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Apr. 11th, 2015 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethDo you ever read a story and just feel like the whole thing would work better if the writer had realised their point of view character wasn't the protagonist? Like, there clearly is a story happening, but it isn't happening to them, or indeed where we can see it?
It's a bit frustrating.
Close cousin is the immediately resolved tension, the long series of incidents where nothing much happens but if it does it's fixed by the end of the page, or the work that does not in the end do anything useful. The status quo exists at the start, middle, and end of the story, and barely ever wobbles.
I realise that a lot of people's experience is like this, but in a story, it's just... for why are you writing it? Why are you expecting us to read it? The mild thrill of knowing their work will be accomplished at the end of the day every day? The zinging one liner that wraps the page where a month's worth of incident happened off screen? I'm sure it's realistic, it has that kind of everyday thing going on, but it's not even constructed like a soap opera with a bunch of different stories that rise and fall, there's just no rise and no fall.
Also, I can't figure out why the guys are in love. Which, it's slash, we're reading hundreds of thousands of words a week about these guys, I can understand skipping that kind of explanation given that we all like them both already, but it's actually what I'm reading it for. I want to see them through each other's eyes and fall for them all over again as they discover each other. Just meeting, having sex, and going on to keep having sex at the end of the day when they get back from work, is again a perfectly reasonable and everyday sounding relationship, but why are we reading it? It's not even focusing on the sex much. Mostly it says they had great sex and it takes like a page or so. Good for them. Why good for us?
What does this relationship reveal about the protagonists? What does it change about them? What do they feel about that?
The current story's protagonist feels overworked and has done for a lot of thousands of words so far. Fair enough. Just, I feel like the story could change emphasis only a very little and have it snap into one of the usual genres, and the thing where it hasn't just leaves it kind of... grey? Hanging there formless? It's not a romance because happily ever after is a given, not a stake. If it's about their careers it isn't about achieving a particular thing, more about hoping everything will stay the same despite the economy. Nothing much is changing for anyone. There's no particular feel for why this part of their life is the story, and not some other part.
And it's not the first or second story I've read this week that is like this. Just a whole series of incidents. A twisting set of ordinary days, all alike.
I'm pretty sure that's a genre and an audience too, actually, I just... I'm not feeling it.
So I keep spending all the time in my head taking the stories apart for parts and figuring out how I'd rewrite them as an episode wrapped around a sharper plot, or focus on the slightly earlier time where things apparently changed state in a dramatic way that could focus a story better, or just try and write it to make the audience and protagonists want and yearn and strive before things actually happen, thus making them more satisfying.
It's kind of rude to read other people's work and mostly be thinking of where you'd AU it for more interest, but it is how I tend to watch TV too, so I guess I'm in the habit.
I'd never leave a comment to that effect though, just be vague here about it, so hopefully not very rude.
... and as ever I mostly notice the thing where any finished story is infinitely superior to my ongoing record of not even starting. These stories may or may not be better than the ones in my head, but that's pretty much irrelevant since I don't even get a first draft going on those ones.
It's a bit frustrating.
Close cousin is the immediately resolved tension, the long series of incidents where nothing much happens but if it does it's fixed by the end of the page, or the work that does not in the end do anything useful. The status quo exists at the start, middle, and end of the story, and barely ever wobbles.
I realise that a lot of people's experience is like this, but in a story, it's just... for why are you writing it? Why are you expecting us to read it? The mild thrill of knowing their work will be accomplished at the end of the day every day? The zinging one liner that wraps the page where a month's worth of incident happened off screen? I'm sure it's realistic, it has that kind of everyday thing going on, but it's not even constructed like a soap opera with a bunch of different stories that rise and fall, there's just no rise and no fall.
Also, I can't figure out why the guys are in love. Which, it's slash, we're reading hundreds of thousands of words a week about these guys, I can understand skipping that kind of explanation given that we all like them both already, but it's actually what I'm reading it for. I want to see them through each other's eyes and fall for them all over again as they discover each other. Just meeting, having sex, and going on to keep having sex at the end of the day when they get back from work, is again a perfectly reasonable and everyday sounding relationship, but why are we reading it? It's not even focusing on the sex much. Mostly it says they had great sex and it takes like a page or so. Good for them. Why good for us?
What does this relationship reveal about the protagonists? What does it change about them? What do they feel about that?
The current story's protagonist feels overworked and has done for a lot of thousands of words so far. Fair enough. Just, I feel like the story could change emphasis only a very little and have it snap into one of the usual genres, and the thing where it hasn't just leaves it kind of... grey? Hanging there formless? It's not a romance because happily ever after is a given, not a stake. If it's about their careers it isn't about achieving a particular thing, more about hoping everything will stay the same despite the economy. Nothing much is changing for anyone. There's no particular feel for why this part of their life is the story, and not some other part.
And it's not the first or second story I've read this week that is like this. Just a whole series of incidents. A twisting set of ordinary days, all alike.
I'm pretty sure that's a genre and an audience too, actually, I just... I'm not feeling it.
So I keep spending all the time in my head taking the stories apart for parts and figuring out how I'd rewrite them as an episode wrapped around a sharper plot, or focus on the slightly earlier time where things apparently changed state in a dramatic way that could focus a story better, or just try and write it to make the audience and protagonists want and yearn and strive before things actually happen, thus making them more satisfying.
It's kind of rude to read other people's work and mostly be thinking of where you'd AU it for more interest, but it is how I tend to watch TV too, so I guess I'm in the habit.
I'd never leave a comment to that effect though, just be vague here about it, so hopefully not very rude.
... and as ever I mostly notice the thing where any finished story is infinitely superior to my ongoing record of not even starting. These stories may or may not be better than the ones in my head, but that's pretty much irrelevant since I don't even get a first draft going on those ones.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-11 04:52 pm (UTC)I've wondered, occasionally, if Jane Austen wasn't pulling a trick like that (deliberately, and for her own amusement) in Emma. Emma leads a tedious, blinkered, very circumscribed life, and all the time away on the far edge of the story, just frustratingly out of view, is the beautiful, accomplished, orphaned doomed-to-be-a-governess star-crossed-lover Real Heroine (who was even saved from sudden dramatic death at sea - offstage!).
But Austen, being Austen, defies the reader, and makes it work. :)