literary vs cinematic story structure
last night one of the things I did to past time when taking a break from the stress of working on sorting out my TDS timeline was watch X-Men: The Last Stand with director and writers commentary on. Two things I remember from that are: 1) that they acknowledges an awful lot of 'nods' and 'winks' to comic book fans by including little things in the background, or ripping certain dialogue from X-Men comic story arcs; and 2) that they discussed throughout the commentary the story structure of the movie particularly regarding the director coming into the trilogy on the third movie with most of the story completed and deciding with the writers to make certain changes, so that certain dramatic or spectacular looking events that originally took place in the middle of the story were pushed to the 'third act'. (If you saw the movie, they were talking about how originally the big ripping the golden gate bridge off it's moorings scene was used earlier in the plot to allow Magneto to reach Mystique and other prisoners on Alcatraz and then toward the end of the movie, the climactic events took place in Washington DC, not Alcatraz. The director made the bridge scene part of the climax, moved the cure to Alcatraz and then placed the rescuing prisoners scene, that takes place earlier, on a moving convoy.)
This whole 'acts' thing is very much something from theatre and movie scriptwriting: dramatic writing. Television is probably one of the most formulaic types of script writing, because no matter how your actual plot is original, you are constrained to writing between commercial breaks and the necessity of building tension before the break to keep viewers from switching channels. Traditionally novel writing also has a structure, but it tends to be a little less formulaic. If you learn about fiction writing in school, they tell you about plot and conflict and resolution and denouement. It's not necessarily in three 'acts'. But, that said, there is a seeming need or market for 'cinematic' fiction. It makes adaptations easier. It makes fiction more appealing to those in acquisitions for the studios, if they can 'see' how it would work as a movie.
So, my current question: at what point, if any, can writing a novel with the goal of having it also work 'cinematicly' compromise it as art or as a novel? Is there a point at which it is *too* commercial or 'sell-out' to worry about how a story will work on the screen when one is primarily a novelist? A point at which there must be a distinction between script writers and novelists? A point at which the novel suffers from being to constrained by 'commercial-break' pacing that readers don't want to read?
I know this for certain: if it's in novel format, it absolutely must work as a novel and hold reader attention before it does anything else. Not to sure where about the rest or the gray area and lines being drawn.
This whole 'acts' thing is very much something from theatre and movie scriptwriting: dramatic writing. Television is probably one of the most formulaic types of script writing, because no matter how your actual plot is original, you are constrained to writing between commercial breaks and the necessity of building tension before the break to keep viewers from switching channels. Traditionally novel writing also has a structure, but it tends to be a little less formulaic. If you learn about fiction writing in school, they tell you about plot and conflict and resolution and denouement. It's not necessarily in three 'acts'. But, that said, there is a seeming need or market for 'cinematic' fiction. It makes adaptations easier. It makes fiction more appealing to those in acquisitions for the studios, if they can 'see' how it would work as a movie.
So, my current question: at what point, if any, can writing a novel with the goal of having it also work 'cinematicly' compromise it as art or as a novel? Is there a point at which it is *too* commercial or 'sell-out' to worry about how a story will work on the screen when one is primarily a novelist? A point at which there must be a distinction between script writers and novelists? A point at which the novel suffers from being to constrained by 'commercial-break' pacing that readers don't want to read?
I know this for certain: if it's in novel format, it absolutely must work as a novel and hold reader attention before it does anything else. Not to sure where about the rest or the gray area and lines being drawn.