Literature, not Journalism

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All---

You've heard these kind of things before:

• Make your diallogue realistic.
• Create characters who are real.
• Tell stories that are real.

I'm hear to tell you today that, to a large extent, that's hooey, if you're writing fiction.

You want to write in such a way that your dialogue comes across as realistic and that your characters come across realistic.  That's not actually possible by simply recording real life.  Anyone who has been involved in theater knows, the actors wear stage makeup and exaggerate their motions -- so that they come across as realistic.  When you look at the up close, they look silly.  When you're doing the acting, you can feel silly.  But when you're in the audience, these things are necessary for things to feel real.

It's the same in other media as well: in photography, in painting, in sculpture.  There are things you do make representations of people seem more realistic than a simple of transcription of reality would seem.

There are a lot of intellectual and psychological and even physical reasons for this, but I think it can become quickly obvious.

First: try transcribing some conversations, literally, word for word, sound for sound, pause for pause.  Notice how little sense people actually make.  If you don't have ready access to conversations, try typing down sportscasters' commentary.  People change sentences mid-way through.  They say, "um," a lot.  They have words they say that mean next to nothing.

Second: try truly describing, in detail, the interaction of a group of people.  Write about all their twitcheing and fidgeting, and staring off into space.  Include their coughs and sniffs and sneezes.  Describe the sound of their voices, their full appearance, the smell of their breath and their bodies.  Talk about how they rearrange their social space.

When you try to record real people behaving as they really do, it's not only daunting, but the product is annoying and difficult to relate to.

Obviously, we make choices.  We choose what to describe and what to talk about, based on what will communicate important character traits or story elements.  We convert people into symbols of people so that the readers can actually relate to them as they might to people.  An information dump merely forces them to engage with  a lot of facts they typical filter, ignore, or subconsciously manage.

Most of you are probably with me up to this point.

Here's where it gets challenging.

I can recall in painful detail countless fights I've gotten into over the years with editors, critique partners, fellow writing class students, and beta readers, in which the gist was this:

THEM: Blah blah blah.  This part doesn't work.


ME: You're so wrong it's almost laughable!  Of course it works.  That's how it works in real life.


Or like this:

THEM: Hoo haa huu.  I can't really follow this part here. It doesn't make sense.


ME: That's on you, not on me.  I can introduce to you two or three people for whom that is precisely how things went in their real lives.


The readers were telling me that something in my fiction didn't work.  I was defending myself and my writing by calling on real life.  Makes sense right?

Actually, I've decided that it doesn't make sense.  When you're writing, and readers don't get it, it doesn't matter how faithful you're being to reality.  We're not journalist -- we're authors.  We already make other choices, right?  We deal with people symbolically.

If there's something you want to get across in your story, don't just show it.  Show it in a way that, as written, your readers will understand it.

I used to hate impressionist paintings.  I still do, but for different reasons.  I used to think they were unrealistic.  Now I'm able to see that they are sometimes more realistic than so-called realistic paintings -- because they communicate something about the very real light and the color that I can understand and experience.

That's what we do in writing.  We create impressions of characters and actions so that our readers can understand and experience.  It's literature, not journalism.

.Nevets.