Art of Storytelling: Paper or Picture?
Art of Storytelling: Paper or Picture?
Is reading a story better than watching a story?
Is watching a story better than reading a story?
These are two questions of the contemporary world — where we live in; that shoots up now and then and here and there we hear people professing any one of the either as better, once they are out of the theatres or from at the library. The question is and has led to several discussions and debates over the turnaround of the years and has been an unsolvable quest. It has literally leaded to the formation of many panels and forums.
The art of writing about anything in any form in particular or in general — be it a poem, a book, an essay or an article — the writer takes the solitary and lonely route to produce the work. The writer over the work has a sole idea to work upon their mind and they have the complete authority over their idea and their conception that they are going to express through pen and paper.
The art of storytelling through books has been dominated from many centuries ago. It is not only because of the lack of photography devices, cinematography equipment and technologies or other forms of storytelling but rather because of the pleasure has the reading given the reader. It helps the reader ignore the world around them and indulge in a new world of thoughts and dreams.
The writer can place the right mix of words founded upon their imagination. The writer of the work imagines the story that they are going to write and become the actor of all the characters that they are going to etch. They visualise the different characters and put themselves in the shoes of each character being created and find out what they might do at that particular situation and based on their ideology and principles they would narrate the whole story. The dialogues that the writer carves are sprung forth from their mind and putting in notion the writers’ thoughts over the dominance of the situation.
The writer also creates situations and subplots that are mostly memoirs of their life. The writing is mostly pieced from their own life experiences and crossings. There are traces of the life of the writer in their work. Each writer begets notions and thoughts through their life happenings and experiences. The scripts written for the work is not refined by another person. It is done by the writer themself. The writer has their work refined and rewritten by themselves itself.
Writing is a personal journey reached through emotions of different kinds of battles of life. Writing is a task of solving the puzzles of the mind and our thoughts. The writers imagine their characters vividly and go deep into their psyche in order to chalk them. The character growth and story construction lie in the intellect of the writer.
The writers always pride in their work and are bouncy about their work until they are criticized. They then read their work again and rewrite and again reread and rewrite. They are blind to the simpler and smaller mistakes and situational reactions in their stories. Most stories lack character formation and development. This happens because of the actuality that they wrote the story and are audacious until an extra mind reads the draft.
Writing is a task of knowing and reading about many subjects and genres. A writer must know about various subjects and genres and not just shadow a subject.
The watching of a story — the movies and the pictures — helps the viewer taste a perfect criticism of the work, as the faults in the plot can be grabbed and the holes in the story plot can be found easily. Alas, the storytelling time period for a movie is shorter compared to a wider variety in book, as a movie would not be watched for more than three hours by any individual continuously. Thus, the creators of a movie must pack the story in a dense manner within the given time period.
Books on the other provide the creator to live up to pages of storytelling. Written stories can take their whole lot of pages required as the literary excellence of a work depends on the depth of the narrative and the length of the explanation.
The books also are not vulnerable to find any goofs in the story since the reader goes into his own world of the book as he reads it. The reader while reading a written story, they flesh out the characters in their visualization and create their version of the story of how they understand in their mind.
Movies on the counter do not enjoy the privileges of the paper. Movies must be made for sole entertainment purposes only. They must be with an ending of moral, happiness or tragedy. They must not talk about deep rooted philosophy or ideology. There can`t be any solitary freedom to the story writer of a movie.
Movies are shaped by their directors, producers, screenplay writers, casting managers, dialogue writers, actors, locations director, script writers, storyteller, choreographers, cinematographer and technicians. Each person talks to each and every one working for the movie, and so while shooting a scene they pour out each other’s ideas, takes and thoughts on story improvement and refinement and shoot the scene they are making. Making a movie is a collaborative work.
Also, the viewer has not much need to think creative and to create visualizations in his mind. The story is showed to the viewer through the visualization mind of another person. The story projected and interpreted by another individual or a contingent of people is shown to us. Thus, the story has the flow of the story told through frames of pictures visualized by the movie production team. It is their visualization that is told. While reading a story, the reader creates the story in his mind as of his understanding and interpretation of the story but in a movie another person’s visualization is shown.
And coming to the structure framework of the story the writing is mostly narrative while movies are dialogues or monologues. Thus, movies are mostly drama or play with some genre elements added to it. Hence movies are mostly dialogue unfolded. Movies work with dialogue moved scenes and acts.
Books on the other, work with narrative structure and literary excellence. Narration helps the writer detail his plot and point of view. The plot can weave new subplots or location description using narration. Narration also explains the characters, protagonist and antagonist in finer methods as the detailed character write-up can be presented.
In movies, pictures and sets of the scenes are designed and used for location detailing. Narrative structures in movies are done by dialogues or monologues. Stories with narration require strong dialog rewrite to accommodate the structure of a movie as each scene has dialogues.
Books help the reader sense and analyse language and speech while movies help tame observation. We have known that the traditional method for learning is by reading books. We get to know about many moral values and science through books. Books are the cooks of knowledge. A movie captures the seeing competency of the viewer. He gets to know the expressionism and realism of human beings. Movies teach us reactions and situations. Books are to be sensed and movies are to be seen.
What we read in our childhood is still incised in us. We remember now and then the stories that have touched us. But movies are not the same case. We tend to forget images. We even forget the faces of people whom we have met. Only certain parts of theirs, as such as their character are instilled in us. So, sensing and seeing are both required as they both finally pilot to impregnating moral values, character, ideology and personality inside us.
Thus, i conclude by saying that a book and a movie are completely different forms of art. A book cannot be compared with a poem. Likewise, an art painting cannot be compared with pictures or photography. Hence so, they are all different and unique forms of art that needs to be appreciated in their own ways and interpreted in their congenital art style and language.
Any art must not only be appreciated by art lovers but also by the common man. Art is expression of emotions. People are very tired of real life. Fiction is much better than reality. They are much happier when they are lost in someone else’s story.
