Some Thoughts On Writing

[hwconundrum]

A writing-related question for anyone on my FL who has an interest in it, even if only from a reader's perspective: at what point does it become acceptable for a story to sacrifice or ignore internal logic in the name of style? Is it ever okay for a story to contain a few plot holes/illogical moments in the name of making the story more interesting

Comments

[allisnow]

Okay, well first thing is that don't beat yourself up over the plot sounding cliche. They all do when you boil them down, and there's nothing you can do about it. I can just imagine Shakespeare sitting down in front of his first draft of R&J, banging his head on his keyboard and crying, "It's such a cliche!"

As far as how much you need to explain to the story, I guess it depends on the kind of story it is, and that's something you need to know ahead of time. I refer you to the MICE quotient: Milieu, Idea, Character and Event. http://triton.towson.edu/~schmitt/311/pages/tsld004.htm

A Milieu story focuses a LOT on worldbuilding. Think of LotR. Yeah the characters and events were important, but Tolkien spent an insane amount of time talking about things that had nothing to do with the plot, because he was doing more than that... he was creating a WORLD. In many Milieu stories the POV character is thrown into a strange new world and either has to acclimate and be accepted or else be rejected. If a person picks up a milieu story to read, they know it because right away a lot of detail is placed on the environments the characters move in.

An idea story is about answering a question. In your case it seems the questions are plentiful -- how did we get here? What do we do now? Detective and who-dunnits are idea stories. In an idea story it's harder to fudge on the details and not answer questions because, in the reader's mind, your whole job is to answer the questions she has.

A character story is probably the most familiar to most people. A character has a problem, tries to solve it, and either succeeds or fails. Usually the character changes over the course of the story. They realize sometime about themselves that is fundamentally important. With a character story, though, you really have to NAIL the characters or people aren't going to be invested enough in them to want to find out what happens. On the upside, people who read character stories care less about what is powering the engines or where the bathrooms on the ship are. A character author can be forgiven on fudging the technicalities if the characters are compelling enough.

An event story, there is a tremor in the force, and the story is about trying to put everything back to 'right'. In a lot of ways this is the old Hero's Journey cycle -- a character crosses over into the unknown, and while they may go to cool places (milieu) and find out things (idea) and change personally (character), the thrust of the story is on FIXING what is wrong. I tend to think this kind of story is harder to fudge too, but dozens and hundreds of 'popular' disaster movies seem to prove me wrong. :D

I don't know if this is in any way helpful -- and if you skipped all that I don't blame you, I'll just repeat that I think it depends on what kind of story you're writing. Is it a mystery about what has happened to these people? Is it an opportunity to try and answer deep philosophical questions? Is it a fictional biography of how these difficult events made someone change? When you can answer that question, you'll know what to focus on, and that should give you some kind of idea of what's able to lay at the periphery instead.

[allisnow]

I just remembered that most of what I read on this topic comes from Orson Scott Card's nonfic "Characters and Viewpoint", which is one of my favorite books-about-writing EVA.

I don't know if this link to google books will work but let's try

[hwconundrum]

Thanks for all that info on the MICE stuff, that was really helpful, and quite a nice change of perspective since I've never really looked at it that way before. :) I suppose part of the trouble is that I'm not terribly sure myself what type of story I'm trying to write, and since I have no destination in mind it's going to be awfully difficult to me to actually get there, so I need to sit down and figure out what I want to do before I proceed any further.

Thinking about it now I suspect the basic story type is Event, with a little extra chunk of Character thrown in for good measure and then all the psychological stuff I mentioned that defies categorisation. Like you say, I think it'll be a little harder to fudge details here but on the other hand I seem to be making some progress resolving my little plot conflicts so there's hope yet. :)

Oh, and about disaster movies... who needs logic and consistency when you can have 'SPLOSIONS? ;) I'm pretty sure there's some kind of Hollywood formula for importance of resolving plot holes against dollars spent on CGI...

Also, thanks for the Google Books link! I'll have to bear that in mind for when I'm settled down somewhere and have money. :) Books in Australia all seem to be stupid expensive for some reason, more than double what you'd pay in the UK.

[allisnow]

Well there's nothing wrong with writing down the ideas that are in your head right now and just seeing what comes out. It may be that afterward or even during the process you will really decide what kind of story you want it to be. Then you can go back and tweak what you wrote. I think the reason I didn't mention that in the first place is because I loathe editing ;)

I was thinking about this other writing book I have, "A Story is a Promise". I forget the author but I'm sure you could google it. Basically he says that when you write a story, you start off by posing a question. What that question is tied a lot into the MICE quotient. If the first chapter of a book has people wondering, "What caused the crew to lose their memories and will they be able to find out the truth?" then the readers will be more prone to wanting the technical details -- assuming the details are technical and not supernatural.