What do you think makes a good story?
Perhaps that's overdoing the metaphor a bit (or a mile), but that's the truth of the matter as I understand it.
A good story follows a natural outgrowth of the characters' choices, both action and inaction, and takes them on a roller coaster of emotional and physical and psychological ups and downs. A good story changes the characters in it (all of them) for good or bad. They become better or worse. A good story doesn't allow them to be the same person at the end they were at the beginning.
On a personal level, I define a good story as one that doesn't give me the option of putting it down nonchalantly. I should have to wrest it from my hungry hands and force myself to get on with the other stuff of life because I care so strongly about the people whose lives I'm following.
I've never understood this myth: "A good story doesn't allow them to be the same person at the end they were at the beginning."
ReplyDeleteWriters/Authors/Creators who blog about their craft often site it even though there are hundreds of examples that debunk it.
Read any Robert B. Parker (or Crais or McDonald or Stark) book and the characters in them are not changed at the end of each book. Spenser (as well as Hawk, Elvis Cole, Joe Pike, Travis McGee and Parker) is the same man in every book and he doesn't change from book to book or within any of the stories.
In fact, the books are written from the stand point that Spenser is as good as he is BECAUSE he WON'T change.
In film James Bond is portrayed exactly the same way. All of the peripheral characters: Moneypenny, Q, and M complain about how much he won't change movie after movie.
In comics Batman is the same way.
Why do you feel as if a GOOD story HAS to involve the character changing?
I think the issue comes into play when people assume the change must be a major one or a changing of personality. Many times, the change is simply that of having gone through the experience and it shaping some growth or pain or refusal to grow in the character. It doesn't mean he or she becomes a different person in a core character sense.
ReplyDeleteA case in point, my story for Rick Ruby, which is coming out in March this year, has Rick's case affect the way he sees his relationships with the three key women in his life. Does it change his behavior with them. No. But it does give him the opportunity to do so. In that sense, he changes a bit, if simply because he faced an opportunity to be a slightly different person, and refused to face it, instead burying himself in the old life to lament that (although he doesn't see it that way) lack of courage.
That's the issue with series books. You can't have the characters make sweeping changes because readers expect the characters to remain essentially the same. But, in a series book, the peripheral characters CAN and usually ARE the ones who have the most change.
Thanks for replying
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome. That's just my take on it, of course. You'll find writers more militant about it than I am, I'm sure.
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