With time, you become a bore entrenched on your own box of miserable
experience. Much of the cause for the rise of these dour, all-is-ashen scribes
has been the emphasis in recent decades on the journey within rather the
adventure without; characters confront a rough patch in their life and spend
the course of many chapters studying their feelings and second guessing their
reactions to further circumstances beyond control, resulting in some eventual
metaphor about powerlessness.
Occasionally in a while this can be a moving saga, but
there is less than there used to be about what people do in the world and how
their actions effect communities and neighborhoods they might pass though. It
would seem that someone had uttered once that having your characters merely
think about world suffices for momentum, but that is hardly enough. There is a
tedium in the results, a monotony self awareness that is depressing for all the
depressed people these plots deal with. Blame therapy, twelve step movements,
the 60s? It hardly matters now.
Once we read stories of women and (mostly) men
who wanted to engage their universe and change it somewhat, a situation where
introspection, if any, was predicated on actual turns of events; tension was
created, resolution came finally,and we had dramatic action. Even the great
soliloquist Shakespeare knew that Hamlet's navel gazing had to be juxtaposed
against more turbulent events around him. It's a shame that our better prose
stylists have largely forgotten that lesson.
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