Seven things that will make me love a story
It was hard to hold myself to only seven things. There are many more, but these are tops on my list.
1. Have a first-person narrator with an extremely likable, personable voice, who's addressing the audience in much the same way he talks to the people around him. This has a magnetic attraction for me. A lot of Sid Fleischman's books are in the first person, or in the third person but with a lot of hero's-point-of-view looks at the world. (Everybody who hasn't read Sid Fleischman is now obliged to go out and read The Ghost In The Noonday Sun, which is the next best pirate book in the whole world after Treasure Island.) Recently I read a novel called Meadowland, by Tom Holt. It was about the Viking settlements in the New World, and the book as a whole was really a pointless downer. It took in the first Leif Eriksson voyage, the second voyage where the Vikings are attacked by Skraelings (their name for native Newfoundlanders) and the episode where the Viking investors start murdering each other in their beds to avoid having to share out the profits of a voyage, and a woman called Freydis slaughters the other women with an axe. That was the climactic episode of the book. Nobody ever achieves anything worthwhile or even does anything nice for anybody else during the whole book. Afterwards, I looked back and went "What a big fat waste of time." But, and this is the crucial thing, I didn't think that till afterwards, because the voices that told the story were so much fun. One of them is a clerk from Byzantium, who is a eunuch but surprisingly well-adjusted, and the other two are "Varangian Guards", i.e. Vikings working for the Big City. They all sounded so down-to-earth and slightly complainey but basically decent, that I felt at home with them instantly. I was so busy enjoying spending time with them that it took me till afterwards to notice that I didn't like the plot.
Another good example: Servant of the Bones, a much-underrated book by Anne Rice. The story is told, within the framing story of a conversation, by an immortal ghost who was alive in Babylon back when King Cyrus conquered the city. He's a young, gentle, kind-hearted, deeply wronged person, and at the same time he's been around for thousands of years and is a cynical killer who used to be a slave-of-the-lamp type of demon used by evil magicians. His whole dichotomy of character is clearly visible all the way through. He's the sort of person I really like spending my time with. I don't like any of the vampire novels anymore, as Lestat is the sort of narrator I stopped finding cool when I was about fifteen, but I still like Servant of the Bones. It took me a long time to notice that the plot is kinda half-baked, just because I liked the lead character so much.
2. Turn somebody into somebody or something else. This is the coolest plot twist ever. I thought so when I was eleven, and I still think so. Turn a guy into a cat. Turn a woman into a tree. Turn a teenage girl into a ninety-year-old man. Turn a grown man into a little girl. Turn the entire army into armchairs, and make it funny, and believable, and happening for a good plot reason, and tell us all about how it feels to spend the week as an extremely frustrated armchair. I got bored with being human and spent literally hours as a small child imagining how it would feel to become a squirrel, a mountain goat, or whatever other animal I thought was best that week. (Maybe that's why there's all this emphasis on spirit journeys in animal forms in some shamanic religions. Playing pretend is just so damn fun.) Give me your own insights on the process.
3. Hurt/comfort. Lots of it. What can I say, it pushes my buttons. I especially like it when the person doing the comforting is trying to be tactful around the potentially vicious temper of the person who's been injured.
4. Villains who are shown to have an understandable reason for what they do. Not necessarily a good reason, but if you can make it a reason that makes me think, "Hey, I'd become a bad guy too if that happened to me" just for a moment, then you've engaged me deeply in the story. I saw a brilliant example of this the other day, in, of all things, the movie Gladiator. (Which I recommend overall. Anybody who likes good Roman costume epics with lots of in-fighting and vengeance will find this the sort of thing they like.) Plot in a nutshell: The Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, is getting old and wants to see the Empire in good hands before he dies. He thinks his son Commodus is "corrupt" (pick your own meaning for that--the guy eventually proves himself to be a slimeball, but at this point he hasn't done anything particularly unpleasant) and unfit to rule. He picks the centurion Maximus to be the next Emperor. (That's Russell Crowe. I wish he would speak up and stop mumbling, but still he was good in the role. Wasn't there a centurion in the Asterix books called Gluteus Maximus?) Commodus is furious and tries to have Maximus executed, succeeds in slaughtering Maximus's family, and generally hounds him till at last he, Commodus, gets his just desserts.
