On light novels and the first-person narrator

[Muphrid]

http://geekorner.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/light-novels-are-poorly-written-and-adapting-them-shows-that/

I ran across this article in the context of some criticism: that light novels tend to be told in a similar fashion, with slightly-snarky but otherwise generic protagonists as narrators, with ornate language that runs purple at times.  Some of that could be attributed to a convention of the genre (the article or the comments mention noir as a case where the protagonists all tend to be similar; the genre itself has certain tropes that are common, even ubiquitous).

I was actually a bit surprised to see Kyon as one of the examples in this article, but after some thinking, I realized there may be something to this argument.  While Kyon has some distinctive features (esoteric references, selective obliviousness, etc.) he does fit many of the checkboxes for the generic LN protagonist-narrator:  not strongly motivated, somewhat snarky narration, gets flowery over things (especially women).

But the article raises a broader point about how narration, when used to characterize the narrator, can be a poor substitute for characterization through actions and dialogue, and it can translate poorly to adaptations, in which that narration has to be shoe-horned in or cut.

That being said, I have to wonder how a first-person story could be told to avoid this problem:  I've felt in the past that it can be unnatural for a first-person narrator to describe his body's reactions and sensations in as much detail as he would use to describe others.  The narrator has to figure out what others are thinking and feeling, but he knows what's in his head, and it's more direct to say so.

Are there other challenges to writing a story in first-person that pertain to this issue?  As a writer, how do you attack these issues?  As a reader, what approaches have you seen that you liked or disliked to characterize a first-person narrator effectively?

[Ergoemos]

That's a really interesting article that I am going to have to read several times to sort of pick out the tibits I want to chew on individually.

I honestly agree with the author, for the most part. I have trouble thinking of light novel protagonists that aren't a generic every-boy, just on the cusp of manhood but otherwise without major opinion or internal strife. (I am not sure I could name a light novel with a female protagonist without just guessing at series and hoping they have a book.)

I love the Haruhi Suzumiya series, as is probably no surprise to anyone here, but I have pretty much always thought Kyon to be a rather shallow protagonist at best. He is dragged along by the plot, rarely ever affecting it himself unless it comes down to the "Okay, Kyon, if you don't press this button (or kiss this girl, or shout your feelings) right now, the world will change forever, and you probably would like that less than what you deal with now."

I have yet to run into a Light Novel series that has the main character make the decisions and decide his own course, though Spice and Wolf is probably the best counter-example to my own spiel. I tend to have trouble getting into light novels in general because of their protagonists. I'd probably not enjoy Haruhi Suzumiya without the anime as a baseline for my mental and emotional image of the characters.

That said, probably one of my favorite-est books in the world is Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. It is a first person narrative with a cynical viewpoint that is sort of dragged along by the plot against her will.

What sets Sunshine apart (as best as I can put it into words without waxing on for paragraph after paragraph) is that the main character's internal monologue is the bulk of the story. Her emotional highs and lows and many many sidetracks as she works her way to moving to the next real plot point are the adventure. You learn about the world through the author's point of view, which is most decidedly not completely trustworthy, but it is a confident point of view that comes from someone who knows the world they are actually living in.

Sunshine also feels like the narrator is talking to you, the reader, as they go through the tale of their life. It feels personal. It feels heartfelt. The words are describing a person who has opinions, strong ones, on everything from how to serve tea, to how the city council tries to screw up her part of her town, to how there is no mistaking that vampires and humans are never meant to interact in ways that do not follow strict predator-prey lines. And yet... she has to work through her inner demons, arguing with herself and sometimes contradict her own thought mid-sentence.

Maybe its the vibrancy of the internal conversation. I honestly cannot imagine how you could easily capture the emotive writing by handing it to a translator and saying "Go."

I am slowly learning Japanese with the fiance. There is some freaking strange and convoluted nuances to how Japanese culture and language intertwine. I am beginning to think that its not that the light novels aren't good, its that it is a near insurmountable task to translate the works without losing the spark of character that breaths life into that sort of first person monologue.

[Muphrid]

Sunshine also feels like the narrator is talking to you, the reader, as they go through the tale of their life. It feels personal. It feels heartfelt. The words are describing a person who has opinions, strong ones, on everything from how to serve tea, to how the city council tries to screw up her part of her town, to how there is no mistaking that vampires and humans are never meant to interact in ways that do not follow strict predator-prey lines. And yet... she has to work through her inner demons, arguing with herself and sometimes contradict her own thought mid-sentence.

