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.

How Much Disbelief Should Novelists Suspend?

by Michael J Coffino | Feb 24, 2025 | blog post

The novel opens in the kitchen of a New York City tenement. The husband has returned after an exhausting day manning a newsstand in frenetic Penn Station expecting to decompress first with a cold beer and then a homecooked meal. Instead, he finds his wife seated at the kitchen table, eyes fixed on an open Daily News, on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Earlier that day, the news reported that a ten-year old girl had been raped, brutally beaten, and left for dead under a staircase in a neighboring building.

The couple are Irish immigrants who came to America in search of a better life. But during the last several months, the wife had begun a slow simmering crusade to return to the homeland, a campaign rooted in the rapidly changing ethnic mix of the neighborhood.

The opening scene kicks off the racial narrative of the book.

Acutely aware of what’s at stake, and noting that dinner has not been prepared, the husband forgoes his customary respite and joins her at the table. Before taking a seat, he grabs a can of beer from the refrigerator, doesn’t open it, and braces for an emotional tsunami. After a short while, however, as his wife emotes, he longs for a pull of the brew and pries open the pop top with painstaking gentle precision to stifle the potentially disruptive “pop.”

The tender opening of the beer is emblematic of the fragile situation.

One more thing: the year is 1959.

Two separate readers of the novel pounced on the pop top reference as historical inaccuracy. Emil Franz patented the pop-top in 1963, years later than depicted.

Was that fair criticism or was the “revisionist” history fair creative license?

Elsewhere on the spectrum, consider the field day critics had with the 1998 film Armageddon. As but two examples of absurdity, Roger Ebert lambasted the portrayal of astronauts literally walking on an asteroid headed to destroy Earth under the power of the same gravitational forces we experience day to day and NASA training oil drillers to be astronauts instead of training astronauts to drill. Ebert summed up his litany of criticisms this way: “Armageddon is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained.” Matthew Rozsa of Salon.com commented: “From a scientist’s point of view, (Armageddon) is a complete fallacy . . . [its] animus toward . . . science runs . . . deep.”

Sometimes storytelling absurdity mocks public intelligence.

To be sure, most if not all of us, writers and non-writers alike, have rolled our eyes, shaken our heads, and muttered under our breath, “oh, come on,” at scenes in books and movies we deem too farcical for our discerning tastes. The challenge for writers is easily stated: veer too far into the surreal and lose reader engagement or tow too closely to the humdrum of reality and lose intrigue and reader interest.

There is no easy answer, especially if the baseline is, as it should be, that novelists and screenwriters are entitled to unfettered license in honing their craft without worrying about self-appointed critics deriding their work because of far-ranging imagination.

Where is the balance? Here are some considerations.

First, be consistent. Whatever the genre, improbable coincidences should ring true to the narrative. For example, the fantasy magic in Harry Potter has rules. Spells require wands, students have to learn proper technique, and lo and behold, powerful wizards have boundaries. When the story honors the rules, it has credibility and meets reader expectation.

Second, know what works in the genre. The freedom to push the envelope in a thriller or court scene is less elastic than in speculative or dystopian fiction. Each has its own leeway. The Da Vinci Code often takes liberties with religious and historical facts, invoking hidden codes and ancient conspiracies, among other extraordinary devices. It works because readers of the genre expect a mix of mystery and action. Similarly, in Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s use of time travel works because it occurs within the context of a reality-based anti-war message. Events can be extraordinary so long as they are grounded in recognizable and accepted themes of the time.

Third, characters must be emotionally authentic. That means emotive extremes must make sense within the storyline. Consider Handmaid’s Tale, where the setting is a disturbing and extreme dystopian society, but the emotional core of the narrative—fear, resilience, and survival instincts—rings true and is relatable notwithstanding the over-the-top setting. The most shocking episodes convey imaginative realism to readers inside historical events. They don’t feel like “fiction.” They feel like real threats and incite emotional reactions in readers.

Fourth, be measured. Don’t inundate readers with a steady diet of episodes that stretch authenticity. Weave them into the narrative like crocheting well-placed threads of color into a large blanket. One effective example is Jurassic Park with its wild theme of dinosaurs roaming freely. The story sprinkles small mysterious events into the narrative, like strange fossil discoveries, unusual animal attacks, and clandestine corporate machinations. By the time those creatures of a time-gone-by dominate the screen, readers are invested and the story holds together in a natural way.

There is no bright line marker, like a check list of ten reader eye-rolls. It reduces to judgment. Professional input helps, whether from a literary agent, book publisher, developmental editor, book coach, or a well-vetted beta reader. Listen to the advice from a source you trust and never forget it is your creation. Err on the side of imagination.