Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book.
Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness.
E. L. Doctorow, City of God I don't particularly believe in the workshop method, but I use it, in a limited form, imposing a wide variety of exercises on the process. The average American workshop is a lazy construction. It presumes that you cannot teach creativity or instincts, and it takes what it can once the process has already been started. The workshop is often a profoundly conservative force in fiction writers' lives, encouraging the simplifying and routinizing of stories. I use exercises in my workshops to crack stories open along their spines, to find new possibilities, to foster strangeness and irregularity, as much as to encourage revision and cleaning up after yourself.