Erik's Reviews > Foreigner
Foreigner (Foreigner, #1)
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![1639329](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1658888239p2/1639329.jpg)
I should've read the negative reviews.
This book - which I read almost right after my (failed) attempt to read Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy - has led me to two important realizations:
#1: Female sci-fi + fantasy authors tend to have a much greater amount of interiority (e.g. internal monologue / narration) than do male authors.
#2: I hate excess internal narration.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with Socrates/Plato, who wrote "the unexamined life is not worth living", though I would clarify it as something like, "The unexamined life is a life followed, not a life chosen." So I believe human beings who don't maintain a healthy internal dialogue with themselves are, if not stupid, at least mostly drone-like.
But there's a marked difference between healthy introspection and a neurotic spiral of nth-order thinking about thinking about thinking. And it's my experience that any writing style that heavily relies on internal narration falls into the latter. It's always neurotic internal narration. It's always thinking that arrests rather than galvanizes action.
I'd even go so far as to claim that too much internal dialogue represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the writing/novel medium. It's TELLING the reader the character's thoughts instead of SHOWING us the thoughts by action, voice, and description.
And being told, instead of being shown, is boring. Which is my also my summary: boring. Book starts off great but then falls into this morass of internal thoughts of a diplomat who's actually terrible at being a diplomat. Incompetence is tedious in the best circumstances. Here, trapped in the thoughts of the incompetent, it's just plain awful.
This book - which I read almost right after my (failed) attempt to read Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy - has led me to two important realizations:
#1: Female sci-fi + fantasy authors tend to have a much greater amount of interiority (e.g. internal monologue / narration) than do male authors.
#2: I hate excess internal narration.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with Socrates/Plato, who wrote "the unexamined life is not worth living", though I would clarify it as something like, "The unexamined life is a life followed, not a life chosen." So I believe human beings who don't maintain a healthy internal dialogue with themselves are, if not stupid, at least mostly drone-like.
But there's a marked difference between healthy introspection and a neurotic spiral of nth-order thinking about thinking about thinking. And it's my experience that any writing style that heavily relies on internal narration falls into the latter. It's always neurotic internal narration. It's always thinking that arrests rather than galvanizes action.
I'd even go so far as to claim that too much internal dialogue represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the writing/novel medium. It's TELLING the reader the character's thoughts instead of SHOWING us the thoughts by action, voice, and description.
And being told, instead of being shown, is boring. Which is my also my summary: boring. Book starts off great but then falls into this morass of internal thoughts of a diplomat who's actually terrible at being a diplomat. Incompetence is tedious in the best circumstances. Here, trapped in the thoughts of the incompetent, it's just plain awful.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
September 8, 2021
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September 8, 2021
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scififantasy
September 8, 2021
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Lewis
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Sep 09, 2021 03:43AM
![Lewis](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526922925p1/68609228.jpg)
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![Erik](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1658888239p1/1639329.jpg)
That said, there are plenty of classics/greats that wouldn't get published and wouldn't get read today, due in no small part to excess interiority. Thoreau's Walden comes to mind, a book that wasn't even popular when it was originally published and only survived through an influence campaign by his more eminent mentor Emerson.
![Lewis](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526922925p1/68609228.jpg)
![Erik](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1658888239p1/1639329.jpg)
Like I said, there does exist niche cases in which heavy internal narration is the proper technique. (Edit: I do not believe this book, Foreigners, is among those niche cases)
![Lewis](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526922925p1/68609228.jpg)
![Erik](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1658888239p1/1639329.jpg)
Perhaps you can answer a question related to your original comment:
Specifically which greatest novelists of all time do you believe would dispute my claim and which claim would they dispute: that good writing shows instead of tells or that excess internal dialogue is a form of telling?
![Lewis](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526922925p1/68609228.jpg)
You made the claim that many of the classics could not be published today, something that I don't see how you can hold to if you are not saying that the industry refuses to publish anything unorthodox or particular in style.
"Specifically which greatest novelists of all time do you believe would dispute my claim and which claim would they dispute: that good writing shows instead of tells or that excess internal dialogue is a form of telling?"
Woolf. Joyce. Eliot. McCarthy. Proust. Dumas, Melville, Vonnegut, Austen, Hugo, Ursula LeGuin, Tolkien, Pynchon, and Dickens are rather tell-y writers. Gabriel Marquez has been described as "utterly demolishing" show, don't tell by writing 100 Years of Solitude. Or consider Lolita, where Humbert tells the reader his sexual preferences through direct explication.
![Erik](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1658888239p1/1639329.jpg)
I wouldn't say I'm confident enough with all those writers' works to make a judgment one way or another. Woolf, sure, she's a teller, and I find her writing tedious and pointless as a result. But some of the others are amusing. Dumas a tell-y writer? Tolkien? LeGuin? If you believe that, then you're conflating exposition with telling.
But that's not how I was taught show vs tell, that's not how I teach it, and I can't imagine anyone with any real experience in the writing field would ever claim that exposition isn't essential.
Rather, a better way to phrase Show Vs Tell is "Don't write out the subtext" or even more simply, "Allow readers to draw their own conclusions."
I tried to find who you quoted "utterly demolishing" from, but could not. I did find someone who wrote about this same topic and gave this example of telling from GGM's 100 Years:
"Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty five."
Exposition, yes. Telling, no. Here's the version of that which tells:
"Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all because he's an incompetent commander, with a terrible mind for strategy. A promiscuous man with no real marital loyalty, he had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated by his enemies one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty five, much to the Colonel's great sadness."
Terrible writing. That's telling. And if you think that great novelists write like that, you simply don't know what you're talking about.
![Lewis](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526922925p1/68609228.jpg)
Kim Stanley Robinson in "Wonderbook" by Jeff VanderMeer
![Lewis](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526922925p1/68609228.jpg)
"Colonel Aureliano Buendia was a poor soldier, with little military talent in sight. In his personal affairs, he was lascivious towards women, but bore great sorrow towards the simultaneous deaths of his sons."
I don't know about you, but this is a perfectly normal thing to write about a side character who appears for twenty pages. Many minor officers from the pages of Shelby Foote, Rick Atkinson, and other tellers of military history are rendered with such brevity. "Show don't tell" is for things you want the reader to mull over and engage intellectually with, not things you simply want to be known to the reader ASAP.
![Erik](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1658888239p1/1639329.jpg)
Yep.
![Lewis](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1526922925p1/68609228.jpg)
![Erik](https://images.gr-assets.com/users/1658888239p1/1639329.jpg)
Here's what it boils down to: If you define show vs tell as description vs exposition, then it's a shit rule. As best as I can tell, we both agree on this claim.
End of discussion - further comments in that vein will be deleted. Good day to you, Lewis.