In this article, I am standing on the shoulders of giants. Lincoln Michel wrote two exceptional posts about this, called “Turning Off the TV In Your Mind” and “What Not Reading Does to Your Writing.” Recurring Bafflement also did a small series on the concept, though she called it “novelization style.” So, I am by no means the progenitor of this idea and won’t take credit for the thought.

I love these posts because they get at something that has aggravated me for a long time: the emerging trend of writers treating books like novelizations of a nonexistent TV show, movie, or anime. These writers really wanted to have a TV show of their grand idea, but they saw writing a book as a consolation prize.

The thing is that, as Lincoln Michel points out, TV and prose are completely different mediums with unique strengths. Would-be authors who write like they removed the line breaks in a screenplay are not harnessing the true strengths of prose because, frankly, they don’t want to. They’re hoping that someone will pick up their book and turn it into their preferred format. Which, as someone who has wanted to be an author (of a book) since age seven, kinda hurts my feels.

I’m not going to rehash everything that Michel and Recurring Bafflement said because then there’s no point to my article. Rather, I’m going to consider ways to shift your mentality away from the TV world and into prose through things that don’t necessarily have to anything to do with your prose itself.

Do not rely on audiobooks to teach you writing.

Yes, you do have to read in order to write (we’ll talk about this in a minute). There is no way around this. But I understand that if you’ve spent your whole life watching a lot of TV, then reading can be challenging. Your brain is more focused on processing visual stimuli than decoding written language.

Some TV brain writers tell themselves they are compromising by listening to audiobooks. Bzzt. Audiobooks are a fine way to entertain yourself, but here’s the problem. Just like the human brain uses different neural circuits to process visual stimuli, it also uses different neural circuits to process auditory language (with some overlap).

In fact, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have found that all three of these inputs – auditory, visual, and written – hit different wiring.

The circuits you use in reading books are similar (but not identical) to the ones you need to produce them. But, again, not the same circuits as those to process visual or auditory stimuli. This is all well and good for readers/listeners; they don’t need to process the written word to enjoy the story. But not so good for writers.

In other words, listening to an audiobook does not teach you how to write. It would be more akin to learning how to become a good old-timey storyteller around a campfire. Let me reiterate: spoken language hits different parts of the brain than written language. And visual formats also use alternative wiring, even though you need your eyeballs to read.

This is not a bad thing … if you want to be a film director, voice actor, or TV producer. But you need to study the art form you actually want to produce. You can only do that by putting words in front of your eyes and reading them.

Read short stories every week.

Reading a book when you have spent your whole life watching TV and movies is challenging. Your processing centers for written communication are weaker and must be stimulated through, well … written communication.

But we don’t need to dive in to War and Peace right away. After all, you likely aren’t going to be diving into writing a book like War and Peace on your first try. Books require strong attention to detail, juggling thousands of data points, and balancing a range of difficult skills, like characterization, themes, and dialogue. We can start small.

Challenge yourself to read one short story a week, or two if you’re ambitious. You can Google lists of “best short stories” and pick whichever one interests you. Take your time with it; don’t skim and let your eyes cross. Tell yourself you’ll give this just as much time as you would a full length novel.

The goal here is to get comfortable decoding written language, considering how word choice impacts the experience, the flow of words.

I’m a busy woman, so most of my reading recommendations in my weekly newsletter are short stories or articles I happened to like. Of course I read books, too, but it sometimes takes me longer than a week to read them because I’ve got so many other things going on.

Or they’re books I read for personal enjoyment that might not be, ah … most appropriate for my readership. Danmei novels are my poison.

Anyway, I also share a different poem every week, which is another great way to start thinking about the flow of language. They’re short, easy to digest, and infinitely rereadable.

If you’re struggling to develop a reading and writing habit, I encourage you to check out my newsletter. It only takes about five minutes a week to read and is full of good advice.

Plus, it’s completely free. No paywall whatsoever.

Stop watching scripted visual media and start watching bodycam or interrogation footage.

I do not watch live-action movies or TV shows. The last TV show I watched was The Untamed back in 2024; before that, the last one was The Expanse in 2018.

My primary visual media was the Touken Ranbu anime between 2021 and 2023, for which I wrote 1.6 million words of fanfic. Once I started writing the Eirenic Verses, I lost interest in anime entirely.

Yes. I know how that insane that sounds. But you must understand that I didn’t grow up watching TV or movies. I watched maybe three cartoon series my entire life, and a tiny handful of movies.

However, I am not a Luddite. I watch a lot of visual media; it’s just unscripted.

I credit my good dialogue skills with the fact that I watch a metric ass ton of interrogation videos and bodycam footage, in addition to being a nosy eavesdropper.

