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Story time
Mar. 12th, 2007 02:22 pmLast year I got beat over the head by the universe with the information that Story is what happens when you do very bad things to your characters. This was iterated to me by like, three writing manuals and several writers' essays (thank you, Lois McMaster Bujold, thank you!).
Ok, I said at last to myself. I get the point. Story depends on Very Bad Things happening to your characters. Well, I thought, I'll have to try it. Darn if they aren't right. Pretty much, plot seems to happen on its own if you subtract out almost all the pleasant things that happen to characters. I suspect that later you add a few nice things back in just to make it easier to identify with the characters. But possibly only in retrospect / anticipation. I read a whole book by Dean Koontz, and outside of retrospect/anticipation, nice stuff never happened. It was very fast paced.
I don't think I noticed this as a kid, because I pretty much fatalistically assumed that Nice Stuff didn't really happen (for example: once as a kid, my parents decided: well, we've paid the bills this month, and we're in California, let's go to Disneyland. They drove us there. It was closed.). So I fixated on the little nice things that happen in stories. Silly me. As my own life gets better, I realize how horrible the lives of most people in StoryLand really are. And now I'm doing my part to contribute to that.
Ok, I said at last to myself. I get the point. Story depends on Very Bad Things happening to your characters. Well, I thought, I'll have to try it. Darn if they aren't right. Pretty much, plot seems to happen on its own if you subtract out almost all the pleasant things that happen to characters. I suspect that later you add a few nice things back in just to make it easier to identify with the characters. But possibly only in retrospect / anticipation. I read a whole book by Dean Koontz, and outside of retrospect/anticipation, nice stuff never happened. It was very fast paced.
I don't think I noticed this as a kid, because I pretty much fatalistically assumed that Nice Stuff didn't really happen (for example: once as a kid, my parents decided: well, we've paid the bills this month, and we're in California, let's go to Disneyland. They drove us there. It was closed.). So I fixated on the little nice things that happen in stories. Silly me. As my own life gets better, I realize how horrible the lives of most people in StoryLand really are. And now I'm doing my part to contribute to that.
