the pose of the narrator

this is sort of an extention of a previous entry, the one about thee's and thou's as constricting language. more like a semi-colon, seperate but related thoughts. here goes.

i'm currently taking a break from watching something called BROKEN SAINTS. it was originally released as a web-animation, i think done with flash. but this is intricate. sort of like a comic with moving pictures, and the artwork has a painted quality. high end production. looks pretty. but that's not what this is about.

this is about the pose of the narrator. i'm about five minutes or so into the first chapter, and the dialogue/ inner monologue/ narrator's voice is crap. this is easy to tell for the following reasons: first, because a portion of the writing is in caption boxes, like in comics. the narrator says things in a fashion similar to the way people who think writing poetry means writing in vague and intentionally... i can't think of another word except pretentious.

crap similar to "i see the coulds surround me and i lose myself, lost inside my inner depths." crap like that. thank god, that's not part of the script, but it could be. the pose of the narrator is such that they scream "PAY ATTENTION TO ME! TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!" i think that's what it might be. i think the writing thus far takes itself too seriously, big dramatic pose with no real reason or effect. or rather that the effect is one that can't even being to work, because it's so goddamn end-all be-all. here's a line from the show: "burning faintly... in the ether of the night," and it's spoken all dramatic and crap.

this is hideously upsetting to me. i can't stand reading crap like this, and i know why. i know that this is a stage that most writers have to work through before they can write anything worthwhile, i know i did it for a while. looking back on the crap i wrote from a pose similar to this makes me want to cry, but i console myself because i know i can put it in its place, and move forward, i know that my writing has improved, at least to the point where i stopped thinking that everything i wrote had to be world-altering.

i think that this problem comes from the want to be taken seriously. a young writer tries so hard to write, and each sentence is so labourious, that they cannot bare to be dismissed, they cannot bare to be ignored. with this in mind, they try as hard as they can to chose language that they think has the tone of serious-ness, that has the tone of so-called real writing. they fail to realise that this will do nothing but alienate an audience, if they're lucky enough to keep one past the first page.

writing is in and of itself a serious endevour, but this does not mean that the writing has to be serious. it's like trying to tell a story where the narrator is, unbeknownst to the writer, is an academic trying to sound intelligent. the end result of this is a bone-dry narritive: the words are not intrensically serious or intelligent; talent does not lie in words, but the use thereof.

for example, take John Milton: "She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods, / Not terrible, though terror be in love / And beauty" (Paradise Lost IX, 489-92). this is not that hard a thing to say, and i'll prove it; here's my re-writing: "she's so pretty, gods love her, and terror lies in both love and beauty." the two bits say basically the same thing, however, Milton is a god among sentence-architects, while i am nothing close. it's not what you say, but how you say it.

the narrator should not suck, this is self-evident.

there we go. rant's done. i know it's a step in the right direction, but even so, it still bothers me that i have to be party to the garbage. occupational hazard of being a reader, after all.

[originally posted 11/19/06]