I recently saw a post on Reddit about someone asking if they really needed to read in order to write a book and a whole discussion was had on there. I didn’t participate, simply lurking and looking at various responses, but I do want to talk about this idea, and where I stand on it.
Yes, if you’re trying to write a novel or short stories or what have you, you need to engage with the written word. It is not enough to watch films or shows or cartoons or whatever else. As others pointed out, would you listen to a musician who doesn’t listen to music? And, apparently, this is a semi-common discussion point, because they note that writing has a relatively lowered barrier to entry.
To get into specifics, it has to do with the toolbox that each medium has. Ultimately, written works require an understanding of language and pacing and the like that you simply will not get if you engage solely with other mediums. Other mediums are in fact different and have different tools which make certain things harder or easier for each of the them to do. Every medium has limitations, and these limitations vary wildly.
For instance, video games are interactive and to completely disengage with that fact is to disregard the medium’s chief strength and differentiation from other mediums if telling a story. Indeed, this is where the rightful sort of scorn of “walking simulators” comes from, since the works often would be better suited for a short film. (The other scorn is stupid and to be disregarded, from reactionary bigots upset that gay people exist.) This is also where scorn for things like how cutscenes are handled comes from, such as treating it like the ‘real’ story alone, and can lead to things like “ludo-narrative dissonance” where what is shown in a cutscene and what happens in the actual gameplay are at odds in ways that jar the player out of the story. It’s also why being forced to do something or gating off crucial information and scolding the player for engaging with it feels very strange (and ignores that the writers and designers made that choice to force the player to do that to continue the story or to fully experience it).
But, the problem with all those other mediums compared to prose like novels and short stories, is the limitations of language in those works. In the rest of those mediums, the only actual words that appear most of the time is dialogue. Spoken language tends to be less grammatically complex and less rich in its vocabulary compared to written works as a rule. When there is text, it’s either quite short like signs or small notes on a TV show or film, or it’s not as short, but unlikely to be very long, like some video games.
There’s also a shift with video games over time- older games that were heavy on text were more common, and that text was often not voiced, so you did get a lot more exposure to vocabulary. Nowadays, even if a script is incredibly long, like the Hades games or Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s still being fully voiced and the vast majority of it is still dialogue. I have a coworker that I’m pretty sure is functionally illiterate who successfully played Baldur’s Gate 3, so the fact that it’s fully voiced makes the game completable for him. The script’s actual length (three million or so words) would be far too much for someone who needs help reading instructions on a single sheet of paper.
This results in prose that reads as quite simplistic, and is no doubt why a lot of YA is structured like it is. (A lot of them are really just trying to get a movie deal like the Hunger Games and make loads of money, as opposed to being a deliberate stylistic choice. I believe The Hunger Games was doing it deliberately, even if I don’t personally like present tense in fiction, but I certainly don’t believe that of some other writers were doing it as an artistic integrity thing.)
I would also note what all those visual mediums do not have- descriptions and actions. Descriptions are integral in many prose works, and what gets described is what is important. Not everything needs detailed descriptions, but what gets the focus is quite important and a deliberate choice. For example, in At the Mountains of Madness, we get a lot of descriptions of the logistics of the trip, the landscape, the Elder Things, and their dead city. We don’t need to know, for example, any of the character’s physical descriptions, just that they’re humans and bundled up for winter. We don’t need to know anything beyond that vague outline. We don’t need a full description of the actual city architecture in “The Escape of Arsene Lupin” because all we need to know is the labels of the street names.
Descriptions of actions also matter. How characters do things have to be conveyed by the text itself, as opposed to how a script might simply mention a fight is there, or how there’s visual choreography or storyboarding or what have you in relation to what’s going on. The person doesn’t have to imagine what’s going on because it’s right there. While fight scenes are often written laconically (a good example in my recollection is how the prose shifts between the normal texts and fights is in The Witcher books), there’s a difference between something being short and punchy because everything becomes a blur in a fight, and everything being laconic because they lack the resources to describe anything.
Descriptions can also go much more out there compared to visual mediums, and the only limit is the writer’s skill and imagination. For example, the reason a lot of aliens in television and film are so humanoid is due to budget limits- they only have so much money to spend on things like costuming and actors and so on. There’s also other limits in even mediums that have fewer, like how cartoons specifically often have simplified designs to make it easier to animate compared to having to track a lot of extra details. When you don’t understand that, because you’re only ever using visual mediums as your baseline, you stunt the possibilities of your work.
Same can be said of Actual Play stuff. As much as I like both Dimension 20 and Critical Role, they are ultimately primarily dialogue and how actions are described is more like in a script for a play or film- short, succinct descriptions. While there can be some introspective aspects that can explore the interiority and such, this is an exception rather than a rule.
There’s also other differences. Pacing is a big one, as are how scenes are constructed. Several people over on Reddit pointed this out about ASOIAF and I cannot get it out of my head because they were absolutely right- the scenes in the books especially the earlier ones are constructed like TV. And, to get into the weeds there, the pacing of a show or film is necessarily faster than a book because of the relative length of time it takes to describe something compared to just showing a visual.
Another thing is how point of view is handled. One thing that is especially fun is the unreliable narrator, and the problem with visual media is that you cannot do something subtle but still obviously unreliable. Either you make it so thunderingly obvious that they’re not reliable [such as everyone telling obviously different versions of the same story or blatant contradictions between what’s being shown on screen and what the character is saying] or else it’s so subtle that it’s lost. The latter is because there’s a sort of psychology to film and television because of the camera, which is seen as an objective, neutral device. Prose allows for far more subtlety. For example, this is something really interesting about the book Lolita, in how Nabokov uses point of view for his villain protagonist, and why I’m ambivalent about the attempts to adapt it. To try to adapt it to film means it either loses all subtlety from the framing or else it instead looks like a celebration of child molestation. It’s also why I am fascinated by Lovecraft’s work, because he routinely plays around with unreliability and layers it and this also means his work ages less poorly than a lot of other Mythos writers, including very recent examples.
Not having a baseline of written material and how they handle things means you aren’t being deliberate in your choices.
Stephen King brings it up in On Writing, too, and this is a time where he’s absolutely right (meanwhile, I’m skeptical of his advice about avoiding adverbs). To quote him, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
(And, in my experience, I tend to write a lot more if I do read on a regular basis or, failing that, listening to audiobooks while working on rote tasks.)
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