Be BRAVE and TRUE

i think a lot of writers, science fiction ones especially, take cues from movies and television. this has an effect, of course, on pacing and plot and tropes, but i'm particularly interested in what it does to prose.

the thing i'm going to call "cinematic prose" is dominated by showing rather than telling. it focuses on the details of the now: what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled. put simply, the POV character acts as a camera, and details are chosen from that frame. it can be very effective: immediate, visceral, and intimate.

however, writing can do things that film can't, especially with time and distance. in prose there is always the option to grasp a thought or detail that is out of the frame and seamlessly integrate it into the flow of narrative. an author can tell a reader many important, revealing things very quickly, one after another. telling, the bugbear of cheesy writing advice, is a versatile, useful tool.

for example, here's a paragraph from tolkein in the silmarillion:

"[...] nonetheless the evil of Melkor and the blight of his hatred flowed out thence, and the Spring of Arda was marred. Green things fell sick and rotted, and rivers were choked with weeds and slime, and fens were made, rank and poisonous, the breeding place of flies; and forests grew dark and perilous, the haunts of fear; and beasts became monsters of horn and ivory and dyed the earth with blood."

this small passage is beautiful. you feel the cadence of it; it's like a dirge of grief as it lists beautiful thing after beautiful thing irreversibly marred by malice. there's no cinematography here. the picture is taken from a great distance, a brief collage of sorrow. telling can gather: it can pick five things out of a person's life and arrange them in a summoning circle to capture their spirit. here's the most memorable (and damning) description of a person i've ever read:

“See that fire tower over there? The man in that tower—you take him fifty yards away from that tower and he’s lost. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know the woods. He don’t know nothing. He can’t even fry a hamburger.”

that last sentence -- he can't even fry a hamburger -- is perfect. we don't have to watch anyone eat a burnt hamburger; we never get closer to the man than the shape of a tower over yonder, and yet in two lines you know exactly who he is and how the speaker feels about him.

as an exercise, i tried writing the same moment several different ways, using differing levels of cinematic versus telling prose. to make it fun i used steve and tony, obviously.

the first set is tony having a miserable time at steve's funeral after civil war.

1: Tony shifted his weight from foot to foot, brushing against Steve’s friends standing to either side of him. The gaze of the crowd clung to him like a water-soaked woolen blanket. They had to know this was his fault. Tony pressed his lips together and looked down at his program, already spattered with rain drops, and waited for Sam to finish the eulogy.

2: Tony had a rock in his shoe. It was driving him nuts. It pinched right in the arch of his foot, wedged in between two stitches in the leather lining the sole. He wanted to sit down and pull the shoe off but he couldn’t, not here. He was going to have to endure it. He had to stand there, listening to Sam give Steve’s eulogy, and let it dig in.

3: Tony felt trapped, listening to Sam give Steve’s eulogy. His guilt pinched and pulled at him, and he had to hide it, endure it in silence, until he could get away and grieve in private.

4: Tony watched them put Steve (not Steve, an LMD of Steve, everything about this was fake) in the ground. It rained. He hated it.

the second is of steve having bad coffee memories.

1: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine,” Steve says, even though it goes down too smooth, sweet and rounded over his tongue, nothing like the sharp, narrow taste of coffee brewed in a hurry with a percolator over smokeless fire. The foam on top forms a delicate fern in white and tan, marred from the touch of his lips to the mug’s rim. He rotates the mug on its saucer until the handle points due north, then folds his hands in his lap.

2: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine.” It is fine — Steve can drink this. Not a big deal. He just doesn’t like how they serve coffee these days, that’s all. The first time he had a latte he’d thought now this is a hell of a lot better than the gritty burnt shit we get as rations usually, and then he’d realized that usually was gone forever. He’d tried going to a diner where kitchen grease shone in little glints of blue off the surface of their bitter, black coffee, but it turned out the familiarity was as bad as the change. Now Steve habitually orders water. It’s cheaper, besides.

3: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine,” Steve says, even though it isn’t. Modern coffee reminds him how much has changed. The stuff he was used to was burnt. The boys’d always spent the first hour on the march every morning picking grounds out from between their teeth.

4: “Don’t bother, coffee’s fine,” Steve lies. Great job, Captain Rogers, you acted like a normal civilian for five minutes. Extra postage allowance for you!

writing the same thing a bunch of different ways was really interesting.  i tried for close cinematic (1), more distant cinematic (2), straightforward telling (3) and blunt as fuck (4).  i liked 2 and 4 the best; they felt the most punchy to me; clear and hard-edged instead of mushy.  i'm going to push my range harder in the future, because i want to give my reader not just what's happening in the present but also the context: how the character relates each moment to their past, their relationships, their factional knowledge and beliefs.  my writing isn't there yet, but i have aspirations, yo, and i'm getting better all the time.

i'm curious which of the versions above people like best, and what y'all think are the pros and cons of cinematic versus telling prose.  i have more thoughts about how this stuff affects pacing and reader experience, but it's late and i hope this is enough to start a conversation.