Scenes of the Imagination
Jan. 17th, 2007 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranSomething else I've been noticing lately is scenes written as imagined by one of the characters.
This is a quite interesting technique and the scenes have some useful properties. For one thing, they help to make a character's head a slightly more interesting place to be in, and they are a vivid way of showing a character's thoughts. It also seems to be a more effective way of building empathy with a character than simply telling us how they are feeling - it let's us do some of the work to fill in the gaps and that makes us feel a bit like we're feeling things ourselves.
It's also interesting in the way it frees up a lot of POV and plausibility issues - it's okay to show us something the character can't have seen because we know they're just imagining it. Perhaps it happened completely differently (and that's part of the fun - there's an extra hidden energy there in the possibility that things could turn out otherwise, sort of like the same sort of tease you get from unreliable narration). It's also okay to let the consistency slip for the sake of drama, because that's what people do all the time when they're imagining things.
Then there's the chance to show a scene more than once or to extract full dramatic value out of a scene that never actually happens.
You do need a certain type of close viewpoint get away with it though, as it's closely bound to the characters' thoughts. I've been reading a lot of litfic lately and maybe why this seems to be coming up so often.
This is a quite interesting technique and the scenes have some useful properties. For one thing, they help to make a character's head a slightly more interesting place to be in, and they are a vivid way of showing a character's thoughts. It also seems to be a more effective way of building empathy with a character than simply telling us how they are feeling - it let's us do some of the work to fill in the gaps and that makes us feel a bit like we're feeling things ourselves.
It's also interesting in the way it frees up a lot of POV and plausibility issues - it's okay to show us something the character can't have seen because we know they're just imagining it. Perhaps it happened completely differently (and that's part of the fun - there's an extra hidden energy there in the possibility that things could turn out otherwise, sort of like the same sort of tease you get from unreliable narration). It's also okay to let the consistency slip for the sake of drama, because that's what people do all the time when they're imagining things.
Then there's the chance to show a scene more than once or to extract full dramatic value out of a scene that never actually happens.
You do need a certain type of close viewpoint get away with it though, as it's closely bound to the characters' thoughts. I've been reading a lot of litfic lately and maybe why this seems to be coming up so often.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-17 12:15 pm (UTC)A lot of literary stuff is pretentious crap, of course - but I've found myself more and more measuring other genres against the standard of fine writing; along with paying more attention to my own prose comes the habit of paying much more attention to everybody else's... which means that I am beginning to enjoy literary works more, and badly written genre books less.
I'll be very interested to read your book when it's finished...