25 replies to this topic

[kurokaze]

Callan S., on 02 May 2012 - 11:20 PM, said:

Why's that any different?

'A guy rides a horse' has no element of challenge. There is no tension, no possibility of failure. That is why it is boring. It is 'not a moment'. (in your words from the OP).
'A guy tries to ride a horse, and the horse wants to not be ridden' - well then the reader doesn't know what is going to happen. The guy could tame the horse. Or the horse could throw the guy and run off. Or the guy could stay on the horse but can't control it and it takes him ten miles in the wrong direction and then breaks its leg.

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Why does he have to/more to the point, why would the cliff and swinging across a river lack a have to?

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

And there's nothing magical about a cliff that isn't stable. Have you seen any movie with a cliff in it? Rocks fall. Every time. Are you familiar with the word 'avalanche'? That's a lot bigger than a couple rocks falling but still hardly supernatural.

[Callan S.]

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'A guy rides a horse' has no element of challenge

I need some appropriately inappropriate image of Christopher Reeve right now (actually there was a girl at my highschool who was also harmed (brain damage!) in a horse accident - they seem like death traps).  I think I'll be focusing on the risks inherent to that and the further complications it'll enact on the life of the character (if not flat out death), rather than a more traditional 'riding a horse is easy and you just do it fur stylin'' trope.

I get the trope of 'suddenly a number of unanticipated and seemingly unnavigatable problems rise up' having it's place.

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I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

You seem to have a 'he has to tame a horse' in your example, which seemed to make it pivotal he climbs the cliff, etc. Just saying my examples could also have a 'have to' as well.

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And there's nothing magical about a cliff that isn't stable.

Well, you seemed to grant it intent "and rocks come loose so that it seems almost like it's trying to keep him from climbing it" *shrug* Doesn't matter.

[kurokaze]

The point is that in every meaningful scene* there is an antagonist. It can be somewhat of a metaphorical antagonist (as the cliff) or it can be even less concrete than that (for instance, the hero needs to ride a horse, the horse is tame, but the hero is very bad at riding horses and prone to injuring himself). It's very easy to write a scene like that so that it's not interesting, because there's no obvious antagonist (to either the reader or the writer). So what you can do is invent one in your mind: God or Fate or The Evil GM or whatever. Someone who is arranging events so that the cliff crumbles in exactly the wrong way, or that the horse twists in the worst possible way, or that the hero's plan backfires.

Of course, you don't actually put God or Fate in the story. You just pretend they are while you're writing it.

*For a certain definition of scene. Any other kind of scene (by the familiar or movie definitions) wouldn't contain violence so isn't relevant to this discussion.

[Callan S.]

No. No anthropomorphic worlds (or atleast no deliberate attempt to do so).

I guess I'm making it hard on myself, having a bent for such a literary direction. But such I do. Meaning without an enemy. I don't want to invent enemies, to invent hate, just to get a story on. I think if ones self was actually climbing a cliff, one would find it pretty meaningful at that point. I think meaning is in there. It's just not as hard a drug as facing an enemy.

[kurokaze]

I think that if one were actually climbing a cliff, one would find it pretty antagonistic at that point. How many times in a day do we say, "Stupid thing!" How many times do we say "because my computer hates me"? Personification is not only one of the basic literary tools, but is something we do constantly in our real lives.

You're free to write while completely ignoring the 'rules' of storycraft, just like you're free to whistle without any knowledge of music theory, and you're free to draw without knowing anything about e.g. perspective, golden ratios, and the rule of thirds. But if you're actually interested in making something that will be of interest to anyone other than yourself, wouldn't it be better to underestand these rules and the reason why they exist? To understand what it means for your work that you do not follow them, and learn what you can do to either compensate for the lack* or fill the hole with something else**?

*For example, infodumps and extended exposition are bad, but if your story has a humorous or otherwise interesting voice, this is a great place to show that off and keep the audience's interest.

**For example, revealing a secret to the reader (especially if the secret is that there is a secret) can work as the 'setback' of a scene even when nothing changes to the characters, because it fills the same purpose: dangling a new carrot in front of the reader as the old one is eaten or pulled away.

Specifically with the cliff: it can be as meaningful as anything to the character, but a writer's job isn't to make things meaningful to characters. A writer's job is to make things meaningful to readers. Conflict provides that connection, breaking down the action into a primal struggle that resonates with anyone on a basic level. It turns the shape of the story into something you recognize unconsciously even if you don't personally give a damn about cliffs or the dude climbing one.

Edited by kurokaze, 06 May 2012 - 12:29 AM.

[Callan S.]

Well, that's the old myth of 'if someone doesn't like X, they mustn't understand X (or otherwise they would like it)'. It sounds, from the 'if you want anyone else to be interested in it but yourself', it's not interested in listening to anyone else in the way it expects to be listened to.

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A writer's job is to make things meaningful to readers.

No. But granted given the abundant supply of material these days, it's easy to argue a buyers market. I can see why Bakker has an article on literature not being able to just rely on people having nothing else to read.