Exposition, unreliable narrators and characters

I've been doing something out of my comfort zone recently - I've been reading a Japanese light novel (based on an anime and manga I've been watching and reading). I watched the anime, read the manga and am now reading the light novel - the order is important here.

By any objective standard, the light novel is pretty badly written. There's a lot of exposition, such as short paragraphs explaining the culture of the like-but-not-quite-our world. Show not tell? Well, there's showing but quite often, that's immediately followed by a tell explaining what just happened. Head-hopping happens quite a lot, sometimes for a whole paragraph, sometimes for a sentence or two. The female protagonist, from whose POV most of the narration takes place, is herself an unreliable narrator. If I was to post something like this in the Workshop, I shudder to think what kind of critique I would get.

But the thing is, I didn't care about any of that, because I really like, and am invested in the characters. I want to know what happens to them, how their relationship develops and I'll happily wade through all of the above to find that out. I probably care about the characters because I've seen part of the story in animated and comic form.

The problem I have is that I'm not entirely sure if the writing techniques are actually effective and worth using, or whether it's because I like the characters so much. I find that, when I come across a new character who doesn't appear in the anime or manga (because they are somewhat behind the novel), I care about them a lot less. They're just a distraction from the main characters.

Comparing it to a novel series I really love, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - I love the story and writing of those books, but really don't give a damn about the characters, *especially* the MC, Covenant himself. This is more like the kind of story I write.

I would love to write characters that could evoke that kind of emotion in the reader, but I don't think I'm really capable of it. I've tried a couple of times, and it works only in fits and starts.

And I'm interested in exploring the writing techniques a bit more. I've used an unreliable narrator once, and it worked but I wasn't really thinking about it, it was just what that story required.

Sorry for the rambling. I'm interested in what people think.

 

I suspect you're right—at least that you probably like the characters because of the anime and/or manga. Things work differently in a movie or show than a written story, partly because there are actors who might be attractive or have a lot of charisma and a few other factors that aren't there in pure written words. I suppose there are similar ways to make a character appealing in writing, but it would work differently. In animation there's the voice actor, who might have a very appealing voice or way of speaking, and maybe the artwork is also very appealing (this part applies to manga and comic books as well). To some extent I think there are parallels in writing, but it's going to work differently. You'd need to figure out how to make characters appealing.

 

I also think this might be key. Don't overthink it, don't look up ways to make characters likeable, but instead write their interactions and think about the way appealing people speak or things they do that make them appealing. Remember people you've known or seen interacting, and think about how they behaved, things they said etc. The way they did things. It all counts toward a person's personality and character. I think most of this comes through interaction—the way a person reacts to other people. Some are nice and. friendly, some are abrupt and offputting, some might have a pleasant demeanor, some might be tough and stoic (I mean it in the general sense of the word this time). It seems to me the biggest part of drama is in the way characters interact, and I think getting that right comes down to being a keen observer of people and trying to figure out what makes them come across in particular ways. What makes some people more appealing than others (besides the visual)? Spend some time meditating on this and try to notice it in life and in movies and stories etc. And go through your memories looking for it.

 

You made me think of something. I had an idea for a fantasy story, but I had only worked out the opening scene and got stuck, because I didn't know where to take it. I hadn't thought about why the characters were doing what they were doing, beyond their political motivations. But if I give them personal motivations for how they act (rather than what they are doing), it opens up a lot of avenues and makes it much more interesting. Now it remains to be seen whether I can write it.

That counts as an epiphany, I think. Gold star for @Xoic!

 

I've read some light novels. I've read 9 volumes of Wandering Witch, all of Yoru Sumino's light novels, and four volumes of the Oregairu series. Oh, and Three Days of Happiness plus a novelization of Makoto Shinkai's The Place Promised In Our Early Days. The Tunnel To Summer is another, which I really loved.

Reading them gave me the exact same thoughts you had: If I posted an excerpt of these to the workshop, I'd get torn to shreds. Not necessarily because of issues like head-hopping but because for some reason, light novels are heavy on exposition, narrative summary and a lot of the times... monologuing. Monologue is fine but not when it makes up 30% of the book with info you've already established.

Yoru Sumino's I Will Forget This Feeling Someday is a prime example. So... much... monologuing. The MC constantly pities himself with how pointless life is or how much more enlightened he is than everyone else.

This is apparently a common theme. Three Days of Happiness explored an MC with a similar worldview. So does Oregairu; it's all about that.

Japan as a culture is different because they face different issues. Their working culture is brutal and they're not allowed to express themselves. If you appear, look or act differently than your peers (and god forgive your seniors), that's social taboo. So is mental health. You feel depressed? That doesn't matter. You must cast it aside and work hard for your comrades. It's abandonment if you take the easy way out and do less work. Shame on you! You don't want to feel shame? Then work.

