Nobody really writes novels any more. What they write are films in novel form, everything’s staged as if it were happening through the lens of a camera, and obviously it’s a trend that’s been getting worse ever since the invention of the feature film but- I think we’ve reached the point now where there’s no pretence about it, I certainly don’t think there’s anybody fighting the tendency anywhere in popular literature.
There’s no interest in using language as a medium, basically. If you read a modern novel it’s virtually all about sight and sound, every scene’s described in terms of visuals and dialogue and very little else. Every so often characters will smell or taste or feel something, but only when it’s an important plot-point. You know. Someone’s going to smell gas just before there’s a big cinematic explosion, or the hero’s going to eat something and be able to taste poison in it, and sometimes there’ll be a crap one-line attempt at doing “emotion” but it’ll usually come down to stock phrases. It’ll be “he felt a sharp pang of fear as the lion bore down on him”, and then the “fear” thing will end up being pushed to one side and the writer will just start describing what the lion looks like.
Sometimes you’ll even see these desperate attempts to fit film clichés into book form, so a character will- oh, I don’t know- he’ll fall over, and then lift up his head and see a pair of legs in front of him, and you just know that in the author’s head he’s thinking about that shot you get in movies where the bad guy stands over the good guy and you see the good guy framed between the bad guy’s feet…
Film’s over-writing literature entirely. It’s a ridiculous, stupid waste of the novel form, to treat it as if it’s just a second-rate version of cinema.
So the challenge for me as a writer, especially in my original fiction, is to really hone my craft as not just a storyteller but as a novelist, to learn to be good at all that stuff that you can do in prose that can’t be done elsewhere.