What Librarians Want Local Writers to Know: A Panel of Marin Librarians in Conversation with Author Michael J. Coffino

Words vs. the Frame

by Michael J Coffino | Jul 20, 2025 | blog post

The camera shot is to film what the sentence is to writing.

A single film shot can establish setting, mood, and character in seconds. For novelists, this presents a challenge: how can words alone compete with the immediacy and sensory force of cinema? The answer isn’t to mimic the screen—but to embrace what only fiction can do.

While film relies on literal images, prose taps into the brain’s ability to construct entire scenes from carefully chosen language, allowing the story to unfold in the mind’s eye. Film shows us what something looks like. Fiction, at its best, shows us what it means.

Novelists possess tools that reach deeper than the visual, accessing consciousness, time, memory, and meaning, in ways film cannot. Here are some examples.

Selective Detail

Selective detail infuses visuals with a personal and emotionally charged quality. In The Road, Cormac McCarthy employs detail to evoke the visualization and emotional despair of a post-apocalyptic world:

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world

The potency of the details captures not only what is seen but what matters emotionally and thematically: a world of despair and fragility.

Omission

The way silence can dwarf the power of sound or music in a film, omission in writing can evoke tension or mood. When writers choose not to describe, they create gaps that allow readers to supply what’s missing and achieve greater emotional investment.

The dialogue in Hills Like White Elephant (Ernest Hemingway) between two characters in a café awaiting a train is a searing example of the evocative power of omission. There, a man and woman talk around the subject of abortion, never uttering the word:

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”

She looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

“Then what will we do afterward?”

A film director would externalize what is internal in that scene and, with sterling acting performances, could make that happen in a powerful way. But in so doing the film defines the emotions for the viewer. The audience watches how to feel. In the book, however, the omission of “abortion” and Jig’s downward eye tilt gives readers the emotional space to feel their own discomfort, upset, or outrage, allowing emotional meaning to swell.

Metaphor

Metaphor can rival, even surpass, the visual imagery of film. Film provides a fixed image while metaphor activates the imagination. A well-placed metaphor can at once reveal character, mood, and theme, while the same impact in film might require multiple shots, scenes, or dialogue. Unlike film imagery, metaphor invites readers into the inner world of the character.

Consider this single sentence from Toni Morrison’s Beloved capturing both the resilience and emotional state of the character: “She is a tree swaying in the storm, but she will not break.” Readers don’t just see her trembling—they feel her rootedness, vulnerability, and strength, a richness that exceeds what a camera can directly show.

Sensory Immersion

Novelists can engage all five senses—a major advantage. A film might show a character entering a room at night under risky circumstances. The camera might linger here and there. Sounds might occur. Maybe music spikes the tension. But in written form, a character might enter grasping a cold doorknob that sends a chill up her spine, find a room oozing a distinct odor, walk under dim lights over creaky floorboards, and experience a parched throat from anxiety.

Film shows what the room looks and sounds like, but literature lets readers inhabit it.

Setting

Through layered description, literary setting becomes more than backdrop; it becomes a living force—shaping story, emotion, and meaning from the inside out. It is a powerful emotive tool, not a finished image like in film. It is alive with fragments, textures, and impressions and, again, evokes reader imagination and internalization.

John Williams was a master at using setting to evoke emotion in ways hard to achieve on screen. Here is an excerpt from Butcher’s Crossing:

The valley widened; the trees thinned; and the prairie rolled on and on, gray-green in the dusk. The air was so still that the sound of the horses’ hooves on the dry grass and earth seemed to echo back from the hills that surrounded them. The faint odor of pine mingled with the sharpness of the grass; and occasionally a breath of wind carried a stronger scent, heavy and musky, from the herds they could not yet see.

Williams doesn’t just describe landscape; he charges it with mood, using words to enrich the reader not only with what is seen, but with what can be felt.

Psychological Interiorization

Psychological Interiorization in literature—the portrayal of a character’s inner thoughts, emotions, and subconscious responses—can rival and often exceed what film achieves. It allows readers to live inside a character’s consciousness in a way that screen performance, no matter how nuanced, can only suggest. Film shows the face. Literature lets us feel the heart and mind percolating beneath.

Consider Virginia Wolff in Mrs. Dalloway:

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.

In that sentence, the character exists in two contradictory states at once: the direct and engaged (the knife) and the removed and alienated (the observer). Literature can achieve this paradox without any explanatory visual cue—it simply is. A film can portray a face in a mirror, but it can’t capture both.

Imagery is an essential tool for making your story come alive in the minds of readers. Write what you see in your mind’s eye—with emotional precision, keen observation, and vivid memory.

Michael J. Coffino has published ten books as author and co-author since transitioning from legal practice in 2016, ghostwrites fiction and non-fiction, freelance edits, and coaches other writers.