It's very reminiscent of the style of the fictional, satirical horror writer Garth Marenghi, who boasts that he's 'the only writer who's written more books than I've read'
There is, of course, the faintest possibility - vanishingly small, but not quite zero - that the writer knew exactly what they were doing.
“Judge Claire Bristol, a woman” may not be clumsy emphasis so much as defensive specification. A precaution. A line inserted after some prior, unseen confusion. Perhaps in an earlier draft Claire was misidentified as a shipping container routing, a regional airport, or an algorithm trained on Victorian case law and mis-scanned parchment.
We assume gender is obvious. The writer may have learned, through bitter editorial experience, that it isn’t. Who hasn’t been there?
For all we know, Judge Claire Bristol had previously been:
Mistaken for a blockchain entity - “Claire Bristol presiding over distributed ledgers”.
Flagged on a chart as a minor storm system moving in from the Atlantic - Claire, Bristol.
Most plausibly, interpreted by an AI as a mid-range office printer with appellate authority - “judge Claire Bristol, incorrect command, reject print queue”.
Hence the clarification. Not elegant, but necessary. Like labelling a specimen bottle on my ward. It looks like urine, but we write “urine” for certainty.
There is also the extraterrestrial possibility. A distant intelligence intercepts terrestrial transmissions of an ancient soap, compiles a list of names, assigns them at random, and dispatches an observer. It arrives, robed, banging a gavel, and no one is entirely sure whether it reproduces by budding or quarterly review. The court transcript becomes careful.
“Judge Claire Bristol, a woman” reads less like bad prose and more like a note to self: Do not assume. Last time this happened, we adjourned for three weeks while someone tried to plug her into the mains.
Or consider a time-traveller, dropped slightly out of sync. In their century, “Claire Bristol” is a class of weather satellite. The clarification prevents procedural collapse. A woman floating in orbit, in robes, sans spacesuit, is sub-optimal. Equally, a softly bleeping, mildly radioactive spacecraft on the magistrate’s bench is sub-optimal.
Even within our own species, the line has uses. In a culture where titles drift and names detach from bodies, the sentence pins one fact to the board: this is a human female judge, not a concept, not a brand, not an app. Or, at least, they/s/he identifies as a woman. For now. We’re interacting with fluid identities. Clear statements provide guidance in the moment.
Clumsy? Yes. But also oddly cautious. As if the writer has seen something the rest of us haven’t and is trying, in their blunt way, to keep the narrative from sliding sideways into the wrong ontology. Quite useful if, like me, insomnia has kept the reader awake all night and they’re mainlining double espressos. Entering the wrong ontology is discombobulating.
Other commentators read the line as incompetence. I am prepared to consider the possibility the statement may be field notes from a writer who once attended a hearing chaired by a sentient kettle and is determined not to repeat the mistake.
You got me going... You could get away with it if you continue "a woman of ..." idk, ill repute or something lol. That way you're sneakily underlining gender, while adding something relevant. Though... that could still be a fine line
Another great one, Lincoln. Is there also an element to this style of writing though that could be traced back to the mind-f*** of a trap in the oft-repeated axiom “show, don’t tell?”It seems a lot of beginning (and maybe not so beginning) writers, coping with a newly diagnosed “S,DT,” try to preempt and circumvent this particular criticism by attempting to just “show” every single detail and in the process end up “telling” nothing. Maybe instead of “show, don’t tell” we go with “whisper, don’t yell”?
Yeah some of it might come from there, but things like the lack of fixed perspective and the free-floating camera that cuts between small gestures feels very TV influenced to me
I don't think that those are mutually exclusive. It's not impossible that the writer interprets “show” as “describe in excruciating detail, as if the reader is watching a t.v. show or movie.”
The passage is full of telling. The excruciating part about the judge’s eyes is all telling things that a good writer might have shown.
Even the bits with the defendant putting his hand in his pocket or whatever are attempts at showing which are in fact merely telling, because it shows us nothing other than “the bad man moved his hand in a bad way”.
I had to overcome this habit in my earlier writing. I was told "show, don't tell" so many times and didn't even necessarily understand what it meant, that my writing became so sparse. As I started reading more closely as a writer, I saw how there was a necessary balance, and how beautiful and fun some telling could be mixed in with showing.
Ah, I just made this point as I restacked the article and see you all already beat me to it.
It's a great point by Lincoln here that actions beats aren't really all that interesting on page versus on screen. It doesn't only come from 'TV mind', though, sometimes it's also trying to avoid repeating 'said' by using an action without really being inspired to use any revelatory action. It's a tough juggling act to make every word carry out multiple roles, takes mastery of the craft.
I agree, I was thinking about this too. "Show, don't tell" has been repeated so many times that the words have started to lose meaning. I wonder if the difficulty doesn't stem from the word "show" itself: It implies a need to be more visual and more opaque instead of writing what's in a character's mind. I can't think of a better way of putting it though, it's just a trap that writers need to be wary of, being so afraid of "telling" that they reduce their characters to mannequins stiffly acting out their emotions.
