These days, countless movies from the early days of film, are circulating on YouTube, alongside YouTube shorts. I occasionally search and watch them, only to soon find that I am unable to tear myself away from the screen. I’m fascinated by how digital reproduction technology has continued to advance, enabling me to watch these old black-and-white films in vivid color. But above all, watching these films makes me feel at peace. Most of these films, shot between 1895 and the early 1900s, record panoramic views of cities like Paris and London. There is no narrative, no main character. Just people from the past, living their normal, everyday lives, passing through the square frame of the screen. In this world, free of danger or conflict, I find inner peace.

        Today, films are often understood as “stories expressed through images,” but that’s because most of the films we come across are “drama films.” Before drama films became mainstream, films sought to capture everyday scenes and activities. The world’s first films were documentaries. In 1895, the Lumière brothers filmed and screened the world’s first film, The Arrival of a Train, which shows a train arriving at La Ciotat Station. Similarly for Korea, while the 1919 kino-drama The Righteous Revenge is known as Korea’s first film, another film was actually screened just before it—the documentary, Panoramic View of the Whole City of Gyeongseong. It’s quite interesting that a kino-drama is considered to be Korea’s first film, ignoring the documentary film that preceded it.

        The Lumière brothers didn’t realize the commercial value of films at the time, but the people who did, moved swiftly. One of the most important directors of early film history, Georges Méliès, integrated narrative into films, demonstrating its commercial value and establishing the foundation for the current film industry. Meanwhile, Hollywood explored various editing and shooting techniques to make seamless, sophisticated, and systematically categorized narrative structures that drew the audience’s attention, creating what’s now known as the classic Hollywood narrative style. No one can deny that narrative played a key role in the birth of the film industry, at the same time demonstrating how closely tied narrative is to the commercial viability of film.

        Drama films actively brought the myriad stories scattered around the world to the silver screen. These films drew on everything from the Bible to the myths and legends of different cultures. And of course there have also been many film adaptations of books. Many of Stephen King’s novels were adapted into big-screen movies, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series became major blockbuster hits. Such examples of book-to-film treatments are legion.

        In my opinion, books that have the potential of becoming adapted for film share a few characteristics. First, the main character needs to be a human. This might sound a bit odd, but there are quite a few books where the main character is not human. Written stories can be narrated through the wind, or even objects, like a hat. Of course, it’s not impossible for films to have a non-human main character, but it’s less likely to be a box office hit without a star-studded cast. Second, it’s better if the book has a specific and clear plot. Books with a lot of internal narrative or wordplay or text-centric works are difficult to produce into films. For instance, novels like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable are challenging to translate into films and even if they were, the particular texture that can only be felt in the text would be lost.

        But what’s most important is that the book must be popular and engaging. Major film studios require massive amounts of capital from investors, which means that generating profits is the number one priority. Films that have no chance at profitability are not even considered for development in the first place. Thus, books that have already been favorably received by readers are considered safer bets that help studios navigate the high seas of the film market towards the safe harbor of a box office hit. Even if success isn’t guaranteed, at the very least, it helps to get investors on board in reaching the development stage. Of course, it goes without saying that good novels don’t always become good films.

        In recent years, there have been some eye-catching examples of films adapted from Korean novels: Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, Snowball, and Concerning My Daughter. These films were notable because they all showcased female characters that had largely been absent in mainstream Korean films. The adaptation of these books by Korean women writers left a significant mark on the landscape of the Korean film industry. Of course, I’m not suggesting that there were no screenplays featuring female leads prior to these films. Surely there must have been many great projects that were shelved during the development stage due to industry trends. However, I believe that the above films were realized because of the enthusiastic reception of young women in their twenties and thirties who make up the main pillar of Korea’s readers.

        In addition to book-to-film adaptations, many films are being adapted from webtoons and comic books. On one hand, this reflects the desire to engage with entertaining works through different media, but on the other hand, it reflects heightened anxiety around issues of box office success and capital recovery. This is because it’s difficult to gauge what the public’s reaction will be to original scripts written by a scriptwriter or a director. Given that the scale of production has gotten larger while the film market has contracted, studios can’t help but select works that have already proven to be successful.

        Around the time I was a middle-school student, I recall searching “How to become a movie director” on an online Naver forum. This was the answer I found: Read a lot of books. You need to know how to write good stories. I was devastated. Not only was I not a bookworm, but I also didn’t find reading or writing to be particularly interesting. Yet I couldn’t give up on my movie director dreams so easily.

        One by one, I started to read the original books that the movies I’d seen were based on. It was then that I realized a wide array of books had been turned into films— from classic, old movies to recent, popular ones. Sometimes the films were better, and sometimes the original books were better, but later I came to think that comparing the two was pointless. The enjoyment I felt reading books was completely different from the enjoyment I felt from watching movies. I suddenly became curious. Why did that person on Naver say to read a lot of books when they were so different from films? Why books and not screenplays?