But back there at the beginning of the movie, there's this awful, wrenching scene where the Emperor tells his son, "You won't be succeeding me. I've picked Maximus as next Emperor." Commodus is devastated. He stands there trying not to cry while his father gives him a very gentle speech that amounts to, "You're not brave, you're not a fighter, you drink, you're given to vice of all kinds, nobody admires you and you'd be a dead loss as Emperor. I failed to bring you up right." Commodus gives this faltering little protest of, "But--but I do have some bravery, not on the battlefield, I know, but there are other ways to show courage", and then it turns into begging. I felt heart-sick sorry for the man. Admittedly straight after that he smothers his old father to death and makes it look like natural causes, and rampages through the rest of the movie doing hideous stuff to the good guys, but there keep being moments when you can see what drives him. It made the movie light-years better than if he'd been just a cackling "Bwahaha! Fools!" type of villain.
(BTW, side note here: in the movie Ben-Hur, the bad guy (I think his name is Maecenas) offers Judah Ben-Hur a position in the Roman army, and Ben-Hur declines with thanks. Maecenas instantly becomes Ben-Hur's implacable enemy, and has him sent to row in the galleys while the female members of his family are flung into prison and contract leprosy. Hardly a proportionate reaction. It didn't make sense to me when I watched it. However, I once heard Teresa Nielsen Hayden say that the moviemakers meant to imply: Maecenas has propositioned Ben-Hur, who turns him down. *ching* That's the only way Maecenas's hatred makes sense. Charlton Heston wrote his autobiography decades later and said something offended along the lines of, "People tell me that our characters were supposed to have been homosexual, or the like. Now that's just ridiculous. We never played them as homosexuals." Which proves two things: (a) Heston was the perfect person to play Ben-Hur, as he has exactly the same little blind spot as his character did, and (b) nobody should ever tell the actors about slash.)
5. Let the characters experience awkward, surprisingly extreme, or "wrong" emotions, and let us feel closer to them by telling us about the reasons and the consequences. Diana Wynne Jones is good at this. Polly in Fire and Hemlock is tortured by the villains by being shamed and embarrassed in front of other people. They invite her to a really posh party in order to make her feel small and force her to stop fighting them, and she agrees to stop fighting because she's so embarrassed. It doesn't sound like much till you see it through her eyes: she's a teenager in a room full of rich, important grown-ups who are all watching her. They subject her to pity and then to contempt and amusement till she wants to curl up and die and she'll agree to anything they tell her. As to wrong emotions, there's a bit in Deep Secret where the hero picks up the girl he was starting to fancy, who has just been magically attacked and is only half there. (Not chopped in half. Her overall body mass has been half removed. She looks like a frosty white ghost.) "To my surprise, I found that holding Maree like that, light, limp, and frost cold, was the most sexual experience of my entire life," reports our hero disturbingly. Which, okay, TMI. But it's one of those stupid things that happen to people sometimes, and it also makes the audience feel closer to him because he took us into his confidence about something that embarrassing and personal.
6. Let characters surprise me by doing something extremely different from what I've been led to expect. Make me believe that they'd be capable of doing it and that they're still a consistent character. My favorite type of surprise is when a person we've been led to think is no fun at all does something unexpectedly kind or turns out to have a good quality that only shows under stress. Best example: David Copperfield's aunt Betsey, whom he's been expecting will be a harridan because his parents hated her. After everyone else in the book has let him down, he flees to her door and begs for shelter. To his astonishment, she turns out to be pretty nice. Kind of cranky and fond of having her way, but she's ever so good to him. Not just him, either. She has a slightly batty old scholar living in her guest room, just because there isn't anyone else to take care of him either.
7. Have at least one undead character and tell us what it's like to be a ghost or a zombie, or to pass through death into one of those states. This is sort of like #2, but it's not really a transformation. It's a different phase of human existence, and one which I find unfailingly cool to read about. As witness Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and A Fine And Private Place and Tamsin and Shaun of the Dead and Reaper Man and Johnny and the Dead and a lot of other Terry Pratchett books and "The Dead Drummer" by Leon Garfield and "The Thing on the Doorstep" by H. P. Lovecraft and that odd kids' book about Max the Ghost translated from German and an unjustly forgotten YA book called Mooncoin Castle by Brinton Turkle which I read incessantly the year I turned fourteen.
