Craft Decisions #3
One of my biggest pet peeves with modern anything these days is the relentless drive to optimize for the latest thing. The attention machine is constantly seeking novelty, something that fits in the current cultural Overton Window, in which I will include far more than just its typical political framing and use it to include trends in general.
You can see this across all forms of media. Not just fiction or writing in general, but in music, in movies, even in video games. Something explodes and suddenly there are twenty variants of that same thing in a matter of months whereas before there were none. In music you see the gradual progression through the decades from jazz to rock to rap to punk rock to pop to EDM and on and on. In games it is visible in the years where shooters are everywhere, or RPGS, or strategy games, and then years where your favorite genre is on a total hiatus, nowhere to be found.
In writing, this same relentless chase of the latest and greatest can lead to stylistic frames that completely alter the intended nature of your book. I have touched on some of these in earlier posts, around the inability of many modern books to refrain from the urge to instill artificial tension into the plot through the use of constant escalation. However, another area that this finds its way into modern fiction is through the ‘show, don’t tell’ editing style and its implications are no less significant.
Anyone who has written fiction has probably heard this advice from at least a few different editors and sources, if not nearly all of them. It sounds innocuous at its heart when you hear it, in fact it sounds almost like common sense. Of course you should have your character’s actions show who they are rather than a monologue. Why settle with narration when you can be far more dynamic and simply have the character resolve conflict in a way that demonstrates their moral frame and world view?
In small doses, this makes perfect sense, and it’s something that you will see in some of my writing, when it suits a particular chapter or in the case of minor characters. If taken to the extreme, however, it greatly limits your ability to build out your characters and their points of view and limits the story that you can tell dramatically. What ‘show don’t tell’ assumes at its heart is a generic and bland character. One that makes a decision in a consistent and repeated way that shows that they are the Good Guy or the Funny Guy. And where it falls apart is when you want to tell a story with far greater depth than that and with characters that don’t fit neatly into boxes.
Without an inner monologue that allows you a window into the character, you might as well be watching generic Hero number seven thousand, rather than your unique character. And if you are trying to create a rich world, with characters that stay with the reader long after they close the book’s cover, than giving them a series of short dialogues and long action sequences will always fall short. There is a time and place for a Bond movie but if every movie was a Bond movie than we’d all be far worse off. And so it falls on the individual writers to push back and stay true to their intended vision if they wish to tell a different kind of story.
If you haven’t read An Enduring Spark yet then let this serve as a warning. Through the points of view of the main characters, you will be exposed to long internal monologues that drive their decisions and showcase the way that they perceive the world around them. As the series progresses, the number of characters with their own POV chapters increases, while the main characters continue to be the primary vehicle around which the story is told. And in each case, I am deliberate in using their monologues to create characters that are neither good, nor bad, but simply themselves.
This doesn’t mean that there won’t be action or that you won’t see their choices through the way that they overcome challenges, or navigate romances, or confront their enemies. What it does mean is that you will see that those choices are never as clean as they would seem without that deeper window. Romance does not come without indecision, regret and mistakes. Heroism is sometimes simply stubbornness and circumstance rather than courage or steadfastness. Villainy may just be a different view on how the world operates and what it necessitates from an individual in response.
Characters whose actions seem evil may be the ones that you will come to relate to the most by the end, and those who appear virtuous may simply be naïve or inflexible. None of this nuance is possible if too much emphasis is placed solely on the next battle or the latest betrayal, without some of the thoughts that accompanied it. There is almost nothing in the real world that is all black or all white and I would do my own created world an injustice if I did not build it to reflect this reality.
So prepare yourself to be shown the truth of a character, and to be told all the ways that they could have chosen differently than they did, and the costs that they bore for the decisions they made. For what is life if not a series of tradeoffs that were invisible in the moment but impossible not to see with hindsight. And what is regret if not a given in a world where you can do anything your heart desires, so long as you give up all the things that those desires will cost you.
Much love as always,
Nick