Writing Tools (22 page)

Before there was cinema, writers wrote cinematically. Influenced by the visual arts — by portraits and tapestries — authors have long understood how to shift their focus in and out to capture both character and landscape.

Many authors now write books with movies in mind, but cinematic techniques can be traced to the earliest expression of English literature. A thousand years ago, the unnamed poet who composed the epic
Beowulf knew
how to write cinematically. He could pull back the lens to establish heroic settings of land and sea; and he could move in close to see the jeweled fingers of the queen or the demonic light in a monster's eyes.

In our time, the epic poet has been replaced by authors such as David Sedaris, who grew up with the movies and sees the world through the lens of satire:

Halloween fell on a Saturday that year, and by the time my mother took us to the store, all the good costumes were gone. My sisters dressed as witches and I went as a hobo. I'd looked forward to going in disguise to the Tomkeys' door, but they were off at the lake, and their house was dark. Before leaving, they had left a coffee can full of gumdrops on the front porch, alongside a sign reading
don't be greedy.
In terms of Halloween candy, individual gumdrops were just about as low as you could get. This was evidenced by the large number of them floating in an adjacent dog bowl. It was disgusting to think that this was what a gumdrop might look like in your stomach, and it was insulting to be told not to take too much of something you didn't really want in the first place, (from
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)

In that single paragraph, I measure at least four different distances from the author's camera to the subject matter. The first is a quick shot of the children in their Halloween garb. The next is an image of the darkened house. The next one gets close enough for us to read the sign. Closer still are the gumdrops in the dog bowl. And perhaps we can add an X-ray image of nasty candy floating in a kid's tummy.

I learned the technique of reporting cinematically from my friend David Finkel, who covered the war in Kosovo in 1999 for the
Washington Post.
Finkel creates verbal cinema in describing refugees so needy that the act of helping them sparks a kind of warfare:

One of the volunteers picks up a loaf of bread and tosses it blindly. There is no chance it will hit the ground. There are too many people watching its flight, packed too tightly. Out goes another loaf, and another, and hundreds of arms suddenly stretch skyward, fingers extended and waving.

In this paragraph, Finkel begins with a close shot of one worker and then moves the camera back so we can see hundreds of arms. The crowd grows out of control, and Finkel focuses on one woman.

"For children. For children," a woman is shouting, arms out, trying to reach the cart. She is wearing earrings, a headband and a sweater, and when she can't reach the cart she brings her hands to her head and covers her ears because behind her is her daughter, perhaps 8, holding on to her, getting crushed, screaming.

And behind her is another girl, 10 perhaps, wearing a pink jacket

decorated with drawings of cats and stars and flowers and now

mud. She has red hair. There is mud in her hair.

Simple descriptions of standard camera angles should help you imagine how to use your "word cameras" for a variety of effects:

• Aerial view.
The writer looks down on the world, as if standing atop a skyscraper or viewing the ground from a blimp. Example: "Hundreds and hundreds of black South African voters stood for hours on long, sandy serpentine lines waiting to cast their ballots for the first time."

• Establishing shot.
The writer stands back to capture the setting in which action takes place, describing the world that the reader is about to enter, sometimes creating a mood for the story. Example: "Within seconds, as dusty clouds rose over the school grounds, their great widths suggesting blasts of terrifying force, bursts of rifle fire began to sound, quickly building to a sustained and rolling roar."

• Middle distance.
The camera moves closer to the action, close enough to see the key players and their interaction. This is the common distance for most stories written for the newspaper. Example: "Scores of hostages survived, staggering from the school even as intense gunfire sputtered and grenades exploded around them. Many were barely dressed, their faces strained with fear and exhaustion, their bodies bloodied by shrapnel and gunshots."

• Close-up.
The camera gets in the face of the subject, close enough to detect anger, fear, dread, sorrow, irony, the full range of emotions. Example: "His brow furrowed and the crow's feet deepened as he struggled to understand.. .. The man pulled at the waistband of his beige work pants and scratched his sun-aged face. He stared at her, stalling for time as he tried to understand, but afraid to say he didn't."

• Extreme close-up.
This writer focuses on an important detail that would be invisible from a distance: the pinky ring on the mobster's finger, the date circled on the wall calendar, the can of beer atop a police car. Example: "The hand of the cancer-care nurse scooped the dead angel fish out of the office aquarium. Patients at this clinic had enough on their minds. They didn't need another reminder of mortality."

Years ago I attended an outdoor concert in which the punk band the Ramones performed in a courtyard adjacent to a Florida retirement hotel. It was quite a scene. Down below, young fans sported turquoise Mohawk haircuts. Up above, blue-haired ladies stared out of windows, thinking the world had come to an end. A young writer sent to review the concert stood in one place for two hours with his notebook in his pocket. I fought the urge to knock him out and steal his notebook. He should have been exploring the territory like a photographer, seeing the event from down in the mosh pit and then up on the rooftop.

