I started reading Clive Barker's Hellbound Heart (the novella later adapted into Hellraiser) this morning, and reading prose from the 80s has me thinking about The Issue With Books These Days that I keep going on about, and also about this tumblr post that I've been sitting on:
A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.
When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.
fascinated by this article, “Turning Off the TV in Your Mind,” about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that’s something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i’m writing.
(sapphoshands, on Turning off the TV in Your Mind, by Lincoln Michel)
I do not wholly agree with the conclusions drawn -- that is, I think what is being described is a symptom rather than the cause -- but the results are what I've been noticing and describing, I think. The 'and then this and then that and then this' nature of a lot of modern writing, just action after action with little variation, broken up with paragraphs of bland description, and when there is internality it is shallow and could have been an action instead.
Not long ago I was reading The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica and translated into English by Sarah Moses, and I was thoroughly enjoying it. It is a modern book but, as said, translated into English from another language, and so potentially in that way avoids pitfalls of whatever is happening to English literature right now. While it is written in the style of a diary and with an extremely limited viewpoint (I've described the feeling of reading this book like peeking into a room through a keyhole), it is also deeply internal. Hellbound Heart, while I'm only twenty or so pages into it, is also deeply internal -- and, while I would not say it is skillfully so, it is still more engaging than other things I've tried to read in recent years.
But I don't think this is the whole story -- Freakslaw was very internal but had something about it that reeks of this 'modern prose' problem. Sheri S. Tepper's writing is heavily environmental, as opposed to internal, I think, and I greatly enjoy her works.
There's something about the rhythm of things, and while I think there is absolutely something to this internality theory, and possibly 'thinking in visual media', I think there's also something about the study I talked about previously where students, while reading, weren't able to fully connect the context of one line to the next. A disjointedness, perhaps.
As always I don't have any grand conclusion, here, except that I need to just read more twenty-, thirty-year-old fiction.