Maybe its the vibrancy of the internal conversation. I honestly cannot imagine how you could easily capture the emotive writing by handing it to a translator and saying "Go."

That definitely could be it, and perhaps KLSymph has some things to say about it, having spent some time working on tidying up an LN translation into something that that is stylistically sound, into something that reads like a story instead of a word-for-word translation.

I have a deep love for the notion of first-person narrative that displays the character's feelings without that character necessarily telling the audience about those feelings.  Rushed sentences, certain word choices, the overall flow of the thought process--these get across the character's state of mind in ways that he or she may not be fully conscious of.

And they also strike me as things that may not translate very well, or very effectively, without great care.

A point made in the comments was that Japanese isn't structured into paragraphs the way English is; their units of composition (the term escapes me at the moment) isn't necessarily intended to start with a particular point and then to support that point.  This more free-form way of writing, at least as the study was presented in an academic context, could make it more difficult for English speakers to parse what's going on into something English readers could understand as effectively.

[Arakawa]

I ran across this article in the context of some criticism: that light novels tend to be told in a similar fashion, with slightly-snarky but otherwise generic protagonists as narrators, with ornate language that runs purple at times. 

Hmm, I'm guilty of writing stuff like that.... out of curiosity, I put the opening paragraph of Ch1 of Lost Twins (where I feel like I've edited every word down to satisfaction, rather than other places where I really do have a long way to go in terms of tightening the style I have in mind) into Hemingway App which the author thinks is a great litmus test. It said the reading level is Grade 18, which I think doesn't exist, so clearly it cannot be read by human beings.

_{(The first paragraph of this post is Grade 16.)}

:-P

I started writing a paragraph-by-paragraph dissection of the advice, the relevant and irrelevant. But then I got too grated by the "this is the only way to do it" tone. Author thinks Hemingway app and Stephen King's style are the litmus tests of good writing. Apparently thinks first person narrative is modern and Freudian and stuff (encourages narcissism?), and that describing a character's thoughts is a questionable practice that you shouldn't do if you can avoid it.

It does have some valid thoughts that tearing narration out of a first-person narrator when adapting the piece sometimes makes them seem like an empty shell. Sometimes that's bad. Though sometimes that's just how it is; you have these sullen people whose thoughts and external behaviour are not very well connected, so you can't really tell what they're thinking. You can't write that kind of character easily without getting into their head a lot. Are we supposed to just not portray those people?

It has another valid thought that focusing too much on describing a person's thoughts can obscure the actual action. That's also point (3) in my counter-thoughts below.

The guy throws out two supposedly egregious LN quotes, specifically in terms of style. The first of which is egregious because it's cliched (and displays a skeevy character) rather than stylistically bad, and the second of which seems fine to me on whatever count. Ironically it even passes the Hemingway app (except where robot Hemingway thinks that a puppy dies whenever you use adverbs like "confidently"). I could still Hemingwayize it, why not:

He smirked, sword in confident hand. He could see the course this fight would take. If you could even call it a fight; he was sure he knew the moves his opponent would take.

Does that add anything? Does that detract anything? The structure and information of the paragraph didn't change. Just periods instead of commas (with added redundancy) to tie one thought to the next.

I'll do one better in terms of advice:

(1) You should write stuff where one thought connects to the other in a logical structure. You should use a well-thought-out grammatical scheme for tying things together into that structure. This scheme can involve fancy toolwork like semicolons and adverbs, or you can use Hemingway style, right down to sentence fragments. Whatever floats your boat, as long as it actually conveys the structure of your thing and there is a structure. (Unstructured Hemingway prose will just read as a burst disconnected non-sequiturs.)

Moreover, it's best to master a number of schemes so you can vary the tone of your piece, from direct and plain to ornate and sweeping, if that seems appropriate to change the mood. The effect is rather like incidental music in a movie. You could avoid learning music; but then you'd have a movie with a minimalist soundtrack. Which may or may not want to be what you actually want.

(2) If a character's thoughts are mentioned, they have to add something relevant to the reader's experience of the story. Just like if any other detail whatsoever is mentioned, it should add something relevant to the reader. This is the root behind dislike of adverbs, because often adverbs add less information than is worth the bother of digesting them. That does not mean that they shouldn't be used when they actually convey information.

