How Watching Films & TV Can Improve Your Writing
Image by @jenskreuter via Unsplash
Awesome! You mean all my hours of binge-watching Netflix, HBOMax, Amazon Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+, Hulu, etc., etc. Are actually helping my writing?
Well, yes, and no.
As with “reading like a writer,” watching like a writer is important. You can’t just passively consume content and assume you will also imbibe how it’s done. If that were the case, all of us who’ve read books or watched tv and movies since infancy would be genius storytellers by now.
The answer lies in deliberate practice: analyzing what worked (and what didn’t) in a particular tv series or film for you. This isn’t drudgery. It’s two simple things:
Learning to notice
Thinking about why it worked (or didn’t)
Likely you’re already doing this on some level as you watch. The next step is to apply it to your writing.
Yes, writing is different from visual media, but there are many things you can learn about storytelling from watching what you already watch anyway.
Also, 95% of us at this point have grown up in a culture saturated with visual media. Most of us watch more tv and movies than we read. (Although maybe this skews more in the direction of reading among writers – one can hope!) Our writing is influenced by visual storytelling whether we like it or not, so why not use it to improve?
This came to me last week as I was writing my newsletter for subscribers, and talking about a couple of films I’d recently watched and how I thought they could be applied to writing.
As I thought about it, I came up with even more ways to use watching to inform writing, and here they are:
They help you think visually – Well, duh. But some of my clients have trouble with this. They don’t see their story world fully. Dialogue takes place between two talking heads, with no details of where they are, or when, or who else is around them, or what else is happening (are they eating? Walking? In a boardroom? A throne room?). The visual world is not fleshed out.
Storytelling – A good film draws you in, makes you care about the characters, has you asking questions right away about how things will turn out. I watched the first episode of House of the Dragon recently (I’m behind, I know) and right away, the setup grabbed me: an aging king with no heirs asks his nobles to choose between two contenders. That isn’t going to end well, I thought. The rest of the season (and presumably, the series) will be about that rift and its repercussions, I imagine. I’m hooked.
Structure – You can enhance your understanding of classic 3-act structure by analyzing what is happening in a film. Some people break this into 4 or even 5 acts. Get a good book on screenwriting (try Robert McKee’s classic, Story) and see if you can spot the setup, the Inciting Incident, the turn into Act II, the Midpoint, the Climax, etc.
It also helps you structure scenes. You see where they get right into the meat of the scene, how they move people in and out, how there is always a point to the scene, and how it leads to what happens next. If those things don’t happen, you notice it instantly. I tried to watch Amsterdam the other day, and only got about halfway through. The scenes dragged, and they seemed to have no point (or it took too long to get there). Thumbs down.
This is related to pacing and creating suspense/tension - Of course, in visual media the music pulls a lot of this weight. But while in writing you might be tempted to write a long passage about how the character gets out of bed, goes to the bathroom, brushes his teeth, gets ready, walks to work, opens the door, sits at this desk, has a meeting with his archnemesis... In film we’re more likely to skip all the “getting there” and focus on the event: the confrontation with the nemesis, who barges into the office, making threats and demands. We don’t care about the other stuff because it doesn’t matter. This is also related to editing, so if you do tend to do a lot of “throat-clearing” before the scene actually starts, make sure when you edit, you get it down to the crucial moments.
Setting as Character – The creepy house, the isolated moor, the cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood, the post-apocalyptic crumbling urban hellscape... all of these are going to inform the mood of the story, as well as the choices the characters make. In two films I watched recently, the setting was crucial to helping us understand the characters and their motivations.
The Banshees of Inisherin is set on an island off the coast of Ireland in 1923. The small, insular community in an Isolated, wild landscape heightened the sense of desperation and absurdity. One person does eventually escape, but you can see how such a small “world” affects the other characters’ development, and their actions and reactions in the story.
In Athena, 99% of the action takes place in a huge housing development in a Paris suburb. The concrete jungle landscape and the claustrophobic interiors inform how the action unfolds and helps us understand the lengths to which these people will go to get what they want.
Dialogue – Obviously! This is all about how specific word choices, tone, diction, and syntax help us understand the character. On the page, it’s tempting to write everything as we hear it in our heads – which might only reflect our own vocabulary, syntax, etc. If we’re not careful, every character sounds the same. Hearing dialogue on screen forces us to pay attention to these things in a new way. You know if you’re watching a laconic Clint Eastwood hero, or something written in a rattling explosion of words by Aaron Sorkin.
Physical action/reaction - If you tend to fall into clichéd physical expressions to denote emotions and character (or use the same ones over and over), watching serious actors will open your eyes to a whole new vocabulary. This can be very subtle, but it’s worth paying attention to.
I was watching an episode of Hell on Wheels where the main character, Bohannon, is attending a dinner with people who are clearly high up on the social ladder. One asks him a question, intending to be insulting, and instantly Bohannon straightens up, changes how he holds his silverware, and speaks in a more refined register than he had previously. The others stare at him, stunned, realizing they’d assumed he was a yokel, when in fact he’s a well-educated, upper-class man not so different from themselves. He’d deliberately created an illusion in order to pass among the rough men of the railroad camp. Thinking about how you recreate that on the page can bring your characters to new life.
Secondary characters – Speaking of characters, pay attention to how secondary or minor characters are portrayed. Note how they are more likely to fall into cliché or stereotype. Beware of that in your own writing. Note what roles they play in response to the main character – how they support or hinder him/her, or reveal the main character through their actions and dialogue. Are there any twists set up involving secondary characters that could be satisfying in your story? The Harry Potter books and films are especially terrific at creating a fantastic array of characters who are instantly recognizable and have an interesting role to play in the story.
The big problem:
There is one big problem with relying too much on visual input to construct our stories, though. We lose precious character interiority. On screen, we have to hear in dialogue or infer from action what the characters are thinking and feeling. On the page, we get to hear their thoughts and feel their emotions, even if they are concealing them from others in the scene. Obviously, a good actor makes you understand what he’s really feeling, even if his words are at odds with it. In writing, you have direct access to a character’s thoughts. Physical actions and expressions are only one way to show this, and can be overused. See my article on How to Express Character Thought and Emotion for more ideas on how to do this.
You can analyze any of the above areas while watching a show or movie, but it can be especially helpful while re-watching something you already know, since you won’t be so absorbed in the story as it unfolds. You might even make some notes as you watch. That will help you notice even more details, and will also help with recall.
Another idea is to watch with the volume off, or watch something in another language with subtitles off. This forces you to pay attention to everything except the dialogue – the character’s expressions and actions, the pacing, the visual details, and so on.
For better or worse, we’re in an age where every reader has been saturated with visual storytelling. Therefore, studying films can be useful for writers in the variety of ways I’ve described above.
