Episode 13: The Ernest Hemingway Effect and Visual Storytelling

Let's Capture Your Story...

Today's episode is titled after what I have been coining for years behind the scenes. I haven't really said this publicly, but it's called the “Ernest Hemingway effect and Visual Storytelling.” Now the author, Ernest Hemingway, one of my absolute favorites, has a very famous quote that says: “Show the audience everything, tell them nothing.” Now this goes back to my screenwriting days. When I was first learning about how to actually write a screenplay, because I think for a lot of people, if you ever were to attempt to write a screenplay without actually studying how to do it, you probably would go about it the way that you would write like a short story or like a novel. And I think we learned that style obviously like in school, right? We were just learning how to give our character's voices, how to be very descriptive, how to increase our vocabulary, how to obviously have proper syntax and punctuation and all that good stuff, you know, all the great writing techniques we learned while we were in school. But I will say that I had to throw all of that out of the window when I went to study how to properly become a screenwriter. It's a real thing of "show versus tell", and essentially, it's just don't write anything in the script that you are directing a character in the film to say verbally, that you could have the character perform or visually display. So an example would be something silly, like telling someone to answer the phone, and when the phone is ringing you have your character say: “ Hey, I think I might answer the phone.”No, they're going to just get up and go answer it. Or they're not–, if it's suspenseful, like the film 'Scream', she didn't want to answer the phone obviously, but that's like a simple silly example. You would never have your character blatantly say something that they could have visually shown to the audience. And so the same thing applies to your visual stories. You want to show the audience something. You don't want to be always talking to them and talking at them. Ready to learn more about how to SHOW (not tell) better visual stories with your audience? Schedule your Story Time Call here LehmanCreativeGroup.com