Comments | alecaustin: Premise vs. Structure vs. Text

alecaustin

Premise vs. Structure vs. Text

Jul 11, 2015 11:59

So this year I was on the pre-convention Seminar before Fourth Street. Despite covering professionalism, voice, and critique in 3 separate discussions, we barely got through half of the things we had notes for, which is about par for the course. So here are some notes on one of the topics we didn't get to.

( Premise problems vs. structure problems vs. text problems )

fourth street, writing

Comments 4

aedifica July 12 2015, 02:47:52 UTC

I am sleepy and have nothing to add, but I enjoyed reading this.

swan_tower July 12 2015, 08:21:32 UTC

Your story's premise can limit how good your story can ever be, and how hard it will be to make it better than the baseline for that kind of story.

This reminds me of when I was writing Midnight Never Come and called it the teenaged boy of novels: it ate every bit of energy and skill and inspiration I could give it, and never stopped being hungry. I've written things before and since where I knew very clearly that it could only ever be X good, because that was what the premise could support, and my job was to asymptotically approach that limit. But with MNC, I wasn't sure where X lay; all I knew was that I was never going to get there, and the graph of "how good is it" was limited not by the premise, but by my ability to carry it. If I wrote that book today, it would be better. (For starters, I would give it the extra 30K to play with that In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall got, and see what it could do with some room to stretch its legs.) But in a way I'm glad I wrote that book when I wasn't good enough to quite pull it off, because ( ... )

alecaustin July 13 2015, 02:16:50 UTC

That makes a lot of sense.

I don't want to claim that writers should only be pursuing that sort of story, because A) prescriptivism, B) people should be allowed and encouraged to write fun things that don't aspire to be the Bestest Story Evar, and C) it sounds like it would make writing so very stressful. That said, I think your observation about how it made you grow is a relevant one.

Meanwhile, I've spent the last few months avoiding writing the scene in which one of my characters dissects the first chapter of Plato's Republic as a lesson in rhetorical shenanigans and uses it to articulate a taxonomy of power. Because that's not going to be hard to pull off at all...

swan_tower July 13 2015, 06:51:49 UTC

I don't want to claim that writers should only be pursuing that sort of story, because A) prescriptivism, B) people should be allowed and encouraged to write fun things that don't aspire to be the Bestest Story Evar, and C) it sounds like it would make writing so very stressful.Oh, certainly not: that way lies burnout. I've written and sold stories where I thought "this is nothing special, but it's fun, and there's no reason a Fun Thing shouldn't be out there in the world." It's only when somebody constantly hangs out within the boundaries of their comfort zone and never wanders toward the edge that you start thinking about maybe prodding them to go further. Flip side is when you critique a story and you see how the story could be really awesome if the author made the protagonist a hyper-intelligent dolphin and added a religious subtext and also changed the ending so that everybody dies . . . but y'know, that's not the story they wrote, and may not be the story they want to write (though you can ask), and if you really feel that story ( ... )