There's a great bit in "Understanding Comics" where Scott McCloud says that - paraphrasing here - it takes fewer panels to depict the creation and destruction of the known universe in a comic book than it does to depict a person blinking. (I bring up McCloud's work a lot because it was genuinely life-changing for me as a teen, but it really is applicable here! One of those books has an entire chapter about word + image combos that makes almost the same point that this post does about redundancy: a picture of a smirking guy jabbing his finger, saying "I jab my finger at you!," captioned "He jabbed his finger!")
Anyway! As always I will say "TV innocent ;-)" - or rather, it's worth noting that good TV writing can do all the stuff you mention in this post on a mechanical level, and that aspiring novelists could learn a lot by thinking about those aspects and applying them to their writing. E.g., so much of cinema is built around the question of "when and why and on what image do we cut to the next shot/scene?", which is something authors... I mean, maybe you ask that question! But you don't *have* to ask that in the same way a good filmmaker does, and I wonder if novels would be better if novelists regularly asked themselves questions like that.
Yes I'm not critiquing TV writing at all. Good TV writing is after all written with its medium in mind--that is, as a blueprint for a show to be acted by actors and directed by directors.
I thought of Understanding Comics while writing this too. Was thinking of how McCloud discusses how much of comics is in the gap between panels and manipulating what readers will imagine between panels...which is an example of thinking in the medium in question.
Yes! My background is in playwriting, and we have our own ongoing discourse about how much to specify in stage directions and how much to leave up to the people staging the show. But I'd wager that if you looked at the script from that "Friends" scene in the GIF, it probably wouldn't have any of the "Ross claps and pumps his fists. Chandler jumps and slaps Joey’s shoulder..." stage directions either. The script is probably more like:
JOEY: I just got some great news!
CHANDLER: Yeah man!
RACHEL (simultaneously): Yay!
And the specific gestures are c/o the actors in collaboration with the director, because they're professionals working on a sitcom and they know what they're being asked to do to bring the script to life.
Not to speak for Lincoln here, but I think his point is that the final narrative art form with TV isn't the screenplay for the TV show, but the TV show itself. So the TV show -- as a visual and collaborative medium that includes the work of actors, set designers, costumers, and director as well as that of the writer -- can convey a ton of info (the individual actors' facial expressions, their hair and makeup, their living space, etc.) at a glance, while prose alone would literally have to spell all of this out.
Yes, definitely! When I say I assume people are "thinking in TV" I don't mean they're thinking in TV *scripts*. I mean they're imagining films in their mind and putting that down on paper.
And yeah our eye just takes in visual information in a different way than text. We see the whole TV frame at once, more or less, while a page of text is read word by word and in a literal sense takes longer to get through than a few second film shot.
I've noticed that a good day of writing is when I get this exact thing right the first time, and that the majority of my editing is "de-TV-ifying" my drafts.
I'm also now thinking about the first chapter in Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien, through the narrator, gives us a bunch of information about Hobbit lifestyle and history and it's all very interesting/engaging. Then Jackson had to get some portion of that same info into the movie, so they create this whole conversation between Frodo and Gandalf that pulls from Tolkien's narrator. Both versions are great and serve their respective mediums.
Very much agree. Read The Hobbit when I was eight years old, in Czech (bc, I'm Czech) and much later saw the film. Love both book and film, which is rather rare...
I love prose, but I am coming back into it after two decades of studying and working in screenwriting. So I really needed to read this. Thank you for the breakdown! More actionable tips and exercises would be helpful as I try to strengthen that interiority muscle.
Thanks quite accurate. "A camera is in some sense “objective,” Yep. "(Fiction) shouldn’t be a dry and neutral description" Double yep. Too many writers sound like objective reporting. This makes for dull reading. Throw a little style in, for pete's sake : )
Interesting to think where well-renowned prose stylists fall on this spectrum. Currently reading Philip Roth's Sabbath Theater...it's almost all interiority. Then you can pick up a book by Cormac McCarthy, and there's literally none.
Some of this is a POV question certainly. Roth mostly writes in first person and McCarthy mostly in third person omniscient IIRC. Looking at some McCarthy openings, his narrator often is providing commentary (or whatever one might call it) that is absent in the the kinds of works I'm talking about, which are often in first person POV without interiority.
