Why Don’t Books Ever Adopt the Screenplay Format?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I've recently resurrected my interest in reading fictional literature which I've not had since I was a university student. Yet there's something I'm repeatedly encountering in commercial fiction which I find difficult to follow which is who is speaking in extended sections of dialogue without "business" or unambiguous dialogue tags.

For example, there are lengthy sections in Agatha Christie's "The Third Girl" of just pure dialogue, such as in this excerpt of a conversation between David Baker and Hercule Poirot:

>> “I don’t believe she’d be your type, you know, anymore than I am. Norma’s in London.”
>> “But you said to her stepmother—”
>> “Oh! We don’t tell stepmothers everything.” >> “And where is she in London?”
>> “She works in an interior decorator’s down the King’s Road [...]"
>> “But that is not where she lives, I presume. You have her address?”
>> “Oh yes, a great block of flats. I don’t really understand your interest.”

It continues like this for almost two pages without indicating who is speaking, requiring me to keep an "odd-even" mental stack for which I often get lost mid-way and have to backtrack unless the spoken line makes it so clear who is speaking. She even sometimes introduces a dialogue tag referring to a conversation between two male characters with "he" which serves no function to disambiguate who said what. So I often wondered why it'd be so unconventional to simply do this:

>> David: I don’t believe she’d be your type, you know, anymore than I am. Norma’s in London. >> Poirot: But you said to her stepmother—
>> David: Oh! We don’t tell stepmothers everything. >> Poirot: And where is she in London?
>> David: She works in an interior decorator’s down the King’s Road [...]
>> Poirot: But that is not where she lives, I presume. You have her address?
>> David: Oh yes, a great block of flats. I don’t really understand your interest.

Isn't that so much easier to track?

Updates

13 d

To be clear, I actually love dialogue tags and especially descriptive and colorful ones used quite liberally such as smirked, bellowed, howled, grinned, whispered, laughed, sighed, snarled, stammered, wondered, etc. There's just a threshold when an author omits them and uses, say, twenty lines of dialogue absent any tags or business where my engineering brain that wants to optimize everything -- for both efficiency and ease of use -- thinks the adoption of the screenplay format [...]

Updates

13 d

[...], just in these exceptional contexts, might genuinely be more efficient for readers as it makes it impossible for them to lose track of who is speaking. It does seem to me like there's a lack of cross-pollination there, although I'm admittedly the type of person who, starting from childhood, incessantly questioned the rules to the point of driving all my teachers towards insanity.

[AmandaYVR]

Because fiction novels are complete, contained works. Film is a visual medium which only BEGINS on the written page. It has all the benefits of the visual medium to enhance the story, characters, and everything else.

Reading screenplays is dry. No one wants novels written this way. The author's word choices, in all aspects, are a component of the art.

In creative writing, there are 'rules'. And then there is the philosophy that one should at least first learn the rules, regardless of whether one decides consciously to break them. Ignorance is not the same thing as consciously avoiding rules or conventions of any industry or realm. Take 'said is dead', for instance. Or, the more moderate 'to said or not to said'. The word 'said' is barely even registered by readers. It's considered more of a punctuation than anything else. It blends in. Which is - sometimes - what the author wants. But sometimes it may be better for a different word to be used. Or no word at all. Words add bulk and bloat. But words also add beauty, depth, insight, ache.

If many readers lose track of which speaker is speaking, in dialogue, then it could be said that the author failed in executing this scene optimally.

But how many people lose track? Why do they lose track?

I don't know anything about your visual deficit. Can't speak on that or surmise anything.

But a lot of readers (particularly professionals in the writing industry in one form or another) prefer a leaner use of dialogue tags, and, for that matter, name-dropping. Because it feels inauthentic. Two people who know each other well in real life do not use each other's names, or the names of other family members, for instance ('dad', 'sister', etc. vs. their first names) incessantly. It's redundant. So too do readers pick up on this inauthenticity. It pulls them out of the story, and reminds them that they are merely reading a story. The experience is diminished. They lose their sense of immersion. It doesn't take much for this to happen.

