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Snakes on plains
I've been a bad DW user lately and forgot to crosspost again, but better late than never:
This is a little meta on storytelling, spawned by various conversations I had during the last week.
It grew a bit longish.
To me there are five essential levels on which a story connects to me. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes not all of them are present but those still the factors that decide how deeply a story will stay lodged in my memory.
The first and most obvious interaction plain is language. It's the first thing you notice about a novel and for me it shapes the perception of a story a great deal. I'm afraid I'm not really a poet. I rarely stop to marvel just at the beauty of a sentence, it'll be usually be that which is transported that impresses me, not so much the vehicle. If I notice something it's humour in the language and that's usually a way to reel me in instantly. If I can laugh with an author the connection made and i want to read on. I find a lot of people notice more about language than I do, but of course subconsciously it has a great influence on my impression. I love it when characters have distinct voices and when the language can paint images in front of me.
And language can also kick me out. Phrases that are repeated very often, even just words make me easily doubt the quality of a book. If I hadn't hated Twilight for it's content I would have hated it for the language.
I don't know if a book can work on language alone, probably not, but it's the basis for all stories and non can do without it either.
The second plain is world building: This is all about creating a universe for your story to play in. Not only the physical appearance of the world but also how it's society ticks. That verse might be a recreation of reality, a distorted mirror image or a completely new set up where you can dictate all the terms. I think the important thing is that the writer spends some time working out the rules of his work, so that the world gets an internal logic, even if that logic is just that there are not all that many rules because it's satire.
That's mostly something that happens in the background and the rules of the world don't necessarily have to be explained to the reader but it helps if they are in the author's mind.
Are there stories that run just on world building? I think so, yes, Tokien's work aside from the LoTR and the Hobbit comes to mind and also role playing source books, where you fill in the other story levels yourself. To me such books can be enjoyable but also a bit tedious at times.
If world building is not really your cup of tea and you can work around it, for example by simplifying the world, just set your story in a reality you know very well, or close to it, the way Jane Austen did. Her novels don't describe all aspects of her time, a lot of things going on in the wider world go unmentioned and the story stays in ballrooms and country estates. That world is perfectly fine as a backdrop for her stories though and there's not really anything missing.
Another way stories often go is to let the world cater to the stories needs. That's the way Buffy goes. Buffy is never going to be a show to obsess about it's world (like say Star Trek), the rules of the verse are constantly changed. Magic, Demons they appear as needed and most likely there won't be any Fyarl for beginner books be coming out soon. The internal logic is kept to a bare minimum.
I find that it's nothing I really need from a story to be happy, as long as it gives me other things, but I still enjoy good world building and I tend to think more of it wouldn't have harmed Buffy, just made it a bit harder to write.
Plot is the next thing on my list. The story you want to tell, not it's background or the character's personal development but just the plain plot. What do your characters do, what do they know, what are they finding out, who meets when, where does the story lead. A brilliantly crafted plot is something wonderful to me and it is one of the most important parts of a story.
If a plot is good enough a story can run solely on it for me without me having too much trouble. A well constructed plot is something that gets me to turn the pages and to tune in for the next episode. Some of my favourite stories are mostly plot driven (Babylon 5 and A song of Ice and Fire by G.R.R. Martin).
I find it's a lot harder to get rid of plot and still get a convincing story, but it's possible. Again it can be simplifyed into barlely existing (Jane Austen comes to mind again), then it fades comfortably into the background. And of course there are also a lot of standard plots to chose from. Some genres like say murder mystery even have certain plot template that is repeated over and over but doesn't really get boring to the readers.
What I'm not a big fan of is when the plot is just used to connect some dots in the character's life and doesn't follow an internal logic. If elaborate plotting is not the authors thing I usually prefer a simple one to one where I can drive trucks through the plotholes.
I think a good example for what difference plot can make is Torchwood. The early seasons had their highlights but for the most part reason was their sworn enemy and it showed. It made the whole thing unbelievable and dragged other parts of the story (world building, characters) down with it, but season three with it's not greatly complicated but perfectly executed plot suddenly absolutely rocked.
Bad plotting is a sore spot too me. If a story needs too many accidents to happen, if nothing makes any sense, or if the characters need to be dumbed down so they don't solve the mystery early on that is something that can easily kick me out of a story and I do need to be very interested in the other aspects of that story to stay on track.
BSG for example had built a pretty cool world for itself, amazing characters and it had a few metaphors going but the plot? The plot destroyed it for me.
I feel that when I invest in a mystery there has to be a resolution, that can lead to glorious revelatory moments like on Babylon 5 or too a ginormous amount of frustration like it did with BSG. So as far as plot is concerned, I love elaborate and thought through, but I'd take simple any day over complex but nonsensical.
