Historical novels vs Historical Movies

Published Feb 14, 2024. L Brown, author.

Fiction uses the power of words. Good authors detail emotions and thoughts with simile, metaphor, and other devices that make the emotional response so much more powerful and memorable, allowing readers to share in the character’s decisions and explore their motives and their moral development more fully. With such vivid imagery, writers create a more intense experience that fully engages the reader’s senses and transports them to the scene so they feel like they are experiencing the emotions firsthand. This is the true power of the written word.

People most often complain that the movie was nothing like the book. Movie makers often use history only as a bare outline for their film. Of course, there have also been times when a movie portrayed a wonderfully accurate picture of history. Docudramas can excel at this. Books take much longer to read and thus give the reader the opportunity to imagine and interpret the story in a way that makes them feel closer to the protagonists and the events being portrayed. Books allow the reader to actually be part of the story.

Fiction can often better handle defeat and dying because it can stimulate the reader to fill in visuals and surrounding details in a way that is more personal to the reader and provides a more satisfying emotional release.

People often find that screen adaptations of books don’t live up to their expectations. But comparing books to films isn’t fair. The two mediums of storytelling each have different advantages and different qualifications for what makes them good. One of the great things about movies is their ability to show a scene. It immerses me into the story in a very different way than the book.

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