Too Much TV In One's Writing?

Lincoln Michael started off the new year with TV Causalities: Avoiding Bad Habits from Visual Media. He points out some interesting things, but I have to wonder if all writing since the invention of the movie has not incorporated techniques from visual media. Using a perhaps absurd example, there is a difference in the pacing of War and Peace compared with The Maltese Falcon; the latter has translated much better to film than the former.

As to the article, Mr. Michael complains of too much concentration on faces, too little summarizing away the banal, and cluttering the page with visual detail. The last two complaints do not worry me. I think typing one's own work cuts down on the extraneous material, and I think from Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel I got the idea that one can skip the overly detailed descriptions. It is the first that I am chewing over.

This isn’t to say that faces shouldn’t be referenced in fiction. It’s just that some writers have a habit of giving faces too much attention and especially of giving them the burden of conveying all character emotions. Even in first person narratives, many writers default to descriptions of the narrator’s face to convey feeling. Sadness wrinkled her face. He furrowed his brow in anger. Her eyes bulged with love. My lips wobbled with joy. Panic washed over my face. etc. These sentences are often visually confusing to begin with (what am I seeing with “sadness wrinkled her face”?), but even when they do make sense they aren’t that compelling without an actual actor’s features to see.

A particular pet peeve of mine is what I think of as the “reaction shot round-up.” In a sitcom, it’s common to show the characters’ reactions to every funny joke or surprising line. Makes sense. The audience presumably loves those characters and wants to see the actors react. But it’s really not compelling on the page to read Sally’s jaw fell to the floor. Donald’s eyes widened. Bjorn gasped. Robin’s nostril’s flared. Mr. Maple grimaced. all in a row every time something notable is said in scene.

I tend towards using faces as indicators of a character or their state of mind. It is the sizing up of people through their faces I am going for, and this is how I do it in real life. 

But the repetitious reaction shots seem to me both boring and too much to type!

sch 1/12/23