jezzaz
Really Experienced
- Joined
- May 11, 2013
- Posts
- 266
Been thinking about this recently.
Reading a lot of Lit - mostly Loving Wives, but branching out into Non Erotic and some of the novellas.
I think it's several things?
Premise, Plot, characterisations, dialog, descriptive, wordage and general writing execution.
What do these mean?
Premise - what's the set up here? Is there something compelling about the premise? Something oddball, unexpected, something that makes you go "what would happen here?" I think there are great stories out that come from the premise - Pratchetts DiscWorld, Enders Game, Harry Potter, The Brother Cadfael stuff, Lee Childs Jack Reacher novels - all of these are a compelling set up, with twists on the usual. Sometimes the stories just write themselves from the set up, sometimes they use part of the unusual situation and then twist it even more (thinking of the Discworld stories here) - but all are offering you an interesting take on reality from word go, unlike the standard fare of the Tom Clancy, which in it's setup is fairly non descript, even though the stories and characters themselves are compelling and well written.
Plot. This is the actual meat of the story being told. Is the story interesting? Is it obvious? Does it take the reader places they didn't expect? Is the story actually directed, or just a sequence of events, one after the other, that takes the characters in the story along with them? Does anyone do anything to actually make something happen?
Plot is massively important for stories with either weak characters or weak premise. However, a strong plot can carry a lot on it's shoulders; Dan Browns The Davinci Code is a case in point. Extremely weak premise, characters that are so so, but very compelling story - enough to overcome a multitude of writing sins. Personally, I consider having a story to tell is the crux of what writing fiction is about; others feel differently and write deep and compelling characters, and then have something happen to them, and that works too.
I think, honestly, this is where most of the stories on Lit fall down, because quite a lot of them are really just set up for the porn to happen in. The literary equivalent of cut scenes in a video game, which are only there to explain and set up the next shooty bit.
Characterisation - by this I mean how the characters are presented. What descriptions do we get? How believable are they? Do they react in ways that are consistent with who they are presented as being? How much do we learn about them that is incidental, but important? For example, learning that Jack Reacher is 6'4" doesn't really change the story at all - but it does give you back ground to how hard it must be for him to constantly find clothes
Lots of characters are plot driven; mine certainly are - which can be a drawback because they often don't evolve naturally - their behavior is predetermined because the plot needs them to do X and Y in order to drive the story forward. I think my characters suffer from this, but it's also a means to an end.
Convincing characters though can also cover a multitude of story sins, although well conceived and developed characters can also make a story totally fall over when they suddenly behave completely out of their established parameters. The more the reader understands the character, the more jarring it is when they behave very out of character.
Dialog - part of making great characters is to develop a style of speaking that is unique (and believable) to that character. This is often the hardest thing to get right, at least it is for me. Everyone I write tends to talk the way I do. Lots of words, lots of information and some slang. I think this is very hard to get right and make right for the character you want to portray.
Put it this way - great dialog is almost completely ignorable - you aren't even aware of it. But bad dialog is very instantly obvious.
Descriptive - this is about describing the world the characters inhabit. For me, it's very important to drop a lot of small details. When writing Sci-Fi, it's even more important to detail the world, because it's a completely new one with lots of small implications. It's not a place where you can just say "It's modern day London." It's not, and you need to explain how it's not.
With real world, it's less about making the world believable and more about making it relatable. It's about the bad customer service the protagonist had that morning, making him all pissed off and snapping at people later. Not really something that impacts the story, but it's all something we've had happen to us at some point, and we can relate. Once the reader starts relating to the characters, you've got them hooked.
I think having a living breathing world is critical, but not to the extension that people like Neal Stephenson has, where there is often more world than there is story (thinking of the Baroque Cycle here). The world has to be adjacent to the story, not a replacement for the story. It has to support the story without taking away focus - as is what happens in lots of Sci-Fi, for example. The actual story of Blade Runner pales next to the amazing world being shown, as an example.
Wordage - it often surprises me how very limited some people's vocabularies really are. That's fine with dialog - lots of people today have very limited speaking vocab - but in terms of the writer describing an event or using nouns, I'm totally amazed at how little of the total of the language gets used. I can understand it, since using a lot of words that people don't know just pisses them off, but by the same token, most of the time people only learn new words from hearing them contextually.
The wide the vocab - and I don't just mean local colloquialisms - the more expanded I find the prose. Having said that, I still can't deal with Tolkiens use of the language. It drives me to distraction.
So two sides to this coin I guess.
General writing execution. This one is really just about constructive ability as a writer. The ability to craft a story, make it interesting, weave it together and leave the reader having felt they really just experienced something they never would have.
A clear example of this is Cloud Atlas. It's an amazingly crafted story - or set of stories - interwoven cleverly, even referencing each other, and each written in a completely different style. The writer even creates an entirely new language in one of the stories.
But as pure stories, it often falls flat on it's face. Each of the stories taken individually tend to have some what boring characters (the most interesting ones are the stories set in the future, which display breath taking imagination) and some what predictable and uninteresting plots. The variance in stories being told - from an old man trying to escape from an old people's home where his family has effectively committed him, all the way to an entire artificially dumbed down cloned servant class rising up from slavery - really? The juxtaposition of story telling is huge. But, in the end it just doesn't matter because you are spending your time marveling at how well it's all constructed, how the author manages to completely change style of pretty much everything he's writing, and make it period correct - even to using old english in some of the oldest stories - it's just amazing. All the failures in actual dialog and plot doesn't matter at all.
This is what I mean by writing execution. Sometimes a story is just told so well, it doesn't matter about all the little things that are done badly. The Harry Potter stuff is another case in point. J.K. Rowlings can't write dialog to save her life, but damn, the woman can tell a story.