I read a book recently written by a person with television background. It read like a film script. It was in prose, it was a book, but it contained all the beats and immediacy of a film, but lacked any kind of depth. In a way it was brilliant, and in another way it made me sad. I don't know if it's the case, but I felt like it had been written purely to be optioned, or maybe it had been written for a younger market with untrained attention spans. Whichever way, in my mind, it failed at being a book, and it failed at being TV.
Anyway, thank you for this article. As an "old-fashioned" writer, I think about these things a lot.
On the subject of how “to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in”, I’d also add that, while a movie camera can pan across a cloudy sky and perfectly depict what it looks like, prose can hint to the reader what that cloudy sky means. Clouds can be “ominous” or “majestic”, they can “promise rain” or “threaten rain”, and such phrasing choices can tell us how this scenic detail is pertinent to the characters or story.
One thing this has got me thinking about… is whether part of this is an attention span issue. People wanting stuff to be happening, rather than just thoughts being thunk. Or authors perhaps supposing that’s the case and writing it whether it’s true or not.
Also, I had an editor criticize me for too much dialogue without breaks for action (even little ones). It flowed to me when I read it, but it’s hard to judge how others will fare with your own writing.
It very well may be. Though I like to think people DO care about interiority and character depth and such even if they aren't conscious of it. This is why people say "the novel is better!" than the film most of the time, I think. You connect more with the characters in a novel, because of the interiority.
The solution for this, imho, is to always make sure you're depicting a scene not just through one character's eyes specifically or point of view in general, but through their feelings, which will color the scene and add depth (plus their thoughts). This is especially necessary when writing in third person.
BTW, a great book without any interiority at all is THE MALTESE FALCON. What's fascinating about LESS THAN ZERO is that it's largely interior in Clay's head but there's nothing there. Also LESS THAN ZERO is so depressing.
I do think books with minimal interiority can work--anything can work if done well!--although almost all the examples I can think of, like Maltese Falcon, have an omniscient and floating third person POV. It really is quite different to do it with first person POV. It can work there too, but there should be a good reason.
Thank you, thank you & gracias for this post. I don’t think this is obvious at all. You actually articulated what I struggle to communicate clearly to my creative writing students in El Paso, Texas. The only point I’m able to explain (somewhat) decently is that our handling of time in prose is all-powerful and so very economic, especially when you think of costly software that renders a young Robert Niro and Joe Pesci in The Irishman. You also made me realize I often switch to TV brain. I’ve been an amateur cinephile since the time of VHS and those accrued fees for tardy returns and/or failures to rewind the tape. So I have to actively escape that mindset when doing prose—or in my case poetry that moves a story—and realize, that words are my only instrument (for poets, a plus: interaction with the white page!). So, words. ‘Just’ words. No actors or sound techs or James-Earl-Jones majestic narrators. I do remind my students of this—words! paragraphs! stanzas!—but you’ve said it so well, my reading of this post will greatly benefit my undergrads and myself. Again—gracias. Saludos & regards from the U.S.-México border.
This was several years ago now, but I was reading a high concept thriller that had gotten a lot of buzz, and in the midst of a big action scene stuff was happening and then there was a paragraph that just said "Dutch tilt." I thought it was a typo, but I looked it up and found out it's a distinctive cinematography technique that I instantly recognized, but has zero meaning when you're reading prose.
It was bizarre, but maybe an early example of the trend.
Ha, not exactly related but reminded me how recently I was googling "Dutch angle" and--despite spelling it correctly--the Google AI summary showed me something about "Dutch Angel Dragons" from some fantasy novel
You close with ‘I know that most of the above is somewhat obvious …’ but I would argue that it is that very obviousness that has obscured these insightful observations from our collective consciousness – certainly mine. And, no, I’m not just writing this response because of the intense rush of delightful bias confirmation I experienced while reading it (honestly, it was almost indecently intense), but more because when I reread it (struggling to see your advice in a more objective light) it began to sink in just how very good your advice here actually is – and for that I must thank you in the most practical way I can, and that is to recommend your Substack highly to anyone looking for advice on improving their writing.