(3) A better word than purple prose is "detailed prose", which is a neutral thing at best. Or, you could say purple prose is the variety of detailed prose where the details don't add anything. Saying your prose shouldn't be detailed is like saying every drawing of a person should be in some minimalist manga style. The real problem is that when you use lots of detail, you need to establish a hierarchy of basic structure the reader has to notice vs. details they just vaguely gloss over by osmosis when reading quickly; if the tiny details are what is more noticeable to a person skimming than the overall action, then your hierarchy has got screwed up. Scribbling over your drawing without a lot of control obscures the underlying structure. Properly speaking, first the viewer sees the arm in a sleeve; only then they might see the frills on the sleeve, or gloss over those.

Ditching details from your prose is not an automatic way out of having to master prose style, because then you're working with less material to convey information. If you are doing a minimalist style drawing, you have to figure out the placement of every line precisely in order to convey what you're looking at. The way you learn minimal drawing in real life is that you do detailed (if messy) sketches, so you can learn to think through the full detail of what's happening, so you can hint at those details in a controlled fashion when you go to do the minimal drawing. Obviously putting things on paper explicitly helps in this process.

Like in a well-structured anime character, it's just a few dots or lines, but to accurately draw how the head rotates, or how the lines are supposed to curve, you have to actually know the anatomy of the head underneath, potentially in great detail. If your 5 lines or so that make up the visible drawing are informed by that well-thought-out structure, the character is far more interesting to look at.

(4) Show, don't tell, is obviously great advice when there's relevant details that you prefer them to infer from what's on the paper. Again, it's still a decision: will the reader enjoy inferring those details? Or just be annoyed at being made to do so? Or just completely miss out on that detail -- can you actually structure your prose in a way that the hint doesn't go over their head? On the other hand, for every detail that you put there explicitly there is the risk that the reader feels beaten over the head with it, or that it'll slow the flow of the story.

(5) You should specify information carefully (using all of the above considerations of how to show not tell) when you want the reader to know exactly what is going on. You should leave things ambiguous if you want the reader to have multiple interpretations. Obviously if you're not thinking about this aspect of things, the result may not be well-thought-out.

--

So, whenever light novels fall afoul of the above, obviously what they are doing is bad. The first-person-protagonist-with-detailed-thoughts thing requires mastery of a number of specific skills which you could get by without if you were writing other genres. As the medium/genre is popular, people who are shaky on those skills write a lot of light novels that display that shakiness. That does not mean Haruhi series would automatically be better if it were written by Ernest Hemingway.

*goes and follows my own advice*

[Arakawa]

I suppose I should thank the guy, as reacting to this "Hemingway is only real writer" tone has helped me figure out by contrast what I'm going for with the current style I'm using, and sort of work out a hierarchy of things to look at to actually make my writing work.

The problem is, in essence, that I'm trying to handle a lot of layers of information at once:

• The action of the thing, which is just not very fast-paced.
• The attitudes and interactions of the various characters.
• The narrator's particular attitude and way of describing things.
• Some purely stylistical variation and frippery that acts in the way of atmospheric music.
• Exposition which has to present a lot of complex ideas (the nature of genies, etc.) in a structured and incremental fashion.

In a story which doesn't reduce very well to just one of those dimensions, removing an entire layer of information detracts from the overall impression and coherence of the thing. But balancing these layers is also a tricky task, where "write more like Stephen King" is not appropriate advice.

[Dracos]

*sleepily comments before reading the article*

I don't go through many VNs or LNs, but the Cypher Every-boy protagonist is enormously common in Japanese manga and anime and games.  At best they might have one personality trait that shows up, but passive lazy observing accepting is just super common, especially for short harem stories.  Even for ones that end up with one, they'll often grow it later int the story after ages of not having one.

Out west there's the cypher every-man (Yes, Dr. Gordon Freeman, tell me again how you're literally held up as an amazing character in college coursework?) that's pretty common, even if less so than the japanese everyboy.  In japan, that becomes the salaryman, but every time I've seen a story with one, they tend to put quite a bit of personality into it so averted more often than followed.

[KLSymph]

[...] perhaps KLSymph has some things to say about it, having spent some time working on tidying up an LN translation into something that that is stylistically sound, into something that reads like a story instead of a word-for-word translation.

*looks up from 30+ hours of editing chapter one of Rakudai Kishi*

Someone's gotta do it.

