FifthView
Vala
Lately I've run into a surprising issue while reading, a certain kind of messy prose I've encountered twice in a row now, from two separate authors.
Things in the story...do not track. I'm not talking about significant story-level or world building features, nor about overall character development, but the simple flow from paragraph to paragraph and even sometimes from sentence to sentence. The prose doesn't track.
Baseball may be a great sport, but I don't watch it. It isn't more tedious to watch than golf, but it's way too slow paced for me. But to be honest, I don't watch any sports, so what do I know? Sitting for hours in front of a television to watch millionaires run around a diamond or back and forth on a court or hitting a tiny ball hundreds of yards trying to find a hole isn't something I understand.
—Wait a minute. See what I mean? Where did that last paragraph originate? How does the preceding flow into it; how does it flow from the preceding? You don't know me, so can you say it's the sort of thought I'd spontaneously have in my mind for some reason? Or is it just....there, forcing you (daring you) to fill in the missing pieces?
I've been encountering this exact sort of thing when reading.
Brain Salad
Of the two examples from my recent reading, the first wasn't so bad as the second. The sort of spontaneous insert of non-tracking info was intended, I believe, to give depth to a character or insight into a character's thought processes. The author seemed to desire the sort of deep immersion into the character's mind that other authors do so well, but chose to create "character voice" by having the character spontaneously shoot out non sequitur nuggets without context. Were I that author, I'd erase everything after the first sentence of this paragraph and replace it with something like, The author was Jackson Pollock, plastering the canvas with the character's brain.
And leave it at that. You've seen those other sentences, so you know what I'm talking about. You have the context. Suppose those other sentences never existed, and all I'd written was this:
Reading the first author, I could simply scratch my head a lot when a character's brain splattered like that from time to time throughout the story—Even though, I might add, the author also chose to have about 7 POV characters in the story and did this with all of them. In first person, for all of them. The story itself was clear enough and enjoyable enough for me not to mind the non sequitur bits leaking from the characters' heads. (But I was still often annoyed, since I don't like feeling I have to force myself to ignore things in the prose.)
Scene and Brain Salad
The second example from my recent reading was worse. I did stop reading after one chapter, and I'm still trying to decide whether to force myself beyond that chapter.
Imagine using prose potpourri as your design principle for writing any setting and the events happening in that setting.
Again, this attempt was intended to put me in the POV of a main character, but it failed miserably because I can't imagine anyone going through the world with a mind in several places at once, thinking about several unrelated things at once, hopping around so much that there becomes here becomes over there now and...back to here? Where were we? Are we there yet? What were we talking about?
This is difficult to describe without examples, but the examples are too depressing to describe. So before I began to write this, I was trying to summarize the issue clearly in my own head, and I settled on "That doesn't track!" for a reason.
First, the phrase generally implies, via a negative, the way prose should work. It should track. If you are telling me a story, and I am wanting to be told that story, then you should make clear what is happening every moment of that story.
I mean, my moments. The real world moments I am reading your story. Sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph...lead me down that track, alright?
From this perspective, a story is not a Jackson Pollock painting.
It is not a random assemblage of dots that can form a picture if only the reader will use a pencil to connect them.
When I read the next sentence in a series of sentences, I want to know a) that it connects to what I've already read, b) that it's most certainly going to connect in some way to what follows, and c) it is, on some level, important to the story. Even if these aren't 100% clear at the moment I'm reading that sentence, 60-75% clear, 40% clear is better than having a sentence that is utterly disconnected from where I am on the track of that story. (The less clear, the more likely some new sentence should soon make it very clear. That's kind of like a belated author apology to me, heh.)
Second, the phrase in the title of this thread might relate to another medium, at least metaphorically. Tracking shots. In movie making. Here's the first paragraph from an article about tracking shots on the web site Film School Rejects:
That last sentence describes what our prose should be doing, at least in close narrative styles. And this metaphor helps me describe what was so bad in the second example from my recent reading.
When a character enters a scene, he's going to be focused on something in that scene. As he moves, his focus will change. His focus could change many times throughout the scene. But in most cases, when his focus shifts, it stays until there's a reason for his focus to shift again. As the scene develops, there's some sense of progression, and the character's attention should reflect this. What he was thinking about or noticing when he first entered the scene is probably going to be in the past now, forgotten.
If a prince about to be crowned king is worrying, thinking the coronation will be viewed by thousands of people, some of them enemies, when he first enters the hall, those thoughts will be different than the type of thoughts he'll have at the end of the coronation ceremony. If he first notices the marble floors and columns, the drapes, other environmental things when he enters the hall, he's not going to go back thinking about them after the ceremony—unless it's in some very new light.
More than this, if the prince is truly progressing down that hall, drawing ever closer to the actual coronation, his focus will move with him. This is the tracking shot. If for some reason during the tracking shot you flash back to the first broken marble tile in the hall, for no reason, and then you "notice" a young noblewoman who stood just inside the door—after the prince has already made it halfway down the hall—I call that prose potpourri.
It's not a great term, admittedly. But if you look at potpourri...what are you looking at? There's such a melange, mixed in no particular order. This is what that second author was doing. I could never tell exactly where I was in the scene, the distances between areas in that coronation location, and so forth. Sometimes I couldn't tell if the MC was still thinking about one person or another; he'd introduced several in the matter of a few pages in the first chapter, and he bounded about in context, back and forth, all over the place. If the MC's focus shifts so erratically, how can I, the reader, track where we are going and what is happening?
Things in the story...do not track. I'm not talking about significant story-level or world building features, nor about overall character development, but the simple flow from paragraph to paragraph and even sometimes from sentence to sentence. The prose doesn't track.
