Romance and cool stuff

[khiemtran]

After reading green_knight's Theory of Everything, Part I, I started thinking about some of the problem scenes from The Silver Bowl and what was missing from them. I've decided that the answer is "romance" ("romance" as in "cool stuff", not as in "girl meets boy"). To me, "romance" or "cool stuff" is in many ways the point of genre fiction. Cool ideas, cool settings, intriguing concepts. If it was all just plot and outcomes, then why not just read mainstream fiction? And even mainstream fiction, I think, has "cool stuff" of its own, it's just a different set of cool stuff.

There was "cool stuff" in the original version, but the plot and starting conditions needed to generate it failed the plausibility test. The newer version is much more plausible and logical, but it just seems... pointless. As the story became more realistic, I found I became less and less interested in it. There were still various reasons to keep reading, and I worked hard to keep the plot pacing up, but in the end it was turning into a story that I didn't particularly care about. I want silver bears and clay horses in my stories, as much as I want realism. I'm going to have to find a way now to get the romance back in there.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Cool stuff - well, there are different kinds of cool stuff. But one of the points about anything I write that is Fantasy/Science Fiction (all of it) is that the plots couldn't take place elsewhere, nor would the characters have lived in Mundania, much less in current-day Mundania - setting and plot and character are undeniably interwoven.

What you're struggling with sounds more like the line between fantasy and fancy, as described by llygoden - there are some stories where the magic does not have to make sense (think Alice in Wonderland) although I wouldn't know how to go about writing one.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It's not specifically about magic or plausibility. It's about the setting and how much I like it. It's about the mood of the story. It's about whether or not the story ultimately affects me, whether this is a world I want to dream about, and whether these are people I want to have adventures with. That's ultimately the missing ingredient for me, and it's frustrating, because I know that ingredient was in there in the first version. I think I've got a little too hung on the pacing and the story technicalities in the revision and lost track of what the point of the story was in the first place.

Oh well, better luck next draft, I guess.