Hi
@BT Jones, let's see how we can help you.
But it is for this same reason that I always say that the very story of a novel or a story is the only element, at least the first, I clarify in passing before I am be shot, on which one should concentrate; not the characters and not the arcs for those characters; to privilege or give more importance to that instead of wondering at all times what kind of story is being told is to misunderstand the whole process. The characters are just vehicles, instruments that you use to tell your story. They are the only element, moreover, by which you can make the reader feel reflected with one of these characters, often with the MC. But they are not the most important thing. Someone who gives more importance to that is actually trying more to sell a product than telling a story; he is thinking more about a YA market, for example, than really worried about what he's counting on. It is very easy to detect, by simply reading, that commercial intention. The winks that are intended to entice the reader are embarrassingly obvious: often the MC is a boy or a girl predestined to accomplish a great feat. Therefore, he is a chosen one, although he does not know it, or he has some gift such as the force, or abilities for magic, since he is the son of magicians, or abilities to pilot combat fighters, because is the daughter of a pilot, or for last she is a good with the bow; therefore she is a hunter, it has an unmistakably aggressive component that predisposes it to adventure. Of course, they are all very smart and handsome (perhaps the only exception is Miles Vorkosigan, whose short stature is presented as a sign of physical deficiency that he must overcome), but at the same time most of them are surrounded by a whole court of evil, foolish and incomprehensible characters whose objective, of course, is none other than to serve as a mere excuse (by the author, of course, always attentive to getting the reader's identification) to highlight the many virtues of the protagonists and leave very clear that they are absolutely great and the rest are heavy and some of the worst that there is. Except their friends, of course.
But look at Borges' stories, for example. There is almost no dialogue. The characters, when they exist, are barely outlined. But instead, there is such an astonishing amount of descriptive details and strange elements that when you finish reading one of his stories you discover that for an hour you moved to another completely different world and that Borges, in effect, led you through a portal, made you cross the mirror and you without ever wondering about the aforementioned characters. I remember reading someone out there who said that it was not necessary to describe a jungle because we are all supposed to know what a jungle is like. One would have to wonder what Borges would answer to that. Because he even turns a log into a narrative element. It is not just any log, of course, as a god leaned on it, pausing on his way to face another god in an epic and terrifying battle. In other words, Borges is always telling you a story; it doesn't give a damn to tell you what a character is like; let's not say that something happens precisely, about the arguments or the arcs. In fact, regarding the descriptions, Borges invented the so-called "lists", and Bolaño later transformed that into the very pulp of his narrative, lists and more lists, endless lists, lists of books and of criticisms of those books, of writers and people, lists of drinks and cities, lists of beers and tequilas and, yes, lists of lies, because they are all lists of false things, all the literature a spell, the trick of a magician. Although it happens, of course, that Borges and Bolaño are excellent liars, they talk to you with a whiskey in hand; well, Bolaño would probably have a mezcal. But with the same smile Bolaño would propose you a contest, to see if you can find a single dialogue in any of his books.
In the same way, his characters are as illusory and vague as his stories. But as soon as you look at him you know that he sold you the whole story and that you believed him absolutely everything. You just start to wish that with that same smile he won't ask you to also lend him money. Because with that tremendous ability to loot and shear the reader, you already know that you could not refuse. So, every writer, at least the good ones, and those two are damned good, has something of a trickster and gypsy, is an artist of the rambling. You know they are lying to you, that they are just giving you a long plane ride, but you have no choice but to listen to them. They surround you with the same magic and charm of that bar old man that hypnotizes you like a snake, and that traps you and offers you no other escape except when you reach the end of the story. Of course, in these there are plot and arc, but in the end you realize that it was the least important, because all the time they only made you enjoy the ride, what they told you about that jungle that from the height of that plane to you were just a green stain, and yet all the details they gave you made you feel like you were a helpless native down there.
Now, in terms of paragraph length or chapter length, parodying the expression, "I don't even tell you": Borges turns the paragraph into magic without respite; Bolaño, in fact, is the king of the long paragraph: pages and pages and more pages in such a way that it simply takes your breath away. But does it matter? Total, you already accepted the deal, you already got on the plane.
So my dear BT, if you want to learn to lie ... sorry, I mean, to tell stories, first of all you must become a complete trickster and con artist. In fact, it's something we should all ask ourselves: how capable are we to tell someone a story in a bar? It's a skill that obviously requires a great deal of improvisation to visualize details and convey them at the speed of light; besides, you have to be convincing and elegant, and even though men naturally approach me for more than obvious reasons, I usually end up wrapping them in my spider web. Besides, as a girl I already had that talent: there was always other girl or a child listening to me absorbed while I was telling their something.
But literature, deep down, is not very far from that.