But you're suggesting the character names be used, rather than dialogue tags. I think we'd all be losing more than we gained, in that approach. It loses the art. It's practical and informative, but its used in screenplays because it will not be read by the audience. The actors portraying these words will instill meaning into their deliveries, which will enhance the audience's understanding of the character, their intentions, and meaning such as subtext not spoken. I think a screenplay format in a book would detract, not enhance, and would remove, not deepen, immersion. There's a balance to be struck that provides enough information, not too much, and also helps to convey more, sometimes with less.

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

It’s a conversation between two people, it’s not difficult to track at all. If you really find it so frustrating that you need the author to name who’s speaking in a written conversation between only two people who can only possibly be speaking to each other, maybe you should go back to screenplays instead of novels. You’re not going to be 100% happy with a lot of literary fiction.


Either that or you could just make notes in the margins, some people really love making notes and highlighting certain passages using sticky notes and pens and the like

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I might need to do that. The excerpt I was speaking about was from Agatha Christie's "Third Girl". I'm afraid what page it was but it wasn't an isolated incident going through that novel where the dialogue spanned two pages (over 20 lines of dialogue without a single tag/business). I tried to cite it in its entirety but they didn't let me post the Q since the detail section was too long. 😢

I don't find it such a problem if the characters speak in different ways, like one has a distinct dialect that contrasts them from the other. But especially in that type of context where we have two characters whose dialect and communication patterns are largely the same, I really find it so easy to get lost without a dialog tag at least once every 8 spoken lines or so.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

[*] I'm afraid [I've forgotten] what page it was [...]

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

One thing though if I attempt to appeal to your empathy and open-mindedness: why don't screenwriters do what you suggest, then, for screenplays with dialogue between two characters? Why is there such a rigid separation in formats?

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Like Shakespeare. Why bother with this format between Benevolio and Romeo?

Benvolio: Good-morrow, cousin.
Romeo: Is the day so young?
Benvolio: But new struck nine.
Romeo: Ay me! sad hours seem long. Was that my father that went hence so fast?
Benvolio: It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?
Romeo: Not having that, which having, makes them short. benvolio. In love? romeo. Out—
Benvolio: Of love?
Romeo: Out of her favour, where I am in love.
Benvolio: Alas! that love, so gentle in his view, Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof.

Why not just do:

"Good-morrow, cousin."
"Is the day so young?"
"But new struck nine."
"Ay me! sad hours seem long. Was that my father that went hence so fast?"
"It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?"
[...]

You know?

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

They’re two different forms of entertainment. You can’t expect a recipe for berry cake to translate well as a side for a steak dinner. Christie is very dialogue-heavy as a writer, that’s a big part of how investigations work in her mysteries, after all: interrogations, interviews, questioning witnesses, etc. each writer has their own style. Maybe instead of dialogue-heavy fiction you might prefer more descriptive heavy fiction like LOTR, or maybe better off with some literary nonfiction, there are plenty with no real dialogue.

Novels are made to immerse the reader into the experience. Screenplays are the instruction manual for the experience actors are meant to give the audience.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Is it so jarring though in that respect? I almost want to study to be a writer just to see how my idea would fail. A lot of books tend to interleave a lot of things that breaks the usual style of writing, like italicized text that describes a note or sign.

I'm not perfectly satisfied by your explanation, and I ask for your forgiveness, that these are just different mediums and therefore operate by different rules.

As a caveat, I broke into my particular industry in the 90s by introducing data-mining and unorthodox sampling techniques into the field of raytracing. That turned out to be an enormous success despite my admitted failure upon failure. Yet I'm a bit of a contrarian as a result, always wanting to see if we can bring ideas from two very different fields together and just see if it works.

