Andrea Phillips, Leave Nothing to Chance – A Twitter Thread
Andrea Phillips; @andrhia; Oct 5, 2017
Heyyyy I’m sick, overwhelmed, and everything is terrible, so here’s a thread on craft and how writing for multimedia made me better at prose. I’ve written scripts for video and audio, several kinds of games text and dialogue, social media of every kind, news both real and fictional. Friends, if there is such a thing as a generalist writer, it is me. I have written ALL the things, and you learn from each distinct form.
One of the first and biggest things I learned about narrative was: leave nothing to chance, control everything in your story, EVERYTHING. If you’re making a fake Twitter for a character… the profile pic matters, the bio matters, when/how often they post, emoji and abbrevs. Every single one is going to influence the audience’s opinion of the character and who they are, so you have to be v. intentional. And you have to be both consistent and aware of what messages each of these creative choices is sending!
Similarly, in video production the lighting and framing matter, the things in the background of the shot, the hair and clothes. These things will EXIST in your final product whether you chose them or not, so you need to make sure it all fits together. Even an empty room or a missing profile picture MEAN something. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice, etc. etc.
In audio, if you need a visual, you need someone to SAY it, which can make for awkward dialogue (or a super hot sound engineer). So you need to develop a keen awareness of what your audience needs to “see,” and do it early so it doesn’t disrupt their mental image. Because storytelling is the fine art of manipulating someone else’s mental imagery, right? Their understanding of a series of events.
But the more abstracted a medium is, the harder you have to work to create a correct mental image, the more you have to describe. So prose is the most abstract medium of all. There is a nothingness, devoid of form and light, until the author speaks. BUT once the author begins the reader starts to drag in a lot of their own ideas into the story, too, based on their experience of the world. Sometimes this is MARVELOUS because you do not want to have to describe every item on a table or every whisker on a face.
In film you need to choose every book that goes on a shelf. Every single one. On purpose. In prose, you can say “some paperbacks” and run. But remember upthread! IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO DECIDE, YOU STILL HAVE MADE A CHOICE!
If you mention a detail without sufficient clarity, the reader will fill it in their own selves… and maybe guess wrong…
In prose, as in audio, you have to figure out what *very few* things you need to get across the right mental image, and use them.
Which in turn means understanding webs of associations in our society, and understanding your characters and story world super well.
Hence the telling detail, right? Lots of us stick to very basic description: She had dark hair and wore a suit. Just the facts. But that’s not enough. That’s filming in an empty white room. Compare with: “She had frizz for miles and yesterday’s burrito on her jacket.”
The first one is a picture, sure, fine, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the character; it’s not doing enough work to earn its keep. This is because you (or I guess me) can leverage the reader’s expectations about what burrito stains and frizzy hair MEAN about a person.
But this isn’t limited to a description issue, because this is the case with literally every word you write. It is doing a job. Sometimes that job is to be invisible and let the story flow over it. “Said,” I am looking at you right now. Sometimes that job is manipulating the reader’s mental image, expectations, and emotional state to arrive at a specific place.
In EVERY case, in prose, each word, line, scene, chapter are doing work. Even if you do not know what that work is. So… pay attention.
Riiiggghhhht I think that’s about enough for right now, love you all, and good night!
