Should I Make Sure My Characters Are Shown Eating? | Dear Writer #11
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I have a scene where the MC wakes up in her boyfriend's bed. She talks with him for a while then makes an excuse to leave. At some point, I thought, "Hm, they didn't even mentioned or ate breakfast."
In another scene, they meet for a date. In the first draft, they go to a restaurant, but then I changed the location to a library. At some point, I thought, "Hm, they don't eat dinner in the whole date."
Do you think this is an issue? Or the reader will just assume the characters ate between scenes (or behind scenes)? Or maybe the readers don't care at all?
(Right now, I only make the characters eat when they are in a bar, restaurant, or while they are doing something else like using the computer.)
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Dear Writer,
There are two main ideas to consider. First is "Chekhov's Gun."
Anton Chekhov argued that if a gun is present on stage in act I of a play, the gun must go off by act III, otherwise, why was the gun there?
Chekhov’s point is that irrelevant narrative elements bog down a story and make your audience ask questions you don’t intend to answer. They create false expectations in the audience and, depending on the gravity of the element in question, may cause frustration. This is a primary reason many people didn’t like The Last Jedi. Johnson's attempt at deconstructionism seemed farfetched given the tone of The Force Awakens and many of the elements TLJ discarded amounted to a violation of Chekhov's Gun.
Second is the question of what Kidder & Todd (in Good Prose) call "proportion and order." What they mean is that structuring a plot is a balancing act. It’s about choosing what details to employ—and to what degree—and what details to ignore altogether; this is proportion. Order concerns the sequence of events.
The storyteller's job is to choose the relevant details and then to place them in the best order to tell the best story. If you've ever moved a scene around in your story so that it would “fit better,” you understand the relevance of order.
My question to you is: “Why is it relevant that we see the characters eating?”
I could just as easily ask you why you aren't showing your characters pooping. It’s fine for important events to occur over a meal, but there must be some narrative content the pushes the plot forward, reveals character, or both.
Eating for the sake of proving characters' realness is inadvisable; your audience assumes that your characters handle all of life's bare necessities in the scenes we don’t see.
At the extreme least, eating should accompany some meaningful narrative content. Otherwise, you’re trying to prove realness in a medium that doesn’t need you to.
And that’s a different form of Chekhov’s Gun altogether.
Best,
DRM
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DANIEL RODRIGUES-MARTIN is the author of books, articles, essays, poems, reviews, and countless rants since 2004. His debut novel, GODDESS FROM THE MACHINE, is available from most major carriers.