I read the article and while it makes a few points I'd agree with, I'm don't find it too valid, at least from my experience with light novels.

First thing that leaps at you, which is completely a stylistic choice is how many adjectives and adverbs there are. No action can simply be carried out, but everything must be narrated, everything must be commentated. You see, these descriptions in LNs rarely happen from the point of view of a detached third-person describing events, but are almost always presented in the form of the protagonist narrating the events they see. All these adjectives and adverbs are there to ensure we don't miss anything, and to tell us how the protagonist views the world.

"Almost always" by the protagonist narrating? That would be consistently true for stories with first-person narration, but at least in my watchlist of LN novels, most stories use third-person narrators.  I haven't really seen heavy personal narration as a problem.  If I had to say anything was too stylistically common for my tastes, it would be the white-void dialogue exchanges.

If one trusts their writing, and if one trusts their characters and situations to pass muster on their own, then you can just present the scene and let people interpret the characters on their own. Yes, some people might interpret things differently, but that isn't a bug, but a feature. Not so in light novels, we must at all times know what the characters actually think, what is their take on every little thing that occurs. The scenes aren't allowed to breathe.

But an author can also write a densely narrated story and let the reader interpret it differently from the narrated opinions.  I don't think dense narration of personal views makes stories bad in and of themselves.

Another issue is that since the author does his characterization that way, they aren't doing it in other ways – such as through the characters' words and their actions. Not just the other actions', but the protagonist's as well. There is no need to "let actions speak for themselves" when you can just narrate every thing you want to transmit to the audience.

I can agree with this.  There's a certain preponderance of talky-thinky characterization going on.  On the other hand, being a bit of a young-adult genre, LNs tend to favor romance, school-life, and other personal-relationship elements, all of which are pretty darn talky-thinky in writing.  In actual action sequences, like in a fight scene, I haven't had the sense that there's too little action going on.

Since so much of the characterization, especially of the main character is carried out through internal monologues, if you cut them all out then the protagonist seems like an empty shell.

Yes... but cutting out the main method of characterization of a character who's characterized by one main method would make him seem like an empty shell regardless.  Why is it a problem of light novels in particular?

I suspect that the article is addressing two separate points, one about narration-as-characterization and one about narration-as-viewpoint, but those are separate arguments complicated by personal narration being used for two purposes.  If the story is being told by a protagonist's personal narration, it's not just serving to characterize the protagonist but also to relate the story to the reader.  Characterization and "being the window into the story" have different requirements, and when the narration does both there's going to be both tradeoffs and subtle interactions.

The "narrator", the "constantly-speaking protagonist" almost seems to be a Freudian creation. This fits the Modernist idea which had put the person at the forefront, and is especially fitting for the Psychological turn of the 20th century, which puts our perspective as self-reflecting individuals as all-important.

Bwahahahahahaha, what?  Since Freud and Modernism are from the 1800s and epistolary novels existed since the 1500s, I think "stories with a protagonist going on and on" predate them by a long, comfortable margin.  If you think Japanese light novels are told in a too self-centered narrative mode, reading two paragraphs of Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (published in 1740) will grind your brain into powder.  Seriously, try it.

In a sense, it feels as if LN adaptations are like movie adaptations of books, or of complete series – they sort of assume you've already consumed the original material and will fill in the gaps, and often fail otherwise.

...Sure, and anime adaptations of light novels are also like movie adaptations of books in that they're adapting written text into a moving-visuals medium.  Because that's what's going on.  I wouldn't simply lay the blame at the writing; when you adapt a book into an anime, some things that books are better at portraying get cut when they don't fit into the limits of anime, regardless of how good the writing is, so you can hardly use "the anime adaptation loses stuff" to argue that the novel was poorly written.

Likewise for LN adaptations, it's true that you lose on the protagonist's character, but it's not like there's much there in the first place, and you get to avoid gems such as (from the fan-translation of Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei, to be adapted in the upcoming Spring season):

"With a sound, the normally straight pleat dress made from ultra thin fabric was massively raised, revealing a pair of tights that outlined delicious curves along with the leather holder along one thigh."

