TV Causalities: Avoiding Bad Habits from Visual Media

On what the page can do that the screen can't, and vice versa.

Before diving into this newsletter, I wanted to share that I have a new science fiction flash story in Lightspeed, “The Last Serving,” if you’d like to read. It’s a quick and fun one I think!

While trying to think of a newsletter to kick off 2023, I decided I might as well elaborate on a topic that I’ve grumbled about publicly and privately over the past few years: fiction that reads like visual media.

Increasingly, I read stories in workshops or submission queues in which the writer seems to be thinking in visual media instead of thinking in prose. Scenes written like a transcription of a sitcom scene. Details that a camera would focus on instead of what text should focus on. Etc.

My impression is that many writers these days are imagining their scenes as TV or film scenes as they write. That they imagine their characters as actors and think about hat they might do, then write it down. This is understandable. These days most writers, myself included, probably consume more stories as TV, film, or video games than we do as text. Still, it is something to fight against. What works on the screen is not necessarily what works on the page.

Before someone yells at me, let me be clear that I’m not in anyway insulting television writing. I’m not saying film or TV are lesser mediums than prose fiction. I’m only saying they are different mediums and thus have different strengths and weaknesses. Different possibilities and constraints. (Relatedly, see my last newsletter on “unfilmable novels.”)

In any event, the issues I’m thinking about are not about how television is written but in how television looks. That is, I think writers are getting these habits from watching screens not from reading screenplays.

Here are a few habits I’d watch out for:

Too Much Focus on Faces

The camera loves to focus on faces. And why shouldn’t it? Humans have an innate attraction to human faces, and if you’re paying actors millions of dollars you want to show them off. But while the facial expressions of your favorite actor might be inherently interesting, the face of a character in prose might note be. Because there isn’t a face there. Only text.

This isn’t to say that faces shouldn’t be referenced in fiction. It’s just that some writers have a habit of giving faces too much attention and especially of giving them the burden of conveying all character emotions. Even in first person narratives, many writers default to descriptions of the narrator’s face to convey feeling. Sadness wrinkled her face. He furrowed his brow in anger. Her eyes bulged with love. My lips wobbled with joy. Panic washed over my face. etc. These sentences are often visually confusing to begin with (what am I seeing with “sadness wrinkled her face”?), but even when they do make sense they aren’t that compelling without an actual actor’s features to see.

A particular pet peeve of mine is what I think of as the “reaction shot round-up.” In a sitcom, it’s common to show the characters’ reactions to every funny joke or surprising line. Makes sense. The audience presumably loves those characters and wants to see the actors react. But it’s really not compelling on the page to read Sally’s jaw fell to the floor. Donald’s eyes widened. Bjorn gasped. Robin’s nostril’s flared. Mr. Maple grimaced. all in a row every time something notable is said in scene.

There are many reasons to reference faces. But they shouldn’t be the default for every emotion, especially when interiority is one of the great strengths of the page over the screen. Barring awkward voiceovers, TV can’t get into characters’ heads. Prose can. Lean into that.

Skipping Summary in Scene

On TV, everything that happens in a scene happens on the screen. We see every action and hear every line of dialogue the characters say. This leads to some ruthless efficiency in screenwriting—conversations happen much quicker than they might in real life, etc.—but that’s a constraint of the medium. The page has no such constraint. Indeed, one of the great advantages of prose is being able to manipulate time. A hundred years can pass in a sentence. A second can be stretched for pages. In any given scene we can summarize time, action, and dialogue to both indicate more time passing and—crucially—to skip the boring parts.

I read so many stories in which nothing is ever summarized in scene. Every action and especially every line of dialogue is written out no matter how banal. Unless you’re writing some kind of experimental riff on the banality of life, I submit something like the following:

John sat down at the table across from Don and Ron.

“Do you want to order anything, John?” Ron said.

John picked up the menu.

“I could have a cup of coffee,” John said. “Waiter!”

The waiter came over. “What can I get you?”

“I’ll take a cup of coffee.”

“One cup of coffee.” He wrote it on his notepad. “That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

The waiter walked away.

John leaned forward. “The craziest thing just happened to me…”

will rarely be preferable to

John sat down and ordered a cup of coffee. “The craziest thing just happened to me…”

Even if what’s happening in your story is more interesting than John’s coffee order, you always think about what can or should be summarized. It’s much harder to track action on the page than it is on the screen, and so you might want to give us on a few specific details and summarize the rest in an action sequence. E.g., it might be interesting to watch two characters play tennis on screen or punch each other in a brawl, but less interesting to read about the angles of each shot or a description of every single swing.

Exceptions always exist and there’s points where you will want to skip summary in order to create specific effects. But there should be a specific effect you are trying to create. Don’t write every action or quote just because you imagine them happening in your head. In general, it’s best to summarize the boring parts and show only the most interesting or important ones.

Cluttered Visual Detail

A final point I’d watch out for is cluttered visual detail. This might sound odd if you’ve had “show don’t tell” hammered into you by every writing class, but I’m not suggesting that one shouldn’t “show.” I’m suggesting that one should show judiciously with a level of detail a reader can grasp and keep in their head.

The key—as with so many things in fiction—is time. Visually, we process something like a character’s outfit instantaneously. Characters walk on screen and we see them. On the page, detailing every item in a character’s outfit would take a full paragraph. That is, would take far more time. He had short brownish hair slicked back with product and was smoking a cigar while waring a charcoal suit with white pinstripes that had peak lapels and was double-breasted, underneath of which he had a white shirt with a red tie with a pattern of yellow flowers and yada yada yada. Probably easier to say something abstract and shorter. He was dressed like a film noir gangster or what not.

As with everything, there are exceptions. Maybe there’s a thematic reason to describe a character’s outfit in great detail? But unless you’re making some American Psycho thematic point about consumerism, it’s unlikely you have a good reason to describe every single outfit of every character in detail. Or every item on a table. Or every piece of furniture in a room. Or every character in a crowded room.

Keep in mind what the reader can keep in their mind. If you have a character who is given one or two visual traits you regularly reference—they’re bald or short or have curly hair or whatever it might be—that helps nail them down for the reader. If each character has fifteen visually identifying traits, few readers will keep track of that. It gets jumbled in the mind.

Anyway, those are just a few things to watch out for when you’re drafting or revising. Watch as much screen time as you like, just remember that prose is a different medium with unique strengths. It’s always best to lean into those. And it should go without saying that there’s no shame in having these or other habits in drafting. Every writer has their tics and traps. Just look to fix them in revision. That’s what revision is for.

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As always, if you like this newsletter, please consider subscribing or checking out my recently released science fiction novel The Body Scout, which The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent” and Boing Boing declared “a modern cyberpunk masterpiece.”