Right there with you on the "contemplating your navel" sin of writing. That was my novel's biggest problem. I kept stalling the action with these long sections of everyone sitting around talking, discussing what happened in the past - so on. I kept using dialogue to tell the reader about character or what had happened, instead of showing. A fiction teacher once told me: dialogue is jockeying for position - it should either show the reader who the character is or move the plot forward. And I break the rule every time.
You know what I think it is, for me, anyway? Being part of the TV/films generation. I know that sounds backwards--wouldn't constantly watching TV/films make you MORE action oriented instead of less? Well, I think it's the interaction between the kinds of novels we write (people like you and I) and growing up with television as the medium that taught us the art of story-telling.
We don't write "action-packed thrillers", we write (at least I write) novels about people in relationships. So there's bound to be some down time when there's not a lot of action going on. This is when our characters stop to consider what is going on in their lives, and make choices.
Now writing a novel is supposed to let you wander through your character's head, be in their mind while they muddle things through. But I don't write that way. Instead, I have my characters muddle through their problems over coffee or beer with another character. Why? Because that's the way it gets done on TV and films, where you can't get inside a character's head except through voice-over narration, which seems old-fashioned.
So my novel's action comes across rather like a screen play. There are moments of action and moments of dialogue (and sometimes, both combined).
When I ran some chapters of my story by some fiction work-shops, and then beta-d it, a lot of the feedback I got was, "We don't get into the character's heads". So I went back and did a lot of changes where I added introspection. Then I had this absurd manuscript in which I had my characters thinking about situation X at the same time they were "hashing over" situation X with another character. Repetitive information.
Most of that is gone now, smoothed out so that the "talking heads" scenes combine one set of information in the dialogue and a different set of information in the p.o.v. character's thoughts. I even have a couple interesting chapters where the character is talking to someone about one thing and thinking of something else entirely.
But still, did TV viewing ruin me for writing fiction? How come I could read a ton of fiction, watch a ton of TV, and my first writing efforts still come across as a screen play masquerading as a novel?
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branchandroot
Re: Ah yes..
Date: 2004-03-22 03:22 pm (UTC)You know what I think it is, for me, anyway? Being part of the TV/films generation. I know that sounds backwards--wouldn't constantly watching TV/films make you MORE action oriented instead of less? Well, I think it's the interaction between the kinds of novels we write (people like you and I) and growing up with television as the medium that taught us the art of story-telling.
We don't write "action-packed thrillers", we write (at least I write) novels about people in relationships. So there's bound to be some down time when there's not a lot of action going on. This is when our characters stop to consider what is going on in their lives, and make choices.
Now writing a novel is supposed to let you wander through your character's head, be in their mind while they muddle things through. But I don't write that way. Instead, I have my characters muddle through their problems over coffee or beer with another character. Why? Because that's the way it gets done on TV and films, where you can't get inside a character's head except through voice-over narration, which seems old-fashioned.
So my novel's action comes across rather like a screen play. There are moments of action and moments of dialogue (and sometimes, both combined).
When I ran some chapters of my story by some fiction work-shops, and then beta-d it, a lot of the feedback I got was, "We don't get into the character's heads". So I went back and did a lot of changes where I added introspection. Then I had this absurd manuscript in which I had my characters thinking about situation X at the same time they were "hashing over" situation X with another character. Repetitive information.
Most of that is gone now, smoothed out so that the "talking heads" scenes combine one set of information in the dialogue and a different set of information in the p.o.v. character's thoughts. I even have a couple interesting chapters where the character is talking to someone about one thing and thinking of something else entirely.
But still, did TV viewing ruin me for writing fiction? How come I could read a ton of fiction, watch a ton of TV, and my first writing efforts still come across as a screen play masquerading as a novel?