Writers with a background in visual arts struggle to translate their ideas into prose. A feature that helps bridge the gap between visual storytelling and prose writing could assist these users in expressing their ideas more effectively.
So for context, I’ve been a musical theatre performer, dancer and actor since early childhood. I adore films, music videos and musicals, and even dreamed of going into filmmaking. But writing a book has also been a long-standing dream of mine. Unfortunately, it’s only recently that I’ve realised that the way my creative brain works isn’t meshing well with prose. Because of my background in very visual arts mediums, I see scenes as if they’re a movie scene or a scene in a play, which can be very difficult to translate to prose. Emotional moments come from specific body language or stylised visuals created by lighting or sound, all of which is super tricky to express in prose. I’ve been trying for a while but it just comes out clunky and too much like stage directions, or I waffle on about unnecessary things, describing things in far too much detail to make sure things appear just as I see them. I seem to bounce from overly procedural language to purple prose that’s so abstract and flowery (particularly when talking about the magic in my story!) that it’s unclear what’s actually going on. So I’m torn. Novel writing is my goal because it’s the only art form I can reasonably do completely on my own and without equipment or resources. As much as scriptwriting has been enjoyable the couple of times I’ve done it in the past, a novel will get me a lot further than a script will in terms of getting my work out into the world. If only I was artistically gifted, a graphic novel would be an obvious choice. But alas, I’m not. And writing a graphic novel with a hired illustrator is a huge extra commitment that I can’t make at the moment. Does anyone relate to this? Are there any authors or particular writing styles that might fit this or work better with my strange, overly visual style of creativity? (I’m also neurodivergent so I don’t think that helps my need for specificity in the visuals of my scenes!) Tl;dr I’m worried I’ll never be able to wrestle my overly visual way of seeing stories into a prose novel format.