Writing for a novel and a film are two very different forms of writing and stand no comparison, for the simple reason that the book is a finished product and the screenplay, all said and done, is only at intermediate stage, a blueprint that has no independent existence. One may even go to the extent of saying that if you want to write a screenplay, then write a screenplay! But if you want to make a film, simply make one.
French-Swiss director, screenwriter and film critic John Luc Godard used to say some of his best films had no script at all – just notes on paper napkins at whatever café he stopped at for coffee.
The truth, however, is that most filmmakers don’t work that way. For reasons both artistic and commercial, they have a script in their hands before the process of actual shooting begins. As compared to cinema, literature operates at a different level. Each reader forms his own corresponding image of the characters and settings and views it with a mental filter entirely his own. It is through his active mediation that the literary work comes alive.
Cinema, on the other hand, operates through concrete images and sounds and has a tendency to encourage passivity. Although like literature, cinema, too, employs the same elements such as plot, character, setting, dialogue and also shares its tendency to manipulate time and space; the experience of the two is very different. The root difference, some believe, is that in cinema, one extracts the thought from the image and in literature, the image from the thought.
The first commandment you get in screenwriting is to think visually. Nothing that can be seen or heard, that is, nothing that cannot be captured by the camera or the sound recorder should get into a script. Flowery language is forbidden in screenwriting. To the point. Non-distracting. Subservient to dialogue and action and plot. No long narrative passages. No detailed descriptions. Basic, cut-to-the-bone narrative. That’s a typical screenplay. No metaphors, similes or poetry. In other words, no artistry.
Syd Field, a celebrated expert on the subject, sums it up in his definition of a screenplay saying “a screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure”.
Without the tool of a beautiful prose, a screenwriter has to become a master of dialogue, action, structure and characterisation and these present their own challenges.
In fact, a screenwriter might well throw this arguments back on my face by saying a screenwriter has to be a better writer because he or she can’t depend on the flow of language but has to create powerful characters, motivation, intent, emotion and point-of-view without the support of pretty narrative.
Screenwriting, therefore, is far more concerned with spectacle/image, movement and speech than with the art and beauty of language. And it is the beauty of language that is the biggest challenge facing a writer — to my mind, far more so than dramatic structure and spectacle.
I think a major difference between writing screenplays and novels is pace. A novel can afford to weave at its own pace, as long as the quality of the prose and of the language is sufficiently strong to maintain the reader’s interest.
A screenwriter, on the other hand, cannot simply rely on the mesmerising quality of a story’s prose and has to keep the audience involved through pacing.
It is a fact that a medium such as cinema, which expresses through the exterior is hard put to create the kind of psychological complexity necessary to illustrate the tension between the inner self and the social mask. The inner monologue that goes on in a man’s mind is best expressed in an abstract medium like literature.
There are, of course, those minor differences or rather limitations that the screenwriter has to face. He has to limit his screenplay to 100-120 pages, each page approximately corresponding to one minute of screen time.
The writer of a novel, however, has the liberty to go on to an epic length if his material so demands. A screenwriter has to invariably write the description in the present tense because a film is always in the present tense, no matter whether it is talking about the past or the future. While in a novel you can write “he walked”, for a screenplay it has to be “he walks”. These are merely a matter of craft. The essential difference really boils down to word and image.
Bluestone aptly sums it up by saying that in the wake of film’s ability to so vividly and immediately represent visual and dramatic narrative, “the novel has tended to retreat more and more from external action to internal thought, from plot to character, from social to psychological reality.”
In the good old days, when cinema was in its infancy, an ugly debate raised its head. Writers denigrated film as a hybrid art that was threatening the hierarchy of word over image. But in spite of all that controversy regarding the primacy of word over image, it’s a fact that cinema owes much to Victorian literature, particularly Dickens. The father of narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith learnt all his lessons from the writings of Charles Dickens. Most of his concepts like close-up, flashback, dissolve, parallel cutting et al is derived from his novels.
Griffith, summing up his intention of making films, in 1913, said, “The task I am trying to achieve is above all to make you see.” Coincidentally some years earlier, in 1897, novelist Joseph Konrad in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus had written: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is before all, to make you see”.
Apart from the resemblance in words, the coincidence is remarkable in suggesting the points at which the novel and the film meet and part company. One may see visually through the eye or imaginatively through the mind. And between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference between the two media.
