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The thing about writing is that everything has to be accomplished with a single stream of words. A narrative can only ever be doing one thing at a time, in stark contrast to movies, where many thin...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:51Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25172 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:43:36Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25172 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:43:36Z (about 5 years ago)
The thing about writing is that everything has to be accomplished with a single stream of words. A narrative can only ever be doing one thing at a time, in stark contrast to movies, where many things can be going on on screen simultaneously. On the screen you can create an 18th century ballroom or a 12th century battlefield with a single shot, and have a conversation going on in front of it at the same time, and have the actor's faces tell a different story from their words. In prose, you can't do any of that, you have to layer things in one at a time. So how do you give the reader the sense that a character's thoughts in a scene differ from their words, or that both characters in the scene are lying to each other? You can't cram it all into one shot like the movies can, so you layer it in. You start by establishing one character's thoughts and motivations, then you show their willingness to lie in support of those goals. Then you do the same for the other character. Then, once they meet, all you have to portray is their actual conversation, because the reader understand what they really want and how they a willing to dissemble to get it, and the kind of ways they talk, and so they recognize what is really going on in the scene even though the scene itself it just the bare up-front conversation. This, I would suggest, is the fundamental answer to all questions where the writer is struggling to say everything they want to say in a scene. This is fundamental to how storytelling works: is is all in the setup. The whole structure of storytelling is setup and payoff, and if the payoff isn't working it is because the setup didn't do its job. Reworking the payoff scene a hundred times won't change this. You have to go back and fix the setup.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-11-08T14:24:32Z (about 8 years ago)
Original score: 4