Writing Styles and Subsequent Reader Response

[tealin]

I recently read Sunshine by Robin McKinley, partly for a commission and partly because my former roommate has been recommending it to me for about a year now.

I've never read any of Robin McKinley's books, probably because I had my nose stuck in Redwall and Harry Potter for all the years when girls tend to pick them up, but I'd heard she was good. And Sunshine was ... well, it was good. It had a well-realized world and a distinct take on magic and ... and characters ... and stuff ... but I had a hard time really getting into it, and it seemed like it was taking forever to get anywhere plot-wise. I've been turning this over in my head for the last thee or four days and I think I've figured out one thing at least: there's just so much internal monologuing. It seems like she puts into the narration every bit of world and character development she scraped together in preparing the novel and then added stuff she made up along the way. It almost feels like the book is made up of a series of short stories, in which she has to cram a lot of exposition into not much plot, that have sort of melted into each other to form one longer story that is no less dense. This gives it a sense of authenticity, I suppose, but it throws any pacing right out the window.

To illustrate what I mean by this I've gone and done something dreadful: tried to write. More specifically, I've tried applying Robin McKinley's style to one of my favourite pieces of snappy literature. Here's the original:

At last, however, on a wild, tempestuous evening, when
the wind screamed and rattled against the windows, he
returned from his last expedition, and having removed
his disguise he sat before the fire and laughed heartily
in his silent inward fashion.
"You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?"
"No, indeed!"
"You'll be interested to hear that I'm engaged."
"My dear fellow! I congrat --"
"To Milverton's housemaid."
"Good heavens, Holmes!"

What I especially like about that exchange is that the dialogue implies so much about who the characters are, what they're thinking, what the situation is, and how it changes. This is conveyed not just in what they say but how they say it, and when. It's a marvellously efficient piece of writing. So I wanted to see if I could render the scene in McKinley style...

At last, however, on a wild, tempestuous evening, when the wind screamed and rattled against the windows, I sat in the golden glow of the sitting room dwelling on a troublesome case that had come into my practise earlier that week. A stockbroker had sprained his ankle on a loose cobblestone – a common enough accident in this city of London – but in his subsequent pain had stumbled onto the bootscraper at his flat and now had a serious case of gangrene. It looked as if I would have to amputate it. Any time I tried discussing this with my dear Mary she turned pale and begged me to change the subject, so my professional ruminations had only themselves for company, or in this case themselves and the macaroons Mrs Hudson had so graciously provided even though I hadn't eaten the fanciful pastry since developing a coconut allergy in India. She had either forgotten this or was intent on preventing me from coming back for visits thanks to acute anaphylactic shock, something Holmes and I had debated during the lighter moments of our acquaintanceship. Speaking of Holmes, where was he? He'd been staying out later and later every night, always in that ridiculous (and fragrant) workman's outfit, and I was beginning to worry that he wouldn't return at all tonight. He couldn't be up to any good.

At last he burst through the door, in some sort of good spirits despite the blustery, chilling weather that had driven me to hot, stagnant India in the first place. Thankfully he promptly removed his drenched and fetid wool coat and, without even casting a glance in my direction, took a seat by the fire. There followed a long and slightly awkward silence wherein I debated whether or not to bring up my gangrenous stockbroker in a desperate attempt to get a conversation rolling, but he continued to stare into the fire with a somewhat absent expression and gave no sign he could tell anyone else was in the room. The crackling of the fire was putting me in mind of Mary frying sausages, which she'd promised to make for dinner tonight in exchange for my not mentioning gangrene when meat was on the table. I wondered if I might manage to sneak out without interrupting Holmes' reverie, as he seemed to prefer the company of his own thoughts to that of his best friend who had come all this way on a distinctly unpleasant evening solely to learn why he'd been spending his nights out in, as far as I could tell, a suit he had found in a compost heap. I was about to stand when he laughed heartily in his silent inward fashion, which was nevertheless directed at me.

"You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?"

"No, indeed!" This was quite possibly the very last thing I'd expect to hear from my friend, to whom the term 'consummate bachelor' was an understatement to the extreme. I wondered what this was about; it seemed a complete diversion from the Milverton case, and I'd never known him to wander from the hunt when he was in bloodhound mode. Had he – had he seriously been spending the last week inflicting some sort of charm on a person of the female persuasion? In that suit? I struggled to think of what sort of girl would not faint at such a combined assault of applied brainpower and stench, and could come up only with the wife of an officer in my regiment who had been struck with Malingering Misogynitis, a disease which had deprived her of the senses of sight, smell, humour, and taste, and which left her physically functional but only capable of giggling sweetly should she be directly addressed in any way. But she was already married, of course, and over five thousand miles away.

Holmes broke in on my recollection with more force than a mutineer's rifle. "You'll be interested to hear that I am engaged."

The sheer unreality of what I had just heard, and whose mouth I had heard it from, made it impossible to think further, not even of how Sgt Ratberger's wife might have travelled all the way back to England, sans husband (who might have been done in by his fondness for vindaloo), and be in a place where Holmes in his filthy disguise might ply his affections on her. Even the word 'affections' in the same thought as 'Holmes' caused enough discord in the orchestra of my brain that the conductor leapt off the pedestal in despair. Decades of rote etiquette kicked in and prompted me to say, "My dear fellow! I congrat –"

He interrupted before I the rest of the sentence could tumble from my astonished mouth. "To Milverton's housemaid."

Ah, so that was it. He wasn't off the Milverton case at all, instead he had sunk to the very lowest trick for him yet to employ, and had used the tender, sweet heart of an innocent (though, I had to admit, probably senseless) young lady merely to achieve his own ends. Of all the dastardly tricks! Had he not even cast a thought to what would become of the poor girl when she discovered that both he and his engagement were no more substantial than the stockbroker's leg would be by this time Monday? I tried to express the enormity of both my shock and disapproval but could only come out with "Good heavens, Holmes!"

Perhaps I was a bit cruel. She doesn't deserve my derision and I'm certainly not qualified to cast it, being an admitted devotee of cinematic books. She wrote well enough to make me crave cinnamon rolls for the last two weeks. On top of that, writing that whole thing and then coming straight here has meant I've written this whole entry in her style and rendered me even more hypocritical than I usually am.

But it was fun.

12:50 am
I just realised the far more efficient way to say all of that is: I am a firm believer is showing, not telling. Ms McKinley seems to be all about the telling with very little showing; even outright action is filtered through the character's recollection into being told about action rather than seeing it for ourselves.

Show, don't tell. Three words in place of, what, two thousand? Yeesh.