Turning Off the TV in Your Mind
In this 2024 post from his Substack, speculative fiction writer Lincoln Michel (Metallic Realms) contends that fiction that tries to imitate a television camera fails to take advantage of techniques specific to the written word. These include interiority, the ability to skip over mundane actions, nonlinear time, and visual descriptions that tell you something about the observer's personality as well as what is being observed. "The problem is that if you're 'thinking in TV' while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints."
Source: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/turning-off-the-tv-in-your-mind
Categories: Advice for Writers, Essays on Writing
