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Jesús Enrique Rosas's avatar

Pretty insightful piece, Megha. I have written for as long as I can remember and it helped me structure my videos around the ideas and not just snappy editing or cat memes (although those are great to add levity now and then)

What I find wonderful about writing is that you're giving the reader this magic template of how the story is unfolding. Asimov can describe how Mike Donovan looks, but my mental image of him is going to be different from anybody else's, including his voice and mannerisms. All that happens inside our heads, just like the punchline of a good joke. It just pops spontaneously in our mind.

That's why writing is so much more engaging, but at the same time, difficult, than watching videos, or series, or movies. In videos you're being served everything: images, sounds, effects... body language, which you mentioned, is one of my favorites. Really hard to convey through writing (at least for me!), without suffocating the emotion with too many words on the page. In that regard, cinema can have the upper hand. Christoph Waltz' masterful facial expression change when Hans Landa switches emotions while interrogating the French farmer is one of those magical moments.

Granted, the 'inner monologue' is always superior in written form. In cinema, where 'show, don't tell' is critical, a character's thoughts almost always sounds like a dry explanation. But then, the writer can use this kitsch effect for the audience's amusement - as Frank Drebin's inner monologues on the Naked Gun series, combined with Leslie Nielsen's deadpan physical humor, proved to be a clever move.

The limits of celluloid clearly define the limits of how the audience experiences the material itself. In having everything served to you, we, as an audience, are constrained by those bounds. Sometimes so much is happening on screen that it's hard to keep up - you mentioned, quite accurately, that good filmmakers put only the essential on screen to convey what they want the audience to experience in that scene. But sometimes, what's on screen can be so overwhelming that a second or third watch is almost a requirement (I'm looking at you, Nolan!)

There will always be common grounds. Bill Murray's 'Mutants' speech in Stripes works on screen, and would 100% work on a written page as well. Again, in my writing experience, text on a page is the common denominator of greatness. It's the seed of the emotions. After all, every movie and TV show starts off a screenplay - the blackest letters on pure white paper. The director and actors fill in the blanks with color, and sounds, and laughter, and tears. Sometimes the result is better, sometimes it's not. I've 'watched' some movies just by reading their screenplays, and then watching the actual, finished film. The result is almost always disappointing - my inner 'eye' or taste is... well, mine, it's personal, so I imagined the film with my own biases, and symbols, even swapping the cast whenever needed.

But yes, reading is harder because it forces you to 'fill in the blanks'. But at the same time, in many instances, it's a more personal experience. It's a direct connection of imagination and creativity between the writer and the reader, even if, ironically, both could have completely different images in their heads.

Thanks for reading this far! this topic in particular fascinates me.

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Hans's avatar

I've noticed that the creative writing style of contemporary writers is very simplistic compared to the style of those from the 1890s to the 1950s (and those educated during that era who continued to write in subsequent decades). I think it has something to do with the fact that the written word is practically a different language from the spoken word, and that we no longer teach the written word as such. I also believe that a major issue is the dispersion of talent that previously found its sole outlet in writing into numerous other creative fields. Also, the number of truly fantastic writers from the golden era of writing is quite small—there isn't much return on investment when it comes to cultivating a whole new generation of exceptional novelists. We really only speak of a few dozen writers of genius note.

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