Was anybody else turned off by the author's approach to characterisation in this book? I feel like he's over-explaining their reasoning/motivation for doing the things they do to the point where it's irritating. It's like he's trying to tell you everything about a character in the shortest time possible. No subtlety.
Am I overreacting? I'm still within the first third but I don't think I'll be able to get through the book if it's entirely like this.
I think you're taking my example a little too literally there... it's an example. The point is to save the reveal (spoilers?) till the end so that you can relate to the story more.
> Linear everything is more readable. Have you ever seen a novel with "levels of abstraction" in it?
Not if you're in the business of writing novels. What happens if you decide to edit out a scene - do you re-read the entire book to double-check that the deleted scene wasn't referenced anywhere?
I think the point is that a feature that's technically trivial can have a profound effect when applied to an object like a novel, which has lacked that feature for its entire three-century existence.
Why chart the emotions of the protagonist to evaluate the story? The value of a story is not in how happy or sad the protagonist was - but how it makes you feel.
It's a rather good starting point for analyzing stories. Most of the stories he mentioned (with Kafka being a notable exception) aimed to make the reader identify with the protagonist. Therefore, it's the protagonist's situation that matters the most. Also, bear in mind that he wasn't charting the emotions of the protagonist, but the protagonist's fortune.
This sort of criticism isn't about content. Simply having something like that happen in the plot is different from saying something interesting about it. Those sorts of plot elements are core to the genre, and are an expected part of anything within it. The genre gets most of its appeal from philosophizing about its content though.
It's just the use of clearly something that's very meaningful to the author, but I wonder if it gets lost or just serves to exacerbate people who aren't viewing it from their same angle, causing the point to be discarded.
Did you read the article? It was about it being bad style (in fiction) because it bluntly tells the reader how to react instead of inferring it from a more fulfilling description. Nothing to do with some prescriptivist proposal to excise it from the language.
And the author admits it's only a heuristic, with exceptions, so they don't even disagree with you about the need to break rules at times.
It must be a pilot thing. I've read a bunch of books by Richard Bach, and he falls in to this 'mode' quite a few times as well.
Agreed that it's a way to take it out of the technical area, but I don't think the story needs embellishing, it is already more than powerful enough by itself.
Great read anyway, be sure to check the story linked elsewhere in this thread as well.
> Good writing is not the same as "making high school analysis easy by making everything for straightforward reasons".
Where'd I write anything like that?
> Plenty of times, things are there, because it experiment or atmosphere or even needing to make it longer.
Even then, the author's picking one thing to put in over a bunch of others they could have chosen. Novels are artificial, what goes in them is what the author decides is best to be there. Often, there's a reason for their choice. Stopping at "the characters were hungry" is leaving a lot of potential meaning on the table. OK—but why, of all the ways that could have been addressed, did the author write that they killed a pig? Why wasn't it sufficient for that to be "off-screen"? Why was that more important to include than other things that could have filled those same pages?
This is especially a valid path to pursue when there are other cues that a book may be operating on more than a strictly literal level, and there definitely are such indications in that one. The final line does all it can without grabbing the reader by the lapels and slapping them, to communicate that the book's more than just a simple story about some kids stuck on an island. At a minimum, it's got some allegory going on, because it all but says as much at the end.
[EDIT] The killing of a pig features heavily in a book that tells you at the end it's got at least some allegory going on, and a major character is nicknamed "Piggy", I might add. Like... yes, I think it's very fair to say that's included and plays out the way it does for reasons other than "the kids were hungry".
It's a work of fiction, by the way. But each of the characters has their own sets of talents and strengths and they are described rather than asserted throughout the book.
The question of whether these descriptions are 'true' is quite pointless in an entirely fictional setting.
> not much is ever described to the reader
> she just says "talented" or "great" about
> her protagonists
It's only fair to say you failed to sum up these 1000 pages accurately.
Sounds a bit unfair and I'm not really sure how you arrived at that conclusion. Here's an excerpt from the article:
In the same way, he can’t define what a good story is, but he knows it’s a story he wants to read. “If you give a version of myself frozen in time the story of the rest of my life, and that version of me would rather read a different book… what am I doing wrong?”
One of the major themes of the book is defining "quality" and "value".
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