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

You hit the nail on the head: They’re different mediums, and so function in different ways. There are dozens of ways to tell the same story (in fact there are only 36 story plot structures in the 10,000 year history of mankind), but each has different methods. There are certainly experimental ideas for each method, one is quite famously a mystery novel with all the pages out of order so the reader has to rearrange them to try to find out what happened. No one has yet.

If you’re looking for a prime storytelling medium that would eagerly accept experimentation, I would suggest poetry. The bare bones of storytelling leaves plenty of room for how they can be rearranged.

[FunkyMonkee]

Yes. It's also pretty "boring" to have to keep reading things like, "Richard said", "To which Sheila replied", "Ed responded", "Betty cried", "Brad enunciated", "Rodney proclaimed after taking Phil's dick out of his mouth", etc. Having to come up with a new way to say, "he said/she said" each time so that THAT doesn't get boring!!

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I actually enjoy varied dialogue tags and "business". Maybe not quite as melodramatic as your example but I prefer that over two pages of straight dialogue without any tags/business, at which point the screenplay format seems so much easier to follow.

[FunkyMonkee]

Most of the story books I've ever read, the conversations aren't laid out like a game of ping pong over a large space. You get a few lines of dialogue, which you can easily keep track of, then some text of the story for a line or two, then a bit more dialogue. Either that or, they're mostly written out in the first person so, it's like you're in their head hearing their thoughts and can usually, easily tell who's saying what.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I've been reading Agatha Christie and Philip K. Dick recently as light reading prepared for something a bit more advanced, and they often go hardcore ping-pong: whole page of dialogue without tags or business. So I often get lost and have to flip back a page and reset my mental stack to realize who is.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

* who is who

[FunkyMonkee]

I SHOULD have Chris's first story on my computer, somewhere, I'm trying to find it. It's pretty short so, I should be able to post it here once I find it.

[FunkyMonkee]

Have you tried inserting your own voices in your head while you're reading to keep track of who is saying what. Maybe Herc has a deeper voice and the other guy has a higher voice. Read all of Herc's lines with a deeper voice in your head and all of the other guy's lines with a higher one.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

That actually might be a major reading problem for me! I lack sub-vocalization since I learned how to read and write English long, long before I knew how to speak it or pronounce it out loud.

So I've observed a lot of English lessons for children getting them to read out loud, but I did it the reverse way.

I can read very quickly as a result since I have no auditory correlation to what I read (audio has very limited bandwidth in comparison), but I often think this might be why I have a lot of difficulty appreciating many kinds of literature -- above all being poetry.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

It's actually so alien and distracting to me when people read text out loud, especially when they change voices for each character, such as in the example of a man trying to mimic a woman's voice when he reads a female character's dialogue, only to switch back to a man's voice when he reads a male character's dialogue, and so forth.

It just sounds so, so, so weird to me since I attribute no auditory quality whatsoever to text.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I used to pride myself in this since I could get through 300-page books in just a couple of hours and test better for reading comprehension than students who took 8+ hours to read the same thing. Yet it was all very academic literature I was reading where we didn't have to tap into different characters and voices. So having no voice in my head was advantageous in those contexts.

Yet I think it might be the ultimate problem I have in appreciating creative writing. To have no voice might allow me to read very quickly but it poses a problem in appreciating ideas like rhythm and might prevent me from embodying a character as much as I otherwise could.

I've been practicing reading English more out loud these days but it's still something for which I need a lot more practice. I get tongue-tied very quickly. For example, my instinct to pronounce "anthropomorphize" is like, "anthromoblaleleuluah!" I get lost unless I deliberately slow down and break the word down into syllables: "an-thro-po-mor-phize".

[FunkyMonkee]

Can you transpose it to Japanese?

[FunkyMonkee]

You don't have to read it out loud, just put voice to it in your head.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Even if I did, I have an embarrassing inability to read Japanese fluently with respect to kanji since I spent a good portion of my schooling in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the US. Average Japanese person knows around 3,000+ kanji, whereas I might know around 100 tops. I do sub-vocalize when I read hiragana and katakana in the way I was taught: a-i-u-e-o, ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, etc.

