This form of writerly myopia is easy to spot within the first few pages of a bad novel as the writer will delve into the details of irrelevant characters’ lives or into irrelevant details of the protagonist’s physical appearance or surroundings. Lower dimensional writing is necessarily myopic. A lousy writer will get stuck in a two dimensional random walk that returns to the origin an infinite number of times in an infinite number of steps The story doesn’t progress. Some people don’t have the ability to come up with a story within a pre-built world and they might take the outline of someone else’s story and make it their own by filling in some textures and faces from their immediate vicinity, often boring the reader with attention to uneccessary details. The pre-existing world allows the author to help the reader see further without much effort, functioning not only as scaffolding for the narrative but also as a telescope for conveying meaningful information.
Because not everyone can do this, many people compose genre fiction or fan fiction about worlds that have already been created for them. You have to be able to build a world in your head and navigate all of its characters and possibilities. You want to make sure that this conforms to your understanding of how things usually happen.Ĭreating this tension requires a certain skill set that not everyone has. You care about the protagonist because you want to know how her past will affect her future. You don’t know what will happen in the immediate present or in the distant future, but you have multiple ideas about what could happen. If you have these two things going on, you have narrative tension. the protagonist has uncertain memories and an uncertain, multistringed vision of the future.It fluctuates rapidly and is able to efficiently and simultaneously communicate uncertainty at multiple length scales.
the authorial vision isn’t stuck on the immediate vicinity and it isn’t stuck on the distant future.
A good story has multidimensional characters and a flexible focal length that simultaneously creates tension over multiple length scales.
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