I was just recently thinking about the differences between books and films, and brought one of my older thoughts a little bit further. I have long held that novels are best suited to stories that deal with the tension between narrator and narrative. By extension, first-person narration is often the best and certainly the easiest way to explore that tension, but that led me to take it a step further than that. I have noticed in my work that I tend to write for ensemble casts whenever I write for visual media, whereas my novelistic attempts tend to gravitate towards a single character, but only recently have I realized why.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that ensembles are just a better setup for visual media that do not have the opportunity to explore the internal lives thereof. I am also becoming convinced that this is because a good ensemble consists of a range of characters representing the different aspects of what would ordinarily be a real person. We contain multitudes, every one of us. We are different people in different company, that much is obvious, but we are also different people in the same company with only a change in situation required. You talk to your wife differently over dinner than while thrashing out your tax returns. And such behavior is not considered dishonesty, I daresay it is even expected. Using a casual, jovial tone with the tax returns or a pragmatic, businesslike tone over dinner would both be considered very odd indeed.
My point is that we are lots of different people, and really only with internal narration of the sort that novels allow us to indulge in can we explore those inner multitudes. Depending on how they are used, comics and stageplays can also convey this to some extent by creating associations between images through juxtaposition.
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