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Ann Leckie has an interesting rant about stories and ideas. I thought it was worth reading:
http://ann-leckie.livejournal.com/191769.html
Great at theory, terrible at practice.
She’s on the right track, but Coffee at Starbucks doesn’t take the imagination far. Why not a Brunhilde type beer naide. Now there’s something. There she stands every night, axe (it is an axe, isn’t it?) waving in the sleezy bar our hero frequents.
This gives him a bit of a start off because he, while not alone in the world, is not one of the myriad who who queque like chickens (OK. Chickens is not right.) morning after morning before settling down in a dreary office to make more money for an overly riches fat boss.
It can be taken so much further. What about a white wine male version that the wispy, bored houswife has her eye on? It could be further complicated becasue she doesn’t realise what she’s walked into is a dying gay bar.
Slush piles are always a trial: sometimes a good idea buried in a badly written plot, usually a bad idea done worse than normal.
Once you weed out the ones that obviously bad (bad grammar, no understanding of plot or pacing, no plot just idle mushings, unaware of gaping logic holes, the characters do dumb things just because it’s convenient for the story, characters are boring/cardboard, preaching a moral, or the story is an obvious rip-off of a recent movie/TV episode) you’re left the ones that could be interesting if only the author knew how to tell a story.
tkepner wrote:you’re left the ones that could be interesting if only the author knew how to tell a story.And of course, you need a story to tell, which means you need a character.
Mark Twain has a short essay, How to Tell a Story, but it deals with verbal story tellng. It seems that American srory telling is different fo English (Mark doesn’t like them.) story telling, for which information you’ll need to read him. But he doesn’t tell you how to write (tell) a story.
This leaves the writer with two definintions of ‘tell’.
Or does it?
tkepner wrote:sometimes a good idea buried in a badly written plot,quote]
What to do? What to do?
“What to do? What to do?”
First, throw out all the stuff that’s boring and does not contribute to the action or move the plot forward. (info. dumps, scene setting, “as you know Bob”‘s, elaborately described locations the s/hero sees for only a few seconds or minutes, unnecessary detailed descriptions of items — do we REALLY need to know the car driving him to the airport is a Checy with 450cc’s, Over-the-head dual cams, and 15” chrome wheels (unless he’s a car nut and would notice such a thing), and so forth).
Second, make sure the story actually HAS a plot (what’s happening and what’s your MC doing about it?).
Third, make sure the characters are believable (Why is the villain acting the way he does? Hitler and Stalin are considered evil for what they did to people, but both considered what they were doing as necessary, and the best course of action under the circumstances — i.e. the end goal justified the means, no matter how cruel that appeared to the individuals impacted by those means. The same goes for the hero, why is he doing what he is doing? This isn’t stuff that necessarily belongs in the plot, but you, as the author, must know it to make characters that resonate with your readers). Are the secondary characters merely caricatures of people for the Hero/Villain to amaze/horrify?
Fourth, is the background world logical? (things declared impossible in one chapter are not commonplace in another; the shero discovers she left her purse with her ID in NYC, but ten pages later pulls out an ID to cross the border into Canada; the hero lived in NYC and never learned to drive, but five chapters later he hot-wires a car in Texas; etc.)
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