“Writing It Visually”

Bumping around the Web, I found this:

You know it when you see it. It may be on stage, or on screen, or even in a novel. It’s a scene or a story that is so well presented that you are completely immersed in it. The story seems completely real.

You may be surprised that it can be done in a book. No surprise — even plays and screenplays have to be written by a writer first. It isn’t the director who makes characters alive — no director yet has been able to raise the dead. If the writer doesn’t put life in characters, it isn’t there — the readers won’t like it — it will never get to the directors and producers. The novel won’t get published nor the movie produced.

What it isn’t



Putting more words on paper. Tons of description. More dialog. More conflict. More realism. “Bigger” settings. “Bigger” action. “Bigger” drama. More sex. More violence. Longer stories. Different story forms. Of course, some of these things can help a lifeless story.



What it is



Visual writing is the language of stories. This language translates a vision of some potential reality, including settings, events, motivation, and dialogue, into aesthetics, movement, and dramatic action, that can be presented cinematically. If writers were able to do this, they would be writing “shooting scripts” and directing, and their names would be given prominence at the front of the film. But few writers can write visually, so directors have someone else translate the script into visual language, if it gets done at all.

The word “visual,” as I use it on this site, means “the totality of the visual medium in creating an effect,” including all things that accompany a visual image to convey a reflection of life. This applies to books as well because the author’s descriptions of settings and drama to create mental images. I think that many elements are blended in visual writing. They include the basics first:

1. Honesty. Honest characters getting into honest situations, causing honest events, and finding honest solutions. The more honest, the more involved we become. (Note: “realism” isn’t the issue here.) See: Creating Honest Characters
2. Drama that engages the reader or viewer. If you can’t answer the question, “What does it mean to the character — what are the stakes?” then it isn’t engaging drama.
3. Dramatic action that reveals the character’s emotions, conflicts, and decisions — leaving much less to dialogue and “telling” about inner states.
4. The effective use of symbols for communicating experience.
5. Engaging the reader or viewer’s imagination by not showing everything in complete detail. For example, “Black-box theater” works amazingly well.
6. Character physical action involved with the setting.
7. Settings that complement the dramatic action.
8. Motifs (music, sound, images, scenes) that help establish mood.

The article’s emphasis on “dramatic action” as a key part of good visual writing echoes something I wrote in a lecture from my UNC class two weeks ago:

Movies are primarily a visual medium. Indeed, it’s instructive to remember that movies were originally called motion pictures.

Motion.

Pictures.

Both words imply visuality. Dialogue is important, but in most movies secondary to what a viewer watches with their eyes.

Therefore it makes sense that as writers, we must learn how to write visually — or what I call “imagematic writing.” Three components:

Strong verbs. Vivid descriptors. Emotional content.

Verbs and descriptors make sense, but what’s the deal with emotional content? How is that visual?

What transpires in the Internal World of a scene, its emotional realm, provides a second way of ‘seeing’ the action. It gives us a psychological hook upon which to interpret and understand what’s going on. A bomb exploding is a bomb exploding. A bomb exploding killing one of the Protagonist’s loved ones means something much bigger.

In other words, the emotional content makes the visual experience more real.

As an exercise, I’ll bet if you went through each of these Scene Description Spotlight posts, you’d not only find I chose scenes with strong verbs and vivid descriptors, you’d also discover that each scene is infused with emotional content. But that just makes sense, doesn’t it? We recall most vividly what strikes us visually, but also impacts us emotionally.



So as you strive to write great visual scene description, dig into the psychological dimension of each scene, providing readers with a ‘second’ way of seeing the action.