A photograph can capture with the press of a button what a writer would need hours to recreate. When it takes more strokes to pen the words than it would a brush across canvas, you know you're looking at something truly beautiful; something you may have little chance of conveying with any power through words alone..
Accents are easier to write (and to read) when there's true audio involved. An otherwise delightful cockney lilt becomes a gushing river of dropped word-endings and apostrophes the likes of which God himself has never seen.
According to conventional wisdom, video equates to 24,000 words a second. Not even Steven King can match that. At least, not yet. The man has written a successful story about a possessed Plymouth, I put nothing past him at this point.
As an amateur musician and playwright, I know first-hand that every media has its downsides. Writing has its own brilliant constructions that other methods have to strain themselves to mirror. The sheer poetry of the right five-word phrase can bring even theater to its knees, to say nothing of the ability to quantify emotion as part of the standard narration filling every foreseeable crack on the page.
That said, there is one area where writing gets its comeuppance: when it comes to the deeply technical, visual media win out time and time again.
The ember that has set this particular flame burning with new life lately is the myriad of fight scenes required to complete The Order. I've covered action scenes in general previously, but this particular discussion veers into new territory, and it isn't limited to fight scenes alone.
To clarify the point: imagine a fight between two real people. It's ungraceful and uncoordinated, a flailing hodgepodge of misguided attempts to get the other person to stop hitting you back. Now imagine instead a fictional fight: a deeply choreographed sequence of fluid movements leading to regular shifts in supremacy resulting in a climactic final flurry with the clear victor walking away.
The former is not terribly impressive through any medium, although the writer can add to it all manner of meaning that it might otherwise lack, bringing light to the private internal struggle exploding within each combatant. The latter, by contrast, is extremely entertaining to watch, but loses something of its original grace when delivered via the written word.
It comes around to the same old song: that which is visually stunning is not always passable in print. If you're looking for the skillful fight between experienced opponents, the unnaturally orchestrated exchange of blows, then you need to take into consideration a few significant modifications to achieve the same result.
The initial trouble (and the natural lure) are the technical details. If you have a visual imagination or find it easiest to base your scene on what you've seen, you will want to describe each move as it happens:
The hero brings his arm back at its full length before shifting all its new-found momentum into a singular declarative strike at the chin of his reeling opponent. The target of this concentrated malice meanwhile raises his arms in defense, cutting short the deliverance of vengeance and instead levying his own haymaker to the hero's solar plexus.
With the exception of a narrative voice that border on the obscene, the above isn't necessarily all that bad, but break it down: this is about two seconds of action, total. That's thirty words a second. Compared to the rate of film doesn't seem so bad, but film also captures more than just the blow-by-blow.
To keep your fight engaging, you have to involve the environment around them. As the fight moves to new surroundings or the elements in the room become part of the action, you have to ensure that you not only convey what the characters pick up or slam into, but that those objects were there all along. You have to dress the scene as you go, placing Chekhov's fabled guns in each new room they enter.
More words and all the white space between now creates a second problem, this time for your reader: the pacing will shift. Reading "and then he totally kicked him in the junk" takes longer than watching it, if only just. Add in even the slightest poetry to your narrative and the scene starts to stretch like so much silly putty until it becomes too thin to sustain itself.
Both issues also apply to highly technical scenes. When describing intense operations with which the general populace isn't already intimately familiar leaves you with a lot to explain before the reader can have any hope of knowing what's going on without already being a professional in the field.
The more common examples include hacking, military operations, invention (also known as "the entire pull of the MacGuyver series"), bypassing security (or generally being a sneaky thief), piloting and nearly any mechanical operation or maintenance.
In order to truly convey the scene, you have to fill in the missing pieces in your audience's knowledge, and that means straying into the same arena as lecture material and technical manuals, neither of which are exactly flying off the shelves. You're left with selling exclusively to those already in the field or looking for a way to convey what normally takes a six-year degree to understand in half a paragraph.
Thankfully, there are tricks to circumvent all these issues (or at least con your audience into thinking you did).
Addressing pacing: start by throwing out what you were taught in English class. Formal sentence structure and big words can interrupt the flow and kill the rhythm of a fast-paced scene. I don't care of the wounding was egregious, if your reader has to pause to fetch a thesaurus, you're generating the wrong kind of action. Don't get flowery. Flowers have no place in fight scenes, except when in vases hurled at people's heads.
Quick descriptions, short sentences or interwoven run-ons will keep the momentum going. If it doesn't feel like time for a period, blow past it and keep writing. If you reach the end of a page and the closest thing you have to ending a sentence is a misplaced semi-colon, you may way to give the reader a chance or two to breathe. Otherwise, chain away.
As for getting the necessary additives out of the way, there's only so much you can scrunch: without a reliable familiarity with the jargon, you can't boil down a complex process with phrases like "bubble sort" and "electroplating." Instead, look for analogies. Transpose the process you want to describe to something so basic (and, hopefully, poetic) that your readers can connect with it.
For those thinking it's an overdone trope, you're right, but it remains the best method for getting your meaning across without simplifying the process itself and thus risking offending the core readership (i.e. those who actually know the process you're describing).
If you're concerned with appearing unoriginal, bring it within the confines of the fourth wall and let the characters involved in making the analogy comment on it directly. If they're just as baffled by the analogy or recognize it as a "dumbing down" of a situation the other character clearly has a handle on, it gives the reader a chance to laugh at the situation without feeling like the joke's on them.
Barring the easy solution, it's time to think about your end-game: you want to convey to the reader that what's happening is involved, complex, difficult, challenging, fragile or similarly unattainable to those without skill and/or luck in unnaturally high quantities.
Eschew accuracy. Look for ways to convey the same meaning without describing the technical specifics. If you've set one of your characters up as a the resident genius or ace in a given situation, sometimes all it takes is for the other characters to be in awe of the mystery of their machinations as they work to solve the latest crisis impacting the crew.
All you have to describe is the end result, the surface evidence of their very involved underpinnings. If you have the opportunity, mix their actions with another concurrent chain of events that can take the focus off the pilot/hacker/mechanic between their moments of effective brilliance.
Back to the original issue: fight scenes. When you can't squeeze, it's time to truncate. There are dozens of moves and counter-moves in a cinematic duel because that's what it takes for quick punches and flicks of the wrist to fill a solid three minutes of film. In a book, it doesn't take that much combat to fill the pages.
Boil it down to the major turning points. It's rare you're going to impress someone with the mere description of a feat of skill inside a fight scene. If they can't see it, it doesn't have the same allure. All that matters is how close to danger their hero is that second, and how close she might be to overcoming the odds and winning out against her foe.
It all comes down to the same thing: when it comes to writing the things that look better on screen, remove the bits you don't need in order to maintain the pace and pulse rate you're seeking.
Now if only I had a cool graphic of someone drop-kicking the word "egregious" out of the middle of a sentence, I'd be set for life.
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