I get most pleasure from a piece that can use its ruminations and sprawl to forward the story. The Things They Carried and The Hours both come to mind as examples of such.

I’m probably stretching the use of the word screenplay too far. And certainly I have nothing against plot. And I don’t mind less-dense writing styles. But it is nice to sometimes have something that sprawls and ruminates rather than skips along at a good pace.

I have to agree with you about the blind-spots an MFA can burn into a writer’s eyes. Elitism is often the name of the game. I was kind of a crank in my program, continually trying to talk about craft while everyone else wanted to revel in reader response criticism of each other’s work. But of my cohort, I think I’m the only one who actually has a job that uses my degree.

I’d like to hear about the fiction (especially Mormon fiction) you’ve encountered that reads too much like screenplay. I haven’t encountered it myself.

But at the same time, most of the authors I love never read McKee. And: the MFA-craft approach brings with it it’s own set of preferences, discourse boundaries, tastes, holy grails, blind spots, etc.

Or in other words, too much fiction these days reads like it was meant to be a screenplay.