Quote:
Originally Posted by Irenicus
Your professor's comment is a creative writing class thing more than anything, I think. Many starting writers have the tendency to "tell" instead of "show," to use an extremely common cliché. As was said above, it's a problem of lazy writing more than a problem of point of view, but it's a lot harder to explain "lazy writing" than to rely on the old cliché as an explanation.
At first I thought you were talking about an anime vs. other cartoons comparison, which would be more interesting. For example, I don't remember any instance where anime-esque inner thoughts are expressed in a Disney cartoon...or a Miyazaki movie. Hmm.
That's a rather unfair comparison, I think. A large number of the more experimental manga simply don't make it overseas. Its relatively short existence and confined geography compared to the novel also puts it at a severe disadvantage. There are an incredible amount of forgettable novels out there both past and present after all, especially genre-based ones (romance novels of various languages, fantasy novels, all those weird 19th century genres, etc.) but we largely remember only the classics.
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Heh, show don't tell was the mantra of my creative writing class. I'm glad I've gotten several viewpoints here since I have such little exposure to art in general.
I can see how it's easier to just instruct people to show and not tell when they are starting out.
Perhaps I've just never noticed it in the literature I've read since it seems to flow more easily into the narrative but with anime it sometimes seems a little out of place (might just be my POV). Plays often have "inner thought" through soliloquies and such but I guess it just seems a bit weird listening to a person's inner thoughts as they occur instead of them speaking directly to us. Many movies use the main character as a bit of a narrator, but that seems to work well for me since they are simply telling us how they felt at that time, we aren't hearing their thoughts as they happen. But with written works, it doesn't seem as weird and jarring. I just know that the few times I've seen inner thought used in Western works, it just seemed so out of place. But again, sometimes it does seem to work when it's the character doing a narration using past tense to describe how they felt at that time, like they are telling us their thoughts after they occurred instead of us hearing them right away. I guess it just seems more natural to me while when you actually hear their thoughts, it just doesn't seem very natural.