Quick definition of a bildungsroman, courtesy of dictionary.com: A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character
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Well, my characters feel pain when they're hurt, but when a character spends a lot of time dwelling on their pain, it just makes me think that they need medication.
And I take medication so as not to have to do that myself, and if I'm not going to ruminate for hours and hours on everything that happened to me before I was 20 I'm really not going to pay to watch someone else do it.
I have noticed that certain of the younger audiences like angst. Lackwit sells like hotcakes to twelve-year-olds, but most of the younger people I'm friends with on line get over it by the time they're 15-16. I think that being OMG speshul and having everyone treat you like khrappe is an adolescent fantasy, basically, but if the point of your book is that your character's going to grow up then letting them stay in this mental state rather defeats your purpose--if you feel like that much past the age of 19, you are depressed, it's not normal, go talk to someone and get therapy and/or drugs
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You know, I've never looked at it like that before, and it's a really interesting point.
Isn't it ironic that apparently Literature is supposed to have all these issues...whereas in real life when we have them, society in general thinks we can just medicate them away rather than *gasp* dealing with them?
Thanks for clearly putting into words what I've been trying to explain about why I don't like most modern "literary" books. When ALL your characters have tons of Issues then it's very likely that the main thing that you get is angst, angst, angst, spam, and angst. And too often the author is so busy piling on the issues that she forgets to give them any redeeming characteristics to make us care.
Oh my god, THANK YOU. I never thought I would find someone who agreed with me that if a character is doing that much angsting, and is so completely fixated on her own problems, then something is wrong.
I loathe reading about heroines who have bad things happen as children and seem to freeze there, so that ten or fifteen years later in storytime they can still be angsting about it, as though nothing else traumatic had ever happened to them or ever would. I'm 25, and the things I'm most upset about all happened within the last few years- but I think a year from now I'll probably have lost most of that anger and angst. People do change, and authors either need to reflect that or accept that they have someone whose severe psychological problems can't be solved by finding out that they're the Heir to whatever.
I'm okay with a character who's that fixated on his/her problems IF it's clearly shown that other characters think he/she is being a self-pitying drip. If they're all busy sympathetically murmuring about how his/her life is so hard, poor dear thing, and/or scorning her with purple prose because they're meanie poopyheads, then that's just boring for everyone concerned, and entirely peopled by cardboard characters to boot.
Whether or not I'll read the story through depends on what the self-pity to other stuff ratio is, of course; I do have a short attention span for that kind of thing.
I think that being OMG speshul and having everyone treat you like khrappe is an adolescent fantasy, basically,
Oh boy...I remember writing a crappy little story when I was in high school, where this girl from another reality ended up in my high school. She had a nifty blue diamond-shaped thingy that floated around her, and if it thought someone had hostile intent towards her it'd kill them. The thing was, it was pickier about defining "hostile intent" than she was, and she eventually had to tell it to calm the hell down, considering she and the students couldn't even understand each other's languages and they may very well have just been trying to say hi.
Vicariously getting even with the kids I hated may have been fun at the time, but I'm glad I only ever wrote a couple pages of that drivel. :P
God I love your lists. :)
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I wish more people felt as you do about 4. There's no option to skip over it, most of the time.
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And I take medication so as not to have to do that myself, and if I'm not going to ruminate for hours and hours on everything that happened to me before I was 20 I'm really not going to pay to watch someone else do it.
I have noticed that certain of the younger audiences like angst. Lackwit sells like hotcakes to twelve-year-olds, but most of the younger people I'm friends with on line get over it by the time they're 15-16. I think that being OMG speshul and having everyone treat you like khrappe is an adolescent fantasy, basically, but if the point of your book is that your character's going to grow up then letting them stay in this mental state rather defeats your purpose--if you feel like that much past the age of 19, you are depressed, it's not normal, go talk to someone and get therapy and/or drugs ( ... )
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Isn't it ironic that apparently Literature is supposed to have all these issues...whereas in real life when we have them, society in general thinks we can just medicate them away rather than *gasp* dealing with them?
Reply
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I loathe reading about heroines who have bad things happen as children and seem to freeze there, so that ten or fifteen years later in storytime they can still be angsting about it, as though nothing else traumatic had ever happened to them or ever would. I'm 25, and the things I'm most upset about all happened within the last few years- but I think a year from now I'll probably have lost most of that anger and angst. People do change, and authors either need to reflect that or accept that they have someone whose severe psychological problems can't be solved by finding out that they're the Heir to whatever.
Reply
Whether or not I'll read the story through depends on what the self-pity to other stuff ratio is, of course; I do have a short attention span for that kind of thing.
Reply
Oh boy...I remember writing a crappy little story when I was in high school, where this girl from another reality ended up in my high school. She had a nifty blue diamond-shaped thingy that floated around her, and if it thought someone had hostile intent towards her it'd kill them. The thing was, it was pickier about defining "hostile intent" than she was, and she eventually had to tell it to calm the hell down, considering she and the students couldn't even understand each other's languages and they may very well have just been trying to say hi.
Vicariously getting even with the kids I hated may have been fun at the time, but I'm glad I only ever wrote a couple pages of that drivel. :P
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