Hello Reader,
Before we go into today’s post, just a reminder that I am running an online workshop on writing great opening chapters.
Key Details: 25th November, 7:00-8:30 pm, online, 20 places, 1 hour of learning, half an hour for discussion and feedback, £25.
My aim to watch 365 films in 2026 is way behind schedule now, but I have still managed to watch an impressive number of movies, (249 as of writing this).
It was while watching my 247th movie of the year that I was suddenly struck by the difference between movies and books and how they relate their stories. The House of the Devil tells the story of a young college student who needs funds to rent her own place and answers an ad for a babysitter. Of course it involves a massive, creepy old house, the parents are just plain weird, and the babysitting duties aren’t exactly… normal.
Anyway, as is normal in horror movies, our heroine, Samantha, throws common sense out of the window and agrees to spend the night in a house where obviously something terrible and gory is about to occur. And, as the evening progresses, of course she goes exploring. On the first floor she finds a locked door. Although she has no idea what might be behind that door, we the viewers get to have a look, because the scene cuts to the room’s interior.
I’m not going to spoil it for you because, although the plot is nonsensical, it’s a creepy little thriller with some lush visuals and decent performances, and I enjoyed it.
Thinking about that edit — Samantha outside the locked bedroom/viewers get to see what’s inside — there is no way that would work in the middle of Samantha’s scene in a novel. If I was writing The House of the Devil as a book I would stay with Samantha and find another way of revealing the bedroom’s contents at a later point in the story. Maybe even when Samantha finds out for herself.
Why is that?
The first point to look at is why the director chose that edit in his movie. This is a well-established device known as dramatic irony, used in both books and movies, where the audience or reader knows a vital piece of information that the characters do not.
We, the readers, the viewers, have access to information that is hidden from the protagonist and other characters. Think of the children swimming in the sea off the beach at Amity, in Jaws. There is an edit to an underwater shot from the shark’s point of view as it swims towards all those tasty looking legs, that familiar music starts up, and there you go, suspense instantly generated.
Who remembers the TV series Columbo? Peter Falk played the titular rumpled detective who solves a murder every episode, but what made this series stand out from other mystery shows is that the audience got to see the murderer killing the victim in the opening scene! Dramatic irony again, only this time used as a way of letting us enjoy watching Columbo solve a puzzle we already have an answer to.
Going back to the movie, The House of the Devil, that edit I have discussed works, right? Well, yeah, but only just in my opinion, but that’s a post for another day. It works in the movie, but there is no way it would have worked in a novel.
At the movies the camera, and consequently the audience, lives outside the characters’ heads. We are observers, never occupying the point of view of a particular character. We are almost like gods, except we are subservient to the gods of the scriptwriter and the director and the editor, who choose to show us what they want us to see and hold back what they don’t.
In a novel, on the other hand, we live in the point of view of our characters. The scene in the novel version of The House of the Devil has to stay with Samantha, because we are experiencing it through her five senses. To cut to the interior of the bedroom, to the other side of the door, revealing the horrors in there, and then back again to Samantha, reveals the artificiality of the storytelling medium.
Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz seeing the curtain pulled back to reveal the trickery, and indeed the author of that trickery, the reader’s belief in the magic of the story will be lost. And when you are writing a novel the last thing you want to do is lose your reader.
That is not to say that dramatic irony cannot work in literature. George R. R. Martin is a master of this storytelling device, along with third person point of view. The novels in the A Song of Ice and Fire series are written in tight third person, but each chapter is written from a different point of view, therefore showing developments in Martin’s epic story on multiple fronts.
Cersei Lannister forges alliances in the Red Keep, while Arya Stark plans revenge on a far-off continent, and the Night Watch witnesses the rise of an undead army, and Daenerys Targaryen sails toward Westeros with the intention of claiming her birthright to the throne.
Martin uses dramatic irony to ensure the reader has a bird’s eye view of the story, but uses tight third person point of view to keep us invested in the characters and glued to the pages.
As a developmental editor I see an increasing number of manuscripts crossing my desk that commit the literary sin of head hopping, where the reader is taken from the point of view of one character to another and then back again, or even another character. This can be disorienting for readers, taking them out of the story, and ultimately leading to them putting the book down and never returning to it.
The language of film and the language of the novel are entirely different.
Writing a novel? Stick to the point of view of your character within that scene or chapter. Changing viewpoint? Start a new scene or chapter.
Your readers will thank you for it.
Best wishes,
Ken
PS
Don't forget to register for Hook Them on Page One: Write an Opening Chapter Readers Can't Put Down
