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[khiemtran]

So, reading after the quake was a real eye-opener. It's fair to say, it really changed my entire concept of what a successful story is, because it was based around different patterns from the ones I normally use. I know how to write a story about finding courage against the odds and how to do an O Henry style Favour Returned. I don't really know how to hang an entire story on a (sometimes inadvertent) guide helping the protagonist realise something about themselves (unless it's that they really do have the courage to so-on and so-on...)

Except. Except, actually I have written stories like this. Years and years ago in school. And I have been reading them, over and over again, in adult form, in some of my favourite novels, without quite recognising the pattern. It was only reading an entire collection where every story fit the same pattern (and yet was otherwise wildly different) that I finally grasped it.

So, now I have to wait a few weeks before I get to test out a new theory [1]. Hopefully, I'll still remember it all since then. In the meantime, the ideas are slowly starting to fill the well.


[1] Finnish? Um... yeah, Chapter five. Two weeks to go.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think I want to read that anthology now.

I recently read a novel in a slightly different tradition from what I usually read (in German, literary) and realised just how much I've internalised that 'this is how a story works'. I thought I could predict the plot points - this is the rival, here will be a crisis, there's a dark moment over _there_ - and they didn't come.

And I wonder how many writers stick to the tried-and-tested pattern because *they* expect it, and *they* feel unfomfortable if it doesn't happen; and how many stick to it because they can't think of anything else, and how many because _readers_ expect it...

From your description, it sounds as the these stories are still stories about a change, only the agent of change is different?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, there was still a change in each one, although often just a resolution for change in the future.

I guess the main though is that a lot of the plot setups I would have rejected as "unrealistic" (just what's in it for the guide?) but I feel now like I've been kind of missing the point all along. It doesn't need to be realistic or consistent, any more than Gandalf really needs a sensible motivation to insist on bringing Bilbo Baggins on his quest to slay a dragon.