Completely missing the big reveal
There's this thing tv shows and films like to do - especially all the mystery/crime things I hate but end up watching - where the hunt is on and someone is going through evidence and there's this swell of music and they find a photo and their face falls and the camera cuts to the picture of a person...
And I'm like, so... who is that?
It could be a reveal of a main character I've spent hours watching and I'm a total blank. No clue.
I'm just really bad at recognising people in photos. It's not face blindness because I'm actually great at recognising people in real life - Oh yeah, I walked past that person on the street fifteen years ago. It's just photos. There's a photo at my mum's house where every time I glance at it I get confused what this random man is doing here. It's of my brother. I've known that dude a long time!
This sort of thing is one of the interesting differences between visual media and books that I think about all the time. I wrote (am writing? Am not writing but should be?) a fic that I was trying very explicitly to write as if it were a tv show. Messing about with trying to imply camera movement and stuff. Cannot get it to work. Trying anyway.
Sidenote: I'm borderline obsessed with trying to write a montage. How to translate that into writing.
So in this fic there's a moment where if it were a tv show the audience would see a character and make a connection. But because the reader cannot in fact 'see' the character that connection is not made until much later - until the POV characters make it.
Is this cheating? There's enough clues that by the time 'the reveal' of this character happened the readers already knew. Which was good. But if they had been able to 'see' they would have had it way earlier. Or, if it were a tv show, some fudge could have gone on. The door opens but we don't get a clear shot of the character, for example. Or, the audiences do see, and know, and get that juicy anticipation of waiting for the characters to find out.
There's so much that is uniquely great about the novel as an art form. The interiority! The language! But there's some stuff they just cannot do. Which is only intriguing, I think.