movie descriptions and book descriptions require different levels of effort — they are fundamentally different things.
Jonathan:
By “New Haven,” yes, I was referring to that city’s former role as a location for Broadway tryouts, not its hosting of the #2 Ivy League university.
Ah yes, New Haven and Broadway tryouts. The “wrongest” review of a musical is attributed to Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen, aka Mike Todd, who in 1943, supposedly wrote of the new musical, “Oklahoma” which was about to come to Broadway:
“no tits, no legs, no chance”
In my opinion there are quite a few great books that have made great movies – these are often oldish books. Incidentally, going from a movie to a book (novelisation) sounds like a very bad idea!
Here are some examples of top of my head – I expect others can come up with more examples:
“Remains of the Day” by Ishiguro (awesome book and beautifully realized film – possibibly the best film of a book)
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K Dick and “Bladerunner” 1982 film
“Passage to India” by EM Foster and 1984 film
several books by Dickens: e.g. “Great Expectations” and the 1946 film; “Bleak House” and the 2005 BBC film
“Rebecca” by Daphne Du Maurier and Hitchcock film version
“39 Steps” by John Buchan and Hitchcock film version (whether John Buchan’s books can be considered “great” is debatable!)
“The Third Man” by Graham Greene and 1949 film version
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee and 1962 film version
These books all mostly have straightforward narrative structure which helps film-wise and I expect there may well be some books that would be a struggle to film.
Chris:
These are some good examples. Also there’ve been lots of great movies based on OK but not great novels, such as The Maltese Falcon, Oppenheimer, The Godfather, etc., not to mention a bunch of classic noir movies.
Just one thing: Graham Greene’s book, The Third Man, is a film treatment, i.e. a novel specifically written to be made into a film. So it’s not a movie based on a novel in the usual sense.
To go in another direction, there’s Gone With the Wind, which might not be considered a great novel or a great movie, but it was a very big deal when it came out as a novel and then a much-anticipated and successful movie. In a pop culture sense, it was both a great novel and a great movie.
And, around the same time, The Wizard of Oz, which is undeniably a great movie. Is it a great novel? Martin Gardner kinda thought so. It’s not an artful book, but it’s arguably a masterwork of folk art.
Overall, though, I think Jonathan has a point. If we think of the great novels in history, from Cervantes through Twain, or great modern novels by Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Updike, etc., very few of them have been made into great movies (as distinguished from mere competent adaptations). And when we think of great movies, from Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane through the masterworks of the 1970s and beyond, they’re more filmic than literary.
Far be it from me to disagree with Andrew when he says I have a point. I’ll give you Remains of the Day. It’s possible that there’s a Dickens movie that matches Dickens, but I’m a little dubious. Buchan is, by these lights, clearly second-rate and in line with the Hammett or Chandler examples of Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep (which of course Faulkner famously struggled with an ultimately conceded defeat, but with a great movie as the result). Rebecca and To Kill a Mockingbird are both really good novels and really good movies, but I think fall short of “great,” though YMMV on both the novel and the movie. And I definitely agree that the more straightforward the narrative structure, the better chance you have. Now I need to see The Odyssey… the book’s excellent.
I’m surprised you’re dubious about a Dicken’s movie that matches Dickens – I gave you a couple of examples. The David Lean 1946 Great Expectations is considered a classic. Likewise the BBC serialised version of Bleak House is excellent. I read (ploughed through) the book earlier this year and used the film version to clarify some of the intricate plot twists. We saw “The Life and Times of David Copperfield” a few years ago and that was also excellent. One of lots of examples of novels being used as an inspiration for a film (think Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare and West Side Story, but we can’t consider Shakespeare as a novelist – or the Bible as a novel otherwise I would want to include the classic “Gospel According to Matthew” by Pasolini!).
It does depend on how you choose to define “Great” especially in the context of novels where there can be elements of snobbery attached. I’m very happy to consider a good novel together with a good film. As you say it depends on one’s personal view – there’s only so far you can go with attempting objective classifications about art!
Making good films from classic books perhaps has more of a history in European Cinema. As well as my examples above one might add (these all came to me after a good night’s sleep!):
Solaris by Stanislav Lem and the stunning Tarkovsky film
A Room with a View by EM Foster and 1985 film
Howard’s End by EM Foster and the 1990’s film (Brits do these films based on early 20th century novels very well not to mention films of 18th/19th century novelists like Jane Austen)
Death in Venice (Thomas Mann) and the film version with Dirk Bogarde
Lord of the Flies by William Golding and 1963 film.
there’s also Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and the 1943 film which was in the top 100 popular movies in US box office apparently so even if it wasn’t “great” snobbery-wise it was great popular-wise.
That’s not to say that I disagree with you about the difficulty of making good films from difficult classic novels. I guess also it depends on whether you want an outstanding but faithful recreation of the style and narrative structure of the novel (like lots of the British film versions of the mid 20th century) or whether you are also happy with a film that takes it’s inspiration from a novel – Apocylapse Now/Heart of Darkness also comes to mind.
I think we pretty much agree, Chris. My initial statement was a little hyperbolic, but we agree that its hard, because great novels (for the most part) are “difficult.” Their difficulty is part of what makes them great. Nabokov is a great writer and his most famous book was made into a terrible movie and I don’t think they’ve even tried with any other book. I loved the book My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Moshfegh, but the thought of a movie based on it makes me ill. Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness is an interesting example of the genre “Inspired By.” I’m all for great movies inspired by great novels and there are dozens of them. I read Lem’s Solaris many years ago, but I’ve never seen the movie… maybe I should.
Oh, and I meant to say that the Moshfegh novel they did make into a book, Eileen, was a not-very-good movie based on one of her not-best novels. That’s more of what one usually gets.
Yes I agree that we are more or less agreed Jonathan. Your example of Nabokov is excellent. I fell in love with Nabokov’s writing way back and used my Grand National Winnings (Ben Nevis!) to buy his Speak Memory autobiography. My favourite novels were some of the more understated ones (Mary, Glory, Invitation to a Beheading) and Bend Sinister. I didn’t enjoy Lolita and haven’t bothered to watch the film; I’ll take your implied advice not to watch it.
I also liked Patrick White’s novels but am not aware of any films of these.
Can recommend Tarkovsky’s Solaris – I went through my 20’s enchanted by the films of Tarkovsky – and Wim Wenders (a couple of novels by Peter Handke filmed including “The goalkeeper’s fear of the penalty kick” which was quite weird but compelling – I haven’t included these on my selection of good films and good books since they’re quite obscure).
I reread Mary and Glory recently and didn’t feel the same spark as I did when I was 20something but that’s quite common unfortunately. I don’t know Moshfegh but will look out for the books you suggest.
Ha! My Dinner with Andre!