There's a great bit in "Understanding Comics" where Scott McCloud says that - paraphrasing here - it takes fewer panels to depict the creation and destruction of the known universe in a comic book than it does to depict a person blinking. (I bring up McCloud's work a lot because it was genuinely life-changing for me as a teen, but it really is applicable here! One of those books has an entire chapter about word + image combos that makes almost the same point that this post does about redundancy: a picture of a smirking guy jabbing his finger, saying "I jab my finger at you!," captioned "He jabbed his finger!")
Anyway! As always I will say "TV innocent ;-)" - or rather, it's worth noting that good TV writing can do all the stuff you mention in this post on a mechanical level, and that aspiring novelists could learn a lot by thinking about those aspects and applying them to their writing. E.g., so much of cinema is built around the question of "when and why and on what image do we cut to the next shot/scene?", which is something authors... I mean, maybe you ask that question! But you don't *have* to ask that in the same way a good filmmaker does, and I wonder if novels would be better if novelists regularly asked themselves questions like that.
Yes I'm not critiquing TV writing at all. Good TV writing is after all written with its medium in mind--that is, as a blueprint for a show to be acted by actors and directed by directors.
I thought of Understanding Comics while writing this too. Was thinking of how McCloud discusses how much of comics is in the gap between panels and manipulating what readers will imagine between panels...which is an example of thinking in the medium in question.
Yes! My background is in playwriting, and we have our own ongoing discourse about how much to specify in stage directions and how much to leave up to the people staging the show. But I'd wager that if you looked at the script from that "Friends" scene in the GIF, it probably wouldn't have any of the "Ross claps and pumps his fists. Chandler jumps and slaps Joey’s shoulder..." stage directions either. The script is probably more like:
JOEY: I just got some great news!
CHANDLER: Yeah man!
RACHEL (simultaneously): Yay!
And the specific gestures are c/o the actors in collaboration with the director, because they're professionals working on a sitcom and they know what they're being asked to do to bring the script to life.
Not to speak for Lincoln here, but I think his point is that the final narrative art form with TV isn't the screenplay for the TV show, but the TV show itself. So the TV show -- as a visual and collaborative medium that includes the work of actors, set designers, costumers, and director as well as that of the writer -- can convey a ton of info (the individual actors' facial expressions, their hair and makeup, their living space, etc.) at a glance, while prose alone would literally have to spell all of this out.
Yes, definitely! When I say I assume people are "thinking in TV" I don't mean they're thinking in TV *scripts*. I mean they're imagining films in their mind and putting that down on paper.
And yeah our eye just takes in visual information in a different way than text. We see the whole TV frame at once, more or less, while a page of text is read word by word and in a literal sense takes longer to get through than a few second film shot.
That McCloud book is a classic. Good points you made here!
I've noticed that a good day of writing is when I get this exact thing right the first time, and that the majority of my editing is "de-TV-ifying" my drafts.
I'm also now thinking about the first chapter in Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien, through the narrator, gives us a bunch of information about Hobbit lifestyle and history and it's all very interesting/engaging. Then Jackson had to get some portion of that same info into the movie, so they create this whole conversation between Frodo and Gandalf that pulls from Tolkien's narrator. Both versions are great and serve their respective mediums.
Very much agree. Read The Hobbit when I was eight years old, in Czech (bc, I'm Czech) and much later saw the film. Love both book and film, which is rather rare...
I love prose, but I am coming back into it after two decades of studying and working in screenwriting. So I really needed to read this. Thank you for the breakdown! More actionable tips and exercises would be helpful as I try to strengthen that interiority muscle.
This is SO spot on and great and the specific tips are incredibly helpful!!
Thank you, Lilly!
This was fantastic, and not obvious at all in my opinion! Thanks for another great craft piece :)
thank you!
Thanks quite accurate. "A camera is in some sense “objective,” Yep. "(Fiction) shouldn’t be a dry and neutral description" Double yep. Too many writers sound like objective reporting. This makes for dull reading. Throw a little style in, for pete's sake : )
Interesting to think where well-renowned prose stylists fall on this spectrum. Currently reading Philip Roth's Sabbath Theater...it's almost all interiority. Then you can pick up a book by Cormac McCarthy, and there's literally none.
Some of this is a POV question certainly. Roth mostly writes in first person and McCarthy mostly in third person omniscient IIRC. Looking at some McCarthy openings, his narrator often is providing commentary (or whatever one might call it) that is absent in the the kinds of works I'm talking about, which are often in first person POV without interiority.
