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And now, let’s get into our last blog post in our Shoot Your Novel course!
Last week we started talking about movies that play in our heads. For some of us, perhaps, much of our life is spent envisioning the future and all its “what ifs” or replaying like a broken movie reel the troubled or glorified days of our past. And because we want the characters in our novels to seem as real and believable as possible, they can daydream too. By creating a kind of movie playing in a character’s head, it can emulate in a way what we do perhaps daily, without even noticing.
Daydreaming Is a Part of Life
I imagine if we really paid attention, we’d see how we spend numerous hours of each day imagining ourselves in scenes—whether events that have happened to us or imaginary ones, like the one Goldman created for his character Levy in the novel Marathon Man, which we looked at last week. Novelists often go deep into POV, showing their character thinking about things and reacting to what is happening in the present scene.
Using deep POV is not only common but considered the way great novels are now mostly written. However, often these internalized thoughts and responses, although frequently effective, are not cinematic. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Continue Reading…