The next level and another one I fairly fixated on are the characters: The personalities you let enact your story, what are they like, how do they feel, where do they come from and in what direction are they evolving. What irks them, what makes them happy and so on and so on? Character development never gets boring and in the end the characters that I fall in love with in a story are what sticks around the longest for me and also what stirs up my fantasy the most.
If I really like a character, he/she will live on in my head and I'll read a lot of (even not so stellar) stuff just to learn more about what became of a character in the authors mind. The more I can relate to the characters (especially also to smaller roles) the more fascinated I'll get. I like it when I recognize people in a story that I run into everyday. I love it when you can see cause and effect in a character's personal evolution. To learn why that person is how he is, how their family history runs. I'd like to imagine what it would be like to know the characters.
Several stories run primarily on characters and they really need little else. Jane Austen sits there and waves again and I also think about Ellen Kushner's Riverside books" where the plot is neat, but pretty much outshone by the characters, especially by how you can watch their family history shape them over generations.
The characters are also what made me fall for Buffy and while Buffy works on several levels, the characters and their development was what I liked best about the show and also what I perceived as dominant.
If you go without relateable characters you get a rather dragging book pretty fast. Tolkien for example specializes in world building and a little plot. And though world building is his passion the Lord of the Rings where he etched out all these lovely characters outshines the Simarillion like a thousand suns and complete middle earth nerds are able to get properly through it.
Characters are also something you have to maintain, if an author suddenly writes a character completely differently, loses the voice, or stops being interested in that characters development but rather just wants them to act out his plot, without bringing too much of their personality to the table, it can kill a story dead. Many a tv show died because it's authors where done coming up with new places for the characters to go.
And finally there's metaphor. To let your story be a stand in for an issue you want to talk about, a message you want to send. To use a story to make a point and also to use the story as a distorting mirror for reality, work out an overlooked observation. Give the story the deeper sense, reality is ultimately not having.
It seems to be the most controversial of the levels I described, literary science loves them obviously, they are practically built on it, several authors though hate it with a passion. Tolkien and Twain are both known to have sneered at metaphor and intensely disliked it when their works where analysed in a "this stands for that" fashion and as kid I was so hard on their side.
A story was something to get away from reality for me, if it forced you learn something about reality I saw that as a betrayal Fortunately as a kid I was pretty blind to them too, unless they came with a sledgehammer.
I thought a moral ruined what could have been a perfectly fine story and I always loved stories that took fairy tail characters and gave them a personality that broke them out of their narrow stand in role in the metaphor and made them go their own way (an example for that would be Patricia Wrede's dragon series)
As an adult I have learned to value metaphor but I'm still a sceptic. My love for saying things indirectly came mostly with russian authors writing about communism while being forbidden to actually do so. Master and Margerita by Bulgakow? Perfect book and full of metaphores, same for a lot of russian scifi (like the Strugazki brothers). So yes, when an author really has to say something metaphors can be a great thing. Also to give an image to complex emotions that are sometimes hard to capture like say irrational fears.
But metaphoric writing is also something that can go wrong for me. For one the message the author is sending can be simply trivial when spoken out loud and all the story is just elaborate window dressing to hide that fact. A story can get preachy. And also it runs in danger of losing the connections on the other (to me more important) levels of the story.
Can a story do without metaphors. I'd say yes, you can write a good story without intentionally trying to send any messages but on the other hand a little bit of metaphor will always be a blind passenger on every story.
As much as Tolkien detested that reading Lord of the Rings is a metaphor on the world wars it still does contain plenty of images on war. Of course if you start looking at it that way all the orcs become germans and suddenly their undistinguished evilness becomes a rather flat thing.
So I think as an author it's important that you are aware of the metaphoric level, whether you want to use it or not. And even if you are consciously using it, it can become hard not to overlook other possible readings that might send rather disturbing messages (*cough* Buffyverserapemetaphors *cough*)
Is it possible to run a story solely on metaphor? Yes, certainly is, I just can't claim to like it very much. To me it's like a whole dish of just spice. A little spice makes food an incredibly lot better, and a few layers and hidden messages do the same to a story, but a dish made just out of spice is no good and I have to say I have the same distaste for stories where the metaphor is lone in the driving seat
If a story runs solely on metaphor, you get Kafka. Which, yeah, interesting, but I wonder if there ever was a reader who actually liked Gregor Samsa. And yeah, that he becomes less and less likeable is kinda the whole point of the piece, but does that really make it more enjoyable?
I think each reader and writer is smitten by those story aspects to a different degree and in the end it's always the mix that makes the drink, but since I like to take things apart sometimes I jotted down how here how the different components matter to me.
Thank you for taking an interest in my ramblings :)
And an ETA for the DW version of this entry: I kind of want to alter my Stance on Kafka. I love his scenarios and I like to use them in role playing rounds, but like a lot of satirical work (Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett) it speaks to a different part of me and I don't connect emotionally the way I do with stories where I'm into the characters
This is a little meta on storytelling, spawned by various conversations I had during the last week.
