From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler Page A

and there's a dark wind blowing from that far horizon, and then you cut to the child—that montage creates something utterly different, a world in which the issue is not just, "Gosh, I don't have parents. I'm a kid struggling," but "I am a human soul trying to work out the destiny of my existence."
    Let's go further.
    "Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"
    How does Pip respond to this?" 'Oh, don't cut my throat, sir,' I pleaded in terror. . .." Now, I don't mean to presume to edit Charles Dickens, but Dickens sometimes wrote in haste. Does he really need to say "in terror"? Do you understand what I'm talking about in terms of abstractions? Certainly the world of emotional abundance he's creating can tolerate these extra taps on the knee, but they are not necessary. Pip's terror is manifest already, is it not?
    But the important thing to understand here is that the man says, "I'll cut your throat," and Pip says, "Don't cut my throat." How long do you think it took him to come to that response? A nanosecond. And how is it written? Pay attention, because there's something really interesting about these three sentences:
    . .. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"
    A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
    "Oh, don't cut my throat, sir," . ..
    Time stops here, doesn't it? This is extreme slow motion, because all of that comes between "I'm going to cut your throat" and "Oh, don't. . ." What is the psychological reality of that? When was the last time you skidded your car on a wet pavement? What happens? You hear every beat of your heart; that telephone pole is floating in your direction, in extreme slow motion, right? It is absolutely organically appropriate for time to slow down drastically in a moment of terror like that. And remember I'm talking about the organic nature of art; every tiny sensual detail has to resonate into everything else. What's unusual about those three sentences in that paragraph where time has stopped? I bet most of you didn't even notice that not one of them is a complete sentence. Listen to it again:
    A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. ["Tied round his head" is a subordinate clause here.] A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
    There's not a single independent verb in those three sentences. Why? Time has stopped. What are the parts of speech that signify the passage of time? Active verbs. Things happen. But here nothing is happening except perception. It is beautifully appropriate—and you don't even notice, except afterward, in an analytic way.
    The organic nature of art, down to syntax. We've dealt so far with very clear examples, I think, of the correspondence of film and fiction techniques, but there are many, many others. I daresay that if you examine the tiniest filmic concept, the most subtle, nuanced filmic concept, you can find its equivalence in fiction.
    I want to leave you with one more example, a subtle one, but I think an unmistakable one: the common transitional device called dissolve. The dissolve is a transition from one image to another where the first fades while the second comes into focus superimposed over the first. The two things, then, mix