alexseanchai | (no subject)

Okay, pausing the Week 6 lecture eight minutes into the twenty-eight to argue with the professor: Why the hell is "advancing the plot" not an intended function of dialogue in prose fiction? Or even just in literary fiction? Maybe it is just that I'm writing a genre that is not the literary genre, but my story that I wrote for his class, most of the plot happens in the dialogue and not the thoughts of the narrator. Because the story lies in the character interactions.

(And also the editor who had a look at "Inherit the Flame" told me I shouldn't ought to spend the first third of the story entirely in the narrator's head! ...I still really need to rewrite that. Especially in light of the "everything tastes like mashed potatoes" metaphor for depression, because that gives Akinyi and Meredith a really compelling reason to want to stay Underhill: life doesn't taste like mashed potatoes!)

But seriously. What is the purpose of divorcing dialogue from plot? "To distinguish prose fiction from television and movies" doesn't count!

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But seriously. What is the purpose of divorcing dialogue from plot?

Literary pretentiousness?

ETA: The message from my mentors/editors over the past couple of months has been: If it isn't contributing to plot, characterisation or world-building, why is it in there?

Edited 2015-11-08 21:01 (UTC)

I think dialogue is supposed (in this paradigm) to advance characterization alone. I am not sure.

I am also still eight minutes into the lecture, because I went to email S a thing and mentioned this point of argument and then had a couple more revelations about the plot of "Inherit the Flame". I want to work on revising that now but it is not on today's list. Homework is on today's list.

The advice I've seen is that dialog (or action, for that matter) should not ONLY advance the plot. You can advance plot, develop character, or deepen worldbuilding*. If you are only doing one at a time, your story can get boring.

*SFF is not the only genre with worldbuilding. They don't use the word for historical fiction, or contemporary fiction set in specific social or physical places--like, among emergency room workers in a big city, or in a small town on the northern prairie. You're showing the reader the setting rather than making it all up, so it's easier to make it seem real...but the 'showing the reader' techniques are the same

Yeah, all the good advice I've gotten is that if it's not advancing at least two of character, plot, worldbuilding, theme (preferably three) you don't need it at all.

...that does explain why so much of the bad literary fiction I've been subjected to lately is wall o' text introspection like a twelve-year-old's first angsty songfic, though.

Yup. Though that isn't the point my professor's making here; see below comment.

HAH yes.

LOL seriously

Hm, okay, point valid.

And I got back to the lecture, and dialogue in written fiction is apparently supposed to build character, conflict, or change. Um, what is "change" in this context if not "plot advancement"? And what is "conflict" in basically any fiction-producing context if not "engine for plot advancement"?

*snort* Has this professor ever actually.... WRITTEN fiction?

He says he has.

Honestly even the idea that you can separate "developing character" from "developing the plot" is hard for me to figure out - in most modern fiction your characters should drive the plot and vice versa, so if you advance one the other should advance (at least a little bit) automatically.

Nodnod!

I see too much fiction with chunks of plot that seem disconnected from character development or world-building. (It happens a lot with battle scenes.) If anything in your writing happens automatically, you're lucky--I don't think it's something writers can rely on. When you're going over a draft and hit the problem of "this scene is dragging and I'm not sure why," or "my first reader loved the beginning but got bored in the middle," I think it's worth considering whether you might have slipped into doing one thing at a time. (It might not be that, of course. Editing is hard.)

Oh, it's certainly possible to do it badly. I didn't mean 'automatically' as in 'it's easy' because OMG writing is not easy, but as in 'if you do the one thing right, the other thing will also be right.'

I can't imagine writing a battle scene in which nobody's character arc advances - because in a battle, people are going to be feeling things really really intensely and making choices under pressure and learning things about themselves and having changing relationships with the other characters in the battle and acquiring new traumas and motivations and so on. So if you write a battle scene where *no* characterization happens, you haven't just missed the characterization opportunity, but you've screwed up writing the battle scene, too. Character may not be in the forefront, it may not be the main function of the scene - and depending on your POV, the battle scene itself may be very spare on the character end, and the characterization consequences only show up later as characters process the experience - but a battle that doesn't affect or illustrate character at all is not going to work as a battle either. Even if it's a battle that's being related third person that none of your characters took part in, hearing about it should affect them somehow, or show the audience something about who they are, or else you've failed to convey the importance of the battle.

The same things applies to lots of other kinds of 'plot-advancement' scenes. And in reverse to 'characterization' scenes - if your character has a deep moment of personal realization or development or whatever, and it doesn't respond to and/or affect the plot somehow, then that's a problem, because it means your character moment isn't actually part of that story. That's what I meant - if you try to do one without the other they're both going to be bad. (Of course they can be bad anyway in other ways. Because writing is hard.)

Edited 2015-11-09 23:02 (UTC)

I'm starting to wonder what your professor thinks "plot" means. (That's the polite version of my question. My first thought was to wonder if he'd recognize a plot if it bit him.)

idk

What a very odd idea.

Everything you've described in this lecture baffles me.

what is with the absolute rules for everything?

I found this in the wee small hours of the morning and leave it here for your perusal and probably to play with...not for this class...

the significance of plot without conflict

I have seen a thing like that before! I have not played with it, though. :)

Dialogue advances plot. Ask any mystery writer with the genius expositing how everything happened.

Your professor is made of WTF.

Yup