So what questions are weighing heavily
on me this evening? None, really. So let's talk about immersiveness
in fiction.
Writing has an old adage: “You must
murder your darlings”. What it means is that when an audience is
traveling through a narrative, there needs to be a flow. A steady
movement from one moment to the next. A writer who writes a
sentence, phrase, paragraph or scene that is too beautiful, too
perfectly written, pulls the reader out of that flow and causes them
to notice the writing instead of the story.
Now there are exceptions. The
beginning or end of a chapter or section can have something like
this, although even there, the writer must be careful. The hooks
that every writer wants to start a story with are a good example of
where this can work, and where it can go horribly awry. There's an
entire contest called The
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest that celebrates the worst possible
opening sentences contestants can come up with. Some of them are
truly horrifying.
On the flip side, there are sentences
that are iconic in literature for being perfect beginnings. “Call
me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times.” And my favorite, “The sky above the port was the color
of television, tuned to a dead channel.” That sentence starts
William Gibson's Neuromancer.
That sentence (written when dead channel meant static, not blue)
created an entire world in my head, that the remainder of the book
filled in perfectly.
But
what about in the middle? The middle is a road, and needs to be
smooth. Bumps in that road, places where the pavement rises above or
falls below the general level, interrupt the journey, make the driver
aware of that particular moment of road rather than the overall
journey on which they have embarked. I don't know about you, but I
hate potholes when I'm behind the wheel.
So the
next question is: how does this simple rule translate into other
media? Tomorrow.
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