I will mournfully admit to my precious reader that I have not read a book now in a long, long while. I have not read one to the end, probably since last March, and I have not really just skimmed a few pages of one, for at least two months now. I am not entirely sure what happened; but I seem to have lost my novel reading focus, for a bit of time now.
For nearly 3 years in a row, I was finishing a novel every week and a half or so. Now, suddenly, nothing. I am still writing fairly regularly, but reading has become a different story. I'm...beginning to find it a bit dangerous, I think. The reason why should be obvious: Many of the novels were beginning to effect what I would want to write in the moment. If I read The Green Hills of Africa, by Hemngway, I would start wanting to write my own African safari story. If I instead read Naked Lunch by Burroughs, I would want to write my own Naked Lunch.
So eventually this all got too much to handle. I got a lot of cool short stories out of it, but I also started to get annoyed. I especially began to get aggravated, I think, once I set my mind on creating my own unique characters. This isn't to say that the characters I would create whilst trying to copy a bit of Hemingway weren't unique -- they often were -- but it's mostly to say that they weren't totally free, either. The pirate characters I am determined now to write, for example, are mostly unable to come from any books about pirates, since there aren't many of those around.
They are instead coming from the few movies about pirates that exist. If I were to try and obsessively pull the pirate characters from novels, I would probably wind up with something awful. And unfortunately I find that this is often the same for many novels, in my experience : It isn't that they aren't good - because they are - but rather that something is missing from them. Something like carelessness. It's hard to explain, but basically my idea goes like this: Characters like pirates wound up breathing so much in TV and film, because in those two mediums, they get to seem careless, in a way that novel characters almost never do. I don't know about my reader, but one thing that annoys me about novels is just how serious they often try to seem. The dialogue is often serious, there are usually never any jokes, and beyond that, as I have written often, the attention that many writers pay to plot is, at times, almost maddening. On TV shows, plots are there, certainly they are there, but there is also often this type of "lackadaisical drift" element there as well. I really believe that TV is popular not because it is easier to do than reading, but rather because the stories are actually told in an easier way than most writers choose to tell a written story. They are told with comedy ,generally speaking , and it's truly shocking just how often this is not at all present in novels.
Most movies, no matter how serious, generally always have comedic characters to help get us through. Novels, however, don't always have this, and they especially tend, in my experience, to almost never have a comedic narrator. For some reason we all have it in our heads that the narrator of a novel has to be as dead serious as can be, and I Think this has often made for a very terrible slog when it comes to books both old and new. In my opinion, the more comedy and especially the more "easy going drift", the better. A television show, for example, will actaully often try to show the audience scenes where nothing of much importance is happening.
In a program like The Sopranos, they had dozens of scenes they filmed where Tony & the gang was just sort of hanging around in their little spot. In a show like True Blood, this would often be scenes at Sam Merlotte's bar or at the vampire bar, "Fangtasia". There'd be a little pause in the action, where no truly meaningful dialogue had to take place, and where nothing of any lasting import was happening. Now of course, think about this type of scene in a novel: It often seems as though it never exists. Perhaps because it is harder to write than to sit in front of a camera talking, many novelists tend to feel that writing unnecessary scenes has no point, and so it never happens. But in my opinion, this has caused books to not feel as "real" to the modern people, as these TV shows now feel. It has, you see, caused novels to seem too serious. Many novelists even seem to live by the idea that every scene in their book ought to be something exciting. Often they might tell you they do this to compete with television and film. But in my opinion...they are ironically mislead! So much of what people love about tv and film is that it always has this drift , I swear. Look for it in the next film or show you watch, and I promise you'll see the moment of "drift" I am talking about, when everything calms down. It's always there in our visual arts; but it's almost never there in our written ones.
As always .. I don't know. JUst some thoughts i guess----
Becki Jean
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