I think “show, don’t tell” more precisely means: give the reader data points, not conclusions, about the *significance* of what’s being narrated. (And, as a corollary, aim to narrate no more and no less than readers will need for this - non-trivial because readers vary, which means there’s an art to it.)
Show the relevant action and sensory details, tell the salient background or interior thoughts/emotions/arguments or logistical transition to the next part that matters, but leave the satisfying work of modeling *why it matters* (especially under the surface, ie subtextually) to the reader.
Interesting that "show, don't tell" also requires the writer to *trust* the reader: And in many ways, this "TV-mind" way of writing betrays a lack of trust both in the reader and, to some degree, in the writer. There's a fear that the reader lacks the imagination or intuition necessary to make the necessary conclusion, and it goes hand-in-hand with the fear that as a writer, you aren't capable of writing well enough to create an environment conducive to making those conclusions.
As you said, there's an art to it, and it's an art that's specific to writing, which is why it's a crying shame that TVheads are relying on techniques employed in an entirely different medium. They're doing an injustice to both themselves and their chosen medium.
This is, pretty much, why I've stopped reading a lot of modern fantasy and pop-fiction. There's no *trust*. Everything is shown, or told. Or sometimes both. Often multiple times. Sanderson, for a very popular example, is absolutely awful at this. We've heard that TV writers are writing for 'second screen viewers' nowadays, but that's rubbing off into a lot of novels too (part of it stemming from TV-brain).
I had to do a search to see what a second screen viewer was and ran into an article covering Netflix's direction to writers to dumb things down for people who are staring at their phones. Yeesh. Neil Postman would have a field day with contemporary culture.
Thanks for pointing this out! I don’t think I had put it in those terms before this conversation, but I’m realizing that’s probably a lot of why I’m drawn to (much or somewhat) older books that have endured for a while. (I’m sure there was a lot of bad stuff back then, too, but it’s passed out of sight in a way the more recent bad stuff hasn’t had a chance to yet.)
Recently started another whack at Infinite Jest, and wow does he trust himself and his reader. Anytime I hit a book like that it’s such a refreshing cold splash in the face, and suddenly recontextualizes all the shallower, worse stuff I’ve been running into just because it’s there. I realize I’ve started forgetting how good (or even just…interesting, tricky, complex, chewy) a book can be.
And, interesting edge case, I read my first Louis L’Amour book ever recently, just out of curiosity, and it’s not demanding and experimental like DFW, but (trying to think back) still seemed to have a decent trust in the reader. Simple story, told in a simple, workmanlike, engaging way that just gives you what you need and keeps moving. Tropes got redundant etc, not much character complexity, but I don’t think he particularly over-explained individual moments and facts. Interesting to see that even easy/potboiler stuff that fully pre-dates “second screen” writing has a different style of “easy.”
That’s such a great observation! I think you unlocked a whole new angle for me to evaluate when editing – does this text trust the reader? The writer? (And, I suppose, is that trust justified?)
Thank you! Definitely going to be playing around with this.
I thought of this too! I like whisper don't yell. I really appreciate that this whole article is basically proof that it's all about balance. And that it's critical to know the difference between showing and telling, since I think the entire piece was the author telling us the scene what they were trying to show-- without telling or showing us anything important.
I call the online rando you refer to "exception guy." I've dealt with this a lot lately, especially when teaching classes where the students are all male. Basically, I offer a general guideline and, sigh, the immediate response from Exception Guy" is, "Yeah, but what if you're on Saturn and...."
Ha! Great name. I know exactly the person you mean - and of course they're trying to defend their position by putting it in a way you can't say No to. But I can be Exception Gal (Doll?) on occasions: honestly intended, it's about trying to work out where the boundaries of the obvious, central case are, and where the general guideline stops applying and being useful. Lawyers and academics do it all the time, if they're any good.
Ha, I totally get that! I think, in the spirit of Lincoln's post, I definitely mean people who have no interest in beyond the amusement of the moment. "Look how tricky I am, doing Rube Goldberg work that is more than the actual work I am arguing against!"
I found something to learn at the end. I learned in the final paragraph that Judge Claire Bristol is a woman. Previously, I was unsure despite all the references to 'her' etc. So i was able finally to put aside that question and focus on her eyes, the color of her eyes, where her eyes looked, where her eyes didn't look, and how old the color of her eyes were.
One thing I was thinking while reading this is that the 'TV brain' prose in question seems to have been influenced primarily by very mediocre TV. Good filmmaking (in movies or on TV) absolutely has a perspective, and those decisions are made in the script, in the choice of camera placement, in the editing, in the music and sound design. All of those things have the potential to create point of view, subjectivity, and explore (via very different means) the interiority that can be found in prose. Film absolutely can play about with time just as much as prose, too, but again it requires high level filmmaking.
The TV brain prose on display here seems more influenced by low budget, tight schedule television. The sort that does the standard coverage setup: shot, reverse shot, wide, plus a few inserts. That's how you film an episode when you have no time and no money (or, sometimes, no skill). You're still telling the story that's in the script, but you're not really using the medium of TV/film to its full potential. You're just pointing the camera and saying the words.
