What Working on Films Taught Me About Writing Fiction

When I graduated from college I started working in the movie business, first as a production assistant then in the camera department. It was an exciting time for indie films in New York.

A passionate community of people in their twenties was banding together to make low-budget movies. We used to see each other on different shoots, gossip about who was working on what, go from one movie to the next.

A friend of mine was working on a movie called Johnny Suede. She had a crush on an up and coming actor no one had heard of named Brad Pitt.

Crew members drank with directors, producers dated boom operators, there was no hierarchy. Every grip and electric, every PA was working on a screenplay of their own, or had ambitions to direct. On set there was a lot of good-natured bitching about how we would have shot the last scene.

I was one of those snarky crew members. I wanted to make something of my own. After a while I got tired of driving a camera truck across Manhattan at four in the morning and I went to grad school for an MFA in fiction.

As a snarky crew member, I thought I too might like to be a director but once I saw up close the grit it took to get a film made I understood it was not for me, indolence being a primary character trait. It wasn’t until I was writing my first novel that I realized that the wonderful thing about being a novelist is that in fact you are a director, one that gets to wear pajamas to work as well as go to bed at a reasonable hour.

We get to control production design, hair and make-up, and how our characters behave. The camera goes exactly where we want it. We can put on a lens that allows for a close-up or a short lens that takes in a whole scene. Whip-pan, zoom, cross-cut? All up to us.

When I write fiction, I see the set: where the windows and doors are, the color of the walls, where the light is coming from. I assumed this was true of all writers but when I was talking about it with a writer friend, he said, “weird, I just hear voices.” I might not mention what’s in the room but I see it.

This made me wonder if I visualize landscapes in similar detail, before realizing that my characters rarely venture outdoors. Do they stay inside because I can’t name the smear of green that for me constitutes the countryside?

Characters in books can always name trees. I only know a few people in real life who can name trees other than your birch, willow, oak.

Two characters in my new novel name a tree. One is the kind of know-it-all who would know about trees, the other talks about Callery pears, those city trees that smell like semen. Since I, who am ignorant of almost all plant-life, know these trees are Callery pears, I figure most people must.

A film director has the great advantage in that film is essentially a collaborative medium. He or she might not see it as an asset on certain days, but for the most part, other perspectives are constructive.

An author just sits alone in a room trying not to read the internet. There’s no producer to give you a side-eye when you got a little hammy with a protagonist’s public meltdown. No script supervisor is going to step in to tell you that the woman who’s head you shaved on page thirty is suddenly braiding her hair on page one hundred.

Maybe a friend agrees to read a draft. You have a therapist on call. A significant other on whom to unleash the frustration of your bad day disguised as guidance on how to load a goddamn dishwasher.

But really, you’re alone. That’s the trade-off for getting to sleep in.

This idea that writing a novel might be a comfy way of directing became even more apparent when I was working on Friends of the Museum. I usually start a book by thinking about the response I want to elicit in a reader—that is, what the experience of reading will feel like.

I’ve said I think like a director but writing FOTM was the first time I actually wanted to engender the feeling you have when you’re watching a movie. As if there’s a whole world going on to which you are merely a spectator. Someone passing through.

I ditched chapters and exposition. I tossed a reader into the middle of a scene and politely asked they swim for shore. I was hoping to capture the controlled chaos of a Robert Altman film, with all its interruptions and digressions. Can a book even do this?

JR did. William Gaddis’ 1975 novel has an enviable quality of restlessness, a velocity that catches you up in the stream of things. Outside of genre, I can’t think of another contemporary novel that dispenses with interiority. Rather than give voice to characters’ thoughts, Gaddis reveals emotion through gesture and silence.

I remember the degree of resentment conveyed by the way a character put on his shoes. I read JR in a state of utter transportation. It was a reminder that books can be different. Sometimes the possibilities of a book can feel so limited.

Wouldn’t it be great if a novel could be experienced like a piece of music or a painting, if it could bypass the brain and hit you emotionally? It feels like a tragedy that reading requires thinking.

In his biography Life Keith Richards talks about how, when he picks up an instrument, he itches to play something that should be played by a different instrument altogether. He writes: “I find myself trying to play horn lines all the time on the guitar.” I couldn’t believe how close I felt to Keith Richards in that moment.

I had tried to make reading a book feel like watching a movie. It turns out that, despite all the advantages there are to being a novelist, you still end up trying to write with a tuba.

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Friends of the Museum by Heather MacGowan is available via Washington Square Press.