But I never got to the schooling that taught us the kanji parts. It's a very embarrassing thing for me that I've been trying to correct as well. My wife helps me to fill out lots of forms since I can't read the kanji on them.

[FunkyMonkee]

Just like our president!

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Ouch! That's the worst insult I've ever received in my whole life! 😁

[FunkyMonkee]

Lol! Sorry, that's not your fault.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Cheers! I was kidding as well. Mostly! Being in Japan though, I do have this craving now to be able to find a group of English readers and speakers. Like an English book club. That would suit me well, I think.

[FunkyMonkee]

I know.
Maybe you can start one.

[FunkyMonkee]

I found Chris's first story. It's only 4 pages. One of his shortest.
CARNIVORAL KNOWLEDGE

NEWS ITEM: Fr. Paul Fine, psychological consultant to several major food companies, believes that the average American family is more frank and open on the subject of sex than on the subject of food. Most families, Fine reports, snack and nibble on junk food throughout the day, rather than eat the “three squares” that tradition says they should eat. And “so deep is the strength of the ideal ‘shoulds’ with regard to food and eating,” says Fine, “that the topic engenders much ‘social lying’” and a refusal by parents even to discuss the subject. “It may be easier to get people to talk with complete frankness about their sex life.”

“Pass the jelly, please,” said Mother.
Without looking up from his copy of Screw, Dad laid down his engorged member to pass the vaginal jelly to Mother. She hooked a wad with two fingers, brought it to her lap, and began moving her hand so fast that it seemed occasionally to reverse direction, like a strobing airplane propeller.
Sis smacked her lips and looked up from her Tiger Beat. “I just love Donnie Osmond,” she said, her index finger darting rapidly in and out of her petite hairless clam. “He’s delicious.”
“There’s a pretty tasty Negress in here this week, son,” Dad observed. “Care for some dark meat?”
“No, thanks, I guess not,” I replied.
“Johnny, I’m worried about you,” said Mother, setting down her romantic novel and looking at me. “You hardly beat anymore.”
“I’m OK, Ma,” I said. “I’m just not very horny tonight.”
“But you beat like a bird. You’ll get sick if you don’t beat better.”
“Awww, leave the boy alone, Beth,” said Dad. “If he’s not horny, he’s not horny.”
“Pass the dildos, please, Mother.” As usual, there was nothing wrong with Sis’s appetite. She revved the vibrator a couple of times and bent intently over a David Cassidy spread. “Mmmm, good,” she drooled.

[FunkyMonkee]

Here's part 2
Suddenly the hunger hit me. “Er, excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.” I stood up and headed for the stairs.
“Don’t be too long, dear,” Mother called after me. “Your penis will get cold.”
I took the steps two at a time. The hunger was irresistible, an actual physical rumbling in the pit of my stomach, followed by sharp, jabbing pangs. This condition had been overtaking me more and more often lately. I never knew where or when it might hit —— in geometry class, playing softball, and now even in the midst of beating with my family. And, as always, the hunger took precedence over anything else that was going on.
I made it to my room and grabbed one of my dog-eared Danish food magazines from under my mattress. Then, moving slowly on tiptoe, I crept into my parents’ bedroom, opened the top drawer of Mother’s dresser, and shoved aside the panties and bras. There, hidden in the back corner and covered by plain brown wrappers, were the goodies: two ham sandwiches, several Slim Jims, an entire barbecued chicken! My mouth began to water and my tongue swelled. With trembling hands, I snatched up a drumstick, a Slim Jim, and half of a ham sandwich. With the stealth of a cat burglar, I rearranged everything as before, slipped into the bathroom, and locked the door behind me.
Taking a comfortable seat on the toilet, I began to leaf hurriedly through the magazine, lingering over my favorite pictures: a boeuf en daube Provençal, simply glistening in its own juices; twin Cornish game hens with moist stuffing oozing from their nether orifices; a lush steak au poivre, knife-slit down the middle to reveal a pink, marbled interior. My mouth was so filled with saliva that I knew I’d drool on my shirt front if I held back a moment longer. Taking a drumstick, I slid it slowly into my eager mouth, shivering with pleasure at the first contact with its soft, firm flesh. Closing my eyes, I feverishly began to chew.