Prose being influenced by TV and film might not necessarily be an automatically awful thing; but bad prose being influenced by bad TV and film will always yield poor results - *especially* if the writer doesn't also read books.
I think you both are correct about good filmmaking. I suppose in those instances I’m thinking about sitcoms where you might have say Joey on Friends say something shocking and then the camera moves around to show you different characters reacting without being from Joey’s perspective, say. Which is an example of what Simon is saying about certain types of television shows.
And in this day and age, a lot of young people are probably coming up mostly absorbing tiktoks, video games, and other visual media. TV brain is just my simplification. But, certainly thinking more of your average sitcom than great cinema!
Absolutely - and it's by far the most common form of television. That used to be the attraction of the rarer 'prestige' shows, which would be the ones that had 'proper' filmmaking. These days, of course, you quite often have relatively high budget shows that still have very basic filmmaking techniques...
Both of y'all are right, but I just don't think "Bad X is the reason for bad Y" is a useful formulation. They're both bad! Crappy leads to crappy; it's a truth immemorial
I would frame what I'm saying more as "Not learning the techniques of X, and only learning techniques from Y, makes for bad X." You can learn a lot about prose narrative from film and vice versa. But you also want to study prose (if you're writing prose) or film (if you're making film), right? I'm not sure if someone who had never seen a movie but had read some great books could make a good film. Of if someone who had never read a novel but had watched a lot of good movies could write a good novel.
That a writer should read, regardless of the online discourse, is irrefutable. Anyone who disagrees, to be frank, is a frigging idiot. The same applies to cinema. I'd bet Scorsese has seen more movies than anyone on the planet
"I'm not sure if someone who had never seen a movie but had read some great books could make a good film."
I'm sure this is true. I grew up without a TV, so read voraciously but missed most routine TV drama, and also any films except what was currently being show in cinemas. I've caught up, obviously, but I know I'd make a terrible movie.
yeah, TV/film is steeped in POV. Lincoln's example made me think of this scene from Succession – also from a trial-like setting – that uses a variety of techniques to situate itself fully in one character's perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED2pSguRn7U
Excellent dissection of this scene! If I could boil down my whole fiction writing class into one piece of advice, it’s that my students’ writing will improve if they read more short stories. “Read more” is the the creative writing teacher’s equivalent of the doctor’s suggestion that the patient should quit smoking.
Also, what the heck is an "animus blink?" It sounds a lot cooler than it is.
"save for the sound of the stenographer busily ta--" STENO MACHINES DON'T MAKE NOISE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
(lol, sorry, huge pet peeve of mine as someone who trained in the field once upon a time. for the uninitiated, here is a video of an actual person using an actual steno machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy9LLUUZ6ic -- note also, contra the excerpted passage, that you literally CAN'T push your knees together if you're doing proper steno posture)
In recent years I've encountered something that's less TV Brain and more Video Game Brain--like I'm following a particular character's vantage point on the scene, but (as you note) with little to no interiority, and with stakes/plot elements that feel like expressions of "health bar" or "power ups." Again, as you say, not to disparage video games, but it's writing that seems to miss the point of prose fiction (& would I want to experience a "video game"-type walkthrough in this format, anyway?).
It's one of the reasons I've mostly stopped reading fantasy. Sanderson really took it to the next level, and he basically teaches this and so many others have followed him. Not everyone, but enough it makes it not worth the time to search through modern stuff when there's so many classics across various genres to be read.
Oh yeah we call that "whataboutism" in America, although at least here it is a slightly different thing. It's shifting to another real topic to ignore the one being discussed. Like someone mentioning an action by the US president is illegal and dangerous and someone replying "well, what about when [another president of another country] did X!?" Whereas the rhetorical move I'm thinking of is about inventing a hypothetical exception to the original topic.
It's actually called “Appeal to Exception Fallacy “ and is a form of straw man.
The white knight fallacy attacks the proponent’s motives, accusing the proponent of making the argument from self-interest, to present a certain image.
I just finished rewatching the first season of True Detective and noticed a lot of what they accomplished in that show only works in the visual medium. You could theoretically retell this story as a novel, but it would need to be significantly different. Hallucinations on the page are different from the screen; the tension you achieve with a 6-minute one-shot can't be replicated exactly on the page. You can't possibly translate those things to the page unless you've read enough to understand the tools available to a writer. At least not well.
Alan Moore has always noted that his comics - Watchmen, especially - were designed to be comics. You can try to retell the story in a different medium, such as in a movie, but it'll never really work because the original story was specifically tuned to fit the original medium.
"The best way for this author to improve their writing is simple. They should read a few good books."
Or else, learn to write screenplays and teleplays, if they think that way.
The biggest difference between those forms and a novel is that the screenplay's principle function is to provide a guidebook for the director, actors and crew on how to produce a movie, whereas a novel's function is to provide the author's own feelings and have them stand on their own two feet with some depth.
But I do suspect a good editor could assist in removing the "TV prose" aspect easily, even if they have to explain basic literary techniques to the author first.