People speak differently in real life than they do in scripted shows because, well, scripted shows are not real. Someone getting arrested doesn’t have time to carefully choose every word, nor are they being told what to say by someone who had a lot of time to carefully choose every word.

As such, you get to see and hear how people act when they are confronted with unusual situations, processing conversation in real time, and in a heightened emotional state.

With the exception of some very unusual individuals (the creepy would-be movie villain from this video comes to mind), people don’t speak in long monologues in real life. They will generally say two sentences, maybe three, or less. You start to see that when you listen to the casual back-and-forth scene in bodycam footage.

You see me use these principles in the first chapter I showed from Absent All Light (coming June 23, 2026).

“Then tell me, dear one, what makes you accept these marks.” Rubbing her sigil-adorned thumb across Cerie’s knuckle, Irith waited. Her blue eyes seemed vacuous pools in the fire-shade, too hard to regard for more than a few seconds.

Cerie lowered her gaze to the slab floor. The answer burned in her chest: acrid smoke. Razed fields throwing up their ghostly alarm calls, long after the farmers had been killed. Glazed eyes of her dead parents staring sightless at the sun. Murdered by marauding Sinans drunk on victory.

“Because this is how we win the war,” she said, her low voice rough and slow. “Because High Poetry prevents others from losing their parents, too.”

Irith patted her hand again before letting go. Keeping her head down, Cerie listened to the shuffling in the cedar chest, the clink of different implements.

Cerie doesn’t give us some grand, melodramatic speech. She says it plainly, even though we can see from her point of view that she’s an intelligent and eloquent woman.

So, if you like visual media, you don’t have to surrender it entirely. Just change what you watch and get comfortable watching real people. After all, if you want your characters to feel realistic, then they must act realistic.

Imagine your character’s eyes as cameras.

If you have TV brain prose, then you are thinking of your POV as a camera. However, you’re doing it in a way that better suits film: an omniscient POV without access to the character’s thoughts.

We do not need to eradicate your cognition style, and I don’t think it’d be possible if you were raised on a steady diet of visual storytelling. After all, our early experiences in life do change the way we think and process the world around us.

Instead, we need to limit the perspective, narrow it down. Think of it like having one stationary camera rather than cutting between different camera angles. You can only see what is in front of that one single camera.

Just like you, as a real-life person, cannot look directly behind you, your character also cannot. They may be able to hear things behind them, or sense someone coming up behind them, but they can’t see another person’s expression unless that character is right in front of them.

Here’s an example of what I mean by a fixed camera. In this scene from What Is Cannot Be Unwritten, Mordrek is getting flogged.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Mordrek flinched when the flog came down hard on his exposed back. A spicy shock fired down his spine. As Paint pulled back the flog, he felt the agonizing scrape of the tiny barbs tearing his flesh.

“I don’t know!”

“Of course you don’t.”

The flog slammed into him again, and he clenched his teeth. Agonized distraction: analyzing the pain-pattern across his shoulder blades. That was better than hearing the fire whining as it heated up the branding rake. He doubted it was for show.

“A name or two, please.”

Smack. The blood itched as it oozed down the skin not yet brutalized by the flog. Mordrek rocked violently, sawing at his own knees and wrists to dull the burning.

Mordrek has his eyes closed here, so we don’t get to see anything, only feel or hear things. This immediately draws us into his body; we know we are embodying his perspective, no one else’s.

Provide physical sensations.

This brings up another unique aspect of prose, which is that we get to feel things through the character. TV brain often has everyone visually express pain rather than actually tell us how it feels because visual formats don’t allow you to embody the character.

As such, you’ll see sentences from the character’s POV where they grimace or move instead of truly experience the physical sensations. The writer has never had to consider what something feels like in someone’s body, so they don’t know how to explain it.

Physical feelings are hard to do in prose and are often best captured by simile or metaphor because otherwise you’re just talking about “his arm broke” or whatever.

Here’s an example from the upcoming Absent All Light, where Cerie has almost drowned:

Then, she was thrown onto her back, two fists pounding her chest in rhythm. Chapped lips sealed around her mouth, and hot air flew down her throat so fast she choked.

Of everything that had happened, this was the worst.

She shoved Uileac away, rolling onto her hands and knees. “I’m breathing, godsdamnit!”

A column of blood-tinged water spattered the dark grass. Now the fists had relocated to her back, where they beat unkindly against her spine.

“You’re a disgrace. A moron.” Uileac continued agitating the fluid in her lungs as she retched. “I’m so ashamed of you.”

Ignoring the comments, Cerie gulped air that burned like liquor in her chest. She wheezed; the hands slowed, then turned to gentle patting.

Icky. I’d be revolted by Uileac putting his nasty mouth on me too.

If you’ve ever almost drowned or gotten water in your lungs, you know that feeling of burning fire in your chest. This makes it easier to remember that we are in Cerie’s POV, not some omniscient camera.