[FunkyMonkee]

And part 3.
There was a startled cry from the far side of the bathroom door. “Mommy! Daddy! Johnny’s masticating! I see him through the keyhole.”
“What?” Father bellowed up the stairs. “He’s what?”
“He’s masticating,” little Sis called delightedly. “He’s eating the meat!”
Omigod, I thought wildly. Fast as I could, I grabbed a handful of toilet paper and wiped my mouth. Then I dropped it and the remaining food into the toilet bowl and began flushing for all I was worth. Footsteps were coming up the stairs, down the hallway. I was panicky. What to do with the food magazine? Mother would die if she knew that was what I had spent my paper-route money on. Struck by sudden inspiration, I flung open the laundry hamper and thrust the magazine under some dirty sheets.
“What’s going on in there?” Dad shouted. “Are you eating up or what?”
“He is! He is! I saw his jaw moving up and down!”
“Sis!” Mother said sharply. “Don’t be disgusting.”
I slowly unlocked and opened the door, hanging my head, too ashamed to even meet my parents’ eyes.
“I’m surprised at you,” said Dad. “Don’t you know that mastication can spur your growth?”
“I know,” I said in a nearly inaudible voice. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t enough,” Mother said in her sternest voice. “You go right to your room. You can finish beating by yourself tonight.”
Without another word, I slunk by them into my room. But I didn’t beat. Instead, I spent the rest of the evening fantasizing about the day when I would finally meet a girl who cooked. Like most boys my age, all I ever really thought about was getting fed.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I find that very easy to follow and very intriguing! I love the prose here.

[FunkyMonkee]

He sent that to me 17 years ago and just now was the second time I read it. It only took me 10:00
Did you get the double or maybe switched meanings? Like, "masticate" instead of, "masturbate" and all they wanted to do was have sex and not eat but, all he wanted to do was and NOT have sex!. A complete switch of the norms of the modern (early `70's) American family.

[Dongie]

Have you checked out 'The Winter of our Discontent' by Steinbeck?

[FunkyMonkee]

@Dongie Me? No. Other than some Poe, ""The Old Man & The Sea", which was THOROUGHLY BORING AS HELL, "Sidhartha", and the Twain story, something about a stranger, I can't recall the full title, I haven't read any of the "classics".

[Dongie]

Yeah, I found Hemingway a touch boring as well but I love John Steinbeck, everything he wrote. I like Poe, he was very dark but brilliant.

[FunkyMonkee]

@Dongie Who was the female Poe? Dauphner, Dauphin, something like that. I read one of her books, too.

[Dongie]

You got me there. Did Ed have kids even? He was pretty strange as I understand it. I've read only a couple The Raven & Tale Tale Heart but I used to love Vincent Price and he did a lot of Poe movies.

[FunkyMonkee]

@Dongie I read those two, too as well as Pit & The Pendulum.
I don't know if he had any kids.
One of his famous quotes was, "Sleep: those little snippets of death; how I loathe them."

[Dongie]

Correct me if I am wrong but did he not write, "ask not for whom the bell toles, for it toles for thee", I love that.

[Dongie]

I remember watching the P&P at about 7 with one of m y older sisters, Diane about 16, and she made it so much creepier and fun. I've not seen it since but I still remember how each swing cut just a bit deeper.

[FunkyMonkee]

@Dongie It was Hemingway..

