What Not Reading Does to Your Writing

More thoughts on "TV brain prose" and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing.

Time marches on, but literary discourse is eternal. The last week has seen a revival of the “should aspiring fiction writers actually read books?” debate. I won’t bother bothering you with the origins or the arguments. Obviously, good artists study their mediums. They also tend to enjoy the art forms they spend their lives working with. Why would you want to write books if you don’t like books? Or make music if you dislike music? Practice and study are the two ways to improve in any field. Everyone knows this, which is why I kind of love this discourse. It’s so absurd that it loops around from inanity to insanity.

Oh yeah? The online rando says. You think every author has to read? Well, maybe you haven’t considered an author who gets caught in a freak basement explosion that lodges a rusty pipe from the boiler into their skull, which after being surgically removed leaves them unable to comprehend written words, and also they have a preexisting ear sensitivity that means they can’t listen to audiobooks with headphones—and before you ask, they live in a crowded home of screaming war orphans so they can’t play audiobooks on speakers—and even if they could still read, they literally do not even have a single free second of the day between work, cooking, cleaning, and posting on social media. Are you saying they can’t still be a writer? Huh? You’re saying a disabled war orphan caregiver with literally no free time because of late capitalism can’t be a novelist? You elitist gatekeeping @&%*#^$*!

(As a side note, I’ve never seen a great term to define this common rhetorical move. It is a bit like straw manning, except you’re inventing an imagined exception instead of an imagined argument. And a bit like white knighting, though not on behalf of anyone real. I hereby propose “straw knighting” as the term.)

While I won’t rehash the debate, one post reminded me of a favorite topic of mine. Namely, the ways that “TV brain” creates a particular kind of bad fiction that’s prominent these days. This “TV brain” prose is influenced primarily by narrative visual media—TV, film, TikToks, video game cut scenes, etc.—without engaging in the narrative possibilities and limitations of prose fiction. We live in a visual culture and writers who don’t read widely tend to absorb their understanding of narrative from visual media. This is not a critique of film or TV or anything else. The point is that artistic mediums have different possibilities and limitations and if you try to make your novel a series of transcriptions of imagined TV scenes, it will fail at being either good TV or a good novel.

[Editing to add: Some people seem to think I’m saying prose writers can’t learn anything from visual media and/or shouldn’t watch visual media. I assure you I’m not arguing either of those things! I am simply saying you also need to read prose. By the same token, a filmmaker can learn plenty from novels but they also need to watch and enjoy movies. A painter can get inspiration from music and should still study painting. Etc.]

My previous post on this topic has been one of my most popular and widely shared articles. I was quite happy with the piece, but it did suffer from one problem. I didn’t have a specific example to dissect. Fortunately the internet has come to the rescue.

This near-perfect example of “TV brain prose” is so tailor-made to my complaints that it almost seems like a parody. And since this now viral post was shared as the “novel opening from a non-reader” that was “EVIDENCE” that writers don’t need to read it seems fair game to discuss.

Here is the full passage. Give it a read first:

This is, frankly, bad writing. It’s boring, tin-eared, and filled with basic errors like missing periods. The setting is a confused mishmash of American and British legal systems. There is a “barrister” and “dock” from the UK but also a “gavel” and “stenographer”—the UK phased these out years ago—from the US system. (It also mixes British and American grammar rules.) But above all it is bad writing in the specific way the prose of non-readers is bad.

No Perspective or Interiority

“TV brain” prose tends to lack interiority and perspective. This is a big problem since those are arguably the greatest strengths of prose over film. Outside of awkward voiceovers, a TV scene is restricted to relaying information through the actions and dialogue of the characters. Prose, however, can easily slip into the interior worlds. It can relate characters’ thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, memories, and dreams. And the use of perspective allows for depth of meaning. Visual perspective is important in great cinema but is not the same as prose perspective and also not really a feature of, say, your average multi-camera sitcom. It is also a different type of perspective, in that it is not driven by interiority.

The above passage has no perspective and reads like a transcription of a multi-camera sitcom. The court falls silent [camera cut] the stenographer types [camera cut] defendant pushes his hands into his pocket [camera cut] judge raises her eyebrows. Etc. The information is conveyed entirely through actions and dialogue without much interiority. (The little we get mostly repeats what we already know from the action and dialogue.) We learn nothing about these characters, not even what crime the defendant is accused of committing.

Who is seeing these things? Who is thinking them? To pick an example, the stenographer is “clearly unsettled” when McKinnon makes a rude gesture. Is this McKinnon happily noticing her discomfort? The judge angrily noticing it and thus intuiting what McKinnon did? Is it the stenographer herself thinking “I’m clearly unsettled” before deciding to adjust her skirt? Most likely, it is just the author wanting to make sure the reader understands the TV camera image being presented.

