Faculty Course Notes, Non-Fictional Prose Course

• The plot summary problem

Film writing of necessity involves a certain amount of description: one cannot quote verbatim from a film image in written language. Beginning film students have a tendency toward plot synopsis: their instinct is to say “what happened” rather than to describe how actions, characters, places, and things are represented. This tendency can be even more marked than in literary studies courses, since many students have not yet been acclimated to consider films as authored works, much less approach them as texts susceptible to critical analysis.