A Change of Style
November 21, 2007 at 1:37 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: styles, Writing
My favorite books to read are classics. I love Seton and Flaubert, Emerson, Twain. Stuff no one reads much anymore. And I think I’ve figured out why. At least in part.
Stories like Dragonwyck and Madame Bovary are not long stories by the word count, but they take some time to read. You don’t plow through one of those in an afternoon on the beach and still get into the depth of the characters and setting, let alone the plot and tragedy of it all. For years I have collected anciently published classics. And while I do not have nearly as much time as I used to, I will pull out certain books and read passages now and again.
Authors told stories differently back then. Not only in the vocabulary they used, but in the way they made setting and time come alive, almost actual characters in the story. By the time you finished reading the book, you knew every nook and cranny, every piece of furniture, every bend in the river…
I miss those kinds of stories. In today’s market, the action starts right under your nose on page one, no build-up, no backstory, no lengthy description. All we ever write is just enough to give the reader a sense of time and place. Elaboration is considered unnecessary, frivolous, not publishable.
Why? It is a matter of society. More people watch television for information now than read the newspaper. Video games, computers and movies are time-killers and methods of escapism, not so much with books anymore. Being educated well enough to read is no longer the exception, nor do families sit around a fire in the hearth and listen to a story, or to someone read from a book.
People have become accustomed to immediacy. Information is not something we wait for, we Google it. We are impatient. We want information, entertainment. And we want it now. Action movies and stories start out with a bang and a boom, or at the very least evil lurking in the opening arrangement of music. They do not begin softly - unless someone or something is seconds away from being torn to shreds right before our eyes, all blood and screams.
What ever happened to just telling the story? To delving into emotion and tragedy, the psyche. Why does everything have to go boom?