What does this have anything to do with light novels? It does because that's the average life of your Japanese person. Light novels are escapism for them. That's why you often see such likable characters. They appeal to them because maybe they don't see people that act like these characters in their everyday lives, especially characters that speak so freely and openly. Hell, most light novels these days are Portal Fantasy (Isekai), where the character literally escapes to video game worlds.

My point is that what the Japanese value differs than us. But I also wouldn't lump light novels with classic Japanese literature the likes of Akutagawa, Osamu, Soseki, etc. I've not read any of them (I've been wanting to) but I imagine the writing is considerably better than your average light novel. These people are the equivalent of the likes of Dickens and Orwell and other such famous authors to the Japanese. Though I would not be surprised if there some patterns between them.

For example, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki is very depressing from what I've heard and it ends with a suicide. So is Three Days of Happiness, where the MC finds life to be pointless, so he sells most of his lifespan for money. He dies at the end, albeit happily.

Glad you posted this as I typed this. More evidence for me. Three Days of Happiness is mainly written with narrative summary. Often when something happens, it's summarized, and the MC often does exposition through his first-person narrative. But this didn't really matter to me. I read the book while on the plane last summer and I actually loved it. I think it's because the exposition was interesting. It told and discussed things that were quite shocking and interesting.

So if you want to do a lot exposition, "tell" things in an interesting way. And have an interesting character too.

This ended up being a long post (sorry) but I've been collecting these thoughts for years mainly through observations. I love Japanese story-telling. They use supernatural elements that for some reason the west is reluctant to use.

 

Part of the reason, I suspect, is because a light novel is specifically written to be converted into an anime or manga. Many of the scenes translate very well into the visual medium - they're more like a screenplay rather than a narrative.

The only classic Japanese author I've read is Edogawa Rampo, and the writing is much better. There's something about the authors of the Japanese literary golden age, most of them died young or topped themselves.

 

Japanese is a very vague language. It usually avoids pronouns, considered unecessary when it's clear who is being spoken about - except that quite often, it's clear to the speaker but not anyone else. A lot of Japanese comedy is based on misunderstanding. So perhaps they're trying to avoid that in their writing.

Then again, in a collectivist society, it's easier to be told what to think rather than have to work it out yourself.

 

So perhaps the writing techniques I describe in the OP *aren't* actually terribly effective and worth using, unless you're explicitly writing this form. That's part of what I was trying to figure out.

 

Oh no, they're not good. Not for a Western audience anyway, maybe if you were writing for a Japanese audience.

One of the rules for (Western) comic books is very much show don't tell, or at least don't do both. You want to make sure the text doesn't repeat what's already being shown in the drawing. I wonder if manga does a lot of that?

 

Not quite. You *are* allowed to be different but only if you fit into one of the predefined categories. If you fall outside these categories, they find it very difficult to process. For example, a foreigner speaking fluent Japanese and *acting* Japanese doesn't compute. My Japanese isn't great, but it's much better than your average tourist and I try to act according to Japanese norms as far as possible. I still get funny looks when I visit tourist spots and speak to people in Japanese.

 

Ohhhh yes. Some manga even has commentary running alongside the panels, or characters explaining to other characters what to do and how it works.

Imagine - a character punches another character and says "My secret techniques manipulates pressure points to kill. That means you will live just long enough for you to hear my exposition."

 

Yeah, come to think of it, there's a lot of that in Asian movies, like Kung Fu flicks etc—"I will destroy you with my Crane technique!"

 

What are you doing here?

You don't even know. You are already informed.

Nani?!

 

I wa shock!

 

That's fair. I guess I should have worded it differently because I made it sound as if everyone is more or less the same (that's impossible).

Yes, exactly. I have a friend who writes fanfiction for a specific anime and she's been at it for years. I recently read some of her works and noticed that they were full of tells and exposition. So, because she asked for critique, I did what I've done at the workshop 100 times already and provided extensive feedback on what she needs to improve on.

Spoiler alert... she really didn't like my feedback.

And she was right not to. I mean, everyone who writes fanfiction for that anime (and I'm guessing most other anime too) write using those "ineffective" techniques. Ironically, they're effective to them, and that's why they use them. So who the hell was I, trying to deviate her from the fandom's normalized form? Heavy exposition is literally a part of it.

I did explain that these things are important for western publishers and such but she explained that she has no interest to publish novels or anything remotely original. She just wants to write fanfiction, which is fine.

 

I was planning to write a fanfiction to use as a marketing tool for the stuff I sell on my website (which is related to a certain anime franchise). The problem was, I was thinking about it in the same way as I would write "normal" fiction, and couldn't quite understand why it didn't work.

The problem, I think, is if you stick to reading one genre, you start thinking everything should be written like that.

Must be terrible if the only thing you ever read is Harry Potter.