buyjupiter
Maester
After listening to Ken Liu speak about cinematic writing last weekend, I was wondering what y'all thought of the subject.
How do you define it? How does it figure into your reading habits, i.e. do you avoid things that are "cinematic" in nature or do you seek them out?
Is the cinematic feel solely one of these characteristics or do you have to combine most of them to be cinematic:
-POV choice and narrative distance?
-strong presence of a narrative "camera"?
-visual description?
-short snappy dialogue?
-low to no internal thought?
-fast pacing?
Because I'm reading The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly right now and it feels cinematic. But I don't know if that is a virtue of the genre (thriller) with its pacing and narrative techniques and because action movies heavily borrow from those techniques, or if it's because I can easily visualize what the author is putting before me in text (in which case the author has succeeded at his task).
I also have been told that my writing can be cinematic (which I feel is a compliment because I spend a lot of time thinking of good clear visual description as well as where to put my POV character to view the important stuff), but if that is in fact a "bad" thing for "real" novelists to do, then I want to know what consistently makes up that cinematic feel. So I can use it if I want to, for effect, or not.
And for reference, one of the books Liu threw out as an example of cinematic writing was the Hunger Games. Which boggled my mind, as I consider first person narratives to be among the least cinematic of books.
How do you define it? How does it figure into your reading habits, i.e. do you avoid things that are "cinematic" in nature or do you seek them out?
Is the cinematic feel solely one of these characteristics or do you have to combine most of them to be cinematic:
-POV choice and narrative distance?
-strong presence of a narrative "camera"?
-visual description?
-short snappy dialogue?
-low to no internal thought?
-fast pacing?
Because I'm reading The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly right now and it feels cinematic. But I don't know if that is a virtue of the genre (thriller) with its pacing and narrative techniques and because action movies heavily borrow from those techniques, or if it's because I can easily visualize what the author is putting before me in text (in which case the author has succeeded at his task).
I also have been told that my writing can be cinematic (which I feel is a compliment because I spend a lot of time thinking of good clear visual description as well as where to put my POV character to view the important stuff), but if that is in fact a "bad" thing for "real" novelists to do, then I want to know what consistently makes up that cinematic feel. So I can use it if I want to, for effect, or not.
And for reference, one of the books Liu threw out as an example of cinematic writing was the Hunger Games. Which boggled my mind, as I consider first person narratives to be among the least cinematic of books.