Russian short stories are about 80% description with minimal explanation, forcing readers to interpret meaning themselves. American literature flips this, prioritizing explanation and narration. Genre fiction leans on constant action instead, treating description and explanation as secondary.
Russian literature, Russian short stories in particular, are like 80% description. They don't tell you anything. There's like no explanation. It's all just description and you have to interpret your own meaning, which is fascinating. And then you read more modern American literature and a lot of it is actually like explanation and narration. And then there's like description thrown in there. What's interesting is like action in literature, very minimal. Like characters are rarely doing something. It's a lot of explanation or it's a lot of observation description. Action is more like genre fiction. You ever open like a shitty fiction novel, you know, and it's just like characters just like doing a lot of things? And you're like, "Okay, yeah, you're doing a lot, but like there's minimal explanation. I don't really know why this is important, and there's minimal description. I like can't really put myself in the world." And so each of these variables is like when someone says, "How do you paint a portrait?" Well, there's a million different right ways to paint a portrait. These are just colors on the palette, and different writers elicit different responses because of the ways that they blend these colors together.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