Include interiority.

Your character is a camera, but they are a camera with a brain. This is the most remarkable aspect of prose that TV or movies cannot replicate, and it is the number one way to fix TV brain. Which is why I have left it for last. What a tease I am.

Now, we don’t want excessive interiority. This is a problem that fanfic writers often have when they are transitioning to original fiction, because one of the charms of fanfiction is being able to reinterpret characters.

A sentence or two between interaction is plenty enough. If you’ve got a full half-page of a character musing to themselves, you need to chunk it up with actions or dialogue.

Let your characters think and mentally react to things during a scene. This keeps them feeling like fully fleshed-out individuals instead of cardboard cutouts.

If you have them doing a bunch of actions, slip in a thought or two. Consider how you often have random stray thoughts even in tense moments, like noticing the color of the sky outside the window or remembering something you have to do tomorrow. These digressions let us know what the character values and reminds us that they are a fallible human being, with the intrusive thoughts we are all known to suffer from at times.

If you have multiple POVs, ensure each of them has a different thinking style.

This is a bit more challenging and only applies if you have multiple POV characters, either in different books or within the same one. Doing this means understanding how your character thinks (because good characters think). Some people have a snarky inner voice, others are softer and gentler.

In Funeral of Hopes, we get to see Uileac’s inner monologue while he and Orrinir perform a training exposition for a bunch of first-year students:

Orrinir was still recovering from the failed downswing, shoulders rounded as if in pain. But Uileac hadn’t struck true—not even close. Maybe his husband was running out of energy this soon into the fight.

He had one chance to end this, hopefully without disemboweling the love of his life. Rushing Orrinir gave the man an opportunity to sidestep, and he’d be propelled right into the wall. Stupid as he’d look, it’d be better than keeping this up. The kids would learn something, anyway, though he wasn’t sure what.

Eking out a weak scream, Uileac charged toward Orrinir with his blade in front of him for a strong forward thrust.

But his partner did not move.

Orrinir had perhaps six seconds to change the outcome. Uileac had always been faster than his taller, heftier husband. With a running start and a big target, there would be little chance of missing. This dim horror dawned on him after he’d already committed to the strike.

Uileac is always thinking ahead: calculating, assessing weak spots, estimating how much time Orrinir has to sidestep.

We also see he’s a pretty prideful person, worried about looking stupid in front of a bunch of children. Even though he’s been getting his ass beat this whole fight because he’s a dumbass cavalryman and not skilled in swordplay.

Contrast this with Mordrek from What Is Cannot Be Unwritten, who is renowned for his gallows humor and constant mockery of pretty much everything – including himself.

Rock bottom. How appropriate.

He pushed against the ground with a burst of dying energy; his head exploded from the surface, and he gasped, reaching out for some ledge he wasn’t sure was there. Only a small spot of light trickled down from behind him, where a veil of rain replenished the pool from the cliffs above. Not enough to see the ends of this infernal cesspit that had lain dormant for centuries.

Like floating in the Melinun Sea, he told himself. Just lay on the water’s surface until he gathered more information or bumped into an edge. Spreading his arms and legs out, Mordrek reoriented himself to face the hole he’d fallen from, trying to identify how tall this cavern was. Perhaps half a story in height. The pool itself was maybe the depth of two average men. So about two-and-a-half Mordreks.

While Mordrek is also tactical, it’s not quite so cold and dispassionate as Uileac. He’s more self-deprecating with a sardonic twist that shows up even when he’s in serious peril.

That’s why it’s going to be so fun when these two idiots are forced to go on an adventure in the seventh book, Shadow and Sword. Fighting like cats and dogs! I can’t wait for their reluctant buddy-cop moment.

If you really want to have a TV series, please do not think of books as some inferior stepping stone. They are completely separate art forms that require different approaches.

The best screen adaptations were from books that were originally meant as books. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Outlander, Dune, and the Hunger Games series were all books that were never intended to be transferred to a visual format.

These beloved series may have beautiful storylines and settings, but turning them into movies or TV shows took expertise and planning. It was not a ready-made transition, and their richness came from the fact that they were perfectly suited to their original form. They became popular enough for film because the stories resonated emotionally, not visually.

TV brain books aren’t memorable because they don’t have the very things that make people want to adapt them. They don’t make anyone feel anything; they are too overwhelming because, as Lincoln Michel noted, they focus on mechanical descriptions and stacking visuals rather than interiority or beautiful prose.

Simply put, you are not going to get your book to the silver screen by mimicking the screen itself. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming about your books being turned into a movie series – I occasionally muse about that myself – but that should not be the primary focus. The focus should be on making a good book, not a knock-off of a nonexistent movie.