Mahouka pls >.>

True, but Tatsuya Shiba's characterization from his own perspective is important to the story.  If you cut his characterization you will carve out the heart of MKnR and turn it more into a generic sci-fi high school story, which kind of defeats what I like about MKnR (and I like it a lot).  And at the same time, much of the setting infodumping will also lost, making the setting that much more sci-fi generic, but I'm sure they'll have to adapt the story-relevant infodumping into time-wasting animations even less informative than a text infodump.

(I haven't watched any episodes yet, so I'm basing that prediction on the manga adaptation.)

But the article raises a broader point about how narration, when used to characterize the narrator, can be a poor substitute for characterization through actions and dialogue, and it can translate poorly to adaptations, in which that narration has to be shoe-horned in or cut.

That being said, I have to wonder how a first-person story could be told to avoid this problem[...]

I don't think it's possible to tell a first-person story that avoids the problem of overreliance on personal narration for characterization.  As I mentioned above, a first-person story uses personal narration for both characterization and for being how the reader views the story.  That strict relationship gives the reader an intimacy with the viewpoint character which is the narrative mode's strength, and really the entire point of the narrative mode's existence.  That intimacy is only appropriate for certain stories, and an author must decide whether the intimacy of this one kind of characterization is valuable enough to sacrifice broader characterization by other means.  Otherwise you should just be writing third-person.

I have yet to run into a Light Novel series that has the main character make the decisions and decide his own course

I wouldn't read Japanese light novels for that kind of main character.  As I understand it, Japanese cultural norms don't really go for such thinking in young adults, and that expectation bleeds into its entertainment.  I don't have a very nuanced understanding, but they tend more towards the "become stronger!" and "for the team!" type of protagonist.

I have a deep love for the notion of first-person narrative that displays the character's feelings without that character necessarily telling the audience about those feelings.  Rushed sentences, certain word choices, the overall flow of the thought process--these get across the character's state of mind in ways that he or she may not be fully conscious of.

That's gold if you can find it.  Some light novels are better, but others dive face-first into "now I'm really angry" territory.

Maybe its the vibrancy of the internal conversation. I honestly cannot imagine how you could easily capture the emotive writing by handing it to a translator and saying "Go."

And they also strike me as things that may not translate very well, or very effectively, without great care.

I do editing, not translating, but I've read some original Japanese.  While the translation probably don't capture all the emotional notes, I think they capture at least the story-important elements and there's enough to get some resonance with me as a reader.  I think that to really get a full grasp of the emotion, the reader would need to also have a set of Japanese cultural expectations, which is probably unachievable anyway.

A point made in the comments was that Japanese isn't structured into paragraphs the way English is; their units of composition (the term escapes me at the moment) isn't necessarily intended to start with a particular point and then to support that point.  This more free-form way of writing, at least as the study was presented in an academic context, could make it more difficult for English speakers to parse what's going on into something English readers could understand as effectively.

Yes..................this is true.  As in "are you kidding me" levels of true.  For line after line I have to figure out how much of the rhythm of the narrative would be lost if I merge sentences for clarity.  I would in all seriousness call it "godawful" from the perspective of someone who's spent thirty hours trying to scrub one chapter for clarity while preserving the feel of reading the original translation as much as possible.  It's right up there with proofreading dense technical research papers written by ESL authors.

I don't go through many VNs or LNs, but the Cypher Every-boy protagonist is enormously common in Japanese manga and anime and games.  At best they might have one personality trait that shows up, but passive lazy observing accepting is just super common, especially for short harem stories.  Even for ones that end up with one, they'll often grow it later int the story after ages of not having one.

That character type may just be the type that sells books.  LN publishing is still a business, the audience that pays money likes it, and writers have to consistently eat, so what can you do?

[Dracos]

KL:

Precisely.  Complaining about it is misunderstanding Cause and Effect.  They're not out there because all writers are lazy bums.  They're out there because a handful that tried that found it enormously financially successful, and so a swell of copycats followed them up.  They're definitely not all of them, but there's absolutely an audience for Cypher don't really do much or have much defining traits, thrown into exciting situation and/or tons of hot girls.

[Muphrid]

Hmm, I'm guilty of writing stuff like that.... out of curiosity, I put the opening paragraph of Ch1 of Lost Twins (where I feel like I've edited every word down to satisfaction, rather than other places where I really do have a long way to go in terms of tightening the style I have in mind) into Hemingway App which the author thinks is a great litmus test. It said the reading level is Grade 18, which I think doesn't exist, so clearly it cannot be read by human beings.

