An interesting photograph and an interesting story exploit the strengths of two very different media.
To start with, they operate at different bandwidths using different tools. The camera shows a “what” but not a background, a “how”, while the pen tells the background and the “why” but is overly verbose in capturing and describing the “what”.
Telling a story requires a reader’s own knowledge of characters in situations, their motives, and the ways they behave, in order to achieve communication. We expect that though readers bring different experiences to their side of the background fill-in, those would be similar enough for our purposes.
While the camera also relies on shared expectations and knowledge from viewers (perhaps even more so than the pen?) it doesn’t explain the end result but simply shows it, leaving us to make our own inferences about who they are and what brought them to this place and shaped them in this way.
For writers, these distinctions can color our prose. Let’s say that the illustration above referenced the start of a story. There is clearly a shared history for these characters. Given an image like this in our heads, the prose story might start with:
“They’d been companions for most of their lives, long enough to get used to their differences without ever quite forgetting them, the way the hair loss of the one was never referenced by the other, since that time when…”
But then, without the actual image presented in full to the reader, the whole cat vs man, similar intense stare, complementary coloring, sheltering embrace, age & experience, and so forth would be lost. The greater bandwidth of the medium is not fully reproduceable, without using many more words that would slow the pace down and clog up an intro.
I tend to ruminate on my stories for a while before I write them, running my characters through their paces while I decide what should be happening with them, in what sequence, and why, sort of like a personal film with god-like telepathic special effects so that I understand the “why”. I have to remember to appropriately represent in the writing of the story those things which I just know from my authorial position, those perceptions which I have pulled from the private film and what that suggested/felt like to me. I can view that film, but my readers can’t, not unless I help them. I may have to use a density of scattered backstory snippits to approximate the bandwidth of my original film.
What sorts of media translations do you run across when writing (or reading or viewing)? How much of what you write is hard to translate from visual language? Or is it all fairytale castles in the air, sketched out with waved hands in the smoke of the campfire?
Mad Genius Club 
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