How a writer can take advantage of this: Describe things that are not happening on the screen in order to induce confusion on the reader subtext can be delivered without the need of any internal monologues as the situations carry themselves forward, dramatically speaking speaking of internal monologues, these can be delivered while something else is happening. In other words - while in a novel the narrator aggregates the dialogue to create a flow, in a VN the dialogue is the flow. This is unnecessary in VNs - unwelcome, even - due to the fact that we already know who said what. On addition, action has the upper hand against impression: in novels, speech is often followed by a statement about the situation, who said it or what was the impact of said speech in the action's flow. To be perfectly practical, it doesn't matter whether a character thinks another character is beautiful: we can judge that by ourselves because we can see them. In visual novels, however, the narrator is always unreliable because the reader always has other points of reference. What this means for the writer: Literature loves their unreliable narrators as a modernist feature. Indeed, the notion that events are scripted instead of described places a lot more emphasis on characters than on narrators - even in first person narratives, which means the reader has more freedom, so to speak, to evaluate what is going on by themselves. This probably makes writing in VNs closer to screenwriting (which, unsurprisingly, are also written in the present tense) than one might think. In visual novels, however, they are part what is going on, even if it's just a sequence of static pictures. Illustration in books comes with a hidden "kinda like this" tag, almost an afterthought.
![where to visual novels where to visual novels](https://i0.wp.com/supernerdland.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/tSaJs4j.png)
If you promote the visual experience to the same status as the text, you bring stories to the present. No matter how detached and descriptive a narrator is in a book, you'll always see the impression of an event, whereas VNs show events on a screen, much like movies. The verb tense used in the prose doesn't change that, but, rather, the fact that most books use past tense and most visual novels use present tense probably comes from how writers noticed the action, in a visual novel, is an action, not an impression. In visual novels, the story is happening.
![where to visual novels where to visual novels](https://noisypixel.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Please-Be-Happy-800x445.jpg)
For the purposes of this article, consider the most popular kind of narrative-driven novels, the best-sellers. I don't intend to encompass all kinds of novels in this analysis. Pardon me in advance for saying things that will make you go "well, duh!", but the intention is to deconstruct our relationship with the medium to a level from where we can build something entirely new. Now, I'm going to talk about the most basic interactions between a reader and a book, a player and a game.