That’s a great point that the author might actually be better off becoming a screenwriter. The only thing I’d add is that even for a script they really need to pare down all these random gestures. I don’t think any actor would want to be hamstrung by having all their gestures dictated by the script.
I wrote a manuscript once that was adapted from a stage play I had also workshopped. I initially tried to retain and recreate some of the longer staged scenes but…to your point, I ended up just typing out a whole bunch of blocking details. Which bored the shit out of me! I ended up turning those sections into a mixture of transcripts and interior reflections, bouncing between theperspectives of different characters. So much better!
Love your posts, Lincoln. While writing my first book, I asked a friend of mine who was a best-selling author for advice and he replied, read to write and then added read books outside your genre and interest.
Yes, I think reading widely is always good. Maybe especially if you are writing in a particular genre, because then you will be bringing in unique influences that will make your work stand out.
No joke, the best writing advice I've ever gotten came from a rabbi when I was like 14 years old—I'm 42 now. It was: "read read read, write write write." It's taken me that long to truly appreciate it.
Maybe you could add an adverb like attentively or diligently, but that's basically all of it. I don't think anyone could spend most of their life reading and writing and not get damn good at it.
No, I don't think you could 🙂! The rabbi's advice was perfect as it is.
I think overuse of adjectives and adverbs is one of the biggest tells. In the text above you could blue-pencil at least 15-20% - before even starting on the bigger issues covered by Loncoln.
This is a great example, and I agree. The writing is bad (eyes offering "no window to the soul" is not a clever subversion of a cliche, but just a cliche, and the author makes it worse by saying the same thing about eyes and inscrutability two more times [1]) but there's a macro problem as well. TV and film can use boredom to amplify tension. Dead air on screen is unsettling. The Coen brothers mastered this. The passage here uses boredom... to amplify boredom. That's probably not the intention, but it's the effect. In a book, dead air makes people stop reading.
To make prose have the same impact, you don't write boringly—you can write about boring events; that's different and can be genius—but, instead, you tighten. You write quick, matter-of-fact prose, leaving one detail in place that suggests that the whole scene is about something darker.
That all said, this would still be lousy TV writing, albeit for different reasons. The lack of consistent mood is just a start.
[1] Also, referring to eyes as "baby blues" is unforgivable. It's even worse that it's an adult woman's eyes. And yeah, I get that she's intended to be a hard bitch, not a desire object, but that's irrelevant. It's just trash-tier word choice.
What's even more damning, as I see it, than the fact that these proudly non-reading authors haven't read much is that _they also don't seem to want to read_.
It's one thing to say, "I haven't been able to read as much as I'd like, due to life obligations, but I still think I'm a damn good writer." I can respect that. Some people truly are so talented that they can reach elite levels without being especially well read. Of course, people like that rarely announce how little they read.
It's the ones who go further, who say they don't need to read more, at all, or that reading is a waste of time, who leave me questioning why the fuck they would bother writing.
If I had to guess, it's because what they ACTUALLY want to do is make a movie or TV show. They don't care about books, but writing is the only medium they have access to. They don't have millions of dollars and a production team, so they write a book and hope it becomes so popular that it gets picked up and made into the movie of their dreams.
This is probably true, and it's painful to read for that reason.
For one thing, it's how writers actually get paid. The book, in many cases, exists to get the movie made; even publishers think this way, which is why they won't push more than a few thousand copies unless they believe they'll be able to put it on a screen.
It also draws a lot of unskilled writers, who will never bother to improve, because they don't care about what the written word can do, into the game. This almost justifies wretched institutions like the query system—so insulting to real writers they've basically all disappeared, rather than put up with agents' bullshit; but probably necessary to manage the thousands of wannabes who think they're one agent's phone call away from being Hollywood royalty.
Your example is me, quite literally. Life is busy and I don't have time to read, but I do my best to read and write as much as I can, even if it's just excerpts of an online book or a short story. I read *something* every day and try to write based on that. It's usually not even fiction.
Have you seen the Russian movie _Stalker_? It's an adaptation of "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky brothers. Well, it takes 'boredom to amplify tension' to an epic level. Probably too epic for a lot of people, though it worked for me. Regardless, don't watch if you're drowsy.
"Judge Claire Bristol, a woman"
That's my favorite part.
It's very reminiscent of the style of the fictional, satirical horror writer Garth Marenghi, who boasts that he's 'the only writer who's written more books than I've read'
He's not just a writer! He's an author, and a dreamweaver.
That's certainly how he self-describes 😂
There is, of course, the faintest possibility - vanishingly small, but not quite zero - that the writer knew exactly what they were doing.
“Judge Claire Bristol, a woman” may not be clumsy emphasis so much as defensive specification. A precaution. A line inserted after some prior, unseen confusion. Perhaps in an earlier draft Claire was misidentified as a shipping container routing, a regional airport, or an algorithm trained on Victorian case law and mis-scanned parchment.
We assume gender is obvious. The writer may have learned, through bitter editorial experience, that it isn’t. Who hasn’t been there?
For all we know, Judge Claire Bristol had previously been:
Mistaken for a blockchain entity - “Claire Bristol presiding over distributed ledgers”.
