Dave wrote:
1. The thing with the "voice" (related in particular to dialogue) comes from my long-standing bias against tons of dialogue. I was taught in workshops that you only "show" the absolutely crucial lines for developing character. Conversation that advances narrative can be "told" as narrative.
I chime in:
I have noticed that in good literary writing, especially short stories, dialog is distilled in the way that Dave describes here, so that the essence of a scene is captured as the charater reacts emotionally, and thinks about it what to do next.
It's a lot harder to do a novel written almost entirely in this mode well than the more conventional way of writing scenes, sequels and narrative summaries as your story building blocks.
If any of you haven't read either Dwight Swain or Jack Bickham's book on scenes and sequels you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but I found this stuff most helpful in letting me figure out what these building blocks of writing are.
In a nutshell, a scene take place in real time, in involves a character with a goal, meeting an obstacle or two, conflict and then when the conflict has built in pitch, everything goes sideways on the character forcing him to re-evaluate or find a new way to meet the goal.
A sequel involves an emotional reaction to some event where the character is processing what happened, starts to think about possible strategies, then makes a decision...which usually goes to set up a new scene.
In literary writing, most of the text is written in sequel mode, so that the scenes are collapsed and distilled to the essence of their conflict. This is why the prize-winners of the Booker confuse us novices with their great telling, when we're told by so many writing books to "show don't tell."
Dave obviously had his training among those who said tell don't show....but the good kind of telling that's a lot harder to do than show. Not the bad telling that's abstract and boring and distancing that new writers often use.
Dave does include some straight scenes in his book, such as the altercation with the reporter, but usually his real time stuff is in the form of conflict-free conversations with his wife.
While I admire many things about ES, I found the lack of conflict made it hard for me to stay interested in the story. I could put the book down too easily.
There are ways to get us inside a character's head in sequel mode so that the telling--with dashes of blow- your-socks-off showing--serves to bring us even closer than we can be watching a scene unfold. But that kind of distillation is extremely tough to do.
I think it's probably better for us to take a stab at writing the scenes, or at least seeing them play out in full in one's mind's eye rather than try to shorthand them off the top. The same thing with playing around with structure. Some people will jump around a lot because that's how bits of the story come to them. But unless you're Marilynne Robinson, it's probably best to learn the discipline of writing great scenes before you collapse them into sequels.
For pacing purposes, you will need to have sequels and scenes, along with narrative summary.
For example, even Robinson's book Gilead begins to pick up pace and become riveting when she starts including some scenes with Jack.
1. The thing with the "voice" (related in particular to dialogue) comes from my long-standing bias against tons of dialogue. I was taught in workshops that you only "show" the absolutely crucial lines for developing character. Conversation that advances narrative can be "told" as narrative.
I chime in:
I have noticed that in good literary writing, especially short stories, dialog is distilled in the way that Dave describes here, so that the essence of a scene is captured as the charater reacts emotionally, and thinks about it what to do next.
It's a lot harder to do a novel written almost entirely in this mode well than the more conventional way of writing scenes, sequels and narrative summaries as your story building blocks.
If any of you haven't read either Dwight Swain or Jack Bickham's book on scenes and sequels you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but I found this stuff most helpful in letting me figure out what these building blocks of writing are.
In a nutshell, a scene take place in real time, in involves a character with a goal, meeting an obstacle or two, conflict and then when the conflict has built in pitch, everything goes sideways on the character forcing him to re-evaluate or find a new way to meet the goal.
A sequel involves an emotional reaction to some event where the character is processing what happened, starts to think about possible strategies, then makes a decision...which usually goes to set up a new scene.
In literary writing, most of the text is written in sequel mode, so that the scenes are collapsed and distilled to the essence of their conflict. This is why the prize-winners of the Booker confuse us novices with their great telling, when we're told by so many writing books to "show don't tell."
Dave obviously had his training among those who said tell don't show....but the good kind of telling that's a lot harder to do than show. Not the bad telling that's abstract and boring and distancing that new writers often use.
Dave does include some straight scenes in his book, such as the altercation with the reporter, but usually his real time stuff is in the form of conflict-free conversations with his wife.
While I admire many things about ES, I found the lack of conflict made it hard for me to stay interested in the story. I could put the book down too easily.
There are ways to get us inside a character's head in sequel mode so that the telling--with dashes of blow- your-socks-off showing--serves to bring us even closer than we can be watching a scene unfold. But that kind of distillation is extremely tough to do.
I think it's probably better for us to take a stab at writing the scenes, or at least seeing them play out in full in one's mind's eye rather than try to shorthand them off the top. The same thing with playing around with structure. Some people will jump around a lot because that's how bits of the story come to them. But unless you're Marilynne Robinson, it's probably best to learn the discipline of writing great scenes before you collapse them into sequels.
For pacing purposes, you will need to have sequels and scenes, along with narrative summary.
For example, even Robinson's book Gilead begins to pick up pace and become riveting when she starts including some scenes with Jack.
Literary writers do not teach a "reduction of dialogue" or "work so hard to minimize scene." (It's possible that I didn't get the memo, of course, but then neither did the authors I typically read.) 