Well, Simon's awkwardness is a distinct part of his character, and you intend for him to grow (where I think part of the criticism deals with characters who do not grow much at all).

I mean, you also intended Simon to be wordy, and to contrast that with his glibness when communicating verbally (for good reasons).  Did it take some getting used to in order to read and critique it?  A bit.  A zealous editor might think that it's too complicated to be worth the trouble, admittedly.

Does that add anything? Does that detract anything? The structure and information of the paragraph didn't change. Just periods instead of commas (with added redundancy) to tie one thought to the next.

Probably depends on how much or little you think of people's ability to deal with semicolons.  I like semicolons, so it doesn't do much for me to cut them out.

(1) You should write stuff where one thought connects to the other in a logical structure. You should use a well-thought-out grammatical scheme for tying things together into that structure. This scheme can involve fancy toolwork like semicolons and adverbs, or you can use Hemingway style, right down to sentence fragments. Whatever floats your boat, as long as it actually conveys the structure of your thing and there is a structure. (Unstructured Hemingway prose will just read as a burst disconnected non-sequiturs.)

Moreover, it's best to master a number of schemes so you can vary the tone of your piece, from direct and plain to ornate and sweeping, if that seems appropriate to change the mood. The effect is rather like incidental music in a movie. You could avoid learning music; but then you'd have a movie with a minimalist soundtrack. Which may or may not want to be what you actually want.

Yeah, that gets at one of my beefs with over-aggressive Hemingway-ism:  it can leave out so much connective glue that you can't tell how statements are related to one another.

And different structures are definitely better suited for certain situations.  I've always heard that you want shorter sentences for action sequences, for instance, and I feel that how much description one uses reveals the narrator's attitude toward a thing: a lot of description means that the thing is important and significant in some way, whereas plainer, more succinct description conveys insignificance, or perhaps a wish that this thing didn't need to be described at all.

(2) If a character's thoughts are mentioned, they have to add something relevant to the reader's experience of the story. Just like if any other detail whatsoever is mentioned, it should add something relevant to the reader. This is the root behind dislike of adverbs, because often adverbs add less information than is worth the bother of digesting them. That does not mean that they shouldn't be used when they actually convey information.

(3) A better word than purple prose is "detailed prose", which is a neutral thing at best. Or, you could say purple prose is the variety of detailed prose where the details don't add anything. Saying your prose shouldn't be detailed is like saying every drawing of a person should be in some minimalist manga style. The real problem is that when you use lots of detail, you need to establish a hierarchy of basic structure the reader has to notice vs. details they just vaguely gloss over by osmosis when reading quickly; if the tiny details are what is more noticeable to a person skimming than the overall action, then your hierarchy has got screwed up. Scribbling over your drawing without a lot of control obscures the underlying structure. Properly speaking, first the viewer sees the arm in a sleeve; only then they might see the frills on the sleeve, or gloss over those.

I think some of this goes back to KL's idea about having some freedom for a reader to imagine the scene works better than overdetermining the scene with tons and tons of details, and I think you nailed why this should be the case:  because it distracts from the point of a scene.  The reader needs enough information to imagine and visualize, but then at some point the details of the time and place need to fade into the background and make way for action, dialogue, or what-have-you.

So there's a logical progression of setting the scene--establishing the place and time, setting the mood with environmental details--and then moving on to the action.  Or at least, that's how I tend to think of it, but I can't pin down where or how I might've gotten this idea in my head...

(4) Show, don't tell, is obviously great advice when there's relevant details that you prefer them to infer from what's on the paper. Again, it's still a decision: will the reader enjoy inferring those details? Or just be annoyed at being made to do so? Or just completely miss out on that detail -- can you actually structure your prose in a way that the hint doesn't go over their head? On the other hand, for every detail that you put there explicitly there is the risk that the reader feels beaten over the head with it, or that it'll slow the flow of the story.

(5) You should specify information carefully (using all of the above considerations of how to show not tell) when you want the reader to know exactly what is going on. You should leave things ambiguous if you want the reader to have multiple interpretations. Obviously if you're not thinking about this aspect of things, the result may not be well-thought-out.

So this is a cool topic: the balance between how much you want to say and how much you want the reader to know.  I have felt that that, in a complicated situation that the characters don't necessarily understand, let that be the depth to the scene, but otherwise make the characters' current understanding and motivations as clear as possible, whereas when the situation is simple, you can mask the characters' understanding or intentions because there's nothing else to confound them.  But I don't know if that can be honed into a good guideline.