In high school, I started to write story arcs for all of the films I watched. Of course, it was difficult to clearly grasp the story structure for art films or experimental films. However, the genre films screened at the multiplex followed a formulaic storyline, and even if there were slight variations, they didn’t deviate greatly from the overall structure. I was incredibly proud to have come to this realization. I thought that if I could just familiarize myself with these structures, I’d be able to write good stories myself. But soon after, this faith evaporated. I no longer found watching films entertaining. I could predict how a film would progress and no plot twist shocked me. Even without looking at my watch, I could tell where we were in the running time based on the story arc. Was that it? Was that all there was to a movie? I understood then that an entertaining narrative was not the only thing that made up a film. I began to explore the different methods employed to express narrative—the movements of the characters or the camera; the various ways to show a space; the tension between each shot; the pacing of the edits; the colors and lighting, atmosphere and texture, etc. This led to a broader enjoyment of films, which made me very happy. And it also led to a clearer understanding of films taking root within me.

        For me, films have always been about the image. Not the narrative, but the way it is expressed. In fact, I dreamed of making films where images were not the vehicle or means for conveying narrative, but were narratives in and of themselves. Even if it was difficult to ascertain their exact meaning, films that pushed forward on the strength of their images felt more “cinematic” to me. Not only do films use audiovisual imagery to stimulate the senses, but this imagery is an art form that can penetrate deep into the unconscious mind, awakening parts of ourselves that we never even knew existed.

        I began to question the assumption that “a good story makes a good film.” In college, this was repeated among film students as fact, but I was always a bit suspicious. Did a good story automatically make for a good film? Even though films were more than stories?

After a few years, I began to write books for the first time because someone had told me long ago that I had to write and read a lot of good stories to become a film director, and also because countless books had been adapted to film. Of course, I already intellectually understood the difference between the two, but I was excited by the possibility that by directly writing a textual narrative, new perspectives might arise. In essence, I wanted to feel the difference in how visual language and textual language handled narrative. That’s why I began writing stories—and now it’s already been seven years.

        After becoming a writer, I’ve gotten mostly two types of questions from people: How did you become a writer after graduating with a film degree? How does writing books differ from making movies? I’ll share just a few of the many insights I’ve gained over the years.

Sentences and Shots
 

When I first write a story, I think of each sentence as a film shot. A shot includes visual elements like the actual filming itself, the lighting, props, and the actors’ facial expressions. These elements determine the emotion and ambiance of the scene, and even the function of the shot. The sentence plays the same role in a story. Within a sentence there is a structure, and within that structure there are words. Depending on what structure you choose and where you place certain words, the meaning and nuance of the sentence changes. I compose each sentence the way I would compose a shot. If composing a shot means deploying the visual elements within it, composing a sentence means arranging the words within. How the sentence is composed, and how the sentences are connected, will determine the story’s atmosphere and tone.

The Camera’s Perspective and the Character’s First-Person Perspective

There are several things to keep in mind when writing a screenplay. These are not absolute rules, but they are generally followed. First, screenplays should be written in present progressive, and only audiovisual cues should be included.  Adjectives and adverbs should be avoided as much as possible, and the character’s state of mind should be communicated through their actions and dialogue, not internal narration. The biggest difference is that it’s impossible to narrate solely from the first person point-of-view in film. For example, a sentence like, “Yesterday, I fell asleep feeling so tired and sick; it felt like my body would crumble into a million pieces” wouldn’t work well.

        Because of this, when I first started writing, the word “I” took on special meaning. “I” am speaking. “I” can speak. Of course, point-of-view shots can be used, or voiceovers employed for internal narratives, but for the most part, films are shot from the camera’s “view.” In films, the world is perceived through the camera’s gaze, but in books written in the first person, the world is perceived through the narrator’s perspective. Thus, I came to believe that the first-person perspective was “novelistic,” and barring certain exceptions, it made me want to continue writing stories in the first person.

Watching vs. Reading
 

Before I started writing myself, I thought that one “read” books and “watched” movies. But since I became a writer, I’ve started to feel that the shape of the Korean alphabet and the sequence of the sentences are a type of image. If you really think about it, we’re already “reading” when watching films. I was always reading subtitles without thinking twice, as well as the title and the ending credits. It was so obvious that I’d never noticed it before.

        This realization brought the films of Jean-Luc Godard to mind. As a director, he had already noticed the interesting things happening in the space between watching and reading, and deployed typography in an intentional manner. This also led me to think of directors like Wim Wenders, Quentin Tarantino, and Hong Sang-soo. Their films, starting with the font of their titles, showcase the unique touch of a writer. Through directors like these, I learned that watching and reading have only been categorized differently, and actually the boundary between them is quite vague.

        In writing stories, I’ve explored the difference in these two mediums and very much enjoyed experiencing the tension between them. I’ve come to realize that writing a book requires deep contemplation of text and language. Otherwise, it’s like trying to film a movie without a camera.

Translated by Hannah Kim

Seo Ije majored in film and made her literary debut in 2018 after winning the New Writer’s Award from Literature and Society. She has three short story collections, Towards 0%, Low Resolution, and Along With the Light that Passes Through the Window and has co-authored an essay “The Scene 
I Loved Made its Way to Me.”  She has also won the Young Writer’s Award, Today’s Writer Award and the Kim Man-jung Literary Award.

Korean Work Mentioned:

•   Cho Nam-joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (tr. Jamie Chang, Liveright, 2020)

    조남주, 『82년생 김지영』 (민음사, 2016)

•   Lim Solah, The Best Life (Munhakdongne, 2024)

    임솔아, 『최선의 삶』 (문학동네, 2024) 

•   Kim Hye-jin, Concerning My Daughter (tr. Jamie Chang, Restless Books, 2022)

    김혜진, 『딸에 대하여』 (민음사, 2017)