Once more, I’m sparked into an essay by a thing I saw on social media. I’m enjoying these sparks, and hopefully you are as well. If not, don’t tell me, because you’re likely to keep seeing them.

Cairn X. Petrick: We have an epidemic of unread writers almost entirely educated in storytelling by cinema, video games, and role-playing games. So, when they decide to write a story, they end up transcribing a story that would better fit a visual medium. This leaves them blind to the many unique strengths of fictional literature.

Cedar Sanderson: This, so much this. I saw this in many stories when I was a selection editor for anthologies and boys books and particularly novels. Sometimes it works. Mostly it does not.

I wanted to unpack this more than I could in a note. Particularly a note jotted while I was up to my ears in housecleaning and baking.

There is a difference between an author who visualizes the story in their head, and writes it down as it plays out before them, and the author only familiar with visual media. This is also not me knocking the story telling in video games: games dwarf books and usually out-earn theatrical film and recorded music put together. Books are a tiny fraction of the market. Gamers immerse themselves in story, and the visualization is a large part of that because of how human brains work.

This is me pointing out that if all you know are games, films, and cartoons, that’s not going to make you a good writer out of the gate. Text stories have different demands on your skills. You don’t have the visuals. You don’t have the soundtrack, which even if you aren’t aware of it, it’s very much part of the story you are consuming when it comes to films and games. I was sort of aware of this, but spending time with D. Jason Fleming watching movies, then discussing them with his deep knowledge, has really impressed on me the importance of the elements of film, and how you just can’t do some of the tricks in text you can on the screen.

The other problem, and this is more relevant to a themed anthology but I have seen it come up elsewhere, is that chances are a film or cartoon adaptation of a story is diluted from the original story. If the writer adapts the film version without looking deeply into the origins, what you wind up with is the textual version of the telephone game. Things distort so much they no longer make sense if you look at them too closely. If your audience is as familiar with the adaptation as you are, it might work because you are making the same assumptions. Unfortunately, you absolutely cannot assume your audience is all aware of the adaptation or even the original story-lore. As an editor, this kind of thing in a story would have me flipping it into the ‘no’ stack, particularly in a competitive reading where I had far more stories than slots to fill.

The textual storyteller needs to treat the reader as collaborator, not simply as audience in the dark. If the author doesn’t at least sketch out the setting, the appearances of the characters, the sounds, the smells (ok, film doesn’t do this, but we know the brain will supply a smell from a visual. Look at a picture of a warm pumpkin pie and tell me you don’t know how that smells!) then the reader is lost in a darkened theater of the mind without the light of the projector to bring the author’s world to life for them. Text can also let a reader into a character’s head which, yes, film can do, but there’s an intimacy of thought which spoken words strip away. In prose the reader supplies the faces, the lighting, the score, and the camera.

Writers who come to fiction from games and film are not doomed. They simply have extra translation work to do. Learn what the page can do that the screen cannot, and what it cannot do that the screen does effortlessly. Read widely in the form you intend to write. If you prefer film or games, then at the very least dig deeply into what makes those work, and put thought in how to translate them to a page for the reader. When an editor has more stories than slots, the ones that still feel like transcribed cut-scenes go in the no pile. The ones that use prose’s own tools — even if the writer first imagined the scene as a tracking shot — are the ones that survive.