i love books because they depend so heavily upon the reader’s imagination and level of engagement with the narrative; it’s an inherently subjective experience. which is why screen adaptations of books are a weird thing for me because i’m just so used to not having to rely on concrete, definitive visuals to follow the story. all the fictional characters i grew up reading about have no faces, because there are minimal to no descriptions about how any of them actually look like. the reader’s impression of the character has to be constructed in a systematic manner––through seeing them from other characters’ eyes, through relationship dynamics, through their actions and decisions, etc. in a way, authors are forced to do this, because there’s no way else you can shape the reader’s understanding of, and attachment to, a character through mere text on a page. the inherent restrictions of the medium actually give rise to the richness and malleability of the tools available for utilisation. you can only convey meaning through words––so you come up with all kinds of different ways to do that, from tone to symbolism to form and structure. how something/one looks becomes the lowest priority; how something feels becomes the central and most important thing.

so in effect, lazy writing is basically a sin, because the nature of the medium demands that you put some base effort into your writing, if not you might as well not write at all because it won’t be worthwhile. and you’d be disrespecting the craft. like, not to sound importunate, but the least you should do is honour your own capacity for creativity bc it will reflect in your writing. if you fall back on well-established tropes and conventions, then it will show too.