TIL: Navel-gazing, the term
I was watching a Brandon Sanderson live signing stream. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with the man, and most of the time, I watch one of his long streams, lectures, or podcasts while drafting a post or something.
A viewer asked a question about navel-gazing. The question was: “How much navel-gazing is too much, and why in the heck is it called navel-gazing?”
The term was new to me. So I gave my undivided attention to hearing what Sanderson responded to it. It turns out this concept has been familiar to me all along. I simply didn’t know one’s gaze into their navels could be the term for it.
“How much is too much is a personal preference for you and your intended audience. There are lots of books that navel-gaze a ton, and nobody cares because that’s the type of story you’re writing. In general, a little navel-gazing is a good thing. Because it reestablishes in the reader’s mind the character’s current motivations, how they feel about those motivations and the progress they think they have made. [...]
For those who don’t know the term, the character is in their head reflecting on their own thoughts for a little while rather than describing the world around them or interacting with another person having dialogue. Navel-gazing does serve a function. Through the course of a novel, your character is going to change. One of the ways you’re going to show them doing that is by having them question their preconceived notions, the things that at the beginning of the book they thought the right way to be. [...]
It’s one of the things we can do in prose that we can’t do in film is this navel-gazing. Basically, the narrative is about the character being introspective solely for the purpose of reexplaining or reinforcing to the reader who the character is. It’s called navel-gazing because the character, instead of looking out at this wide world of exciting things going on, they’ve stopped, and they’re looking down at themselves. They’re looking at their belly.”
I was thrilled to know the term for it. As of recently, this is one of the techniques I don’t appreciate much. I believe most of the published navel-gazing prose should have remained in the drafts and transferred into dialogues and actions that carry the same meaning as the internal monologues in the printed version. Leaving that pondering and realization to the reader makes the reading experience profound and impactful.
Another reason that I feel frustrated by line after line of navel-gazing is the prose moves away from the story and turns into an essay. Something like this text you’re reading. Stories feel more relatable when they’re formed as stories.
I was reading “If Cats Disappeared From The World” recently. It’s a first-person novella. This is the publisher overview:
“Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week . . .
Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself – and his beloved cat – to the brink.”
In this book, with every offer from the devil to disappear from the world, the character starts pondering about that object's value and history with it. These pieces could’ve been turned into actual flashbacks or current plot points. The reader would’ve read these events and thought about the same ponderings in their own unique way. They would relate to the character more personally, given that they would judge the narrator by his actions, not thoughts.
This sentiment might be due to my recent favorite stories, which fall more in the film medium than text. An unexpected behavior from the character, an interaction, a facial expression, or an element in the scene that is symbolic is what is stimulating for me at the moment. They make me question the character’s journey, and it’s me who gazes into their navel and forgets about the surrounding world. I need to be like this since I can only see the surface. I’m not spoon-fed with what’s going in the protagonist’s head. Consuming a story this way is a challenging yet fulfilling experience for me.
However, as Brandon explains, navel-gazing is what prose can do that films can’t. Getting into the character's mind and presenting their thoughts firsthand. Hence, personal preference it is. I might even get back to enjoying it with the right book.
