How to turn off the movie in your mind

On writing books as books and not as films, the magic of the rule of three, red flags that signal immersion-breaking roadblocks in your writing, and the simplicity of a simple period.

Writers who pride themselves on their “cinematic storytelling” often position themselves as observers rather than storytellers. They meticulously describe expressions and gestures while neglecting the rich interiority that makes prose unique.

But novels aren't storyboards waiting for adaptation.

The visual storytelling style has been absorbed so deeply today that its limitations are being imported into fiction. Yet prose offers what screens cannot: direct access to thoughts, compressed time, and subjective perception. The question "What can a novel do that Netflix cannot?" typically reveals untapped potential.

Manuscripts excel when writers stop treating the page as a deficient screen and start using its unique capabilities. The novel's power lies exactly where cameras can't go—inside consciousness, across time, and through associative leaps.

Fiction offers an intimacy impossible in other narrative forms. Readers choose to read because they’re seeking that deeper experience. Writers who embrace this, engaging readers through prose's full spectrum rather than only its visual aspects, create resonant work that invites readers inside another consciousness.

Won’t you come in?

In this issue of The Writes of Fiction:

• On writing books as books and not as films

• The magic of the rule of three

• Red flags that signal immersion-breaking roadblocks in your writing

• The simplicity of a simple period

  

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Turning off the TV in your mind

My theory is that we live in the age of visual narratives and that increasingly warps how we write. Film, TV, TikToks, and video games are culturally dominant. Most of us learn how stories work through visual mediums. This is how our brains have been taught to think about story. And so, this is how we write. I’m not suggesting there is any problem in being influenced by these artforms. I certainly am. The problem is that if you’re “thinking in TV” while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints. I don’t believe in rules for art. But I believe in general principles. One is that it’s typically best to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in. A novel will never beat good TV at being TV, but similarly TV will never beat a good novel at being a novel.—Read the rest from Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

More on shaping a story: Great novels don’t hook readers by accident. They strategically build up tension and feelings, then release them at just the right moment. This perfect timing isn’t about fancy writing tricks; it’s baked into how the story itself is built.

When a story pulls readers through the pages so smoothly they forget all about the clock, it’s not just clever words doing the work—it’s smart structure doing its job. That irresistible “just one more chapter” feeling happens when the story’s building blocks create a natural flow that keeps readers turning pages without even thinking about it.—Read the rest at Best ways to pace your story’s key moments.

The rule of three and how it helps our writing

People remember "things in threes" better. (Really, they’ve done studies) Think of famous speeches (Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), or clichéd ad copy (location location location). Even our stories are broken down into three acts. Three makes people pay attention, and we can use that to make them pay attention to our stories.—Read the rest from Janice Hardy at Fiction University.

What’s missing from another well-known threesome in writing: Three-act structure produces a disproportionately large act in the middle of a novel—the double-stuff cream in the three-act Oreo—leaving writers with a puffy, gooey act notoriously recognized as the most difficult section to write. Act 2 of a three-act story is twice the length of the other acts, forcing writers to combat the infamous “saggy middle” effect using a hodge-podge of plot tangents and pacing tricks.

But it’s not the writing that makes the double-stuffed Act 2 feel like such a slog; it’s the structure itself. The loss of momentum is a symptom of a missing component that flattens plot and character development: the midpoint complication.—Read more at The missing link in three-act structure.

Red flags that your novel might be too much work to read

Readers can only remember so much before it all starts to gloss together. If the scenes are constantly changing from character to character, and it's multiple chapters before the same character or plotline comes around again, salient details can and will get lost. Even worse, too many points of view usually go hand-in-hand with too many characters, especially if every point of view has its own cast. It's not long before all those secondary and minor characters are overwhelming.

Frequent point of view switches is also a tension killer, since whatever felt tense and immediate five chapters ago probably doesn’t any more. You might do a fabulous job at building tension, then it cuts to a new character in a new location and all that tension plummets. By the time the reader gets back to it, they barely remember what was going on.—Keep reading from Janice Hardy at Writers in the Storm.

More on connecting the dots for readers: When characters fail to react to what’s happening around them, it’s as if nothing is happening at all. A snappy line of dialogue goes nowhere if it doesn’t get under someone’s skin. The first glimpse of a long-sought clue builds no excitement if nobody notices it. A punch in the nose might as well not have landed if it doesn’t start or end a disagreement.

When characters don’t react to the conversations and events around them, readers will assume they don’t care. If the characters don’t care, why should readers?

Keeping your characters engaged in the story keeps readers engaged with it too. When writing viewpoint characters, you have access to both internal and external responses. For other characters, you’re limited to whatever visible manifestations of those responses that the viewpoint character or narrator can perceive.—Keep reading Action-reaction misfires that flatten your writing.

Dashes, colons, and commas should often be replaced by a period

Dashes have two main jobs. A dash can signify an abrupt change in sentence structure — a shift like this that doesn’t fit with the grammar of the first part of the sentence. Or a dash can work like parentheses — setting off lists, parenthetical information, etc. — when you feel parentheses won’t cut it. Rules for dashes do not say you can use them to join complete clauses — this clause is an example. This is one of the most common abuses of the dash I see — people use them to string together two things that could stand alone as sentences. I suppose a loose interpretation of that “abrupt change in sentence structure” rule makes this OK. But when I’m editing, I make each clause into its own sentence, separating them with a period.—Read more from June Casagrande at Grammar Underground.

More on formatting: Standard manuscript formatting says a lot about you and your work.

• You’re aware of industry standards and expectations.

• You own the software needed to produce a manuscript file that’s compatible for everyone else who will work with your book.

• You’re confident enough in your book’s content that you don’t need attention-grabbing tricks to tempt people to read it.

Your professionalism encourages trust and confidence in you and your book.—Read more in Formatting your manuscript for editors and agents.

Fiction Fuel

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.—Doris Lessing

Embrace the novel’s unique power

By moving beyond "thinking in TV," authors tap into literary techniques that set novels apart. Writers who master prose's strengths—exploring consciousness, compressing time, and making the abstract tangible—create fiction that complements rather than competes with visual media.

In a world of endless streaming, the novel's advantage remains clear: not what it shows us, but what it lets us become. Fiction invites readers into another mind—an experience impossible elsewhere.

Onward,

Lisa

P.S. My next openings for one-on-one Story Accelerator coaching are in early summer—book now if you’re finally ready to skip the frustration of writing by trial and error. Let’s accelerate the process.

P.P.S. If you only need a little bit of help, schedule and pay for a consultation with me in one click—boom, it’s that easy.

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This is The Writes of Fiction, a curated trove of old and new thinking about writing, designed to help you get better at the craft of writing fiction. And this is the distraction I have to put up with while I’m writing, courtesy of editorial assistant Rémy. 👇

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