It happens quickly, in other words, though we wouldn’t call even the most rapid repartee thoughtless rather, what is spoken is the thought. Ideas and replies are offered by one speaker as soon as another is finished. As a conversation (at the dinner table, say) heats up, it creates a space in which thought and action lose their causal relationship and seem to merge. Certainly, thought and action play a role in conversation: speaking is an action, and during a particularly slow conversation each participant may even have some time to think carefully before saying something.īut there’s something else that can happen within a conversation, and authors like Tolstoy and Sally Rooney know it well. A couple of Tolstoyan characters, for example, might spend the better part of 40 pages on either side of a samovar, and though not much will have happened, a lot will have changed. A simple conversation between two people-or three or four-can alter the pace, the direction, and the drama of a story.
What makes a great story seems to involve something more: not just thought and action, but also interaction. However, we also know, intuitively, that describing what characters do and why they do it is not the only way to generate forward movement in a story. We use and encounter this simple and essential storytelling structure all the time. A moment of thought, perhaps prompted by some external event or new insight, tends to precede this kind of action.
#Sally rooney conversations with friends series
In the latter case, there is presumed to be a moment or series of moments, prior to an action, when it was contemplated, weighed against other actions (or inaction), and even planned. An action is either thoughtless-in which case we call it impulse or instinct-or it is thoughtful. Why did she do that? Why did he go there? A why, that is, which takes thought as its object. The kind we’ve been telling each other for millennia.īut a good story, of course, is just as much about the why as it is about the what. And when you lay enough of these evidentiary moments in a series, over time, you get a story.
What someone does is observable, documentable-it becomes evidence, then, what someone did.
We still tend to think of life in these terms.
0 kommentar(er)