"Almost always" by the protagonist narrating? That would be consistently true for stories with first-person narration, but at least in my watchlist of LN novels, most stories use third-person narrators.  I haven't really seen heavy personal narration as a problem.  If I had to say anything was too stylistically common for my tastes, it would be the white-void dialogue exchanges.

I thought as much; the article author's view did some pretty narrow on this point.

I do editing, not translating, but I've read some original Japanese.  While the translation probably don't capture all the emotional notes, I think they capture at least the story-important elements and there's enough to get some resonance with me as a reader.  I think that to really get a full grasp of the emotion, the reader would need to also have a set of Japanese cultural expectations, which is probably unachievable anyway.

Yeah, some of that is inevitable, but it does seem like turning the Japanese into stylistic English is a nontrivial endeavor and reflects a good bit on the translator and editor, so we're insulated a bit from the author.

[Jason_Miao]

light novels tend to be told in a similar fashion, with slightly-snarky but otherwise generic protagonists as narrators, with ornate language that runs purple at times

I, myself, do not know Japanese, so have no opinion from direct experience.  But it was my understanding that Japanese culture itself suggests "purple prose".  Perhaps someone who is somewhat fluent in Japanese might weigh in on whether the following quote is a fair description?

While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.

One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?"

I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.

"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden? you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."

"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.

Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens ..."

I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."

"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?'"

Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.

I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists.

At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?"

They said such-and-so.

"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?' — how do I say that?"

"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,'" they say.

"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!"

"Well, yes, but it's a different word — it's more polite."

I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.

As for the broader point of Light Novels not approaching True Literature (which the writer knows because the Hemmingway App says so), well...yes.  I'd thought that was clear from the the genre description itself.  They are not novels that are Heavy with meaning, but rather, "Light" pieces of fantasy fulfillment.  <-- (Incidentally, look at me being snarky.  This is indicative of my lack of true character.)

I am not sure I could name a light novel with a female protagonist without just guessing at series and hoping they have a book.

Off the top of my head, Prince 1/2.  But that (1) has a Chinese author so not from the same cultural background as most other popular light novels that get translated to English and (2) is about an everygirl who is faking her gender in an MMO.  So I don't know whether it debunks the point of LN protagonists, or is an exception that proves the rule.

[Arakawa]

That character type may just be the type that sells books.  LN publishing is still a business, the audience that pays money likes it, and writers have to consistently eat, so what can you do?

KL:

Precisely.  Complaining about it is misunderstanding Cause and Effect.  They're not out there because all writers are lazy bums.  They're out there because a handful that tried that found it enormously financially successful, and so a swell of copycats followed them up.  They're definitely not all of them, but there's absolutely an audience for Cypher don't really do much or have much defining traits, thrown into exciting situation and/or tons of hot girls.

It was particularly weird to have article author cite Steven King's writing advice in this context -- since King is obviously going to be writing mass quantities of books that are meant to sell well to a particular (large) market, and his writing probably reflects that and has its own corresponding idiosyncracies/cliches/shortcuts that you could just as easily mock with the kind of tone the author is taking (and that plenty of people do mock King's stuff, fairly or unfairly). This is pretty much the same thing as Overly Talky LN-protagonist-narrator, which is also a shortcut in some ways.

[thepanda]

Are the Every-boy LN protagonists that same-y, though? I admit I haven't read a ton of LNs, but the ones I have read about tend to have some distinguishing characterists, if only because they've been shaped by the worlds they inhabit.

Put Saito, Kyon, Yuji, and Touma in a room together; You'd be able to tell the difference.

[Arakawa]

Put Saito, Kyon, Yuji, and Touma in a room together; You'd be able to tell the difference.

Fanfiction ideas! XD

[Dracos]

I'm not sure I could tell the difference between Saito and Touma just by them talking.  Not mapping Yuji, but really the lot of them have very few differences.  Enough to be identified if you know them well, but they're very similar types.

Touma in his original writing is in fact so unmemorable, he's supposed to have not been noticed as different when amnesic.  While they've adjusted him in future writings a bit, he's actually cannonically supposed to have so little personality that folks don't even notice that he's lost his memory.

[thepanda]

My read on the memory loss was that it left his personality intact, and he actively hid the fact that his memories vanished.