I’ve been following Lincoln Michel’s substack lately. Lincoln has a ton of great writing advice, elegantly stated. Recently I read a couple posts of his about “TV-Brained Prose.” The original post, titled “Turning Off the TV In Your Mind” is one of Michel’s most popular posts, and for good reason. It lays out some common bad habits of writers who consume more visual media than written work, and it helped me identify places where I could improve my own writing.

In fact, I became so preoccupied with Lincoln’s advice that I began second-guessing a lot of my decisions as I was writing, for better and for worse. I was on the prowl for unnecessary visual language, boring play-by-plays, and missed opportunities for interiority. I was deleting and rewriting paragraphs over and over; classic insecure writer shit. Then, one night, it struck me that there was something that felt incomplete to me about Lincoln’s TV-brain analysis. His critique is aimed at writers who write as if “trying to describe a video playing in their own mind,” but a lot of the advice boils down to “don’t try to replicate in writing what is more effective in a visual medium.” There’s a bit of a conflation there. A person describing a video playing in their head isn’t thinking like a filmmaker, they’re thinking like a film consumer.

This is an important distinction, because while I don’t think there’s much value in writing like you’re doing a summary of one of your favorite shows (despite the fact that I basically built my career on doing that) I do think there can be some value in writing as if you are filming one of your favorite shows. The difference, and the reason I wanted to write this post, is that the latter requires having an eye.

It’s easy to think of a camera as an impartial, objective observer, because we only see what the camera sees. But there are people behind the camera, and they are choosing where it looks, and for how long, and at what angle. Look at how Wes Anderson frames his shots. Look at how Guy Ritchie paces his scenes. Look at how long Quentin Tarantino lingers on pretty ladies’ feet, and then tell me the camera is an impartial observer. No, the camera is more akin to the director’s eye, and each director has a different way of looking.

Similarly, in prose, the order in which we choose to describe things, and the detail with which we do (our “shot list”, one might say), have tremendous impact on the reader’s impression of the story. As an example, let’s look at the opening of one of my favorite books, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared.

This could be reproduced almost exactly as the opening shot of a film adaptation. “It did not look important” is doing something that film can’t do, certainly, but these three sentences create a very deliberate visual starting point for the story, the same way an establishing shot might.

The passage continues in a less filmic fashion:

An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

We’re not getting visual details here, but introspection and commentary — something that prose can do far better than any visual medium. But just as with Wes Anderson’s framing or Tarantino’s feet pics, we must ask ourselves: who is providing this introspection and commentary? The author-as-narrator often becomes as invisible as the director behind the camera, despite the fact that it is literally their words through which we view the story. Though these words purport to describe the scene objectively, only Leguin could have made these observations in the way she made them.

The problem with “TV-Brained Prose” isn’t that it’s too visual. Not entirely, anyway. The problem is that it ignores the active role the creator’s “eye” (or ear, or voice, or whatever body part you’d like to substitute) plays in deciding what to show next. When we fool ourselves into believing the camera is impartial, we churn out flat prose which treats all aspects of a scene — every gesture, every moment, every article of clothing — with the exact same level of importance. This is the difference between thinking like a passive consumer of media, and thinking like an active creator of it.

To put this in the form of concrete advice: don’t worry so much about whether your writing sounds like a TV script. Worry more about whether it sounds like you. Are you writing in a more stilted or formal way than you normally talk? If so, can you articulate the reason why you’re doing that? Do you know why you’re describing the things you’re describing, in the order you’re describing them? The more of those questions you can answer, the more your work will begin to feel distinct from everyone else’s. Because in the end, it’s these small, invisible decisions which are the essence of your individual style.