Our Society Is Saturated By Visual Storytelling Whether Were Best

The following sample essay on Our society is saturated by visual storytelling Whether were best tells about visual medium.

Our society is saturated by visual storytelling. Whether were talking TV shows, Hollywood movies, or Video on Demand were still talking about the one form of storytelling that has become the most prevalent and powerful in modern entertainment.

Whether you realize it or not, that visual medium is influencing the way we write and tell ourselves stories.

I always see stories whether reading or being told play out in my head cinematically  camera pans, slow mo, special effects, the works.

And I’m sure I’m not alone. For many of us, stories originate as visuals in our imaginations. Say, when we sit down to write a story or a the dreaded Language Paper 1 Question 5, were just doing our best to translate those visuals into descriptive prose that will help readers see the same things.

However, the influence of movie culture goes beyond that.

The movie industry has created a very specific type of storytelling: faster paced, based on solid story structure, and, of course, emphasizing creative visuals. All these trends have impacted modern written fiction.

We talk about how books today are different from books of yore, and one of the primary reasons for this is their simultaneous evolution alongside the visual storytelling in the movies. If we compare todays books with yesterdays books, we can see that, like movies, they are generally faster-paced, more plot-focused, and more visual.

Today, let’s consider the most prominent differences in books vs.

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movies.

Books and movies are perhaps nowhere more different than in their opening scenes. By the time we sit down to watch a film, we’ve more or less committed to the story. Were not going to get up and leave the theatre unless the movie really stinks halfway in.

This allows filmmakers the comparative luxury of crafting leisurely and artistic openings running through the credits, panning the setting to show the stage, then focusing on a moment or two of the protagonists conflict-less Normal World before getting down to business.

Although we certainly do see books (especially thrillers) borrowing this approach from movies, it’s important to realize it simply doesn’t work as well in written fiction. Readers are not as patient in the beginning as are viewers, which means authors must create stronger, faster hooks that get readers to the heart of both the conflict and the character as quickly as possible.

Movies have quite a few advantages over books. Their visual nature can often seem more exciting, especially when portraying physical action. Thanks to their visual nature, movies can literally show the story. Showing in a book, even in the hands of a master author, is still nothing but description.

However, this “telling” nature of a book can be one of its chief advantages over a film. Novels are more interior than movies. Movies show what’s happening on the “outside,” as it were, of its characters. Books show what’s happening on the inside.

Authors get to share their characters’ very thoughts with readers, and, as a result, the opportunities for characterization are much deeper in a book than in a movie.

Naturally, there are both pros and cons to having written storytelling cop so heavily to visual storytelling. But I tend to think that, overall, the novelists’ ability to learn from their movie-making brethren has been a healthy and productive trend.