Maybe it's because I have gray hair, but I say yes to all this! Excellent post.
I read a book recently written by a person with television background. It read like a film script. It was in prose, it was a book, but it contained all the beats and immediacy of a film, but lacked any kind of depth. In a way it was brilliant, and in another way it made me sad. I don't know if it's the case, but I felt like it had been written purely to be optioned, or maybe it had been written for a younger market with untrained attention spans. Whichever way, in my mind, it failed at being a book, and it failed at being TV.
Anyway, thank you for this article. As an "old-fashioned" writer, I think about these things a lot.
On the subject of how “to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in”, I’d also add that, while a movie camera can pan across a cloudy sky and perfectly depict what it looks like, prose can hint to the reader what that cloudy sky means. Clouds can be “ominous” or “majestic”, they can “promise rain” or “threaten rain”, and such phrasing choices can tell us how this scenic detail is pertinent to the characters or story.
One thing this has got me thinking about… is whether part of this is an attention span issue. People wanting stuff to be happening, rather than just thoughts being thunk. Or authors perhaps supposing that’s the case and writing it whether it’s true or not.
Also, I had an editor criticize me for too much dialogue without breaks for action (even little ones). It flowed to me when I read it, but it’s hard to judge how others will fare with your own writing.
It very well may be. Though I like to think people DO care about interiority and character depth and such even if they aren't conscious of it. This is why people say "the novel is better!" than the film most of the time, I think. You connect more with the characters in a novel, because of the interiority.
The novel WAS better!
I need to be reminded sometimes that television is not literature, and vice versa.
The solution for this, imho, is to always make sure you're depicting a scene not just through one character's eyes specifically or point of view in general, but through their feelings, which will color the scene and add depth (plus their thoughts). This is especially necessary when writing in third person.
BTW, a great book without any interiority at all is THE MALTESE FALCON. What's fascinating about LESS THAN ZERO is that it's largely interior in Clay's head but there's nothing there. Also LESS THAN ZERO is so depressing.
I do think books with minimal interiority can work--anything can work if done well!--although almost all the examples I can think of, like Maltese Falcon, have an omniscient and floating third person POV. It really is quite different to do it with first person POV. It can work there too, but there should be a good reason.
Thank you, thank you & gracias for this post. I don’t think this is obvious at all. You actually articulated what I struggle to communicate clearly to my creative writing students in El Paso, Texas. The only point I’m able to explain (somewhat) decently is that our handling of time in prose is all-powerful and so very economic, especially when you think of costly software that renders a young Robert Niro and Joe Pesci in The Irishman. You also made me realize I often switch to TV brain. I’ve been an amateur cinephile since the time of VHS and those accrued fees for tardy returns and/or failures to rewind the tape. So I have to actively escape that mindset when doing prose—or in my case poetry that moves a story—and realize, that words are my only instrument (for poets, a plus: interaction with the white page!). So, words. ‘Just’ words. No actors or sound techs or James-Earl-Jones majestic narrators. I do remind my students of this—words! paragraphs! stanzas!—but you’ve said it so well, my reading of this post will greatly benefit my undergrads and myself. Again—gracias. Saludos & regards from the U.S.-México border.
This was several years ago now, but I was reading a high concept thriller that had gotten a lot of buzz, and in the midst of a big action scene stuff was happening and then there was a paragraph that just said "Dutch tilt." I thought it was a typo, but I looked it up and found out it's a distinctive cinematography technique that I instantly recognized, but has zero meaning when you're reading prose.
It was bizarre, but maybe an early example of the trend.
Ha, not exactly related but reminded me how recently I was googling "Dutch angle" and--despite spelling it correctly--the Google AI summary showed me something about "Dutch Angel Dragons" from some fantasy novel
You close with ‘I know that most of the above is somewhat obvious …’ but I would argue that it is that very obviousness that has obscured these insightful observations from our collective consciousness – certainly mine. And, no, I’m not just writing this response because of the intense rush of delightful bias confirmation I experienced while reading it (honestly, it was almost indecently intense), but more because when I reread it (struggling to see your advice in a more objective light) it began to sink in just how very good your advice here actually is – and for that I must thank you in the most practical way I can, and that is to recommend your Substack highly to anyone looking for advice on improving their writing.