When I’m looking for writing inspiration, first and foremost I’ll turn to my bookshelf. But second? I’ll turn to my television. Movies and prose fiction are close relatives, in my opinion, and there’s much that writers can learn from their silver-screen counterparts.
Here are five movies that have inspired my own fiction in one way or another, and some of the lessons they’ve taught me.
There Will Be Blood: A modern classic from director and screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson, what’s inspiring to me about this film is the relative simplicity of its narrative structure. “Simplify the action; complicate the motivation” is an old writing adage that I think a lot about when putting together my own stories, and that saying bears out wonderfully in this movie, which creates so much of its narrative simply by pitting one fascinating character against another.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: A series of short films written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, these vignettes are a veritable masterclass in storytelling tropes. Some tropes are undermined while others are not, and piece-by-piece this movie demonstrates the effects that writers can have by either defying or satisfying their readers’ expectations.
Ghost World: A heavily revised adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel, this has been one of my favorite movies for a long time. It’s basically a perfect movie, in my opinion — funny, human, and gut-wrenching all at once — but as much as anything, I think that writers can learn from this film’s dialogue. Each in their own ways, this film’s central characters are all trapped between two worlds, whether they’re caught between adolescence and adulthood, optimism and hopelessness, mainstream culture and the fringe. There’s tension between each of these worlds, and so much of that tension is played out in the characters’ dialogue.
Take Shelter: If you’re interested in writing about unreliable or psychologically disturbed characters, look no further for inspiration than Take Shelter. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, this film tells the story of someone who may or may not be suffering a mental breakdown, and the result is a film that’s incredibly engaging and more than a little bit eerie. There’s a lot to learn here about atmospheric writing and, like other films on this list, telling a story that’s relatively simple in its structure but vastly complex in terms of its characters’ motivations and emotions.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): To me, this film offers so many lessons about maintaining momentum between scenes. That shouldn’t be surprising: The entire film is one continuous shot. What that means for writers, however, is a film that teaches a lot about scene transitions and building a sense of urgency into your narrative, two huge necessities if you’re sitting down to write a successful novel.
Raymond Fleischmann’s debut novel, How Quickly She Disappears, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House (Berkley Books) this January. Fleischmann has published short fiction in The Iowa Review, Cimarron Review, The Pinch, and Los Angeles Review, among many others, and he’s received
