The ever-insightful Andrew Wille on why if you think of a novel as a film then you're missing so much of the best that a novel can do, and why readers and editors want Telling, third person, ominsicent and knowledgeable narrators ...

I shall call one kind of writing which I recognise all too well "overwrought Doctor Who", and another "Dishwasher Syndrome", forevermore...

http://wille.org/blog/2014/01/17/tell-me-a-story/
Edited by EmmaD at 13:00:00 on 18 January 2014

Hi Emma

It is indeed a useful blog post. 

Just a small point, the http: in your link doesn't work. I copied and pasted this line and it did for some reason: ​
wille.org/blog/2014/01/17/tell-me-a-story/

I write in first-person, although I started writing with a third-person POV. But first-person feels right for me. I have wondered about moving to third-person for a future novel, depending on what the novel needs. With it, I could look forward to practicising the full psychic distance range (great link to your blog post, by the way) taught in the Self-edit course.
 

Great article, Emma. Thanks for posting.

Yes, thank you, Emma.

This concept is one of the most elusive. If not the most elusive.

The link didn't work for me, but the copy and paste did. Thanks Sharley.

ps. One comment that registered with me was about US writers. And with my use of a mainly-US writing site, I can vouch that, for some reason, a lot of work concerns itself with triviality, and does so at great length.
Is it an American thing? I do not, as a rule, enjoy talking to Americans. They have a tendency to bombard you with minutiae, when you might have something significant to offer.
They converse to a rhythm: talk, talk, talk, listen, talk, talk, talk, talk, listen, talk, talk etc.
Okay, I generalise. Sorry, Americans.

I'm at this very moment reading a novel for a New Scientist review and was thinking about just this subject. The novel is very readable; strong imagery; good concept, and so on. It and its two predecessors are going to be made into a movie (or two or three). However, the book already is a movie, really. It's written as if describing a film, so the prose is functional and specific but doesn't have its own life. Maybe it's to do with a generation of writers having got most of their stories through film and TV when growing up; and maybe it's partly that their readers are the same. But it does seem a shame, if not a redundancy, that many novels now don't utilise the one advantage they have over visual story-telling: the medium of telling itself, in this case prose.