Theatrics Ruin Writing

A gust whistled through a broken window, the only sound in the abandoned flat besides the thrumming of the storm outside. Dragging his feet, defeated, a lone man limped across the floor, looking to his left and right frantically while wiping his bloody nose between haggard breaths. Punctuating the silence, a flash of lightning followed by an immediate peal of thunder shook the building, and the man yelped. He tried to spin on one foot, but his ruined leg was claimed his balance, and he collapsed in a tumble, biting off a curse in the process.

As if from nowhere, a figure emerged in front him, stepping out of the shadows, and then he really screamed. Whatever noise came out of his mouth, though, was swallowed by another peal of thunder, and the cracked window howled all the louder. A cloaked figure seemed to tower in front of him and, despite the obscured face, he recognized him.

“Y-you! You’re the guy who killed my brother. P-please, we didn’t mean—” His fumbling voice broke off into a low whine, though, as the figure raised handgun, brandishing death itself as it pulled its hood back.

“Tell him I said hello, yeah?” the voice responded, and he blinked in-spite of his own terror. It was a woman? His mouth tried to form confused words, but a gunshot chorused with the thundering storm outside, and the night grew darker.

…

…Not doing it for you? Yeah. Let’s talk about it.

So what went wrong? The writing could probably use some work, okay, but bear with me on this one. That entire excerpt is written like it’s for a movie, or maybe a comic, but not a narrative. This is really common to see especially in roleplaying (but plenty of books with bad editors too) because of where writers are getting their inspiration. If you spend all your time playing video games, watching movies, and reading graphic novels, you’re going to write like you’re trying to re-create those things. I’m not going to take that lecture any further, though, because I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else.

Books (and roleplay) are descriptive writing where the only images your audience gets are the ones they read. You don’t have the luxury of touching on multiple senses at once like a movie might, with a soundtrack, stunning visuals, and a heart-pounding bass note to drive it all home. You get the reader’s imagination, and that’s about it. Trying to shoehorn the rest of it in there feels cheap and cliché more often than not. You end up with something weak by the end. This becomes a problem since we spend so much time binge watching Netflix, playing Dragon Age, and re-watching all the Star Wars movies, and our creative voice begins to sing the tune of pictures. We start brainstorming in images instead of words, and that perfect scene we’ve got in our head runs on different groundwork than we need. Instead of rhetoric to drive it all together, we think of soundtracks. Instead of word choice, we think of lighting. We spend so much time trying to catch our reader’s attention with literal images that we forget the art that good writing is made of.

Don’t get me wrong here: good writing is depictive. Good writing should place your reader in the room, it should let them smell the salt of the ocean, breath the freedom of an open sky, and bake in the heat of an oppressive sun. Your reader should be able to feel the fear in the air and sense the hope in a tired people, but getting them there is the hard part. Unfortunately, because of how much visual media we have now, we forget to use the tools we as writers have at our disposal.

If I wanted to show you a broken and beaten people, I could talk about the rags that they wear, the dirt that covers their face, the steady thrum of a worn shoes on a tightly packed street, and that would get me part of the way. I could talk about the children weeping on their parents’ shoulders, the screams of abandoned infants or the cries of a debtor being dragged away from his family. There’s certainly a time and a place for this in writing, and in small doses it can actually be really effective, but you can go so much further than just the direct visuals.

Narrative writers have so many more tools at their disposal. In describing someone, I could say something like “On these streets, hope was like food: hard and tasteless when found but more likely to make you sick than keep you alive.” You can probably do better than that, but here’s my point: in one sentence you can give your reader everything they need to know about those people in a way that a picture never could. Whether or not that sentence is perfect is not my point—my point is that it’s a tool a filmmaker would never have. I can use similes, metaphors, and even personification to show you what I’m getting at without ever describing what it looks like. Before you know it, you’ve taken your reader to a totally foreign place, put them in the shoes of another man or woman, and breathed life into a creation that exists only in someone’s head.

While roleplaying, though, getting away from visual media as an inspiration can be especially challenging. So many roleplays are generated based off of games, shows, and movies already that our canonical inspiration is inherently visual, and so it becomes harder to dissect and redirect the fuel that runs the story itself. Too many people spend all their time turning their roleplaying just into what they wished they could’ve seen in a certain game, a scenario they never got a chance to experience, and it really shows in the writing (and their patience, for that matter).

From a micro perspective, you can see where theatrics trouble your writing pretty easily, but it applies to the grand scheme of things too. Trying to pigeonhole your character’s story into the capacity of a movie’s two-hour story arc is simply not helpful to your writing. Similarly, trying to treat every thread like an “episode” or even a “chapter” is more likely to send you into the death-spiral of planning where you lose sight of your character’s life and personality beyond the second page. Planning a character’s entire story to lead up to a big punchline, a dramatic event, or an envisioned climax turns everything along the way into something both tedious and lifeless. No amount of flare or mind-blowing spectaculars is worth that.