How to stop viewing your story as a film
When thinking about scenes and story ideas, I can't help but picture something playing out as a movie. It's so much easier to picture someone moving and doing things than to actually describe what they are doing and write about it. I understand that this would make it easier for me to grasp what is happening in the story but my reader will not see what I see.
How can I stop viewing my writing as a film or how can I put the scene I picture in my head into words that make sense on a page?
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Conveying your ideas through written words is like carrying on a dialogue with someone through old-fashioned letters, or through email. Notice that the classic big authors received and wrote a lot of letters. You can get quick feedback about the understandability and impact of your written words through individual correspondence with people and through online discussions, for example at StackExchange. All of this will give you practice and training. It will convince you in a visceral way that putting together your words in a thoughtful way makes a difference.
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A key feature of written fiction is that we're not limited to two senses (sight and sound) the way film is. We writers can give the reader access to three additional senses, plus the internal experience of the viewpoint characters.
So practice writing all five senses, and practice writing viewpoint characters' internal experience. Thoughts, feelings, interpretations, internal conflicts and debates, and so on.
Here are some great ways to practice:
- Observe something, and write what you observe. Focus on the five senses. If a thing you're observing doesn't offer all five senses, that's okay. Later you can find something for those senses, and describe that.
- Observe something that you feel some internal reaction to. It need not be a strong reaction, but try a variety of reactions. Write what you're observing, and your reactions.
- After you've read something that you really enjoy, go back and make notes about how the writer gave you insight into the characters' experiences through their senses and internal reactions.
- Bring all of that to your fiction. When you write, in addition to whatever you would normally write, also write what the viewpoint characters see, hear, smell, feel, and taste. Write their reactions and opinions of those things.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26239. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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