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.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and insightful comment! I am currently reading the book Tess of D'Urbervilles and the body language described in that book is absolutely poetic and beautiful. It's astonishing how Thomas Hardy can build such a magical world with such little direct physical description. I was thinking about just how lack lustre any possible film adaptation of this book would be. There would be entire magical dimensions that would be missing. I think this generation is wonderful at making videos, but they are definitely missing out on recording and finding their own true "voice" if they don't also write.
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.
Some excellent observations! Especially in the denigration of everyday writing (and by extension every day thought). However, when you look at the ordinary letters and correspondences from the nineteenth century, even they are indicative of a population of more thoughtful writers. So even though the total number of "masterful writers" is limited, the average writing capability, was still much higher.
I have to disagree with you about younger millennials and gen Z. I find them to be just as credulous as their elders, if not more so. Part of this is due to the death of literature and book reading in general, which seems to be endemic to the younger generation.
A prime example of this that I like to use is "climate change." People too easily believe that every drought and flood is the result of a man made change in the climate. This could be dispelled by reading two books. The first one is a novel, the second a biography that reads like a novel.
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck gives a wonderful description of the central valley in California and its natural history. Cycles or rain and drought have been going on for ages there. The second book is Water to the Angels, which is a biography of William Mulholland, chief architect of the Los Angeles aqueduct. Without water brought from over 200 miles away on the other side of the Sierra mountains, Southern California as we know it could not exist. Those two bits would give you all the information you need to question claims about climate change.
Reading books, whether historical novels or straight up history or biography teaches us how to interpret contemporary events, as well as claims. I just finished reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Just before that, I read a biography of Robert E. Lee. Both books necessarily delved deeply into the origins and prosecution of the American Civil War. Not surprisingly, the two books took different tacks in analyzing the same events. The analyses did not conflict, but they did apply a different lens to the same facts. This causes one to have to apply critical thinking to sort out the differences. It also causes one to ask additional questions, such as, why was Fort Sumter not evacuated, while every other Federal fort in the South was ordered evacuated? Now I have to go find another book that will answer that question, hopefully.
Film simply cannot bring forth this type of critical thinking and quest for knowledge. A Tik Tok video certainly can't. If people seem more stupid and credulous these days, it is because they don't read books anymore.
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.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and insightful comment! I am currently reading the book Tess of D'Urbervilles and the body language described in that book is absolutely poetic and beautiful. It's astonishing how Thomas Hardy can build such a magical world with such little direct physical description. I was thinking about just how lack lustre any possible film adaptation of this book would be. There would be entire magical dimensions that would be missing. I think this generation is wonderful at making videos, but they are definitely missing out on recording and finding their own true "voice" if they don't also write.
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.
Some excellent observations! Especially in the denigration of everyday writing (and by extension every day thought). However, when you look at the ordinary letters and correspondences from the nineteenth century, even they are indicative of a population of more thoughtful writers. So even though the total number of "masterful writers" is limited, the average writing capability, was still much higher.
I have to disagree with you about younger millennials and gen Z. I find them to be just as credulous as their elders, if not more so. Part of this is due to the death of literature and book reading in general, which seems to be endemic to the younger generation.
A prime example of this that I like to use is "climate change." People too easily believe that every drought and flood is the result of a man made change in the climate. This could be dispelled by reading two books. The first one is a novel, the second a biography that reads like a novel.
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck gives a wonderful description of the central valley in California and its natural history. Cycles or rain and drought have been going on for ages there. The second book is Water to the Angels, which is a biography of William Mulholland, chief architect of the Los Angeles aqueduct. Without water brought from over 200 miles away on the other side of the Sierra mountains, Southern California as we know it could not exist. Those two bits would give you all the information you need to question claims about climate change.
Reading books, whether historical novels or straight up history or biography teaches us how to interpret contemporary events, as well as claims. I just finished reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Just before that, I read a biography of Robert E. Lee. Both books necessarily delved deeply into the origins and prosecution of the American Civil War. Not surprisingly, the two books took different tacks in analyzing the same events. The analyses did not conflict, but they did apply a different lens to the same facts. This causes one to have to apply critical thinking to sort out the differences. It also causes one to ask additional questions, such as, why was Fort Sumter not evacuated, while every other Federal fort in the South was ordered evacuated? Now I have to go find another book that will answer that question, hopefully.
Film simply cannot bring forth this type of critical thinking and quest for knowledge. A Tik Tok video certainly can't. If people seem more stupid and credulous these days, it is because they don't read books anymore.