I watched a movie recently in which a daughter tells her parents and fiancé that she has, in secret, been pursuing a new direction for her life. The parents disapprove, not least because it will end the engagement. The father threatens to disown her and tells the wife they are leaving. There is a moment when the wife hesitates, the husband snaps for her to come on, but then on the way out, she looks back over her shoulder with a look of, possibly, approval, or at least ambivalence, on her face. Later, the mother encounters another character who convinces her of the need to support her daughter, and they set out together to do so.
Here's the thing -- the visual aspects of the mother's ambivalence about denouncing the daughter worked (at least for me), but they would be very hard to "show" in a novel. Clearly, what I wrote above is "telling." I mean, "She looked back with an expression of ambivalence on her face," would be telling, not showing, and it seems far less effective that what was accomplished by the actress in this movie. I suppose it would be possible to describe facial expression (position of eyebrows, how widely the eyelids were open, lip position, etc.) in enough detail that someone knowledgeable about expression interpretation could glean the idea of ambivalence or maybe approval, but how many readers could do that, or would want to? The viewer had to observe and interpret, but I suspect most were able to do so, and did it quickly and easily.
In a novel, it would seem to me that the mother's possible openness would be better conveyed in some other manner, but I wonder how often contemporary authors, especially those of us who are amateurs, fall into the "visual" trap (if that's what it is) because we have watched so many stories told through the medium of video.
As another example, I read a fair number of indie books where it's just one action sequence after another, with characters running hither and thither, doing this, that, and the other. And I wonder how much of that is influenced by movies where lots of action and special effects can often cover a pretty serious lack of believable, relatable characters or action that flows from the setting and plot.
I have read some advice from experienced authors about "writing like it was a movie," but, I wonder. How much has our exposure to visual media influenced writing styles, possibly to the detriment of written stories?
