If you’re writing a novel for a 21st-century reader, you have one job—to create a movie in your reader’s brain.
Modern readers love movies. But they read because the movie you create inside their brain is somehow more real to them than a movie on a screen. Because they help to create it. Your novel is the raw material your reader uses to create their own personal movie.
Why Not Write a Classic Novel?
One mistake a lot of beginning writers make is to write a novel like Jane Austen would have written. Or Charles Dickens. Or Fyodor Dostoevsky.
These were all great writers, yes. But they were writing with a different purpose—to create a storyteller in their reader’s brain. And it worked. If you read a classic novel written in the 19th century, you’ll hear a storyteller in your brain. But you won’t see a movie in your brain. You’ll see some clips of a movie, yes, but those clips will be interspersed with still-life paintings, essays, and audio voiceover by the author. The exact mix will depend on the 19th-century author.
But 21st-century readers want more movie clips, fewer paintings, fewer essays, fewer voiceovers. They just do.
If you feel called to write a classic novel for a 19th-century reader, feel free to do so. But those readers are dead, and that’s a marketing problem you’ll need to face.
How Do You Create That Movie?
The way you create a movie in your reader’s brain is to focus on the one thing that’s happening now that you can show your reader. Your are creating a sequence of words. Your reader will read them in the order you write them. Your reader can’t read two paragraphs at once. Your reader can’t even read two sentences at once.
Your reader reads sentences one at a time, and each sentence (with rare exceptions) needs to be showing something that can happen in approximately the length of time that it takes to read the sentence. The key word here is “approximate”. If it takes three seconds to read it, and it’s half a second of action, that’s fine. Or if it’s ten seconds of action, also fine. Sentences like that are called “Immediate Scene” and they are the lifeblood of your novel.
But a sentence has lost its way if it shows something that would take ten minutes to play out in real life. When your editor scrawls “Show, Don’t Tell” in red letters on your manuscript, they’re talking about sentences like that.
A Word About Narrative Summary
Once in a while, you do need a few sentences of “glue” between scenes to move things forward by minutes or months or millennia. Those sentences are called “narrative summary” and every novel needs them, once in a while. But narrative summary is not a movie in your reader’s brain. It’s voiceover or it’s a jump-cut between scenes.
When you’re editing your novel, you’ll always find some narrative summary. Just ask yourself if you need it. Could you write the novel without it? If you took it out, or shortened it, or rewrote it as immediate scene, would the novel be stronger?
If the answer is yes, then pull out the long knives and slit its throat and throw it to the sharks. That bit of narrative summary is pulling the whole boat underwater.
If the answer is no, you can’t possibly cut the narrative summary in any way, then leave it in. That bit of narrative summary is punching above its weight and deserves to live.
A Word About “The Rules of Fiction Writing”
From time to time, you’ll find all sorts of lists of “rules” that purport to tell you how to write a novel. Those rules can seem silly and overbearing. You will easily be able to think of exceptions to any of those rules.
None of the rules that I’ve ever seen are ironclad. Every rule can be broken, if there’s a reason.
But whoever concocted those rules had a reason, and you now know the reason. The “rules of fiction writing” are designed to help you create a movie in your reader’s brain.
Any “rule” that doesn’t help you create a movie in your reader’s brain is probably not a very good rule. (Again, there are probably exceptions.)
Any “rule” that does help you create a movie in your reader’s brain is probably a useful rule. Use it when it applies. Ignore it when it doesn’t.
Homework
- Do you have your own set of “rules” that you use for fiction writing? Which of these help you create a movie in your reader’s brain? Which of them don’t?
- Do you have a scene that isn’t working? Read it and ask yourself how long each sentence would take to play out as a movie clip. Does that give you any insight into how to bring that scene to life?
Leave a Reply