This is a continuation of my last post, which just got cut off. Never had a blog before. Need to learn when they have their limits. Anyway, as I was saying, Tolkien had certain elements in his stories that would be considered bad storytelling today. Peter Jackson dealt with this by cutting those parts or making small changes. We may judge him for that, but here’s the thing, in the modern world of novel writing, things wouldn’t be much different.

When I started reading, I learned about this thing called “bad writing” and “good writing.” Bad writing leaned too heavily on exposition, engaged in constant head hopping, used brand names, and introduced too many characters, i.e., all the stuff I do. Good writing concentrated on action scenes, stayed from one perspective per chapter, avoided adverbs, and made you care about the characters. Good writing was short, cutting all the unnecessary fat, and it used strong verbs. As I pointed out in my earlier post, by these standards, Tolkien was an awful writer. So were a lot of old writers. Doestoevsky spends so much time on exposition, he’s practically writing an editorial. Douglas Adams went on tangents that took up nearly half of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. And all of these writers made extensive use of omniscient viewpoint, which is now considered verboten.

The standard explanation for this is that people had different tastes in the past. However, I’m not willing to merely accept that people had different tastes without asking “Do we have better tastes now?” After learning from a few tough reviews what the expectations of modern writing were, I wrote Beer Run. Now it’s getting published! Which is great! A dream come true! I thank the people at Solstice Publishing for making it happen. (www.SolsticePublishing.com) However, one beta review I got sticks with me.

“It’s like an episode of a TV show.”

He meant that as a compliment, and why not? There are a lot of good television shows out there. There’s nothing wrong with a book that is like a TV show. It’s compact. It has memorable characters and a limited cast. There’s humor and action. Witty dialogue. Little to no exposition. The world is relatable and doesn’t require that much exposition to explain. That’s largely due to the fact that the world borrows a lot from classic science fiction and our own world. A story about a microbrewery on the moon in a Federation-like world depends on the reader to understand the Federation and microbreweries, something the general public is already familiar with.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the rules of modern writing appear to turn books into inferior movies. The perfect modern book is comprised of action scenes interspersed with dialogue. Sound like something you know? The golden rule of “show, don’t tell” tries to turn literature, a written medium, into a visual medium. The problem is books are not a visual medium. A camcorder will be able to show better than the most skilled novelist. The strength of literature is storytelling. There’s a reason that Hollywood scours novels and comic books for its latest blockbusters. And then Hollywood started running out of ideas. It seems that novels are imitating visual media without realizing how dependent visual media is on literature. Hollywood likes fantasy and science fiction, and those things are tough to do when the norm is a limited third-person perspective, cut exposition, and minimizing the number of characters.

If I were to give advice to myself three and a half years ago when I started writing, I would tell myself to learn these modern rules if you want to get published. It’s good advice for writers. I’m not sure it’s good for writing. Imitating visual media in the stories we tell puts novels at a disadvantage and it limits the kinds of stories we can tell. Just a thought.