“Visual Grammar” vs. “Visual Storytelling”
The Bitter Script Reader had an interesting post recently here recently, discussing some new screenwriting lingo “visual grammar”:
I think calling it “visual grammar” when discussing a writing technique is needlessly confusing because it made me think of the purple prose that screenwriters use when trying to be overly descriptive. Stuff like:
The tide rhythmically laps against the sandy shore, in a metronome of nature’s beauty. Water. Sand. In. Out. White foam bubbles to the surface like the carbonation in a soda as the waves themselves erase small etchings in the sand that took it’s artists hours to create in painstaking detail. Nature is indifferent — and yet beautiful at the same time. We marvel at how the tides compelled by a lunar relationship borne hundreds of thousands of miles away could directly impact the actions of those without even being aware of it.
zzzzzzzz…. what? Oh, sorry… I know that’s a terrible example, but I got bored myself while I was typing it. If you’ve read a lot of scripts, you probably have seen the examples of purple prose I’m talking about. Avoid that crap like the plague. To me, it always reads like those 1000-word writing assignments that were given in school, and led the students to try to fill up the page by overwriting ever little bit of description, to the point of using every synonym in the book.
Writing visually does not necessarily translate into good scene description, as TBSR points out. Knowing what to include in scene description is as important as how you describe it, no matter how visual you are:
It’s not about writing long description, and it’s not about writing about everything seen in every scene in exhaustive detail. Worry less about writing full paragraph descriptions of how your character’s hair is parted, or what sort of socks they’re wearing (unless it’s important to the plot.) Make sure there’s a reason for every visual you’re given and that you’re not just trying too hard to micromanage everything.
In other words, it’s showing, not telling… and I’m always in favor of that.
I don’t call it “visual grammar.” I call it “visual storytelling.”
All for keeping it simple, so visual storytelling works for me.
Check back later today with another Scene Description Spotlight.
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