I started with my New Year's writing goal on Monday of this week. Three days in, and I already remember why I've had so much trouble with any novels I've planned in the past.
Writing prose is HARD WORK. Especially when you actually care about what you're writing.
See, for NaNoWriMo, what I wrote didn't really matter. The idea was to just write as much as I could, regardless of how good it was. I wound up writing a lot of garbage - flecks of gold in the middle, certainly, but there's a lot to be trimmed out.
I've been having difficulty figuring out how to incorporate character description into my prose, especially in the opening paragraphs, which are supposed to be engaging. For a bit of guidance, I turned to a book I read back in college, Disgrace by Nobel-prize winning author J.M. Coetzee. I wanted to see how he described his main character in the first chapter.
He didn't.
Oh, that's not to say the reader doesn't learn a lot about David Lurie. We learn about his divorces, his sexual history, and - most importantly - his attachment issues.
It's an uncomfortable read.
However, we never learn (at least in this first chapter) what exactly the main character LOOKS like. It kinda makes me rethink my assumptions on how important physical description IS.
I'm gonna have to take another look at the books I read and how the writing progresses. I'm new to prose fiction, so I'm still learning the mechanics.
This is gonna be fun.
3 comments:
I think that reading too many physical descriptions is actually distracting. I prefer to use what is given, and interpret the rest to make a custom scene or character. Too much description makes me feel like the author is boxing me in with way too many particulars that really aren't even necessary. And my own imagination has less freedom. Seems ironically less engaging that way.
In Saints, by Orson Scott Card, he actually never describes the main character. He deliberately left that out, so readers could picture her however they wanted. In interviewing female readers, he found that most readers pictured her as looking like them.
I don't think visually, and I have no idea what she looks like. But I have no idea what any characters in any books I've read look like, regardless of how well they're described. My brain just doesn't work that way.
ick...I likes descriptions, I look for them because I want to see the character as the author intended.
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