Use movement and gesture in your fictionAn Emmy Award-winning cameraman and director turned award-winning novelist offers wise thoughts on keeping a fresh eye for small details
Published:
June 15, 2011 I have spent more than 20 years behind the lens of a camera, framing the
way people move in hundreds of films (and in the process, taking home
an Emmy and two Gordon Parks awards for cinematography). Maybe that’s
why I think movement and gesture are important in writing, because they
tell us visually what is happening internally.
I’ve tried to apply that cameraman’s eye to my budding writing career, which began with my 2010 novel Drink the Tea, which won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Best First Private Eye Novel competition, and a starred review from Publishers Weekly. I suspect most people like Willis Gidney, my private eye, who also appears in my second novel, Steal the Show, due out this month.
When
I write a scene for a novel, I try to see it, to visualize the
important details. Where are the people at the start? How about at the
end? What changed?
You can learn a lot watching how characters move in well-directed films. In the opening scene of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels,
Sullivan explains his new project to his bosses. They hate it. The
scene is all one take, and the way the actors move in the scene is
motivated by their feelings and reactions to one another. The staging is
poetry.
Alfred Hitchcock had a great sense of staging and movement. In fact, he deliberately confined his shooting space in films like Rear Window and Dial M for Murder—for him the films were exercises in staging and camerawork. Any fiction writer can learn a lot by watching them. |
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