Wistful, maybe even melancholie
My great failing as a writer is that I cannot come up with a plot to save my life. I can create interesting characters and write dialogue and even cobble together an engaging scene with multiple people. I let other people read what I write and there reactions always start off with an emphatic, "I want to know what happens next." Well, I have no idea what happens next. I just... don't know. Everything seems cliched and everything that I'd want to write I don't think would work as a narrative.
Case in point; Carly and I were watching Adventureland last week. Very much a coming of age story and boy meets girl. The characters were engaging and moderately fresh and their budding romance was a nice slow boil. The pacing was great. I just wanted it to go on this path and have the couple realize what they are meant to be with each other and then roll credits. But it had to go down the rom-com mainstay of some kind of misunderstanding to separate them so they could be united by a grand gesture as a climax to the story.
You know what? Fuck that. Its incredibly unrealistic, and just bad story telling. But we're conditioned to enjoy or want this. We can't fathom that love might be complicated and that people could only have romantic tension brought on by deus ex machina. The notion that real people would have real problems is nonexistent in story telling. The closest we get is Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally orders something at a restaurant. I would like to see a story with a natural progression with no third act surprises. I know that seems boring, but it hasn't been done in so long that it would seem fresh. Boy meets girl, they court, they fight, the end up together with nothing retarded happening.
And that's just one genre.
To get this train back on the tracks it jumped in paragraph two; I think that a lifetime of digesting what passes for typical narrative has left me incapable of drafting one of my own. I can't think of anything that doesn't follow the predetermined arc, and this is my fault as a pop culture junkie. I've been force fed formula since I could read or enjoy the movies and now I can't think of anything that doesn't follow suit.
Case in point; Carly and I were watching Adventureland last week. Very much a coming of age story and boy meets girl. The characters were engaging and moderately fresh and their budding romance was a nice slow boil. The pacing was great. I just wanted it to go on this path and have the couple realize what they are meant to be with each other and then roll credits. But it had to go down the rom-com mainstay of some kind of misunderstanding to separate them so they could be united by a grand gesture as a climax to the story.
You know what? Fuck that. Its incredibly unrealistic, and just bad story telling. But we're conditioned to enjoy or want this. We can't fathom that love might be complicated and that people could only have romantic tension brought on by deus ex machina. The notion that real people would have real problems is nonexistent in story telling. The closest we get is Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally orders something at a restaurant. I would like to see a story with a natural progression with no third act surprises. I know that seems boring, but it hasn't been done in so long that it would seem fresh. Boy meets girl, they court, they fight, the end up together with nothing retarded happening.
And that's just one genre.
To get this train back on the tracks it jumped in paragraph two; I think that a lifetime of digesting what passes for typical narrative has left me incapable of drafting one of my own. I can't think of anything that doesn't follow the predetermined arc, and this is my fault as a pop culture junkie. I've been force fed formula since I could read or enjoy the movies and now I can't think of anything that doesn't follow suit.