"VISUAL. WRITER." -or- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Medium

I'd take to talk a moment of your time to talk about an issue that's been a constant in the terrible fanfiction that F/F/T3K15 has been going over recently. And before you start guessing, no it's not tone-deaf crossovers or Equestria Girls self-insert adaptations.

It's something I've taken to calling "visual writing;" maybe there's a more formal term, but that's what I call it. It's been a consistent problem for far longer than recently, and I'd like to talk about what it means when my riff consists of "VISUAL. WRITER." usually expressed in exactly that fashion.

Most mediums by which we get pop culture entertainment are visual - that it, part of their communication requires a visual element. This includes but is not limited to television, movies, comic books, and video games. If you're not looking, you're only getting a partial incomplete experience. Other mediums - literature, music, and their combination in audiobooks - are non-visual and don't have those same elements. ("But you have to look at text to read it-" Stories can be written in Braille; you don't need sight to read a book these days.)

For many fanfiction writers, the nuanced difference between the two goes over their heads.

Visual writing is what happens when non-visual mediums, especially fanfiction, try to use the trappings of visual mediums as part of their communication. This can include having characters become visible, scene changes are prefaced with "we now go to," massive description blocks as the thousand words a picture is worth try to physically manifest themselves, and description of what the character's actions look like instead of what those actions are. In the worst cases, something will block the "view" at the end of the chapter in preparation for a commercial break or straight up mention the "camera" in any context where there is no in-universe reason for a camera to be present.

It's a bit like trying to wear a lion's skin thinking that doing so would give you the lion's strength. A bit like reading the stage directions out loud during a play.

Visual writing is actually an exaggeration of a common bad writing pitfall. One of my favorite writing advice books is How NOT to Write a Novel, by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman. They categorize common writing mistakes done by aspiring professional writers on their novels, demonstrating each with a snippet of text inspired by real novels they had to go over as editors, followed by humorously-presented advice on what the mistake it, why it's bad, and how to fix it.

One of the pitfalls they address is a perspective / voice issue titled "You'll Have to Go Through Me (wherein the fact that the character has senses is paramount)." In these cases, the sensual input of the perspective character, usually in first-person, puts itself entirely between the reader and the actual events happening. Phases involving actions not done by the character are prefaced with "I saw," "I felt," "I could hear," etc. The entire experience becomes subjective by forcing it to be filtered through a single character. It's stifling to read. To quote the book, "This steps down the drama inherent in what’s going on; it muffles the reader’s experience. Unless the main point of a thing is the character’s experience of it, give us instead the thing itself."

Visual writing is "You'll Have to Go Through Me" when the perspective character is the camera the author thinks is filming their story. That is essentially the short of it. The experience is muffled by the imposition of television communication elements in a medium that literally can't handle them. It feels like watching a television show, alright... one that takes deliberate steps not to be understood. (And when the author tries to rectify this by blatantly stating what something means, that's a different problem altogether.)

When it comes to fanfiction of television shows like My Little Pony, visual writing is the fanfic equivalent of a cargo cult. Cargo cults are too meaty a topic to go to completely in depth, but here are the basics if you're not familiar. During World War II, the United States built temporary airstrips on various Pacific islands, including ones with natives. The natives observed as the airstrip personnel landed cargo planes with supplies and modern technology. The airstrips were eventually disassembled when they weren't needed anymore, but the natives, believing the constructions and motions of the airstrip were elaborate rituals to invoke the power of their divine province of choice, rebuilt the airstrips with their own supplies and imitated the motions in the hopes that they too would receive the same blessings.

In this story, visual fanfiction writers parallel the natives, the show makers the U.S. military, the show the airstrip, and the cargo a well-told story (or half-baked depending how much you like the episode). Fanfiction writers imitate tricks the show uses to communicate, one way or another unaware that what works to communicate information quickly when you have animation and audio becomes a barely-readable slog when put to text so literally. Note that the "show makers" isn't limited to MLP - the fanfic that evolved my riffing running gag all the way to the blunt statement it is now was Nintenkingdom the Story, which presented itself entirely as some sort of television show vaguely inspired by the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime.

Why fanfiction writers go visual - what the natives think the rituals were - is something I think can be more clearly attributed to stupidity over malice. That they're simply imitating what they see from the show and don't have the experience to communicate it except as a passive audience watching it. Hopefully, with experience and constructive criticism, they will eventually grow to realize that their imagination is the camera, and voicing everything through a fictional filming apparatus is not the way to go to create engaging stories.

When writers keep doing it after probably a few years, though? They could probably use a swift kick in the metaphorical pants.