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While I'm on a roll here: I thought of another oddity about writing fic for visual media. I'll use "Lewis" as an example again, if you don't mind, because I'm writing for it at the moment and have been reading a lot of fic, but it's equally true for any fandom.
Logistics. I'm not talking about the niceties of forensic science or police procedure or anything like that, but just consistency and how things fit together. It's far less of a worry in a TV show or movie, where you just cut from one scene to another that could take place an hour later or the next day, but in writing there's an urge to cover (even in half a sentence) the intervening period and to figure out how characters get from here to there. For example, Lewis and Hathaway are always driving around to crime scenes, and frequently they take one car. If they're coming from home, one of them presumably picks the other up; they seem to take turns. (You wouldn't want the same nondescript car on screen all the time, I guess. Lewis apparently sold Morse's Jaguar.) On the show the logistics of this don't matter; in fic I've noticed a strong tendency to worry about whose car is where and who lives where and how everyone gets home, in addition to the whole "too many pints to drive" thing, which is canon but never seems to turn up much after the initial "Orange juice or what?" line. It's hard to resist working these things out when you're putting down text, and to spend time with a map of Oxford and to wonder where the hell the boys live.
I'm trying to avoid this by using my favorite "skip the next obvious scene" technique (and ending scenes in the middle), which it strikes me now is a rather visual-media-derived method. But the back of my head is still urging me to make it all make sense.
In comparison, I think in most book canons the logistics are fairly well worked out (I mean, I don't know exactly how one gets from Vorkosigan House to the Imperial Residence, but it's reasonably easy to fake) and so one can spend time worrying about other things. Which one will.
Logistics. I'm not talking about the niceties of forensic science or police procedure or anything like that, but just consistency and how things fit together. It's far less of a worry in a TV show or movie, where you just cut from one scene to another that could take place an hour later or the next day, but in writing there's an urge to cover (even in half a sentence) the intervening period and to figure out how characters get from here to there. For example, Lewis and Hathaway are always driving around to crime scenes, and frequently they take one car. If they're coming from home, one of them presumably picks the other up; they seem to take turns. (You wouldn't want the same nondescript car on screen all the time, I guess. Lewis apparently sold Morse's Jaguar.) On the show the logistics of this don't matter; in fic I've noticed a strong tendency to worry about whose car is where and who lives where and how everyone gets home, in addition to the whole "too many pints to drive" thing, which is canon but never seems to turn up much after the initial "Orange juice or what?" line. It's hard to resist working these things out when you're putting down text, and to spend time with a map of Oxford and to wonder where the hell the boys live.
I'm trying to avoid this by using my favorite "skip the next obvious scene" technique (and ending scenes in the middle), which it strikes me now is a rather visual-media-derived method. But the back of my head is still urging me to make it all make sense.
In comparison, I think in most book canons the logistics are fairly well worked out (I mean, I don't know exactly how one gets from Vorkosigan House to the Imperial Residence, but it's reasonably easy to fake) and so one can spend time worrying about other things. Which one will.