Baseball may be a great sport, but I don't watch it. It isn't more tedious to watch than golf, but it's way too slow paced for me. But to be honest, I don't watch any sports, so what do I know? Sitting for hours in front of a television to watch millionaires run around a diamond or back and forth on a court or hitting a tiny ball hundreds of yards trying to find a hole isn't something I understand.
—Wait a minute. See what I mean? Where did that last paragraph originate? How does the preceding flow into it; how does it flow from the preceding? You don't know me, so can you say it's the sort of thought I'd spontaneously have in my mind for some reason? Or is it just....there, forcing you (daring you) to fill in the missing pieces?
I've been encountering this exact sort of thing when reading.
Brain Salad
Of the two examples from my recent reading, the first wasn't so bad as the second. The sort of spontaneous insert of non-tracking info was intended, I believe, to give depth to a character or insight into a character's thought processes. The author seemed to desire the sort of deep immersion into the character's mind that other authors do so well, but chose to create "character voice" by having the character spontaneously shoot out non sequitur nuggets without context. Were I that author, I'd erase everything after the first sentence of this paragraph and replace it with something like, The author was Jackson Pollock, plastering the canvas with the character's brain.
And leave it at that. You've seen those other sentences, so you know what I'm talking about. You have the context. Suppose those other sentences never existed, and all I'd written was this:
Of the two examples from my recent reading, the first wasn't so bad as the second. The author was Jackson Pollock, plastering the canvas with the character's brain.
That's where the author would start a new paragraph, perhaps with, But the second author forced me to stop reading after I masochistically let myself finish reading the whole first chapter.
Reading the first author, I could simply scratch my head a lot when a character's brain splattered like that from time to time throughout the story—Even though, I might add, the author also chose to have about 7 POV characters in the story and did this with all of them. In first person, for all of them. The story itself was clear enough and enjoyable enough for me not to mind the non sequitur bits leaking from the characters' heads. (But I was still often annoyed, since I don't like feeling I have to force myself to ignore things in the prose.)
Scene and Brain Salad
The second example from my recent reading was worse. I did stop reading after one chapter, and I'm still trying to decide whether to force myself beyond that chapter.
Imagine using prose potpourri as your design principle for writing any setting and the events happening in that setting.
Again, this attempt was intended to put me in the POV of a main character, but it failed miserably because I can't imagine anyone going through the world with a mind in several places at once, thinking about several unrelated things at once, hopping around so much that there becomes here becomes over there now and...back to here? Where were we? Are we there yet? What were we talking about?
This is difficult to describe without examples, but the examples are too depressing to describe. So before I began to write this, I was trying to summarize the issue clearly in my own head, and I settled on "That doesn't track!" for a reason.
First, the phrase generally implies, via a negative, the way prose should work. It should track. If you are telling me a story, and I am wanting to be told that story, then you should make clear what is happening every moment of that story.
I mean, my moments. The real world moments I am reading your story. Sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph...lead me down that track, alright?
From this perspective, a story is not a Jackson Pollock painting.
It is not a random assemblage of dots that can form a picture if only the reader will use a pencil to connect them.
When I read the next sentence in a series of sentences, I want to know a) that it connects to what I've already read, b) that it's most certainly going to connect in some way to what follows, and c) it is, on some level, important to the story. Even if these aren't 100% clear at the moment I'm reading that sentence, 60-75% clear, 40% clear is better than having a sentence that is utterly disconnected from where I am on the track of that story. (The less clear, the more likely some new sentence should soon make it very clear. That's kind of like a belated author apology to me, heh.)
Second, the phrase in the title of this thread might relate to another medium, at least metaphorically. Tracking shots. In movie making. Here's the first paragraph from an article about tracking shots on the web site Film School Rejects:
Tracking shots are similar to the long take because they both keep the audience engaged with the actions occurring on screen. However, instead of just keeping a certain shot in frame, the tracking shot is specifically meant to follow someone or something along as they move through the scene. When done well, the tracking shot should be invigorating, taking the audience down the same roads our characters follow.
That last sentence describes what our prose should be doing, at least in close narrative styles. And this metaphor helps me describe what was so bad in the second example from my recent reading.
When a character enters a scene, he's going to be focused on something in that scene. As he moves, his focus will change. His focus could change many times throughout the scene. But in most cases, when his focus shifts, it stays until there's a reason for his focus to shift again. As the scene develops, there's some sense of progression, and the character's attention should reflect this. What he was thinking about or noticing when he first entered the scene is probably going to be in the past now, forgotten.
If a prince about to be crowned king is worrying, thinking the coronation will be viewed by thousands of people, some of them enemies, when he first enters the hall, those thoughts will be different than the type of thoughts he'll have at the end of the coronation ceremony. If he first notices the marble floors and columns, the drapes, other environmental things when he enters the hall, he's not going to go back thinking about them after the ceremony—unless it's in some very new light.
More than this, if the prince is truly progressing down that hall, drawing ever closer to the actual coronation, his focus will move with him. This is the tracking shot. If for some reason during the tracking shot you flash back to the first broken marble tile in the hall, for no reason, and then you "notice" a young noblewoman who stood just inside the door—after the prince has already made it halfway down the hall—I call that prose potpourri.
It's not a great term, admittedly. But if you look at potpourri...what are you looking at? There's such a melange, mixed in no particular order. This is what that second author was doing. I could never tell exactly where I was in the scene, the distances between areas in that coronation location, and so forth. Sometimes I couldn't tell if the MC was still thinking about one person or another; he'd introduced several in the matter of a few pages in the first chapter, and he bounded about in context, back and forth, all over the place. If the MC's focus shifts so erratically, how can I, the reader, track where we are going and what is happening?
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