How to show characters learning something in a non-boring way?
Okay so I want to write a fiction where a character is learning something, for example a language, such as Japanese. I want to show the entire process of learning the language with all the details included, but I also don't want it to bore the reader. Is this possible?
I was thinking of showing the thought processes of the character, for example the character going "Ah!, So these are the vowels in the Japanese language." But I fear doing this repeatedly for everything might end up boring the reader.
"with all the details included" If you mean that literally, then your book will be teaching the reader Japanese. Which p …
10y ago
Your fears are correct: "all the details included" is a terrible way to write fiction. If all the details were included …
10y ago
If you as the writer find the process of X fascinating, you will be able to translate that to the page in a way which ma …
10y ago
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"with all the details included" If you mean that literally, then your book will be teaching the reader Japanese. Which probably won't make for an interesting novel. If you can really merge together teaching the reader a new language with an entertaining story, that would be a great achievement, and your book could become very popular with educators. But wow, that sounds difficult. I'm a software developer by profession. I can't imagine writing a book that would include all the details of how to program in Java and also be an interesting story.
Now if there are some things about the Japanese language that you think are particularly interesting and that you want to work into a novel, that's a different thing. I don't know anything about Japanese, but I can easily think of many ways that some detail about a language could be made relevant to a story. A story could have an important plot point where a difficulty in translating created misunderstandings. A character might realize something important about his friend from this society or about the culture in general from some characteristic of the language. (I'm suddenly reminded of a TV show I saw years ago where a character talks about the tropical paradise that he plans to retire to, and he says, "The natives there have no word for 'work', but they have a hundred different words for 'cocktail umbrella'.") Some subtlety in grammar could turn out to be an important clue in solving the mystery. (In the Bible, in Matthew 21:31-32, Jesus makes a theological argument based entirely on the tense of a verb used in a scripture quote, that makes sense in English but is more pointed in Hebrew.) Etc.
Would it be possible to write a story where the learning process itself is made interesting? Maybe. I think it would be hard. You could certainly have a scene where a character who has been struggling to learn some difficult subject suddenly gets a burst of understanding, and has a "eureka" moment. Plenty of stories have been written where the struggling student suddenly has a breakthrough and demonstrates that he can now beat the master in a sword fight or chess game or whatever. But could you do that over and over again as he meets each new challenge? I think it would get tedious. I'm not saying it can't be done, and more power to you if you can pull it off.
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If you as the writer find the process of X fascinating, you will be able to translate that to the page in a way which makes it fascinating for the reader.
If you enjoy math, you talk about the satisfying click of numbers as they slide into place, and how there is always a right and a wrong, unlike the slipperiness of philosophy. If you love languages, you show the character uncovering the parallels between French and Italian, and then Italian and Spanish, and suddenly making the leap to Portuguese. If you're into puzzles, you channel Sherlock Holmes. And so on.
The easiest way to get this on paper for your first draft is to transcribe, in a sense, what it was like for you do process X. Never mind the character for the moment; just write down your experience as if you were writing a blog post or a diary entry or a letter.
Once you have the entire lesson/scene on the page, then you can start rewriting it for your character, and adding fictional flourishes and compressing time etc. to make it more readable.
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Your fears are correct: "all the details included" is a terrible way to write fiction. If all the details were included it wouldn't be fiction, it would be a textbook--and we all know how much fun those are to read.
The power of fiction lies in the reader's imagination--what you want is enough detail to prompt their imagination, while still giving it some room to work with. In your case, what this means is that you should provide the reader with only the most interesting or surprising details, then let them fill in the rest. Your readers can probably guess that Japanese has vowels--that is not a very interesting detail. However, it might surprise them to learn that written Japanese is a mix of letters (representing sounds) and pictograms (representing concepts). That is the kind of detail that might be good to include, especially if it has some other relevance to the plot (see Dale Emery's answer).
It's easiest to separate the interesting details from the boring ones when you yourself have some familiarity with the subject, so you might want to go do some research on the Japanese language first, then take the details that surprised/delighted/intrigued you and put them into your story as your character's thoughts and observations (see Lauren Ipsum's answer).
EDIT: For the advanced techniques, go read this essay.
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