Rebecca Makkai points out: Fancy three-dimensional sets are easier to construct in books than in movies, but harder to explain

In a post entitled, “You’re Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie,” Rebecca Makkai writes: You want to set your movie in a futuristic New York where every building has a flying car port on top and there are highways through the air and half the people are genetically modified to be 7 feet tall and the sky is red and everyone’s left hand is a phone and all the police are robots? Cool—that will take you all of about ten seconds to get across onscreen. You want to do all that stuff on the page? You’ve got tougher options. Some writers think they’re going to get away with devoting about ten seconds worth of space to establishing the context, or not mention it at all until it’s way too late. Because it’s never mentioned in the movies, it just is! Other writers try to take the time necessary to let us see, in detail, everything we’d see on the screen in ten seconds, and that turns out to be around thirty pages—because on the page, everything needs to be explained. Readers will want to…