Novels don't capture what it's like to interact

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I remember novels as being wondrous when I started reading them as a kid because they often described how it felt to be a person, from the inside, which is something too personal and too deep to come up in discussions or conversations. When a character was ashamed of some small faux pas and kept on ruminating about it, for instance, it rang true, and no one had ever openly admitted to something like that in person. It took reading about it in a novel to realize this is a universal experience.

But one thing I never found described in novels was the deep unease and hyperalertness that I feel when I am face to face with another person and I have to act normal and make conversation, and I have to keep track of what they say, and respond, and so on. It feels as if I am about to be struck by oncoming traffic. It's a disorienting feeling that there is so much to keep track of and so much to do, and I'm struggling to do it all fast enough in real time, while also there is (figurative) traffic that feels like it's about to hit me and I can't possibly pay attention to that too.

But now I realize this does not come up in novels because it's not how people ordinarily feel when they have to interact with other people. I think most people actually feel relaxed and natural, because interacting is second nature to them. Do you find that descriptions of human behavior are often oddly alienating?

(Btw, I don't read novels anymore, just nonfiction and memoir.)

Definitely. I read loads when I was young because I was trying to figure out the rules of people and how they talk to each other.

But it's profoundly unrealistic because both sides of the conversation, although from different characters, are both originating in the same mind, and serving a narrative not two independent viewpoints.

That doesn't make it worthless, in my opinion, but it's certainly not the way real people interact and it's of limited value in that sense.

^^^THIS^^^

Dialog, whether in novels, or television isn't supposed to be an accurate reflection of normal social interaction. Its supposed to move the plot of the story forward while appearing to sound and feel like a normal, natural human interaction. if it were meant to be accurate, and mirror an actual conversation, people would soon get bored and stop reading. If a story was written in real time, they would take too long to tell as well.

Agree with both of you.

But I was more thinking of the type of novel in which the main character's inner experience and feelings are described at great length. For instance the character might be very worried about how they look or if they sound smart enough, or about making a fool of themselves, when they're meeting someone. And there's a lot of detail about their palms being sweaty or their thoughts, like trying to come up with impressive words or trying to sound interesting, for example. But the character is never off-balance or feeling like a deer in headlights, and just deeply uneasy when confronted with a normal conversation, which is my normal experience and I used to think it was everyone's experience.

I think most authors would be very uncomfortable writing that type of subject matter. Its a bit of a taboo. After all what is the correct response when someone asks, "how are you?" we say, "fine". Most people don't really want to know how another person might actually be feeling, because they don't want to, or don't know how to cope with the way one person's distress makes them feel.

Most novelists probably don't think too much about stuff like that, so they'd find it difficult to write characters like that. Assuming that they even know about some people being like that, of course.

I write fiction as a hobby, and I tend to put a lot of weight on the thought process of the characters and why they choose to say the words they do.

Yeah, sure. I think the problem is that a lot of what happens in that 'deer in headlights' experience is deeply internal.

One of the first rules you learn when you start taking fiction writing seriously is "Show, don't tell." Don't write "John was nervous," write "John wiped his sweaty palms on the back of his jeans and took a shaky breath."

It works because its universal shared experience. Our brains deconstruct the second sentance into "John was nervous" because we know what sweaty palms and shaky breaths mean to us.

So I guess there's two problems. First, the experience isn't universal so most readers won't immediately relate. Second, we're talking about absence. That's how I experience verbal conversations with others - my brain takes a holiday and is replaced with...nothing.

How do you "Show, don't tell" when there's nothing to show?