Visual Writing vs. Descriptive Prose

Published by Emil Abraham,



Visual writing means writing and thinking with images that the audience will see rather than words they will read. How do you write with visual ideas as opposed to writing visually descriptive prose? We are all familiar with descriptive prose:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. The troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), p. 3

This visually descriptive opening to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is, no doubt, admirable prose fiction. However, it would not work for a film script. The freedom of the novelist to assemble impressions and condense impressions over time (written in the past tense) into a mood or atmosphere that is the setting for characters and action is hard to duplicate in film or television. It is barely conceivable that a moviemaker would reproduce all of these visual images, even in a montage. A scriptwriter cannot assume the freedom that the novelist has. A lot of descriptive imagery is irrelevant to the visual medium. If the nights are cold, saying so in the script does not translate onto the screen; to do so with a line of dialogue would be heavy handed. You have to show someone shivering or putting on a sweater—all very costly in screen time unless critical to the story.
The omniscient narrator is a novelistic device that is hard to duplicate in a screenplay unless you create a voiceover narrator. In a novel, the narration is verbalized. In a screenplay, it must disappear. Whether you are adapting an existing work or writing an original script, the imaginative challenge is to select a key setting and a key image. Do we choose the flashes of artillery at night? That would be quite demanding to shoot. A script can’t deal with the simile of comparing it to summer light- ning. Do we choose the soldiers marching by raising dust with the crops, orchards, and mountains in the background? This is probably more concise cinematically and requires the right location. If we describe it too closely, the location search becomes impossible. Do we need to see the stream and the pebbles? Do we need to see the dust on the leaves? It is unrealistic for the writer to impose this kind of detail on the production. The director will resist when faced with the concrete task of choosing a location and a camera angle.
Essentially, the script writer has to introduce action. This is true not only for movies and television but also for corporate and instructional programs. The description that sets the scene is usually subordinate to character and action. The art is to combine them. Six pages on and some time later, Hemingway gets to a street scene with characters and interaction. On the seventh page, the first dialogue interchange between the narrator, a priest, Lieutenant Rinaldi, and a captain occurs in the mess hall. Two pages of dialogue in which the mood of war is introduced could easily take 5 or 10 minutes of screen time and a lot of money to create with lead actors, a crowd, sets, props, costumes, and locations. Yet by the end of Hemingway’s Chapter 2, we barely have a title sequence for a movie. Good novel! Bad script!
A scriptwriter has to invent a visual sequence that will condense background and action in such a way as to advance a story. This could be achieved by a number of devices:
  • Solution 1: Create an observer. A character could be riding a bike down the road with the scene in the background and the column of soldiers in the foreground. He arrives in the village. The street scene is established. Cut to the mess hall.
  • Solution 2: Create a montage. We see quick cuts from artillery flashes in the night. Cut to a column of soldiers marching past. Quick cut to ambulance. Cut to civilians hiding from gunfire. Cut to ripe fruit in an orchard. Cut to Lieutenant Rinaldi in the mess hall.
  • Solution 3: Use audio to add value to the scene. Interior, night, mess hall, Lieutenant Rinaldi, a captain and a priest in terse conversation with an American. Between phrases, the sound effect of an artillery exchange rattles the glass faintly from the shock wave of an explosion. Flashes of nearby artillery illuminate the faces near the windows.
Some screenwriters invent scenes in their adaptations that are not in the original work, or even change the plot, often to our great annoyance. Is it laziness? Is it legitimate adaptation? Sometimes what works in a novel doesn’t work on screen. A novel can be hundreds of pages long. A feature film