What about you guys? What are the elements that will make you love a story?
1. Have a first-person narrator with an extremely likable, personable voice, who's addressing the audience in much the same way he talks to the people around him. This has a magnetic attraction for me. A lot of Sid Fleischman's books are in the first person, or in the third person but with a lot of hero's-point-of-view looks at the world. (Everybody who hasn't read Sid Fleischman is now obliged to go out and read The Ghost In The Noonday Sun, which is the next best pirate book in the whole world after Treasure Island.) Recently I read a novel called Meadowland, by Tom Holt. It was about the Viking settlements in the New World, and the book as a whole was really a pointless downer. It took in the first Leif Eriksson voyage, the second voyage where the Vikings are attacked by Skraelings (their name for native Newfoundlanders) and the episode where the Viking investors start murdering each other in their beds to avoid having to share out the profits of a voyage, and a woman called Freydis slaughters the other women with an axe. That was the climactic episode of the book. Nobody ever achieves anything worthwhile or even does anything nice for anybody else during the whole book. Afterwards, I looked back and went "What a big fat waste of time." But, and this is the crucial thing, I didn't think that till afterwards, because the voices that told the story were so much fun. One of them is a clerk from Byzantium, who is a eunuch but surprisingly well-adjusted, and the other two are "Varangian Guards", i.e. Vikings working for the Big City. They all sounded so down-to-earth and slightly complainey but basically decent, that I felt at home with them instantly. I was so busy enjoying spending time with them that it took me till afterwards to notice that I didn't like the plot.
Another good example: Servant of the Bones, a much-underrated book by Anne Rice. The story is told, within the framing story of a conversation, by an immortal ghost who was alive in Babylon back when King Cyrus conquered the city. He's a young, gentle, kind-hearted, deeply wronged person, and at the same time he's been around for thousands of years and is a cynical killer who used to be a slave-of-the-lamp type of demon used by evil magicians. His whole dichotomy of character is clearly visible all the way through. He's the sort of person I really like spending my time with. I don't like any of the vampire novels anymore, as Lestat is the sort of narrator I stopped finding cool when I was about fifteen, but I still like Servant of the Bones. It took me a long time to notice that the plot is kinda half-baked, just because I liked the lead character so much.
2. Turn somebody into somebody or something else. This is the coolest plot twist ever. I thought so when I was eleven, and I still think so. Turn a guy into a cat. Turn a woman into a tree. Turn a teenage girl into a ninety-year-old man. Turn a grown man into a little girl. Turn the entire army into armchairs, and make it funny, and believable, and happening for a good plot reason, and tell us all about how it feels to spend the week as an extremely frustrated armchair. I got bored with being human and spent literally hours as a small child imagining how it would feel to become a squirrel, a mountain goat, or whatever other animal I thought was best that week. (Maybe that's why there's all this emphasis on spirit journeys in animal forms in some shamanic religions. Playing pretend is just so damn fun.) Give me your own insights on the process.
3. Hurt/comfort. Lots of it. What can I say, it pushes my buttons. I especially like it when the person doing the comforting is trying to be tactful around the potentially vicious temper of the person who's been injured.
4. Villains who are shown to have an understandable reason for what they do. Not necessarily a good reason, but if you can make it a reason that makes me think, "Hey, I'd become a bad guy too if that happened to me" just for a moment, then you've engaged me deeply in the story. I saw a brilliant example of this the other day, in, of all things, the movie Gladiator. (Which I recommend overall. Anybody who likes good Roman costume epics with lots of in-fighting and vengeance will find this the sort of thing they like.) Plot in a nutshell: The Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, is getting old and wants to see the Empire in good hands before he dies. He thinks his son Commodus is "corrupt" (pick your own meaning for that--the guy eventually proves himself to be a slimeball, but at this point he hasn't done anything particularly unpleasant) and unfit to rule. He picks the centurion Maximus to be the next Emperor. (That's Russell Crowe. I wish he would speak up and stop mumbling, but still he was good in the role. Wasn't there a centurion in the Asterix books called Gluteus Maximus?) Commodus is furious and tries to have Maximus executed, succeeds in slaughtering Maximus's family, and generally hounds him till at last he, Commodus, gets his just desserts.
