"Look at this, isn't it beautiful"
I am a visual person. I learn visually, I love art, I am drawn to beautiful things, and I appreciate the visual medium so much more than any other medium. Visual storytelling, the art of facial expressions in acting, color theory, beautiful things for the eye to absorb and appreciate, all of it. And it is easier to show your work with something to look at. A painting, a video, a sculpture, things you can hang on your wall or set on your mantle, or show to your friends. Something for others to see and appreciate and react to. Something you can say, "look at this" and watch their reactions and feel the satisfaction and gratification of how you moved them after all the work you have put into it.
But I am not a visual creator. I can't draw, or paint, or edit movies, or sculpt. I write, and the written word is such a different kind of media, such a different form of art, that it can't be appreciated the way other art can. The things I create can't sit on the mantle for people to look at and appreciate. What I create takes hours or days to view, and there's no way for me to see their reaction to what I've created. I can't take a picture and send it to a friend and say "look what I made today". I can't ask a reader "did you see what I was doing here? how did that make you feel?" because chances are they won't remember the individual pieces, because there are too many.
There's also the time element to it. A piece of visual art can come together in as little as a few hours, and then you have something to show for your time. But writing takes so much longer. Novels take months and years, and even short stories or poems can take weeks to get right. It's frustrating, spending so much time on something, that you can't just share out. And with art, you can share the work as it is in progress. Even an unfinished painting is beautiful to look at. An un-edited story or an unfinished novel means nothing. You can't share it until it is fully complete.
This has been a deep frustration of mine for a very long time.
Today I watched a video essay about the movie Dune Part 2, and just the way the essayist talked about the movie, about the visuals and the subtle changes and the visual storytelling that adds layers, brought up that frustration again, because nothing I write will ever be talked about like that. Because there are no visuals in written story. It's all black ink on slices of dead trees, and anything visual happens in the reader's imagination, which I have no control over like a filmmaker or artist has control over what to show.
I know I'm being too hard, on myself, on the written word. Written stories have purpose and place just as much as visual art. I can chose my words carefully to paint specific pictures, and there are just as many literary devices as there are filmmaking devices, and there is precedent for deep-dive book reviews that are just as amazing as the video essay I watched.
But it still hurts not being able to say "here, look what I did" and have people look at it and say "wow, that is beautiful, you did a good job."