To illustrate what I’ve been discussing in the last few posts on how description in a novel versus a screenplay can differ, I’ve taken descriptions of characters from several different adapted scripts. Here you can see the difference between the language the author of the novel is able to uses, versus the more succinct, visual language the screenwriter has to choose in the adaptation.
The first example is the description of Chiyo’s mother in Memoirs of a Geisha. The excerpt from the book is long, detailed, and mentions things we are not necessarily seeing at the present time. The writer describes each character’s personality in a way that would be inappropriate for a screenplay:
“Because from my earliest years I was very much like my mother, and hardly at all like my father or my older sister. My mother said it was because we were made just the same, she and I-and it was true we both had the same peculiar eyes of a sort you almost never see in Japan. Instead of being dark brown like everyone else’s, my mother’s eyes were a translucent gray, and mine are just the same. When I was very young, I told my mother I thought someone had poked a hole in her eyes and all the ink had drained out, which she thought very funny. The fortune-tellers said her eyes were so pale because of too much water in her personality, so much that the other four elements were hardly present at all-and this, they explained, was why her features matched so poorly. People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste, and so does a mushroom, but you can’t put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. She had her mother’s pouty mouth but her father’s angular jaw, which gave the impression of a delicate picture with much too heavy a frame. And her lovely gray eyes were surrounded by thick lashes that must have been striking on her father, but in her case only made her look startled. “
By contrast, the screenplay description condenses these images down to a few short lines, and the mother and daughter’s personalities are revealed through actions throughout the story, rather than talked about right when they are first introduced. The screenwriter must show, not just tell, what the characters are like:
“MOTHER (40) reclines, wrapped in a quilt. She is frail, her face etched with pain. She opens her eyes briefly to drink a medicinal tea: they are a silver color.”
This description still mentions the gray eyes, since they are an important detail, but rather than elaborate on each physical feature, the screenwriter gives an overall sense of the mother’s illness and state of pain by showing us that she is ill through her actions.
In Twilight, Stephenie Meyer spends a lot of time describing what the characters look like. In fact the entire book is filled with descriptions of how gorgeous Edward is. The author also spends a lot of time describing Bella, and not just what she looks like, but what this means about who she is and how she fits in:
“Maybe, if I looked like a girl from Phoenix, should, I could work this to my advantage. But physically, I’d never fit in anywhere. I should be tan, sporty, blond—a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps – all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun. Instead I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete; I didn’t have the necessary hand-eye coordination to play sports without humiliating myself – and harming both myself and anyone who stood too close.”
By contrast, the screenplay description is short and simple, while still capturing the essence and most important points of her overall look as described in the novel:
“ISABELLA SWAN, 17. Long, dark hair frames alabaster skin. She’s a vulnerable, introverted, imperfect beauty.”
Again the screenwriter doesn’t need to mention here that Bella is clumsy, as the novelist does, because this will be show later through her actions during the course of the movie.
In the story Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, the narrator, Red, describes his first impression of Andy in great detail. Here is another example of the type of detail that the prose writer can delve into, going off in tangents and mentioning things that aren’t being seen or heard in the present moment of the story:
“When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean. That’s a funny thing to remember about a man, I suppose, but it seems to sum up Andy for me. He always looked as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he was, especially when you consider how conservative most banks are…and you have to multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks don’t like to trust a man with their money unless he’s bald, limping, and constantly plucking at his pants to get his truss around straight. Andy was in for murdering his wife and her lover.”
Stephen King doesn’t just describe Andy, he makes a comment on how New England bankers are, and mentions what Andy does for a living. He goes off on a tangent, because stories are not linear and are not meant to occur in real time, as a screenplay is. In the script’s description of Andy, Frank Darabont is much more succinct, and mentions what Andy normally looks like in contrast to how upset and agitated he is when we first see him:
“ANDY DUFRENSE, mid-20’s, wire rim glasses, three-piece suit. Under normal circumstances a respectable, solid citizen; hardly dangerous, perhaps even meek. But these circumstances are far from normal. He is disheveled, unshaven, and very drunk. A cigarette smolders in his mouth. His eyes, flinty and hard, are riveted to the bungalow up the path.”
In The Time Traveller’s Wife, author Audrey Niffenegger spends a lot of time introducing Clare at age six, describing what she is doing in great detail:
“She is very young. She is oblivious; she is alone. She is still wearing her school uniform, a hunter green jumper with a white blouse and knee socks with penny loafers, and she is carrying a Marshall Field’s Shopping Bag and a beach towel. Clare spreads the towel on the ground and dumps out the contents of the bag: every imaginable kind of writing implement. Old ballpoint pens, little stubby pencils from the library, crayons, smelly Magic Markers, a fountain pen. She also has a bunch of her dad’s office stationery. She arranges the implements and gives the stack of paper a smart shake, and then proceeds to try each pen and pencil in turn, making careful lines and swirls, humming to herself.”
The screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, describes the same action, but in a much more succinct, simplified way. Also note that in the screenplay, the action is already in progress when we first see her. Unlike the book, the movie has the constraint of time, and doesn’t waste precious minutes detailing how Clare unloads and sets up her art project. The action is already underway, so the more important parts of the story can take place sooner:
“CLARE ABSHIRE, 6, sits on a large beach towel on which she has spread crayons, colored pencils, magic markers, and a stack of paper.”
In the novel, Fight Club by Chuck Palanuik, the Paper Street house is described in detail, giving the reader a good sense of how it feels to inhabit such a dilapidated, odd home.
“The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures. When it’s raining, we have to pull the fuses. You don’ dare turn on the lights. The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a basement. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor. The baseboard moldings are carved and varnished and eighteen inches high. The rain trickles down through the house, and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust.”
The script mentions a few details in the action description, but more often shows us how the house is by mentioning things as they occur, and uses some brief voice-over to describe some of the home’s quirks.
“It’s a grand old three-story long abandoned.”
“Tyler and Jack climb CREAKY STAIRS to the 2ND FLOOR LANDING”
“Jack turns on the water. LOUD VIBRATIONS from the walls. Water spits in starts.
Reading novels and screenplays is a great exercise to help you contrast how screenwriting differs from other types of writing you are used to seeing. By choosing the right details and the most vivid, descriptive words, screenwriters are able to convey images as effectively as novelists using far fewer words. This skill is extremely difficult and takes time and practice to master.