[FunkyMonkee]

@Dongie Did you ever hear this?
https://youtu.be/y7htAlPqwBI?si=DdxQn8ey3vQufgRb

[Dongie]

All quite on the western front or can't remember

[Dongie]

Some of it sounds familiar, like from movies.

[FunkyMonkee]

@Dongie Each song is based on one of Edgar's stories. "A Dream Within A Dream", "The Raven", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask Of Amontillado", "The System Of Dr. Tarr & Professor Feather", "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" and, I forget the name of the last song.

[NamerOfStars]

Because for most parts of most books, it's not necessary. Adding it in would up your page count to a ludicrous degree.

Far better to just put in indicators of who's speaking, or add in things to break up the dialogue and make it easier to follow.

[IslaTheWitch]

When I was a kid they printed screenplay adaptations for movies. I remember Batman with Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger was displayed in cinemas and my dad bought me a book based on the screenplay... for other movies it was also often available

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I've actually never read a screenplay back-to-back! Were they interesting? I might need to give it a try. I'd be especially curious of getting ahold of Tarantino's screenplays.

[IslaTheWitch]

for me almost everything from SF/fantasy genre is interesting... I read a few books per week :D

But I liked to read screenplay adaptations, it was like watching the movie again, the same dialogs, described scenes... I enjoyed it

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I never had any spatial awareness and I think that might be my mental defect, perhaps borderline or outright learning disability, that makes me unable to appreciate a lot of settings descriptions with respect to dimensionality (position, orientation, precise time, width, height, length, north, east, south, west).

I think of scenes like the way Frank Miller draws:


He drew the rain but only because it's so relevant to the scene. Everything else in the background is jet black -- negative space -- and that's the way my observation and especially memory works. I just remember the rain. I don't remember all the things behind the character to his left, right, behind, in front. Character and rain.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

That's the whole way I look at life. Lots of negative space.

If there's any background, it's just something very important to the characters -- more a "mood" than a "thing", or obstacle. I get bored very easily.

My foregrounds in the way I think are obsessively detailed and recalled from my memories to obsessives levels. But the background just mostly disappears; it becomes metaphorically pure black or pure white.

[IslaTheWitch]

I know people who need detailed description of the character and environment :D so there must be kind of the golden mean :D

[WindAtMyBack]

That's bad writing if it continues without a "XYZ said" every now and then. I'm surprised a publisher would let it go on that long. A half a page is too long. Two pages like that is completely absurd.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I might have just stumbled into a very bad experience because I started ordering a lot of English books from Amazon, and my wife -- bless her heart (she's pure Japanese and never studied or practiced English as much as I did) -- actually surprised me with gifts from her daily shopping: "Third Girl" from Agatha Christie and "The Man in the High Castle" from Philip K. Dick.

Yet both have these extended dialogues between two characters without a single tag or interleaved business description which required me write down notes on the side (the books were too expensive for me to feel right marking directly in them) to keep track of who is who. So that's where I was questioning if the screenplay format, just in these sections, might be clearer and easier to follow.

Yet my ideal once more is just more dialogue tags and/or business descriptions.

[dustybiker2]

Just read a screenplay? It would be disjointed and annoying to read. I have scripts from The X-Files. The easiest one to read is from the episode Triangle as it was the only episode which was filmed in one long take.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

I think my ideal preference would be for dialogue tags or business to be included, say, at least 8 lines or so, give or take depending on the clarity of who's speaking. I love descriptive writing though; I never found screenplays all that interesting. I was just thinking of the screenplay/staged format as an alternative to, say, 20 lines of spoken dialogue written without a single tag or business description.

[dustybiker2]

I prefer just dry one-liners myself.

[GuyAnswersGirls123]

Action hero style?

[dustybiker2]

lol Yes. Or British.

[NathanDavis]

I really need to continue Miss Princess Consuela BananaHammock's saga...

[Dongie]

It's an art in itself. To much descriptive naming can be very boring or dumbing and numbing down. It takes thought for every line.