Flagged on a chart as a minor storm system moving in from the Atlantic - Claire, Bristol.
Most plausibly, interpreted by an AI as a mid-range office printer with appellate authority - “judge Claire Bristol, incorrect command, reject print queue”.
Hence the clarification. Not elegant, but necessary. Like labelling a specimen bottle on my ward. It looks like urine, but we write “urine” for certainty.
There is also the extraterrestrial possibility. A distant intelligence intercepts terrestrial transmissions of an ancient soap, compiles a list of names, assigns them at random, and dispatches an observer. It arrives, robed, banging a gavel, and no one is entirely sure whether it reproduces by budding or quarterly review. The court transcript becomes careful.
“Judge Claire Bristol, a woman” reads less like bad prose and more like a note to self: Do not assume. Last time this happened, we adjourned for three weeks while someone tried to plug her into the mains.
Or consider a time-traveller, dropped slightly out of sync. In their century, “Claire Bristol” is a class of weather satellite. The clarification prevents procedural collapse. A woman floating in orbit, in robes, sans spacesuit, is sub-optimal. Equally, a softly bleeping, mildly radioactive spacecraft on the magistrate’s bench is sub-optimal.
Even within our own species, the line has uses. In a culture where titles drift and names detach from bodies, the sentence pins one fact to the board: this is a human female judge, not a concept, not a brand, not an app. Or, at least, they/s/he identifies as a woman. For now. We’re interacting with fluid identities. Clear statements provide guidance in the moment.
Clumsy? Yes. But also oddly cautious. As if the writer has seen something the rest of us haven’t and is trying, in their blunt way, to keep the narrative from sliding sideways into the wrong ontology. Quite useful if, like me, insomnia has kept the reader awake all night and they’re mainlining double espressos. Entering the wrong ontology is discombobulating.
Other commentators read the line as incompetence. I am prepared to consider the possibility the statement may be field notes from a writer who once attended a hearing chaired by a sentient kettle and is determined not to repeat the mistake.
You got me going... You could get away with it if you continue "a woman of ..." idk, ill repute or something lol. That way you're sneakily underlining gender, while adding something relevant. Though... that could still be a fine line
Exquisite
That made me hoot with laughter!
Wow, a real one???
That part made me laugh out loud. It was great.
like yeah man I gathered 😭😭
Another great one, Lincoln. Is there also an element to this style of writing though that could be traced back to the mind-f*** of a trap in the oft-repeated axiom “show, don’t tell?”It seems a lot of beginning (and maybe not so beginning) writers, coping with a newly diagnosed “S,DT,” try to preempt and circumvent this particular criticism by attempting to just “show” every single detail and in the process end up “telling” nothing. Maybe instead of “show, don’t tell” we go with “whisper, don’t yell”?
Yeah some of it might come from there, but things like the lack of fixed perspective and the free-floating camera that cuts between small gestures feels very TV influenced to me
I don't think that those are mutually exclusive. It's not impossible that the writer interprets “show” as “describe in excruciating detail, as if the reader is watching a t.v. show or movie.”
The passage is full of telling. The excruciating part about the judge’s eyes is all telling things that a good writer might have shown.
Even the bits with the defendant putting his hand in his pocket or whatever are attempts at showing which are in fact merely telling, because it shows us nothing other than “the bad man moved his hand in a bad way”.
I had to overcome this habit in my earlier writing. I was told "show, don't tell" so many times and didn't even necessarily understand what it meant, that my writing became so sparse. As I started reading more closely as a writer, I saw how there was a necessary balance, and how beautiful and fun some telling could be mixed in with showing.
Ah, I just made this point as I restacked the article and see you all already beat me to it.
It's a great point by Lincoln here that actions beats aren't really all that interesting on page versus on screen. It doesn't only come from 'TV mind', though, sometimes it's also trying to avoid repeating 'said' by using an action without really being inspired to use any revelatory action. It's a tough juggling act to make every word carry out multiple roles, takes mastery of the craft.
I agree, I was thinking about this too. "Show, don't tell" has been repeated so many times that the words have started to lose meaning. I wonder if the difficulty doesn't stem from the word "show" itself: It implies a need to be more visual and more opaque instead of writing what's in a character's mind. I can't think of a better way of putting it though, it's just a trap that writers need to be wary of, being so afraid of "telling" that they reduce their characters to mannequins stiffly acting out their emotions.
I think “show, don’t tell” more precisely means: give the reader data points, not conclusions, about the *significance* of what’s being narrated. (And, as a corollary, aim to narrate no more and no less than readers will need for this - non-trivial because readers vary, which means there’s an art to it.)
Show the relevant action and sensory details, tell the salient background or interior thoughts/emotions/arguments or logistical transition to the next part that matters, but leave the satisfying work of modeling *why it matters* (especially under the surface, ie subtextually) to the reader.
Interesting that "show, don't tell" also requires the writer to *trust* the reader: And in many ways, this "TV-mind" way of writing betrays a lack of trust both in the reader and, to some degree, in the writer. There's a fear that the reader lacks the imagination or intuition necessary to make the necessary conclusion, and it goes hand-in-hand with the fear that as a writer, you aren't capable of writing well enough to create an environment conducive to making those conclusions.
