Raindrops on Roses (Part Eighteen): The Hypothetical Screen-Novel

To reiterate what I said in my introduction post (see Raindrops on Roses part Fifteen-and-a-Half), I wanted to talk about adaptations of computer screens, but I couldn’t think of a good book that did something similar to match the film/game/book sets I had been doing. So instead I plan to describe how the aspects that make Searching and Secret Little Haven work might translate over to a less visual medium.

Some books aren’t entirely without visuals, of course. The graphic novel medium could potentially use the computer screen quite well. It presents a similar limitation to Richard McGuire’s Here, where instead of a single place presented over multiple time periods, the novel could depict a single screen, following the cursor around just like a film might. Individual windows could be treated like different panels and such, for example.

This does run into the problem of separating itself wholly from its filmic inspirations. At best, what I’ve just done is describe a storyboard for something like Searching. And, I mean, it works. I could see something done like this, but that’s not what I was going into this piece trying to explore.

We learned from Searching that introducing characters before reducing them to IRC messages helps the audience, largely by letting them get to know that character in a different context first. And we learned from Secret Little Haven that a sort of melodramatic earnestness goes a long way. If all your characters have their emotions written on their sleeve, interpreting their messages as anything other than the obvious becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Both of these lessons operate under the assumption that the aesthetic problem gets solved, i.e., how do you make a book look like a computer screen? The closest I can think of is the “documentary novel” Nothing But The Truth by Avi. It’s written in a semi-script format, which serves to hide both critical details about the truth behind certain events but also many of its characters’ motivations. So even that example is not perfect. It runs counter to the emotional honesty that the previous two examples provided, obfuscating rather than illuminating.

What we’re looking for, therefore, is a novel that eschews traditional formatting in favor of (probably) text messages, IRC chat, or some other format that reduces description. It preferably needs to have earnest characters, each of whom get little introduction scenes before being pulled into the larger narrative.

I don’t know if that book exists yet. If it does, I haven’t read it yet. It might be a bit of a mess, to be honest, though I also think a lot of books sound like a bit of a mess when you boil them down to a paragraph of description. But it would be neat to see if it matches the same mood that those other examples do.

-F