It grew a bit longish.
To me there are five essential levels on which a story connects to me. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes not all of them are present but those still the factors that decide how deeply a story will stay lodged in my memory.
The first and most obvious interaction plain is language. It's the first thing you notice about a novel and for me it shapes the perception of a story a great deal. I'm afraid I'm not really a poet. I rarely stop to marvel just at the beauty of a sentence, it'll be usually be that which is transported that impresses me, not so much the vehicle. If I notice something it's humour in the language and that's usually a way to reel me in instantly. If I can laugh with an author the connection made and i want to read on. I find a lot of people notice more about language than I do, but of course subconsciously it has a great influence on my impression. I love it when characters have distinct voices and when the language can paint images in front of me.
And language can also kick me out. Phrases that are repeated very often, even just words make me easily doubt the quality of a book. If I hadn't hated Twilight for it's content I would have hated it for the language.
I don't know if a book can work on language alone, probably not, but it's the basis for all stories and non can do without it either.
The second plain is world building: This is all about creating a universe for your story to play in. Not only the physical appearance of the world but also how it's society ticks. That verse might be a recreation of reality, a distorted mirror image or a completely new set up where you can dictate all the terms. I think the important thing is that the writer spends some time working out the rules of his work, so that the world gets an internal logic, even if that logic is just that there are not all that many rules because it's satire.
That's mostly something that happens in the background and the rules of the world don't necessarily have to be explained to the reader but it helps if they are in the author's mind.
Are there stories that run just on world building? I think so, yes, Tokien's work aside from the LoTR and the Hobbit comes to mind and also role playing source books, where you fill in the other story levels yourself. To me such books can be enjoyable but also a bit tedious at times.
If world building is not really your cup of tea and you can work around it, for example by simplifying the world, just set your story in a reality you know very well, or close to it, the way Jane Austen did. Her novels don't describe all aspects of her time, a lot of things going on in the wider world go unmentioned and the story stays in ballrooms and country estates. That world is perfectly fine as a backdrop for her stories though and there's not really anything missing.
Another way stories often go is to let the world cater to the stories needs. That's the way Buffy goes. Buffy is never going to be a show to obsess about it's world (like say Star Trek), the rules of the verse are constantly changed. Magic, Demons they appear as needed and most likely there won't be any Fyarl for beginner books be coming out soon. The internal logic is kept to a bare minimum.
I find that it's nothing I really need from a story to be happy, as long as it gives me other things, but I still enjoy good world building and I tend to think more of it wouldn't have harmed Buffy, just made it a bit harder to write.
Plot is the next thing on my list. The story you want to tell, not it's background or the character's personal development but just the plain plot. What do your characters do, what do they know, what are they finding out, who meets when, where does the story lead. A brilliantly crafted plot is something wonderful to me and it is one of the most important parts of a story.
If a plot is good enough a story can run solely on it for me without me having too much trouble. A well constructed plot is something that gets me to turn the pages and to tune in for the next episode. Some of my favourite stories are mostly plot driven (Babylon 5 and A song of Ice and Fire by G.R.R. Martin).
I find it's a lot harder to get rid of plot and still get a convincing story, but it's possible. Again it can be simplifyed into barlely existing (Jane Austen comes to mind again), then it fades comfortably into the background. And of course there are also a lot of standard plots to chose from. Some genres like say murder mystery even have certain plot template that is repeated over and over but doesn't really get boring to the readers.
What I'm not a big fan of is when the plot is just used to connect some dots in the character's life and doesn't follow an internal logic. If elaborate plotting is not the authors thing I usually prefer a simple one to one where I can drive trucks through the plotholes.
I think a good example for what difference plot can make is Torchwood. The early seasons had their highlights but for the most part reason was their sworn enemy and it showed. It made the whole thing unbelievable and dragged other parts of the story (world building, characters) down with it, but season three with it's not greatly complicated but perfectly executed plot suddenly absolutely rocked.
Bad plotting is a sore spot too me. If a story needs too many accidents to happen, if nothing makes any sense, or if the characters need to be dumbed down so they don't solve the mystery early on that is something that can easily kick me out of a story and I do need to be very interested in the other aspects of that story to stay on track.
BSG for example had built a pretty cool world for itself, amazing characters and it had a few metaphors going but the plot? The plot destroyed it for me.
I feel that when I invest in a mystery there has to be a resolution, that can lead to glorious revelatory moments like on Babylon 5 or too a ginormous amount of frustration like it did with BSG. So as far as plot is concerned, I love elaborate and thought through, but I'd take simple any day over complex but nonsensical.