As you said, there's an art to it, and it's an art that's specific to writing, which is why it's a crying shame that TVheads are relying on techniques employed in an entirely different medium. They're doing an injustice to both themselves and their chosen medium.
This is, pretty much, why I've stopped reading a lot of modern fantasy and pop-fiction. There's no *trust*. Everything is shown, or told. Or sometimes both. Often multiple times. Sanderson, for a very popular example, is absolutely awful at this. We've heard that TV writers are writing for 'second screen viewers' nowadays, but that's rubbing off into a lot of novels too (part of it stemming from TV-brain).
I had to do a search to see what a second screen viewer was and ran into an article covering Netflix's direction to writers to dumb things down for people who are staring at their phones. Yeesh. Neil Postman would have a field day with contemporary culture.
Thanks for pointing this out! I don’t think I had put it in those terms before this conversation, but I’m realizing that’s probably a lot of why I’m drawn to (much or somewhat) older books that have endured for a while. (I’m sure there was a lot of bad stuff back then, too, but it’s passed out of sight in a way the more recent bad stuff hasn’t had a chance to yet.)
Recently started another whack at Infinite Jest, and wow does he trust himself and his reader. Anytime I hit a book like that it’s such a refreshing cold splash in the face, and suddenly recontextualizes all the shallower, worse stuff I’ve been running into just because it’s there. I realize I’ve started forgetting how good (or even just…interesting, tricky, complex, chewy) a book can be.
And, interesting edge case, I read my first Louis L’Amour book ever recently, just out of curiosity, and it’s not demanding and experimental like DFW, but (trying to think back) still seemed to have a decent trust in the reader. Simple story, told in a simple, workmanlike, engaging way that just gives you what you need and keeps moving. Tropes got redundant etc, not much character complexity, but I don’t think he particularly over-explained individual moments and facts. Interesting to see that even easy/potboiler stuff that fully pre-dates “second screen” writing has a different style of “easy.”
That’s such a great observation! I think you unlocked a whole new angle for me to evaluate when editing – does this text trust the reader? The writer? (And, I suppose, is that trust justified?)
Thank you! Definitely going to be playing around with this.
I thought of this too! I like whisper don't yell. I really appreciate that this whole article is basically proof that it's all about balance. And that it's critical to know the difference between showing and telling, since I think the entire piece was the author telling us the scene what they were trying to show-- without telling or showing us anything important.
I call the online rando you refer to "exception guy." I've dealt with this a lot lately, especially when teaching classes where the students are all male. Basically, I offer a general guideline and, sigh, the immediate response from Exception Guy" is, "Yeah, but what if you're on Saturn and...."
Hahaha
Ha! Great name. I know exactly the person you mean - and of course they're trying to defend their position by putting it in a way you can't say No to. But I can be Exception Gal (Doll?) on occasions: honestly intended, it's about trying to work out where the boundaries of the obvious, central case are, and where the general guideline stops applying and being useful. Lawyers and academics do it all the time, if they're any good.
Ha, I totally get that! I think, in the spirit of Lincoln's post, I definitely mean people who have no interest in beyond the amusement of the moment. "Look how tricky I am, doing Rube Goldberg work that is more than the actual work I am arguing against!"
I will never get over the mere fact that this discourse exists & commend you for refuting it with more consideration than it could ever deserve
Agree. Pretty sad and telling that it does exist.
Please give us, exception guys, a break. We are trying to understand what your “generally” means because we are out of the discourse.
I found something to learn at the end. I learned in the final paragraph that Judge Claire Bristol is a woman. Previously, I was unsure despite all the references to 'her' etc. So i was able finally to put aside that question and focus on her eyes, the color of her eyes, where her eyes looked, where her eyes didn't look, and how old the color of her eyes were.
😂
For that common rhetorical move: it reminds me a bit of sea-lioning, which is worth knowing about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
Thoroughly enjoyed this, Lincoln.
One thing I was thinking while reading this is that the 'TV brain' prose in question seems to have been influenced primarily by very mediocre TV. Good filmmaking (in movies or on TV) absolutely has a perspective, and those decisions are made in the script, in the choice of camera placement, in the editing, in the music and sound design. All of those things have the potential to create point of view, subjectivity, and explore (via very different means) the interiority that can be found in prose. Film absolutely can play about with time just as much as prose, too, but again it requires high level filmmaking.
The TV brain prose on display here seems more influenced by low budget, tight schedule television. The sort that does the standard coverage setup: shot, reverse shot, wide, plus a few inserts. That's how you film an episode when you have no time and no money (or, sometimes, no skill). You're still telling the story that's in the script, but you're not really using the medium of TV/film to its full potential. You're just pointing the camera and saying the words.
Prose being influenced by TV and film might not necessarily be an automatically awful thing; but bad prose being influenced by bad TV and film will always yield poor results - *especially* if the writer doesn't also read books.
