The fast cuts between perspectives, characters who feel like they're performing their quirks rather than embodying them, dialogue that sounds like it's written almost too perfectly, scenes that feel framed for maximum visual impact.
It reminds me of watching a cool, new Netflix show that everyone is raving about. I won’t say which specific novel I’m discussing, because that wouldn’t be nice, and besides, although the novel has a very Netflix-vibe, I’m quite enjoying it.
Some months ago a friend of mine read the second chapter of my current WIP and said: if I wanted to watch Netflix, I’d turn on my TV. She was saying my second chapter, while well-written, was trying too hard to be TV. She told me: let your story do what no TV or movie can do. Use the power of the novel as an art form.
That has stuck with me. What can a novel do that a Netflix series can’t?
It can go deep into the inner world of the characters. It can drop you into a character's stream of consciousness as they wrestle with whether to forgive someone who destroyed their life. (my novel Jonah) Or how grief really, never leaves the body via reiteration. (Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow)
These are the territories only novels can explore with this kind of intimacy, this kind of precision.
Let’s keep the form of the novel. Let’s exploit it. And let Netflix be Netflix.