But back there at the beginning of the movie, there's this awful, wrenching scene where the Emperor tells his son, "You won't be succeeding me. I've picked Maximus as next Emperor." Commodus is devastated. He stands there trying not to cry while his father gives him a very gentle speech that amounts to, "You're not brave, you're not a fighter, you drink, you're given to vice of all kinds, nobody admires you and you'd be a dead loss as Emperor. I failed to bring you up right." Commodus gives this faltering little protest of, "But--but I do have some bravery, not on the battlefield, I know, but there are other ways to show courage", and then it turns into begging. I felt heart-sick sorry for the man. Admittedly straight after that he smothers his old father to death and makes it look like natural causes, and rampages through the rest of the movie doing hideous stuff to the good guys, but there keep being moments when you can see what drives him. It made the movie light-years better than if he'd been just a cackling "Bwahaha! Fools!" type of villain.
(BTW, side note here: in the movie Ben-Hur, the bad guy (I think his name is Maecenas) offers Judah Ben-Hur a position in the Roman army, and Ben-Hur declines with thanks. Maecenas instantly becomes Ben-Hur's implacable enemy, and has him sent to row in the galleys while the female members of his family are flung into prison and contract leprosy. Hardly a proportionate reaction. It didn't make sense to me when I watched it. However, I once heard Teresa Nielsen Hayden say that the moviemakers meant to imply: Maecenas has propositioned Ben-Hur, who turns him down. *ching* That's the only way Maecenas's hatred makes sense. Charlton Heston wrote his autobiography decades later and said something offended along the lines of, "People tell me that our characters were supposed to have been homosexual, or the like. Now that's just ridiculous. We never played them as homosexuals." Which proves two things: (a) Heston was the perfect person to play Ben-Hur, as he has exactly the same little blind spot as his character did, and (b) nobody should ever tell the actors about slash.)
5. Let the characters experience awkward, surprisingly extreme, or "wrong" emotions, and let us feel closer to them by telling us about the reasons and the consequences. Diana Wynne Jones is good at this. Polly in Fire and Hemlock is tortured by the villains by being shamed and embarrassed in front of other people. They invite her to a really posh party in order to make her feel small and force her to stop fighting them, and she agrees to stop fighting because she's so embarrassed. It doesn't sound like much till you see it through her eyes: she's a teenager in a room full of rich, important grown-ups who are all watching her. They subject her to pity and then to contempt and amusement till she wants to curl up and die and she'll agree to anything they tell her. As to wrong emotions, there's a bit in Deep Secret where the hero picks up the girl he was starting to fancy, who has just been magically attacked and is only half there. (Not chopped in half. Her overall body mass has been half removed. She looks like a frosty white ghost.) "To my surprise, I found that holding Maree like that, light, limp, and frost cold, was the most sexual experience of my entire life," reports our hero disturbingly. Which, okay, TMI. But it's one of those stupid things that happen to people sometimes, and it also makes the audience feel closer to him because he took us into his confidence about something that embarrassing and personal.
6. Let characters surprise me by doing something extremely different from what I've been led to expect. Make me believe that they'd be capable of doing it and that they're still a consistent character. My favorite type of surprise is when a person we've been led to think is no fun at all does something unexpectedly kind or turns out to have a good quality that only shows under stress. Best example: David Copperfield's aunt Betsey, whom he's been expecting will be a harridan because his parents hated her. After everyone else in the book has let him down, he flees to her door and begs for shelter. To his astonishment, she turns out to be pretty nice. Kind of cranky and fond of having her way, but she's ever so good to him. Not just him, either. She has a slightly batty old scholar living in her guest room, just because there isn't anyone else to take care of him either.
7. Have at least one undead character and tell us what it's like to be a ghost or a zombie, or to pass through death into one of those states. This is sort of like #2, but it's not really a transformation. It's a different phase of human existence, and one which I find unfailingly cool to read about. As witness Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and A Fine And Private Place and Tamsin and Shaun of the Dead and Reaper Man and Johnny and the Dead and a lot of other Terry Pratchett books and "The Dead Drummer" by Leon Garfield and "The Thing on the Doorstep" by H. P. Lovecraft and that odd kids' book about Max the Ghost translated from German and an unjustly forgotten YA book called Mooncoin Castle by Brinton Turkle which I read incessantly the year I turned fourteen.
What about you guys? What are the elements that will make you love a story?