I absolutely agree! The people who blame filmmaking for bad writing often have no idea about the mechanics of filmmaking.
I think you both are correct about good filmmaking. I suppose in those instances I’m thinking about sitcoms where you might have say Joey on Friends say something shocking and then the camera moves around to show you different characters reacting without being from Joey’s perspective, say. Which is an example of what Simon is saying about certain types of television shows.
And in this day and age, a lot of young people are probably coming up mostly absorbing tiktoks, video games, and other visual media. TV brain is just my simplification. But, certainly thinking more of your average sitcom than great cinema!
Absolutely - and it's by far the most common form of television. That used to be the attraction of the rarer 'prestige' shows, which would be the ones that had 'proper' filmmaking. These days, of course, you quite often have relatively high budget shows that still have very basic filmmaking techniques...
Both of y'all are right, but I just don't think "Bad X is the reason for bad Y" is a useful formulation. They're both bad! Crappy leads to crappy; it's a truth immemorial
I would frame what I'm saying more as "Not learning the techniques of X, and only learning techniques from Y, makes for bad X." You can learn a lot about prose narrative from film and vice versa. But you also want to study prose (if you're writing prose) or film (if you're making film), right? I'm not sure if someone who had never seen a movie but had read some great books could make a good film. Of if someone who had never read a novel but had watched a lot of good movies could write a good novel.
That a writer should read, regardless of the online discourse, is irrefutable. Anyone who disagrees, to be frank, is a frigging idiot. The same applies to cinema. I'd bet Scorsese has seen more movies than anyone on the planet
"I'm not sure if someone who had never seen a movie but had read some great books could make a good film."
I'm sure this is true. I grew up without a TV, so read voraciously but missed most routine TV drama, and also any films except what was currently being show in cinemas. I've caught up, obviously, but I know I'd make a terrible movie.
yeah, TV/film is steeped in POV. Lincoln's example made me think of this scene from Succession – also from a trial-like setting – that uses a variety of techniques to situate itself fully in one character's perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED2pSguRn7U
Excellent dissection of this scene! If I could boil down my whole fiction writing class into one piece of advice, it’s that my students’ writing will improve if they read more short stories. “Read more” is the the creative writing teacher’s equivalent of the doctor’s suggestion that the patient should quit smoking.
Also, what the heck is an "animus blink?" It sounds a lot cooler than it is.
I feel like Animus Blink might be a minor superhero.
Yeah, I had to wonder about that one--it was another thing that made me think "gen AI."
I think it’s someone half-remembering “ominous”.
My guess is a Hogwarts professor or an indie rock band.
e.g. Animus Blink, Professor of Teleportation?
Maybe "animated" and the autocorrect jumped in remembering the last thing they googled...? Haha
"save for the sound of the stenographer busily ta--" STENO MACHINES DON'T MAKE NOISE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
(lol, sorry, huge pet peeve of mine as someone who trained in the field once upon a time. for the uninitiated, here is a video of an actual person using an actual steno machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy9LLUUZ6ic -- note also, contra the excerpted passage, that you literally CAN'T push your knees together if you're doing proper steno posture)
Additionally - why would the stenographer be typing while the rest of the room is silent? There is nothing to transcribe if nobody is speaking!
The stenographer is the author, which explains why they're noting every single movement in the courtroom 😵💫
This really shows the importance of doing proper research as a writer.
In recent years I've encountered something that's less TV Brain and more Video Game Brain--like I'm following a particular character's vantage point on the scene, but (as you note) with little to no interiority, and with stakes/plot elements that feel like expressions of "health bar" or "power ups." Again, as you say, not to disparage video games, but it's writing that seems to miss the point of prose fiction (& would I want to experience a "video game"-type walkthrough in this format, anyway?).
It's one of the reasons I've mostly stopped reading fantasy. Sanderson really took it to the next level, and he basically teaches this and so many others have followed him. Not everyone, but enough it makes it not worth the time to search through modern stuff when there's so many classics across various genres to be read.
British English has a great term:
whataboutery
the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.
Oh yeah we call that "whataboutism" in America, although at least here it is a slightly different thing. It's shifting to another real topic to ignore the one being discussed. Like someone mentioning an action by the US president is illegal and dangerous and someone replying "well, what about when [another president of another country] did X!?" Whereas the rhetorical move I'm thinking of is about inventing a hypothetical exception to the original topic.
It's actually called “Appeal to Exception Fallacy “ and is a form of straw man.
The white knight fallacy attacks the proponent’s motives, accusing the proponent of making the argument from self-interest, to present a certain image.
“Whataboutery” is common in right-wing political arguments.
I just finished rewatching the first season of True Detective and noticed a lot of what they accomplished in that show only works in the visual medium. You could theoretically retell this story as a novel, but it would need to be significantly different. Hallucinations on the page are different from the screen; the tension you achieve with a 6-minute one-shot can't be replicated exactly on the page. You can't possibly translate those things to the page unless you've read enough to understand the tools available to a writer. At least not well.
Alan Moore has always noted that his comics - Watchmen, especially - were designed to be comics. You can try to retell the story in a different medium, such as in a movie, but it'll never really work because the original story was specifically tuned to fit the original medium.
