nerupuff wrote: ↑Tue Sep 03, 2019 12:31 amThere comes a point in the narration where it would say, "Character A crosses her arms and rolls her eyes at me, almost oblivious to the fact that I didn't mean to insult her that way."
I think at a certain point you need to be willing to adapt your writing to the medium you are working in. Writing a screenplay is not the same as writing a short story, and writing a visual novel is not the same as writing a novel.
Just because there are lots of novels that include beats between dialog doesn't mean your visual novels have to be written that way. I think you can learn a lot about visual novel writing by reading good literature, but I think if you just copy things directly, you're at risk of copying the wrong things. You need to understand
why the author wrote certain things, and figure out of those reasons apply to what you're writing.
Description in dialog scenes is often referred to as a "beat." Beats can be helpful to break up long sections of dialog, so you don't have one character talking for multiple paragraphs with no interruption. Oftentimes, they're used for timing: you want to insert a pause, and instead of saying, "she paused before continuing," you describe a specific bit of action, like "she took a deep breath before continuing," or "she glanced out the window in a moment of distraction before continuing," or something like that.
A lot of times,
the beat is there because the author needed a beat. Oftentimes, the
specific action of the beat is inconsequential; it's there because the author wanted to indicate a pause without having to say, "she paused."
If you're reading books and seeing, "Ah, George R.R. Martin often stops mid-paragraph to mention that a character crossed or uncrossed their arms, therefore I should imitate his style by narrating when characters cross and uncross their arms," I would say that you are missing the point. GRRM wanted a beat to break up a large paragraph of dialog, so he used a beat that was suited to the paragraph he was writing and the medium he was working in. And as a visual novel writer, it is your job to control the pacing of your writing in a way that suits the scene you are writing and the medium you are working in.
This isn't a hard-and-fast rule. I'm not going to stop reading your visual novel because you described action that wasn't depicted on-screen. But if you're constantly saying, "She smiled" when the sprite is already showing me that she's smiling, or "she was wearing a blue sweater" when I can clearly see that from the illustration, it's going to start to wear me down. If you're writing, "she folded her arms" when what you really mean is that "she was exasperated," it might be worthwhile to consider if there's a better way to communicate that character's state of exasperation. Maybe you write the beat differently. Maybe you have her convey her emotional state through spoken dialog rather than relying on narration. (I am personally a big fan of using dialog to convey information rather than relying on narration; this is already true of my prose writing, and it's even more true of my visual novel writing: a lot of the VN scenes I write make
extremely limited use of narration, usually using it to set up a scene and exit a scene, and relying on dialog to carry everything in between. Obviously, if there's action like a character swinging a sword, that requires narration, but if I'm just trying to convey a character's emotional state, I can do that through dialog. This certainly isn't the only way to do this, and I'm not sure it's even the best way to do it, but it's what's worked well for me.)
Working in a visual medium does mean that you get to let the visuals do some of the heavy lifting (for example, you never have to write the sentence "she was wearing a blue sweater" when introducing a character who is clearly illustrated as wearing a blue sweater), but it also comes with certain constraints. For example, if the artist didn't draw the character as wearing a blue sweater, then you don't get to describe her as wearing one. (As an aside, I have always wondered if many VNs take place in Japanese high school in part because the existence of uniforms gives a narrative excuse for wardrobe changes to be infrequent.) Your art budget and the number of backgrounds you have will limit the number of locations your story can have. Part of the writer's job is to write around these limitations: if the story is written to have 15 different locations but you only can afford to have 10 backgrounds, the writer has to figure out how to rework the story to work with that smaller number of backgrounds. (Sometimes, this might mean having more "generic" backgrounds so that two scenes in different locations can use the same background, other times it means reworking the story so that characters keep returning to the same venues or otherwise reducing the number of locations visited in the story.) Sometimes, you'll have a set of sprites, some of which don't include all of the poses you might want to have characters take. This, too, is a limitation. It's a softer limitation, and you can get away with a few incongruities in narration, but it's important to realize that being a
visual novel writer is a specialized skill that requires you to do things that aren't normally required for someone who is just writing a novel. The easy way out is to force your audience to adapt to the way you've chosen to write the story -- some readers will even let you get away with this, especially if the rest of your writing is good. However, I think things tend to work better when you are able to adapt your writing to the medium you are working in.