Anyway, that's my list. What do you guys have?
Reading a lot of Lit - mostly Loving Wives, but branching out into Non Erotic and some of the novellas.
I think it's several things?
Premise, Plot, characterisations, dialog, descriptive, wordage and general writing execution.
What do these mean?
Premise - what's the set up here? Is there something compelling about the premise? Something oddball, unexpected, something that makes you go "what would happen here?" I think there are great stories out that come from the premise - Pratchetts DiscWorld, Enders Game, Harry Potter, The Brother Cadfael stuff, Lee Childs Jack Reacher novels - all of these are a compelling set up, with twists on the usual. Sometimes the stories just write themselves from the set up, sometimes they use part of the unusual situation and then twist it even more (thinking of the Discworld stories here) - but all are offering you an interesting take on reality from word go, unlike the standard fare of the Tom Clancy, which in it's setup is fairly non descript, even though the stories and characters themselves are compelling and well written.
Plot. This is the actual meat of the story being told. Is the story interesting? Is it obvious? Does it take the reader places they didn't expect? Is the story actually directed, or just a sequence of events, one after the other, that takes the characters in the story along with them? Does anyone do anything to actually make something happen?
Plot is massively important for stories with either weak characters or weak premise. However, a strong plot can carry a lot on it's shoulders; Dan Browns The Davinci Code is a case in point. Extremely weak premise, characters that are so so, but very compelling story - enough to overcome a multitude of writing sins. Personally, I consider having a story to tell is the crux of what writing fiction is about; others feel differently and write deep and compelling characters, and then have something happen to them, and that works too.
I think, honestly, this is where most of the stories on Lit fall down, because quite a lot of them are really just set up for the porn to happen in. The literary equivalent of cut scenes in a video game, which are only there to explain and set up the next shooty bit.
Characterisation - by this I mean how the characters are presented. What descriptions do we get? How believable are they? Do they react in ways that are consistent with who they are presented as being? How much do we learn about them that is incidental, but important? For example, learning that Jack Reacher is 6'4" doesn't really change the story at all - but it does give you back ground to how hard it must be for him to constantly find clothes
Lots of characters are plot driven; mine certainly are - which can be a drawback because they often don't evolve naturally - their behavior is predetermined because the plot needs them to do X and Y in order to drive the story forward. I think my characters suffer from this, but it's also a means to an end.
Convincing characters though can also cover a multitude of story sins, although well conceived and developed characters can also make a story totally fall over when they suddenly behave completely out of their established parameters. The more the reader understands the character, the more jarring it is when they behave very out of character.
Dialog - part of making great characters is to develop a style of speaking that is unique (and believable) to that character. This is often the hardest thing to get right, at least it is for me. Everyone I write tends to talk the way I do. Lots of words, lots of information and some slang. I think this is very hard to get right and make right for the character you want to portray.
Put it this way - great dialog is almost completely ignorable - you aren't even aware of it. But bad dialog is very instantly obvious.
Descriptive - this is about describing the world the characters inhabit. For me, it's very important to drop a lot of small details. When writing Sci-Fi, it's even more important to detail the world, because it's a completely new one with lots of small implications. It's not a place where you can just say "It's modern day London." It's not, and you need to explain how it's not.
With real world, it's less about making the world believable and more about making it relatable. It's about the bad customer service the protagonist had that morning, making him all pissed off and snapping at people later. Not really something that impacts the story, but it's all something we've had happen to us at some point, and we can relate. Once the reader starts relating to the characters, you've got them hooked.
I think having a living breathing world is critical, but not to the extension that people like Neal Stephenson has, where there is often more world than there is story (thinking of the Baroque Cycle here). The world has to be adjacent to the story, not a replacement for the story. It has to support the story without taking away focus - as is what happens in lots of Sci-Fi, for example. The actual story of Blade Runner pales next to the amazing world being shown, as an example.
Wordage - it often surprises me how very limited some people's vocabularies really are. That's fine with dialog - lots of people today have very limited speaking vocab - but in terms of the writer describing an event or using nouns, I'm totally amazed at how little of the total of the language gets used. I can understand it, since using a lot of words that people don't know just pisses them off, but by the same token, most of the time people only learn new words from hearing them contextually.
The wide the vocab - and I don't just mean local colloquialisms - the more expanded I find the prose. Having said that, I still can't deal with Tolkiens use of the language. It drives me to distraction.
So two sides to this coin I guess.
General writing execution. This one is really just about constructive ability as a writer. The ability to craft a story, make it interesting, weave it together and leave the reader having felt they really just experienced something they never would have.
A clear example of this is Cloud Atlas. It's an amazingly crafted story - or set of stories - interwoven cleverly, even referencing each other, and each written in a completely different style. The writer even creates an entirely new language in one of the stories.
But as pure stories, it often falls flat on it's face. Each of the stories taken individually tend to have some what boring characters (the most interesting ones are the stories set in the future, which display breath taking imagination) and some what predictable and uninteresting plots. The variance in stories being told - from an old man trying to escape from an old people's home where his family has effectively committed him, all the way to an entire artificially dumbed down cloned servant class rising up from slavery - really? The juxtaposition of story telling is huge. But, in the end it just doesn't matter because you are spending your time marveling at how well it's all constructed, how the author manages to completely change style of pretty much everything he's writing, and make it period correct - even to using old english in some of the oldest stories - it's just amazing. All the failures in actual dialog and plot doesn't matter at all.
This is what I mean by writing execution. Sometimes a story is just told so well, it doesn't matter about all the little things that are done badly. The Harry Potter stuff is another case in point. J.K. Rowlings can't write dialog to save her life, but damn, the woman can tell a story.
Anyway, that's my list. What do you guys have?
