Velka
Sage
I read this article a few days ago on Kill Screen, and it's been brewing in the back of my mind since.
While the main conversation is about a character in Witcher 3, it is framed in a literary critique. The tldr; version of the article is that while players of 'story-based' games expect the interactions and choices they make to hold significant meaning and consequence, sometimes a fencing lesson is just a fencing lesson.
I really liked the conversation about 'sideshadowing' and examples of how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky used it in their works. "Nobody in Anna Karenina is destined to do anything" made me laugh out loud.
This quote, however, was what made this whole article stick in the recesses of my mind:
In Great Expectations, Pip gives a pie to a convict, and the reader assumes that this apparently inconsequential event will in fact be consequential… We do not expect our daily donations to be Dickensian pies. In novels, when bread is cast upon the waters, it comes back manifold, but in life it often just drifts away.
As I work through editing the first draft of my novel, and slowly slog through writing the first draft of the follow-up book, I'm finding I do have moments in both works where I use sideshadowing. Now, everything I've read, and advice I've solicited (and sometimes haven't) have all pointed to the "unless it moves the plot forward in a meaningful and clearly communicated way, cut it and never look back" camp. As I gain more confidence in my worth as a writer, and the quality of my work, I'm finding this advice, while valuable in many ways, doesn't always jive with my style and the way I want to tell my stories.
I think there is magic, and value, in using "moments of seeming insignificance in order to conjure a literary world of “possibilities that could have happened even if they did not"." I like subtlety, I like nuance, I like moments that simply exist to add a layer of realism in literary works. (Which is why I probably would fail horribly at writing YA where everything needs to be fast and action based.) I like to leave the reader wondering what a character really meant when they said something, or if the reason they gave for an action was truly their motivation.
I'm interested in hearing other's thoughts on this article and how it relates to your work, or works you enjoy.
While the main conversation is about a character in Witcher 3, it is framed in a literary critique. The tldr; version of the article is that while players of 'story-based' games expect the interactions and choices they make to hold significant meaning and consequence, sometimes a fencing lesson is just a fencing lesson.
I really liked the conversation about 'sideshadowing' and examples of how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky used it in their works. "Nobody in Anna Karenina is destined to do anything" made me laugh out loud.
This quote, however, was what made this whole article stick in the recesses of my mind:
In Great Expectations, Pip gives a pie to a convict, and the reader assumes that this apparently inconsequential event will in fact be consequential… We do not expect our daily donations to be Dickensian pies. In novels, when bread is cast upon the waters, it comes back manifold, but in life it often just drifts away.
As I work through editing the first draft of my novel, and slowly slog through writing the first draft of the follow-up book, I'm finding I do have moments in both works where I use sideshadowing. Now, everything I've read, and advice I've solicited (and sometimes haven't) have all pointed to the "unless it moves the plot forward in a meaningful and clearly communicated way, cut it and never look back" camp. As I gain more confidence in my worth as a writer, and the quality of my work, I'm finding this advice, while valuable in many ways, doesn't always jive with my style and the way I want to tell my stories.
I think there is magic, and value, in using "moments of seeming insignificance in order to conjure a literary world of “possibilities that could have happened even if they did not"." I like subtlety, I like nuance, I like moments that simply exist to add a layer of realism in literary works. (Which is why I probably would fail horribly at writing YA where everything needs to be fast and action based.) I like to leave the reader wondering what a character really meant when they said something, or if the reason they gave for an action was truly their motivation.
I'm interested in hearing other's thoughts on this article and how it relates to your work, or works you enjoy.
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