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Showerthought: That scene in a book where the character just sits and thinks used to bore me, now it's my favorite part.
I used to skip paragraphs of internal monologue in novels when I was younger. Wanted action, dialogue, stuff happening. But around 3 years ago I read 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy. There's this whole section where the man and the boy are just sitting in a dark house, waiting. Nothing happens for pages. But that stillness hit different after I turned 30. Maybe it's because I spend my days coordinating shipments and solving other people's small emergencies. The quiet in that chapter felt like a break I actually needed. Has anyone else had a genre or style they hated suddenly click for them later on?
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lisaf383d ago
Oh man, have you tried picking up a novella by Kent Haruf? Something like "Plainsong" has these quiet, long scenes where people are just existing in their daily lives and it hits the same way as that stillness in The Road. For me, it was poetry - I hated it in high school but now I find myself reading Mary Oliver before bed to slow my brain down from work stress. Give yourself permission to let the quiet parts breathe, they're not filler, they're the actual point of the book sometimes.
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