Reviewer: gerald Signed
Date: October 27 2013
Title: Chapter 1: Chapter 1
First off, thank You for taking Your time to give some thoughts on the creative process behind writing any story. Also, I mention my personal thoughts and opinions, not trying to offend or attack anyone, also (...) the dead crab (...) and several butcher aprons. So off we go again:
Sadly, I find the description to be oversimplifying the vastly deeper and more complex problem of creating a believable and addictive world for the readers to dive into. Not trying to nitpick, I would disagree strongly with the division into three "things".
While We can always group certain aspects of the created world into various bundles, if You will, it will always be imperfect. Background and characters often meld. There should never be a closed set of characters and a finite environment they operate in - characters change and so does the setting. It gets even more convoluted when You realize that characters are also part of the setting, in a way that they provide a background for each other (and themselves as well!), while the setting can also participate in the flow of events as a subject-like entity.
But most importantly, the third thing: "misunderstandings".
If forced to reduce a story conceptually to three "separate" parts (or at least, mostly isolated), I would agree that characters (the who), setting (the where) and events (which are what the story is all about, after all) are the three main things, but I find the last one to be the most important and I'd rather call it "plot". By suggesting that every story is limited to describe and operate on misunderstandings between various perspectives (which may be any of the characters and viewers), You ignore a lot of possible aspects of the plot. The simplest example is "the unknown" - which isn't a misunderstanding of any kind, but merely a set of facts or events that are yet to be identified by the characters and/or readers. Just like nobody knows the future in the real life, the characters are bound to explore it for themselves and that alone is one of the most important driving factor behind any fiction - the desire to find out how it ends, where the description leads. Of course the characters should all be different from each other and it is bound to impact the story, often in the form of misunderstandings, but it doesn't have to be limited to that - they can discover various things about each other, which will simply drive their development rather than create various situations. Not all differences are doomed to be problematic. And not every plot must be derived from problems. That's simply because many things can't be "solved" in real life and similarly not everything should be "solvable" in stories.
Finally, the character "destruction", as You put it - it is a very good point, but I find it not to be emphasized enough in Your description. In my opinion, believable characters are the objective of any story that aspires to be decent. Without them, it would all be pointless - as I like to think about it, why would anybody bother describing the puppets hanging off a deus-ex-machina driven plot. Of course, not everybody needs to write (or read) novels and porn is also great (and it has a huge audience, wouldn't you know it..), but.. yeah...
Those are my main observations and while I could dwell on the suggestions (one does not have to limit writing to familiar topics, but at least should undergo certain amount of research; cliff hangers are generally bad for story flow, it's best to reasonably avoid them) or argue with the exercise (500 words per character.. seriously? such description will have to be heavily based on stereotypes and therefore not only fairly primitive, but also will depend on the reader, which will create misconceptions and.. 10k words is barely enough...), I'd simply state that it will most likely vary from author to author and even by story, so trying to generalize such things usually doesn't help.
Maybe one general suggestion that has driven mine work so far: think. Not just _about_ the story, plot or characters, but also as the characters. Try to put yourself in their shoes, think how they would act or react rather than just drive them towards the next event. And also try to imagine what the readers might think, how they may perceive the events, critically approach each chapter and the storyline as a whole. Personally I find the last part to be the hardest...
To reiterate - thank You for the effort to aid any novice writers out there (hopefully it will give them something to think), but, in my opinion, they shouldn't limit themselves to following something interesting or thinking up misunderstandings.
Author's Response:
Thanks for taking your time to reply to my thesis. I took no offense to your opinions.
I have a very scientific and logical approach to the way I see things in life. The three things, are definitely an example of this. In this case, I attempted to give a very technical basic thoughts on how I thought the process is occurring in stories.
I agree with you melding of the characters and setting. Setting is often alive in and of itself, a forest or city are not unchanging, and neither are characters. That said, I stand by my thoughts on unchanging characters, at least to the application of short stories. Novels may have drastic changes which are brought about by story evolution.
Misunderstanding, or the events brought on by the know, or lack of known information could be called plot. Then again you could also break those down into scene's which make up an overall flow to a story which results in a plot. A plot necessitates that there might be a finite ending or a place where the story is going to end up, in truth not all stories work that way and sometimes they don't end at all. I think your attempting to label my concept of misunderstanding as plot, and that may be correct, as you said, "The simplest example is "the unknown" - which isn't a misunderstanding of any kind, but merely a set of facts or events that are yet to be identified by the characters and/or readers."
But the unknown is a misunderstanding in a sense, because even if not known by any of the characters, the reader will know. If the readers knows, even if the characters cannot identify the lack of or need for information, it's clearly a situation in which a misunderstanding has occurred. So I'm not arguing with you, I think we're just choosing to define things differently but ultimately are talking about the same, thing, in your instance, the plot.
Defined as: "Plot is a literary term defined as the events that make up a story, particularly as they relate to one another in a pattern, in a sequence, through cause and effect, how the reader views the story, or simply by coincidence. One is generally interested in how well this pattern of events accomplishes some artistic or emotional effect. An intricate, complicated plot is called an imbroglio, but even the simplest statements of plot may include multiple inferences, as in traditional ballads."
Positive misunderstandings can occur and lead to a happy ending, to think all misunderstanding are bad, is a fallacy. But again we are both really talking about the same thing mostly, I think, so I will move on.
I'm glad you agree on my thoughts of character destruction, and your right, I could have delved far deeper into the subject.
Research is a must. I think it follows my thoughts, on knowing about what you write. Otherwise you will just be confusing your audience. I think cliff hangers are good, of course you don't use them every scene. Cliff hangers should be used as a hook, a reason for the audience to want to come back and find out what happened. No cliff hanger is created equal and some can barely register on the cliff hanger scale. Knowing whether Van Hilda will be going to the sausage feast is mundane and not very important, but should she go, Sir Mathew Jones will be delighted, as the rest of the readers at his chance to talk to her. Maybe even ask her out on a date, not nearly as pressing as a man shrunk and trapped in a shoe with a foot coming down at the end of a chapter.
A character bio does not need to be that long. The writing exercise was meant of novices who cannot take the time or effort to write 50k word stories. Should you write a 10k word bio for a 12k word short story, I'd call you nuts, but alas it was my fault for not clarifying.
I hope both our comments will prove some help to the community. As for interesting things in stories, I will never bend on that point. If a story has no hooks or anything of interest to me at all, whether it be situational, environmental, etc, then I will not read it. Sure a biography or technical manual might entertain or even be interesting to some people, but I believe that to be a smaller niche market.
Thanks again for adding to the discussion.
