Cinematic Prose vs. Synopsizing

When I was younger my dream was to be an author, but more specifically, an author whose book would be turned into a movie. I wanted to see my characters and worlds brought to life on the silver screen. To make sure this happened, I thought that my writing had to read like a film. It had to be cinematic.

Here’s where we get into this idea of “cinematic prose”. There’s a lot of differing opinions and views about what cinematic prose is and what it means. To make things simple, in this blog I’ll split these views into two terms: cinematic prose and synopsizing. 

Cinematic prose is the good stuff—the wish that little author-to-bes have when they put pen to paper. It’s creating characters with solid backstories and interesting arcs. It’s building a world that—no matter how fantastical—is rich and tangible to the reader. It’s taking advantage of the tools a novelist has to write a strong story. 

Synopsizing, while perhaps helpful at times, is more so about getting bogged down with the details, the descriptions, and the need to guide the reader like a camera zooming in to the big clue in the corner of the room.  

Even so, authors who write cinematic prose and authors who synopsize still have plots, characters, side characters, subplots, and they use the same medium of the novel, which leads to the question: how can you tell the difference?

In all my searches, the greatest disparity I found lies in the biggest difference between a novel and a movie. Obviously, there are plenty of differences between movies and novels, but in truth, movies and novels still communicate stories in similar ways. As Sarah Kolzoff notes in her article about cinematic prose, movies can tell with dialogue and clarity and they can show through the actors’ facial expressions, the camera work, and with the use of symbols. Similarly, novels can tell through exposition and dialogue. They can also show through symbols and literary devices. Basically, movies and novels have different tools, but they can accomplish the same things, except that movies lack one thing: interiority.

Sure, movies could have a voice-over, but just as too much exposition can take a reader out of the story, too many voice-overs can remove the watcher from the movie. As Jacob Mohr notes in an article about “cinematic perspective”: “A movie camera never hears the inner thoughts of the characters it films.” Interiority truly is the superpower of the novel. 

There’s how you can tell the difference: cinematic prose is full of interiority, but synopsizing is not. Then what makes this prose cinematic in comparison to synopsizing if movies, which are cinematic in nature, don’t even have interiority? I read it best from Barry Lyga's writing blog. In movies, actors convey those thoughts and emotions on their faces and in their body language. In books, you don’t have actors. You have your original characters and their faces appear differently to every reader because all of their imaginations are unique. This means you can’t simply describe their facial expressions and hope the reader knows what it means, instead you have to show those thoughts and feelings. Once you show them strongly, the reader’s imagination will turn that interiority into a movie. They will see prose and think, “How cinematic.”

Here’s a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to show what I mean:

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin.”

Morrison’s description of loneliness is cinematic because it shows the reader through body language and personification what loneliness feels like so vividly that the reader themselves can feel it and imagine it. If I were to write something similar in a synopsizing style, it might look something like this:

"She was huddled in on herself and the room around her was empty. She moved back and forth on her heels, her eyes switching between the door and the floor. She took in the cobwebs in one corner that spread outwards, making the room look like a head of hair that was slowly graying. The desk was covered in unread letters and a long dried-out stamp. She was the only thing moving in that whole room, the only thing living."

It still has a metaphor, it still makes the character seem alone and perhaps even lonely, but we’re missing the depth of her loneliness. There’s a limit to her loneliness because all we can see is what she’s doing and what’s around her, but not what’s within her. 

Synopsizing can be helpful here and there. In that paragraph above, I gave you a description of the room and the character’s body language, which is good information to have. However, focusing only on what is easily seen or what the author wants the reader to see misses out on the empathy that the author can make the reader feel. That empathy, stemming from interiority, is what separates cinematic prose and synopsizing. 

A quick note: just because prose is cinematic doesn’t mean it’s easy to be turned into a movie. There’s lots of other logistics there like how much of the story can be summed up in two hours or how that beautiful prose can translate to the screen. But, I like to think that our minds are little theaters of their own and cinematic prose can lead to a whole movie marathon. 

The key takeaway here is this: show the readers what your characters are thinking and feeling, don’t just tell the readers what your characters are doing. Maybe your book won’t be turned into a movie with a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it’ll feel that way in the mind of your readers.  

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About the author: Sofia Olivares is a rising junior at Vanderbilt University, majoring in Cognitive Studies and Creative Writing. Sofia loves writing YA, sci-fi, and literary fiction, and will read anything and everything. Sofia is also a long-distance runner and a capybara enthusiast.