WORKSHOP

1. Read selections of your recent work, paying attention to the distance between you and the story subjects. Look for your tendencies. Do you move the camera around? Or do you settle for a safe middle distance?

2. Changing camera distance and angle lies at the heart of cinematic art. Watch a favorite movie with a friend, paying attention to the camera work. Discuss how you would describe certain scenes if you had to write them for print.

3. When out in the field doing research, take a disposable camera or cell phone camera with you. Your goal is not to take publishable photos but to keep your eyes open. Be sure to take photos from different distances and angles. Review these before you write.

4. The next time you write about an event, change your vantage point. View the scene from close up and far back, from in front of the stage and behind it.

Tom Wolfe argues that realism, in fiction and nonfiction, is built on "scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative." This requires, according to Wolfe's manifesto in
The New Journalism,
"extraordinary feats of reporting," so that writers "actually witness the scenes in other people's lives."

That advice was offered more than forty years ago, but adherence to it still makes eyewitness storytelling seem new.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — On a cold, concrete slab, a mosque caretaker washed the body of 14-year-old Arkan Daif for the last time.

With a cotton swab dipped in water, he ran his hand across Daif's olive corpse, dead for three hours but still glowing with life. He blotted the rose-red shrapnel wounds on the soft skin of Daif's right arm and right ankle with the poise of practice. Then he scrubbed his face scabbed with blood, left by a cavity torn in the back of Daif's skull.

The men in the Imam Ali mosque stood somberly waiting to bury a boy who, in the words of his father, was "like a flower." Haider

Kathim, the caretaker, asked: "What's the sins of the children? What have they done?"

This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Anthony Shadid, covering the war in Iraq for the
Washington Post,
practicing a form of immersion journalism, getting close to the action, capturing scene after bloody scene.

Scenes can be witnessed or, in fiction, invented, but they can also be remembered, as in this scene from the childhood of Nora Ephron:

It is September, just before school begins. I am eleven years old, about to enter the seventh grade, and Diana and I have not seen each other all summer.... I am walking down Walden Drive in my jeans and father's shirt hanging out and my old red loafers with the socks falling into them and coming toward me is ... I take a deep breath ... a young woman. Diana. Her hair is curled and she has a waist and hips and a bust and she is wearing a straight skirt, an article of clothing I have been repeatedly told I will be unable to wear until I have the hips to hold it up. My jaw drops, and suddenly I am crying, crying hysterically, can't catch my breath sobbing. My best friend has betrayed me. She has gone ahead without me and done it. She has shaped up. (from
Crazy Salad)

The scene is the basic unit of narrative literature, the capsule of time and space created by the writer and entered by the reader or viewer. What we gain from the scene is not information, but experience. We were there on that sidewalk with Nora Ephron. We
are
there.

"As the atom is the smallest discrete unit of matter," writes novelist Holly Lisle on her Web site,

so the scene is the smallest discrete unit in fiction; it is the smallest bit of fiction that contains the essential elements of story. You don't build a story or a book of words and sentences and

paragraphs — you build it of scenes, one piled on top of the next, each changing something that came before, all of them moving the story inexorably and relentlessly forward.

From childhood, we inhale scenes. We experience them from literature and news reports, from comic strips and comic books, from movies and television, from advertising and public service announcements, from our memories and dreams. But all these are
mimetic,
to use an old-fashioned literary term. They are imitations of real life.

The best writers work hard to make scenes real. In one of the most interesting moments in dramatic literature, Prince Hamlet (act 3, scene 2) directs the traveling players on how to create scenes so realistic that they will capture the conscience of the murderous king: "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature." Anything exaggerated or "overdone," argues the melancholy prince, takes away from the purpose of dramatic art, which is "to hold .. . the mirror up to nature." The mirror remains a powerful metaphor for the aspiring writer, especially the journalist. The writer's goal is to reflect the world, to render the here and now, so that readers can see it, feel it, understand it. But the job of the writer is not merely to capture scenes and compile them. These scenes, these moments within scenes, must be placed in a meaningful order, a storyboard, a script, a sequence.

You may think that the most common sequence will be chronological. But scenes can be arranged in space as well as in time, from one side of a street to the other. Scenes can be used to balance parallel narrative lines, shifting from the perspective of the criminal to the cop. Scenes can flash back in time, or look ahead.

One of the most arresting stories to come out of the Florida hurricane season of 2004 was written by Dong-Phuong Nguyen of the
St. Petersburg Times.
Set in Pensacola in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, the story records the poignant experience of folks returning to their neighborhood to view the destruction for the first time. It begins from a distance with a simple scene:

They waited for days in the hot sun behind the patrol cars and sheriff's deputies, straining for any glimpse.

Because of the danger, authorities blocked their return. More elaboration of the scene:

They brought coolers and portable chairs. They joked about their fine china. They warned each other about using their hands to sift through the rubble because of the snakes.