Writing Cinematically

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been planning like mad for NaNoWriMo 2012 – this is becoming a yearly thing and, after having a ball the past two years I’m not ashamed of that fact – and it occurred to me that my way of visualising scenes and chapters, almost, might be quite interesting to some people.

Basically, my new novel (which I’m not quite ready to announce) is going to be a sci-fi epic in its own right. And the first in an actual pre-planned series – the first major series I’ll be writing. And I can assure you, you’re going to love it?

But what’s been helping me get these vapid, ethereal ideas out of my brain and into some sort of logical context? Why, of course, I visualise every scene in my mind as a mini-movie.

Now that might sound stupid, but consider this: writing a fiction book is like guiding an invisible “narrator” who tells the story around a series of situations and makes observations on what they see that the reader can synthesise appropriately. My new book will be in third-person (I tried Colonisation in first-person to… mixed success.) and essentially what I’m doing with the writing is using the text as a camera in a film to showcase events, characters and settings.

And getting your head into that frame of mind really helps. Basically, I imagine what the “movie version” would show and I aim to fill that textual frame with all the detail to make it a rich, vivid and most importantly believable cohesive whole that the reader will be able to visualise similarly.

My new book is going to be a no-holds-barred space opera, and this poses its own challenges. I’ve some pretty amazing space-based showcase events that I want to really do justice to, and the absolute easiest way I’ve found it to get a scene from, say Star Wars and take cues from that, and hope to emulate the atmosphere and energy portrayed there. You really have to imagine you’re there in the fictional universe you aim to create for it to be believable, but also you have to make sure the reader also gets there in a way similar to how you picture it in your head.

This may seem quite odd and weird, but it isn’t. It’s very easy to lose yourself in details that don’t matter, but if you want to write a blockbuster scene, imagine it’s a blockbuster movie. I find it really does help.