terrible writing
Trying this again.
Hey All
Below is a note i sent to the writing clss. I often sent their notes to you as well.
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Tonight I helped the tiger people with some stacking hay. I prefer stacking hay to lifting weights becase when I stack hay, when I'm done the hay is stacked. It was an hour drive over, four hours work, and an hour drive back.she said I'm one of th best friends she's ever had, and i told her a) if I didn't help a 71 and a 73 year old friends haul hay, my mother would crawl out of the grave and kill me. and b) they help me plenty. In any case, I didn't get work done on anything else, so here is the note, and Ill try to send a note tomorrow. I don't know if i will, since tomorrow I have thee hour infusion for crohn's tomrorrow, and pick up Tony from the vet where he has to get his tooth pullled out.
Here is the note to the opthmalogist. I'm tired. I have no idea where that came in. I meant to the writing class.
Thank you,
derrick
Hey All,
I've said before that during class I will not infrequently use published works as examples of both good and bad writing. I'm reading a novel right now that is terrible.
It's Greenmantle, by John Buchan. Buchan wrote more than 100 books, including 30 novels. His most famous novel is The 39 Steps, which I read decades ago, and recall liking. I don't know if it was a better novel or if I was a less discerning reader. You may have heard of The 39 Steps, not least because it was made into the successful 1935 Hitchcock movie of the same name.
This novel suffers from what I call The Amusement Park Ride Problem, and I also call it The Clive Barker problem.
I read 1 and a half novels by Clive Barker. I hated them. One reason I hated them (and this is not the amusement park ride problem) is that they were vile and offensive to be vile and offensive. I quit reading him when he had a character seeing one person (or maybe zombie, I don't remember) raping another person's wound. It did not advance the plot. It was merely there to be offensive. I remember an early English teacher saying to me "If the sex advances the plot, that's okay. If the plot advances the sex, that's pornography."
But that's not The Amusement Park Ride Problem. That is when the character's decisions aren't what moves the plot, but instead the plot is basically moving forward along a track, with the character following along. An example of a plot that works is Hamlet. Hamlet's decisions (or in this case refusals to decide) move the plot forward. In Clive Barker's case, I remember at one point the protagonist turns left instead of right, and that moves the plot forward. That would be okay if you are making a larger point about the randomness of life. But he wasn't. It was just crap writing.
In Greenmantle, three British and one American are sent into WWI Germany/Turkey, to make their way to Constantinople to discover some German war plot. Fine. But then the main character is making his way across Germany, and he is escaping from various Germans, and gets to the Danube, and is walking through the snow, when, miracle of miracles, he comes across a barge being pulled by a tugboat that comes to shore just near where he is standing, and he sees the crew carrying a body to be buried, then goes to ask the crew if he can join, and what do you know, they just buried their engineer who just died, and the protagonist happens to be an engineer, so he gets to join the crew. And whom does he see sitting by the shore? One of his fellow spies! Who got there independently. And happens to be in the same village in Germany. Of all the villages in all of Germany. . . . Then they get to Istanbul, and are about to get killed by a mob, when, gasp, another of the spies happens to show up in the alley in time to rescue them. In all of the alleys in all of Turkey. . . . This keeps happening. Things happen TO him, as opposed to him making them happen. This is very very bad.
This is a lesson for any type of writing, not just fiction. It is true in memoir. Don't make it so things just happen to you, You'll note in A Language Older Than Words, I am presented with situations, but my choices affect the narrative, affect the flow of the story. It is true in other forms of nonfiction. In the best history, even though what is written is what has already happened, a good historian shows how the actions are the results of choices made by the story's protagonists and antagonists. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer showed how choices made by the Allies after World War I, led to social conditions that led to the rise of the Nazis, how choices made by Hitler affected his rise to power, how choices made the German political opposition to Hitler were ineffective or harmful, and so on. There's an extraordinary series of books called Lee's Lieutenants, which is a history of the Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War, the the author, Douglas Southall Freeman, does this interesting thing where at no point in the narrative does the reader have more information about a battle than did Robert E. Lee at the time. This implicitly puts the reader into his position, showing how he made decisions based on the information he has.
The point is that you have to make the protagonist the driver, no matter what you are writing. In this book the protagonist, Richard Hannay, is a passenger, being carried along the amusement park ride, from fright to fright, but he has no real volition, which means his choices, such as they are, carry no weight. Why should I care what choices the protagonist makes if he's going to just randomly meet one of his comrades at a random place in Germany? Why should I be invested in his choices? And that's the whole point of any book: to get the reader invested in the choices and experiences of the protagonist.
Think about any book or any movie that you liked.
I'm not a fan of Ken Kesey, but in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, RP McMurphy gets into the state hospital because he thinks it will be easier than being in the prison. Then he tries to rile up Nurse Ratched basically because he's bored and he wants something to do. Everything that happens is because of his choices and the responses to his choices by Ratched and the power she represents. In the movie The Sting, their con of a carrier for the mob is an accident (which is okay, to have an inciting event that's an accident) but they get found out by Hooker making idiotic choices, and everything that follows are based on the choices of major and minor characters. Or Stephen King's "Selam's Lot," The protagonist, whose name I don't remember right now, runs through no fault of his own into what's going on in that town. From then on the choices he makes affect him and those around him.
So I'd like you to think about this for whatever book you are reading (fiction or nonfiction). How do the various characters make decisions. How do those decisions affect the central narrative of the book? or same for TV shows. Obviously Walter White's decisions drive the actions of Breaking Bad. Right? You see that right?
And I want for you to be able to see when authors do NOT do that. Where, like Clive Barker or John Buchan, they just have characters put on the house of horrors ride at the amusement park
And then I want for you to see that in your own writing. Are your characters driving their own vehicles, within some constraints (It's perfectly fine for Stephen King to pop a dome over a community, so long as the characters get to make decisions within that that drive the plot, just like it would have been okay for Hannay's boss to have given this assignment, if we would have seen Hannay make decisions that mattered in ways we can see how they mattered."
Drive your own stories with the decisions of the protagonists (and antagonists).
Thank you,
Derrick