We might technically call this a third-person omniscient perspective, but really it is a camera perspective. Which is to say, there is no perspective. Prose is rooted in perspective. Knowing the POV of a passage changes how we understand it. “Bob was a piece of work, but Sarah could handle him.” That passage’s meaning changes if we read it as Bob’s thoughts or Sarah’s thoughts or the narrator’s statement.

I am currently reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which is a masterclass in the use of a floating third-person perspective. Morrison freely dips into the different interiorities of her characters, often in the same scene, but it is always clear whose perspective we are inhabiting at any moment. We know who is thinking or seeing or feeling because their perspective colors and deepens the scene’s meaning.

A Barrage of Generic Gestures

If interiority and perspective are a great advantage of prose, then a great advantage of film is the use of actors. That’s no small thing. We are humans and find human faces and movements inherently captivating. Even banal movements can be powerful on film. An actor, especially a good one, can convey huge emotions and meaning with a gesture as small as a knuckle cracking or an eyebrow raising. In a sense, every character “raises an eyebrow” or “cracks knuckles” in the same way on the page. You could probably make a viral YouTube supercut of great actors shrugging. Few would want to read a supercut document of “[character name] shrugged” repeated endlessly.

There is a place for small movements in prose, of course. There’s a place for everything. But a feature of TV brain prose is the overabundance of these small gestures that communicate far less on the page than they do on the screen. The above passage is bloated with banal movements. We often get several in a sentence: “The defendant smirked, shrugged, leaned back in the dock, and pushed his hands more deeply into his trouser pockets.” Watching Robert De Niro perform those movements might be interesting. It is dull to read.

Even TV brain writers tend to know this, which is why they often default to purple prose, clunky phrasing, adverb abuse, and thesaurus overuse. So you end up with phrases like “a long, slow animus blink.”

This abundance of generic gestures is related to the aforementioned lack of perspective. Is the judge actually noticing the man on the dock “pushing his hands more deeply into his trouser pockets”? Is the man noticing his own actions? Nope. These are just actions happening, captured by the implied camera.

Playing a Scene in Real-Time

This scene plays out as if in real-time. We get seemingly every single character movement—at least that a camera would capture—and every line of dialogue. In film, nearly every scene will play out in real time. (Yes, occasionally you will have a montage or a slow motion scene but you know what I mean.) Unless the camera cuts away to another scene, we will see and hear everything that happens at the speed it happens.

This is a limitation of film. That medium has many other advantages, but that’s exactly why we prose writers should lean into the unique advantages of prose fiction. An advantage of prose is that we have complete manipulation of time. We can spread five seconds over 500 pages. Or we can speed through a century in a second. In prose, you can simply skip over boring dialogue. You can summarize. You can digress. You have complete control.

All of the issues I’m highlighting here are related. In a good work of fiction, you might cut away from the present action—skipping the repetitious parts or boring gestures—and instead provide the reader with character-deepening interiority. Or an interesting flashback. Or a compelling digression. Or atmosphere-setting description. The options are endless, but you have to read to absorb them. Otherwise, you are left ignoring myriad techniques of prose and instead merely transcribing only action and dialogue from a TV scene in your mind.

Repeated Repetition and Redundancy

There is another huge issue with this passage that one can’t blame on TV per se. The opening is extremely repetitive. We learn nothing by the end of the page that we didn’t know at the start. The first few sentences tell us a judge is angry at an arrogant man in a courtroom. The rest of the passage simply repeats this information over and over without adding anything to our understanding of the characters, world, or story. We learn nothing more about the Judge or McKinnon. We don’t know what crimes the latter has committed or what in particular motivates the judge. A good editor would trim this entire page down to a few sentences and ask the writer to add in some text that is both interesting and reveals or deepens the characters and story.

The needless repetition is a problem even at the paragraph level. Look at the last paragraph again. The judge’s “cold, clear, blue eyes… revealed no window to her soul.” “[H]er eyes observed everything through lenses set only to work in one direction.” “[Those eyes] would show others nothing of her true mind.” “A woman of private thoughts […] her inner mind would never be betrayed by her baby blues.” Four sentences in a row that repeat the same information using variations on the same eyeball metaphor.

I can’t blame this on TV. Film might be restricted to action and dialogue, but a good show (even a bad one) would do a whole lot more with this scene. There would be progression. Revelations. Plot twists. Something.

What would cause a writer to needlessly repeat information and ignore all the potential of the page? I think we know the answer. They don’t read. Because they don’t read, they do not know what can be done and what has been done to death.

The best way for this author to improve their writing is simple. They should read a few good books.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.