essay
I forgot my flash drive, so I'll just store this first draft here for now.
Kevin Snow
Eng 150
2/28/2006
To Win, To Lose, or To Confuse.
The formula for many stories is, I suppose, unintentional. People like to read stories where everything turns out better in the end, and people like to write those same stories. Every once in a while I want a story that doesn’t turn out all right in the end. But nearly
Every one of those I manage to find ends with a bunch of philosophical babble (Steven King) that I could never hope to understand, and wouldn’t want to read if I did, and/or ends in terrible tragedy all throughout with everyone dieing (Shakespeare), which is to severe for me. Blade Runner (the movie, haven’t gotten the book yet) ends with them main characters saving everyone but themselves dying terrible gruesome deaths… almost (if you don’t watch the last thirty seconds, they don’t spring right back up and hug eachother).
The formula as I have observed generally goes: Find love, loose love, search, find love again; or possibly: Have problem, look for solution, find solution, fail anyways, cope, fail some more, consider, recover some, stall, climatic event, win by just a little, problem solved, and then return to normal life for the last two pages, except with fame, fortune, power, and the girl. Just about everything I have ever read or watched has fallen almost always within 75% of one of those sequences. If you say that is the correct way of doing things, then your probably right, and everything else will probably fail. There is a reason for those things to be there, even if it makes the generalities of the stories seem repetitive.
Would you like a book that ended at what you thought would be halfway through the storyline, with the main character dying in an ambush by some bandits with absolutely no connection with the events of the story besides the fact that they decided that the road the hero was on would be a good one for robbing people? Well, you would probable expect an end since you only have a few pages to go, and see that it wouldn’t be fulfilling, and you might expect to get a hook for the next book in the series, but not that it would end as mundanely as that. But what if it didn’t end there, what if it was in the middle of the pages, and some seemingly completely different story picks up in the middle, and eventually nearly finishes the quest for the first character that never got there, but right before that they decide they have something better to do and move along, right out the end of the book? You might consider putting the book down right in the middle, though more likely than that you would just go to bed and forget that the story wasn’t over when you wake up. Perhaps you would finish the book through a force of will, and then vow to never read anything by that author again. Then again, a few of you might shout “best book ever” and if you’re a journalist for an off to the side of nowhere newspaper or magazine, your comments would end up on the back of the next printing, as I suspect that there are many hundreds of one line reviews to consider, and most of the popular ones have bad stuff to say. If you wrote this, you would do worse than if you wrote a formulaic and serious science fiction novel, and each and every one of the concepts you put in there are wrong in most of the publics minds (though if you point this out about it, it immediately becomes an art piece or a comedy, even though it was quite serious).
So why even bother with that unless you are some kind of literary genius (like Steffen R Donaldson, as seen in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever), when you don’t like it, the general audience doesn’t like it, the critics and publishers don’t like it, and you have to take two jobs anyways because you could never support yourself with it? I don’t know, but I am going to do it anyways.
Kevin Snow
Eng 150
2/28/2006
To Win, To Lose, or To Confuse.
The formula for many stories is, I suppose, unintentional. People like to read stories where everything turns out better in the end, and people like to write those same stories. Every once in a while I want a story that doesn’t turn out all right in the end. But nearly
Every one of those I manage to find ends with a bunch of philosophical babble (Steven King) that I could never hope to understand, and wouldn’t want to read if I did, and/or ends in terrible tragedy all throughout with everyone dieing (Shakespeare), which is to severe for me. Blade Runner (the movie, haven’t gotten the book yet) ends with them main characters saving everyone but themselves dying terrible gruesome deaths… almost (if you don’t watch the last thirty seconds, they don’t spring right back up and hug eachother).
The formula as I have observed generally goes: Find love, loose love, search, find love again; or possibly: Have problem, look for solution, find solution, fail anyways, cope, fail some more, consider, recover some, stall, climatic event, win by just a little, problem solved, and then return to normal life for the last two pages, except with fame, fortune, power, and the girl. Just about everything I have ever read or watched has fallen almost always within 75% of one of those sequences. If you say that is the correct way of doing things, then your probably right, and everything else will probably fail. There is a reason for those things to be there, even if it makes the generalities of the stories seem repetitive.
Would you like a book that ended at what you thought would be halfway through the storyline, with the main character dying in an ambush by some bandits with absolutely no connection with the events of the story besides the fact that they decided that the road the hero was on would be a good one for robbing people? Well, you would probable expect an end since you only have a few pages to go, and see that it wouldn’t be fulfilling, and you might expect to get a hook for the next book in the series, but not that it would end as mundanely as that. But what if it didn’t end there, what if it was in the middle of the pages, and some seemingly completely different story picks up in the middle, and eventually nearly finishes the quest for the first character that never got there, but right before that they decide they have something better to do and move along, right out the end of the book? You might consider putting the book down right in the middle, though more likely than that you would just go to bed and forget that the story wasn’t over when you wake up. Perhaps you would finish the book through a force of will, and then vow to never read anything by that author again. Then again, a few of you might shout “best book ever” and if you’re a journalist for an off to the side of nowhere newspaper or magazine, your comments would end up on the back of the next printing, as I suspect that there are many hundreds of one line reviews to consider, and most of the popular ones have bad stuff to say. If you wrote this, you would do worse than if you wrote a formulaic and serious science fiction novel, and each and every one of the concepts you put in there are wrong in most of the publics minds (though if you point this out about it, it immediately becomes an art piece or a comedy, even though it was quite serious).
So why even bother with that unless you are some kind of literary genius (like Steffen R Donaldson, as seen in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever), when you don’t like it, the general audience doesn’t like it, the critics and publishers don’t like it, and you have to take two jobs anyways because you could never support yourself with it? I don’t know, but I am going to do it anyways.