People are always saying "the book was so much better than the movie" and scolding you for missing out on the source of the film. I myself can't name one movie better than its book.
Why?
"Theater Of Mind." Books are built purely on imagination. Books are read purely with imagination. Books are amazing, purely because of imagination. It's the one thing movies can't do. The screen, what you see, is what defines the screen. There is nothing else to it.
Books are worlds. Movies are locations.
Jerry Jenkins has a specific definition, which I wrote a whole chapter on. Engage the theater of your reader's mind. This says everything. All you need to do is let the readers piece together the images the book provides and let it run free. Movies take so much money and so many people to make because they're focusing on what the viewers see. Authors let readers do all the work.
Because books are based on the reader's mind, readers see anything the words provoke and more. It's easy to imagine a world based on the few paragraphs that construct the world. Because minds have no boundaries. Thus and therefore, words have no boundaries.
You Can't Fully Connect With The Characters. One of the main problems with movies is that you have no intimate connection with the protagonist. You can't see their thoughts, you can only read their body language and actions. Characters in books have a mind that speaks, that grasps the reader and pulls them into their own minds
Movies can't do this. The film industry depends on dialogue to take the place of thoughts, which is a poor substitute.
Words Further The Mood. Due to the mood, some of the most provoking scenes occur, in both movies and books, but books are a step ahead.
Words can define the mood of the setting even more, by describing "the treacherous aura of pristine mansion" or how the character takes notice of "the crafty twitch in the guide's motions." Screens confine us to seeing the scene as it is. It is hard to create any depth in the fast-paced series of images that flash before you.
Hey everybody! Thanks to Jerry Jenkins' blog post and my dear friend Fox-ishCat, I can make a few points on why everybody is always saying the movie is better than the book. The post is essentially to writing description, so I highly recommend checking it out. Here's the link:
http://www.jerryjenkins.com/how-to-evoke-powerful-images-in-your-readers-mind/
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