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If I have one weakness as a writer of fiction—and oh, how I wish I had only one weakness as a writer of fiction—it’s in the area of Moving Characters Around. Looking at my problems with simply getting from point A to point B, it occurs to me that a large part of the problem is my handling of time; not so much the pacing per se as the way time passes on the page.
Essentially, I only seem to have two modes of presentation. The first is highly detailed, moment-by-moment, roughly real-time, e.g.
His eyes did not meet mine. “What are you thinking?” I asked.
He blinked slowly, like a lizard. “Nothing,” he said.
I rubbed my nose, less a scratch than a gesture of annoyance.
And so on, often at tremendous length.
The second is the bare-bones flyover. From a work in progress:
For three days they walked vaguely south, where the prairies turned into rolling hills. Once or twice Katy fancied she felt eyes upon them; but Pismire assured her they were quite alone. Still, she noticed his hand crept often to the pommel of his sword as he walked, and he slept uneasily. Just before noon of the fourth day, they came to the long river valley and turned west, walking on with the river to their left while the moon changed shape above them.
Now, neither of these viewpoints is sufficient in itself to telling a modern mainstream narrative. The former is the stuff of experimental fiction, of those odd Nicholson Baker books where the action of the narrative is meant to unfold in same amount of time it takes to read the book, while telling an entire story in the latter style went out with Beowulf. Luckily, that one only gets trotted out when necessary and fitting.
Problem is, sometimes I want to telescope a scene—to present the decision without slogging through all the reasoning and counter-argument that leads to the decision, for instance. And neither narrative gambit is really appropriate for that. The real-time approach produces pages and pages of dialogue that takes forever to get anywhere; sometimes I feel less like a writer than a secretary, taking transcription.The overview approach, on the other hand, doesn’t lend itself to smaller increments.
Back in the day, writers had strategies to deal with this stuff. In Dickens, or Hugo, or Ford Madox Ford, there are all these middle-path passages, economical paragraphs along the lines of
Oliver pleaded his case with Mr Bumble for a quarter-hour, but in the end it profited him little; the old beadle, though at first seeming well-disposed to Oliver’s protestations of innocence, presently began to lose patience with the boy, and ascertained to settle the affair by the expedient of shouting remonstrances at Oliver, beating him soundly, and sending him off to bed with empty hands and a rumbling belly.
The thing is, I don’t think I could ever write a paragraph like that in my own work. (I mean, I wrote that one, but I was imitating someone else.) It does the job on the page, but it flouts the prohibition drilled into me by every writing teacher I’ve had since I could first hold a pencil: Show, don’t tell.
I suspect another part of the problem is my training as a screenwriter, and the general way in which the modern sensibility has been unconsciously influenced by the conventions of the movies. Because my two modes are really cinematic modes, aren’t they? We’re either in among the characters as the scene unfolds, or we’re up above in the passage-of-time montage, with pages flying off the calendar and Indiana Jones’s airplane leaving a red line along the map. The third way—the way of the faux-Dickens passage above—is inherently literary, and rarely makes it to the screen; and when it does, it inevitably requires a narrator on the soundtrack (the opening of The Royal Tenenbaums springs to mind). It can work onscreen—and brilliantly—but then, film allows you to both show and tell (as Wes Anderson does).
(And there’s a fourth mode, of course—the title card, e.g., “Ten years later,” which works pretty much the same way onscreen and on the page.)
So: questions. Is there a way around this? What narrative tricks or ploys work to keep the action from bogging down in moment-to-moment detail? Should fiction be cinematic—that is, should it contain within itself its own screen adaptation?
This post seemed a lot more clear and incisive in my head, before I started writing it down. |
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