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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27925
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27925
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There is no background in prose. The reader receives every word and they receive them one at a time. Thus there is no place to hide anything.

Where you can be more subtle is in the connections between things. If you mention a rose, it is a foreground rose for the moment the reader is reading a word, but if you mentions roses several times and in several contexts throughout a work, the reader may not notice the significance of that motif being repeated.

On film, the director composes an entire scene but it is left to the viewer to decide what parts of that scene to look at. In prose, the writer dictates exactly where the eye falls at all times. All readers see the same thing when they read, but that does not mean that they all remember it, or even that they grasp its significance the first time it is seen.

So, you cannot obscure things in space, the way you can in a film, but you can hide (or reveal) things in time, just as you can in a film.

This means that you actually have far more control in prose than you have in film. You can control what the reader sees with much more precision and therefore control the effects of realized connections much more closely.

Original score: 5