Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31141
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31141
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

This seems to be an increasingly common problem and my belief is that it results from the writer consciously or unconsciously seeing the movie in his head and trying to transfer it to the page. Thus they give what are essentially stage directions at every verse end.

To break this habit, you have to remember that a novel is not a movie. A movie is, in some sense at least, a complete experience. The viewer's major senses are saturated with sound and visual action. There is certainly some room for the viewer to fill in the gaps, but not nearly so much as there is in a novel. A novel works far more by suggestion than by saturation. Providing all the details of a scene that a movie can pack into a single shot would be tedious and exhausting in a novel where the reader cannot take them all in at a glance but must read every detail one at a time and gradually integrate them into a complete picture.

Novelists seldom go into that much detail, and when they do, it is done as scene setting, and the novel then relies on the reader's memory while the action unfolds in front of the scene that has been painted. (Indeed, the extent to which a novel relies on memory is perhaps the greatest thing that sets prose storytelling apart from movie storytelling.)

The big difference between movie and page is that a movie has both a background and a foreground. A novel only has a foreground. A movie can draw the reader's attention to one element of a complex scene. A novel calls the reader's attention to each word in turn. When you visualize a scene, you visualize background details, but if you describe them, they become foreground, not background, which scatters the focus that the reader should have in a scene. This is why most dialogue in novels is just dialogue, with no actions described at all. It keeps the focus on the dialogue.

But for the most part, the novelist never does rely on painting a complete scene. Instead, they rely on the use of telling details to draw images from the reader's own mind, or they dispense with the need to paint a scene at all and focus on other aspects of the human experience, dispensing with a painted backdrop altogether.

I don't want to go as far as some would and encourage you to drop descriptions altogether. That is going too far and description is an essential part of the novel. But description is done largely through suggestion and relies hugely on memory (which is why it is hard to lift a novel out of its cultural context). But resist the urge to describe every motion, to act out the scene in your head. The novel is not the right media for that kind of storytelling. Novels are, to a much greater extent than movies, a medium of ideas rather than raw experience and your focus should be on the ideas that your characters are discussing and acting upon, rather than on the details of their movements or the backdrop they move against.

Original score: 36