True. Good point.
Straw knighting is a great term for it and your sketch of the internet rando is perfect.
"The best way for this author to improve their writing is simple. They should read a few good books."
Or else, learn to write screenplays and teleplays, if they think that way.
The biggest difference between those forms and a novel is that the screenplay's principle function is to provide a guidebook for the director, actors and crew on how to produce a movie, whereas a novel's function is to provide the author's own feelings and have them stand on their own two feet with some depth.
But I do suspect a good editor could assist in removing the "TV prose" aspect easily, even if they have to explain basic literary techniques to the author first.
That’s a great point that the author might actually be better off becoming a screenwriter. The only thing I’d add is that even for a script they really need to pare down all these random gestures. I don’t think any actor would want to be hamstrung by having all their gestures dictated by the script.
💘💘This is so true! TV scripts read quite differently than TV *transcripts*.
I wrote a manuscript once that was adapted from a stage play I had also workshopped. I initially tried to retain and recreate some of the longer staged scenes but…to your point, I ended up just typing out a whole bunch of blocking details. Which bored the shit out of me! I ended up turning those sections into a mixture of transcripts and interior reflections, bouncing between theperspectives of different characters. So much better!
Love your posts, Lincoln. While writing my first book, I asked a friend of mine who was a best-selling author for advice and he replied, read to write and then added read books outside your genre and interest.
Yes, I think reading widely is always good. Maybe especially if you are writing in a particular genre, because then you will be bringing in unique influences that will make your work stand out.
No joke, the best writing advice I've ever gotten came from a rabbi when I was like 14 years old—I'm 42 now. It was: "read read read, write write write." It's taken me that long to truly appreciate it.
Maybe you could add an adverb like attentively or diligently, but that's basically all of it. I don't think anyone could spend most of their life reading and writing and not get damn good at it.
No, I don't think you could 🙂! The rabbi's advice was perfect as it is.
I think overuse of adjectives and adverbs is one of the biggest tells. In the text above you could blue-pencil at least 15-20% - before even starting on the bigger issues covered by Loncoln.
*Lincoln. Sorry
This is a great example, and I agree. The writing is bad (eyes offering "no window to the soul" is not a clever subversion of a cliche, but just a cliche, and the author makes it worse by saying the same thing about eyes and inscrutability two more times [1]) but there's a macro problem as well. TV and film can use boredom to amplify tension. Dead air on screen is unsettling. The Coen brothers mastered this. The passage here uses boredom... to amplify boredom. That's probably not the intention, but it's the effect. In a book, dead air makes people stop reading.
To make prose have the same impact, you don't write boringly—you can write about boring events; that's different and can be genius—but, instead, you tighten. You write quick, matter-of-fact prose, leaving one detail in place that suggests that the whole scene is about something darker.
That all said, this would still be lousy TV writing, albeit for different reasons. The lack of consistent mood is just a start.
[1] Also, referring to eyes as "baby blues" is unforgivable. It's even worse that it's an adult woman's eyes. And yeah, I get that she's intended to be a hard bitch, not a desire object, but that's irrelevant. It's just trash-tier word choice.
Yeah completely agree, and I also almost singled out the “baby blues” line. I really thought they meant she had postpartum depression at first heh.
What's even more damning, as I see it, than the fact that these proudly non-reading authors haven't read much is that _they also don't seem to want to read_.
It's one thing to say, "I haven't been able to read as much as I'd like, due to life obligations, but I still think I'm a damn good writer." I can respect that. Some people truly are so talented that they can reach elite levels without being especially well read. Of course, people like that rarely announce how little they read.
It's the ones who go further, who say they don't need to read more, at all, or that reading is a waste of time, who leave me questioning why the fuck they would bother writing.
If I had to guess, it's because what they ACTUALLY want to do is make a movie or TV show. They don't care about books, but writing is the only medium they have access to. They don't have millions of dollars and a production team, so they write a book and hope it becomes so popular that it gets picked up and made into the movie of their dreams.
This is probably true, and it's painful to read for that reason.
For one thing, it's how writers actually get paid. The book, in many cases, exists to get the movie made; even publishers think this way, which is why they won't push more than a few thousand copies unless they believe they'll be able to put it on a screen.
It also draws a lot of unskilled writers, who will never bother to improve, because they don't care about what the written word can do, into the game. This almost justifies wretched institutions like the query system—so insulting to real writers they've basically all disappeared, rather than put up with agents' bullshit; but probably necessary to manage the thousands of wannabes who think they're one agent's phone call away from being Hollywood royalty.
Your example is me, quite literally. Life is busy and I don't have time to read, but I do my best to read and write as much as I can, even if it's just excerpts of an online book or a short story. I read *something* every day and try to write based on that. It's usually not even fiction.
Have you seen the Russian movie _Stalker_? It's an adaptation of "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky brothers. Well, it takes 'boredom to amplify tension' to an epic level. Probably too epic for a lot of people, though it worked for me. Regardless, don't watch if you're drowsy.