Impulse

A well edited film works by antic­i­pat­ing your curios­ity. Just when you start to won­der, “What hap­pened with Han Solo?” the film cuts from Degobah to the Millennium Falcon. The same mech­a­nism works even within a scene. One char­ac­ter starts to say some­thing shock­ing. Just as you won­der how the other char­ac­ter takes it, they cut to a close up of that character’s face. It is almost as if the film is wired to the move­ment of your eyes — flick­ing between char­ac­ters as your eyes move around.

I think I first noticed this when I was a kid, glued to this mar­velous new inven­tion called HBO. I clum­sily tried to describe it in my Still vs Video posts. It’s the fol­low­ing quote from John Houston that really crys­tal­lized the idea for me:

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“To me, the per­fect film is as though it were unwind­ing behind your eyes, and your eyes were pro­ject­ing it them­selves, so that you were see­ing what you wished to see. Film is like thought. It’s the clos­est to thought process of any art.” (found on p. 60 Walter Murch’s, In the Blink of an Eye)

Thinking about this quote, I real­ized that I use a sim­i­lar approach in my writ­ing. My fic­tion writ­ing style is spar­tan, as you can see in Natiki. I’ve never been com­fort­able writ­ing flow­ery prose detail­ing every last scratch on the fur­ni­ture or med­i­tat­ing on each shade of color. Most human beings don’t take in that much detail when they walk into the room. People tend to notice the details only when some­thing draws their atten­tion. I like to write fic­tion sim­i­larly — sup­ply­ing details a lit­tle at a time as you’d notice them while invis­i­bly fol­low­ing the pro­tag­o­nist around. If I do my job well, you don’t notice. The writ­ing fol­lows your thoughts just as in film.
(BTW: Walter Murch’s book goes into this mech­a­nism in detail. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing read if you are inter­ested in edit­ing or just love movies).