The next level and another one I fairly fixated on are the characters: The personalities you let enact your story, what are they like, how do they feel, where do they come from and in what direction are they evolving. What irks them, what makes them happy and so on and so on? Character development never gets boring and in the end the characters that I fall in love with in a story are what sticks around the longest for me and also what stirs up my fantasy the most.
If I really like a character, he/she will live on in my head and I'll read a lot of (even not so stellar) stuff just to learn more about what became of a character in the authors mind. The more I can relate to the characters (especially also to smaller roles) the more fascinated I'll get. I like it when I recognize people in a story that I run into everyday. I love it when you can see cause and effect in a character's personal evolution. To learn why that person is how he is, how their family history runs. I'd like to imagine what it would be like to know the characters.
Several stories run primarily on characters and they really need little else. Jane Austen sits there and waves again and I also think about Ellen Kushner's Riverside books" where the plot is neat, but pretty much outshone by the characters, especially by how you can watch their family history shape them over generations.
The characters are also what made me fall for Buffy and while Buffy works on several levels, the characters and their development was what I liked best about the show and also what I perceived as dominant.
If you go without relateable characters you get a rather dragging book pretty fast. Tolkien for example specializes in world building and a little plot. And though world building is his passion the Lord of the Rings where he etched out all these lovely characters outshines the Simarillion like a thousand suns and complete middle earth nerds are able to get properly through it.
Characters are also something you have to maintain, if an author suddenly writes a character completely differently, loses the voice, or stops being interested in that characters development but rather just wants them to act out his plot, without bringing too much of their personality to the table, it can kill a story dead. Many a tv show died because it's authors where done coming up with new places for the characters to go.
And finally there's metaphor. To let your story be a stand in for an issue you want to talk about, a message you want to send. To use a story to make a point and also to use the story as a distorting mirror for reality, work out an overlooked observation. Give the story the deeper sense, reality is ultimately not having.
It seems to be the most controversial of the levels I described, literary science loves them obviously, they are practically built on it, several authors though hate it with a passion. Tolkien and Twain are both known to have sneered at metaphor and intensely disliked it when their works where analysed in a "this stands for that" fashion and as kid I was so hard on their side.
A story was something to get away from reality for me, if it forced you learn something about reality I saw that as a betrayal Fortunately as a kid I was pretty blind to them too, unless they came with a sledgehammer.
I thought a moral ruined what could have been a perfectly fine story and I always loved stories that took fairy tail characters and gave them a personality that broke them out of their narrow stand in role in the metaphor and made them go their own way (an example for that would be Patricia Wrede's dragon series)
As an adult I have learned to value metaphor but I'm still a sceptic. My love for saying things indirectly came mostly with russian authors writing about communism while being forbidden to actually do so. Master and Margerita by Bulgakow? Perfect book and full of metaphores, same for a lot of russian scifi (like the Strugazki brothers). So yes, when an author really has to say something metaphors can be a great thing. Also to give an image to complex emotions that are sometimes hard to capture like say irrational fears.
But metaphoric writing is also something that can go wrong for me. For one the message the author is sending can be simply trivial when spoken out loud and all the story is just elaborate window dressing to hide that fact. A story can get preachy. And also it runs in danger of losing the connections on the other (to me more important) levels of the story.
Can a story do without metaphors. I'd say yes, you can write a good story without intentionally trying to send any messages but on the other hand a little bit of metaphor will always be a blind passenger on every story.
As much as Tolkien detested that reading Lord of the Rings is a metaphor on the world wars it still does contain plenty of images on war. Of course if you start looking at it that way all the orcs become germans and suddenly their undistinguished evilness becomes a rather flat thing.
So I think as an author it's important that you are aware of the metaphoric level, whether you want to use it or not. And even if you are consciously using it, it can become hard not to overlook other possible readings that might send rather disturbing messages (*cough* Buffyverserapemetaphors *cough*)
Is it possible to run a story solely on metaphor? Yes, certainly is, I just can't claim to like it very much. To me it's like a whole dish of just spice. A little spice makes food an incredibly lot better, and a few layers and hidden messages do the same to a story, but a dish made just out of spice is no good and I have to say I have the same distaste for stories where the metaphor is lone in the driving seat
If a story runs solely on metaphor, you get Kafka. Which, yeah, interesting, but I wonder if there ever was a reader who actually liked Gregor Samsa. And yeah, that he becomes less and less likeable is kinda the whole point of the piece, but does that really make it more enjoyable?
I think each reader and writer is smitten by those story aspects to a different degree and in the end it's always the mix that makes the drink, but since I like to take things apart sometimes I jotted down how here how the different components matter to me.
Thank you for taking an interest in my ramblings :)
And an ETA for the DW version of this entry: I kind of want to alter my Stance on Kafka. I love his scenarios and I like to use them in role playing rounds, but like a lot of satirical work (Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett) it speaks to a different part of me and I don't connect emotionally the way I do with stories where I'm into the characters