You're Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie.

What film teaches us wrong about writing fiction

We’re in a golden age of TV (if not quite a golden age of full-blown cinema), so I don’t blame anyone for consuming a vast proportion of their narratives on screens. But so many issues I address with my writing students stem, I suspect, from subconsciously internalizing what works on the screen and trying to make it work on the page. Here are 12 things that film teaches us wrong (and 4 that it teaches us right) about writing fiction or narrative nonfiction. Look at even the sappiest love stories of the 1800s, and eyes, eye color, and eye contact are barely mentioned. Jane Austen gives us…

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