Re: Bringing things to a close - suggestions?
- From: James A. Donald <jamesd@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:48:49 +1000
So anyway, I'm doing an Open University novel writing
short course, and I'm also practising by writing a
book - it's a first novel attempt set on an
alternative world (lacking elves and dwarves, etc;
just humans in an alien setting). Before I started
writing I'd planned out the storyline, but now I'm
seven chapters into the first draft and the characters
have taken over the writing process completely and
there's no way I can see to get from where I am now to
where I intended the storyline to go when I was
planning the book. Plus I have no idea of what sort of
ending the characters are leading me towards, or how
to find an ending that would be satisfactory for me
(and others, perhaps) as a reader.
A lot of quite good books, which I much enjoy, have the
following format: The characters wander around an
interesting world, doing tourist type stuff. From time
to time they are menaced by various bad fortunes and the
bad guys start chasing them. Eventually they dispatch
the bad guys, or at least wreak enough harm on the bad
guys to get left in peace. They then get married, or at
least pair up, find nice jobs, and settle down some
place in the interesting landscape.
Consider the Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle, which has
no discernable plot except whatever machinery is needed
to thrust the major characters into middle of each key
event of the birth of the modern and the end of the
medieval, and is all the better for it. Some
improbable coincidence appears involving Isaac Newton,
the stock exchange, and a friend of a friend, and one
our major characters finds himself running a message for
Isaac Newton, and that is the plot until he needs to be
on the front lines of a key battle, whereupon we have
another equally improbable but largely unrelated
coincidence. There is no particular end, since the
modern takes longer to be born, and the medieval longer
to expire, than the characters live.
Similarly, the average James Bond movie is a tour of
scenic places, with bad guys and hot women appearing
more or less at random. Story ends when bad guys are
dead and James Bond gets laid.
Plot, while necessary, tends to be much overrated.
In a really good book, everything should strongly serve
characterization, and everything should strongly serve
plot, and everything should strongly serve
narrative/worldbuilding. But two out of three is pretty
good, and you can probably get away with one of them
pretty good, one of them a bit weak, and one of them
made of cardboard, as for example, the infamous plots of
James Bond movies, or the lack thereof.
Similarly the original startrek formula was cool science
fiction idea (narrative/worldbuilding), new and
different in each episode, some character study on Kirk,
Spock, and Bones, and then for dramatic tension, some
guys wearing red get killed, then for plot, Captain Kirk
would get into a fist fight and get laid. If Kirk and
Bond can get away with that, so can you.
--
----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/ James A. Donald
.
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