Sep 16 2008
So, what makes a good story?
I know writer wannabes (and writers) ask that question all the time. Or, at least, those of us addicted to fiction do. What makes a good story?
People frequently ask me what kind of stories I write, what kind of stories I read. I have quite a bit of science fiction and fantasy on my shelves, but I have historical and romance and even murder mystery and horror. No western though. But it’s more about the authors than the genres because the authors on my shelves are all people who know how to tell a good story or , at least, know how to tell a story well.
Naturally, that’s my own goal. In fact, I can’t remember when I didn’t want to tell stories. Prose and essays assignments were as likely to turn into stories as anything else when I’d slip out of my own skin and put myself in someone else’s. Oh, they were a little like me, perhaps a facet of me that I took out and warmed in my hand, then planted to see what might have grown if the garden were different. The tendency toward science fiction and fantasy was as much laziness on my part as anything - you can make more than a character to suit your fancy, but a whole world. And why not?
But I don’t tell the story to give a reader a world. I tell a story so I can give the reader what I get from the very best stories: a chance to wear a new skin for a while, to understand myself better by pretending, if for only a bit, to be someone I’m not. That’s why my heart thunders when Val Con senses that Miri is in danger. That’s why I sobbed when Moreta disappeared in the colds of between. That’s why I laughed with Beautiful made that newbie thank Captain Redhead for nearly spitting him on his own knife.
And I want to give that to others. I want you to thrill when Venetia rides the wind to her lover’s bower. I want you to wipe away a tear as Charley waits for eternity for the little girl that will never return. I want you to feel the lightning dancing from your fingertips with Stormna as she calls the storm to replenish a land stricken with drought. I want you to stumble with Tander trying to follow his stealthy wife as they infiltrate a mountain fortress. I want you to ache for Laren and the mother he lost - and the mother he spurned.
I’d like to think I’m doing you all a favor by writing all this, but I love doing it. Painting the pictures with words when my hands are too clumsy to do them in reality, setting the sky or the world, hitting the right phrases so that, when you read it, you can hear the voices talking. Perhaps these skills are all in my head and I miss with words just as I do with paint. But, if I can give one person, just one, what I want them to see, to hear, to feel. If I can make one person cry or laugh or gasp, well, that would be worth it all.
So, what makes a good story for you?
definitely more about the authors than the genres! There are lots of books in genres I like that suck … doesn’t matter if they’re the type of story I like if they are not well written - and if an author I enjoy reading writes out of a particular genre I am stil likely to enjoy the work - although even with that said, I still didn’t even try Nora Roberts’ little jaunt into vampire stories
There are so many elements that have to come together for a good story, but for me, the characters tend to be the most important… if I like the character(s) I am willing to tolerate more weaknesses in other areas. If there is NOT a character I like, it’s unlikely that I will finish reading.
It wasn’t Nora Roberts best work, though I admit to a fondness for her protagonist vampire (yep, I pretty much get new Nora Roberts’ automatically). Her newer series, starting with Blood Brothers, I like better. But, then, violence doesn’t bother me much.
I never enjoyed Anne Rice (How does one identify with a whiny vampire who keeps complaining about immortality and “having” to kill people? If your “life” is so horrible, take a sunbath, why don’t you?), but I’m not sure I want to condemn all vampire stories out of hand. On the other, I really haven’t found many compelling ones to date so you might have something.
As for characters, you have an excellent point. Identifying with characters is what really sells me on a story. I have finished and even enjoyed tight plots or fascinating stories that didn’t have characters that sucked me in - but they don’t get read over and over. Those are the books that, at best, I hand off to others or donate to the library. If one has good characters I can forgive a lot, though not everything. Without them, it will never quite be the story it could have been for me.
I tend to gravitate toward character-driven stories, but for me there has to be one of three other elements … the author telling me something I didn’t already know (for example, Robertson Davies’ World of Wonders which was a brilliant character study of a magician; I knew very little about sleight-of-hand magic prior to reading it); the author telling me something I do know, but the reading of which makes me feel less like I’m the only person in the world who knows it (as in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which brilliantly pictures a dystopia I imagine all too often); or the author telling me the story in order to tell me something else — a firm foundation of extended metaphor or subtext (as in Billy Budd ).
I’m kind of hard to please as a reader, I guess.
Baron,
You are entitled to whatever you need as a reader. There’s nothing wrong with high expectations as long as you’re willing to live with the consequences mean that you have a limited pool of writers to read from.
I have the same problem (even if my criteria is different than yours). However, I have a sizable collection of the writers I like best and I’m happy reading them over and over rather than get disgusted with substandard work.
It’s not impossible that what I write wouldn’t appeal to you. The failing is not in you if you don’t like something. You are entitled to get what you’re looking for when you pick up a book and to be disappointed if you don’t find it.
I tend to read the same books again and again, also.
Although, as an editor, I’m quite capable of appreciating something even if it’s not necessarily what my brain is wired to “want” to read, if that makes any sense. I’d be a pretty awful editor, in fact, if I couldn’t do that. I’ve done some of my best editing work on projects I would never have voluntarily read just for my own pleasure, but which I profoundly appreciated by the time I was done with them.
Truth is, I only rarely edit other people’s stuff. There are a few good reasons for this. First, I’m an engineer/physicist and most of the people I know don’t write fiction but technical papers (which I can edit quite effectively, but it’s a different topic). Secondly, I am always very honest and, truthfully, many people don’t like the truth about their writing.
Those that do, however, I always try to be helpful without trying to force it into my own style. Sadly, that is harder to do than you might think. My style is HOW I write. For nonfiction, I can do it OK, but the fact I don’t enjoy it makes my editing rather uninspiring in my own opinion. I enjoy fiction more but I also expect more. For the most part, I try to steer my editing to things I appreciate or writers I respect so that I can focus on things I can help with and not flavor it with my own attitudes and mindset.
I’m not objective enough to tell you how good I’ve been at that.
I sometimes think that the best editor/reader for a project is one who has no natural inclination toward it, simply because that person won’t cut the writer any slack, so to speak. It’s really hard for most writers not to write strictly for themselves as an audience, and to remember that they need to reach a wider base of people. It’s inevitably true that everyone writes the kind of thing he likes to read … and gets tunnel vision in the process, usually.
My favorite reader of my own work was a guy who hated the genre I was writing in, hated my style, and actually hated me personally. He was a kick-ass genius at calling me on my shit, because he had no reason not to, if you know what I mean. But when he liked what I was doing … I knew it was really working.