Fiction is a fantastic form of written literature. One moment you can be flying over the expansive planes of (insert world name here) to being a shadow cloaked rouge in the city, possibility is boundless. My personal favorite aspect of fiction is the sheer number of ideas and theories that people come up with, the many creations they scatter about their world. Every part of a story speaks of the author, what they think and how they view the world. Though out of the concepts that I think are most important, characters tops the list.
A good story has to have good characters, yes it also needs a plot and coherency, but without characters it all amounts to moot. A character needs to be relate-able, the reader needs to feel like they are actually getting to know a real person and for all intents and purposes that is true within the story. People will involve themselves into the story if they can associate and like a character because it is the only window they have into that life, and that is what gets people to like the story: immersion. At the same time you cannot generate a character that is a "Mary Sue", each character will have some role to play and they need to play it well.
Finally there is a small matter at the end to deal with; nothing lasts forever and all good things must come to an end. A story will have an end, what kind is up to the author, but it must have an end. the end should not always be happiness and bliss, sometimes a person dies and needs to die (usually a character you have developed and the audience has become somewhat attached to) to develop a dynamic environment, give it a sense of realism and weight. Ultimately, however, fiction is the expression of the authors ideas; a world created in their head.
"When reading, we don't fall in love with the characters' appearance. We fall in love with their words, their thoughts, and their hearts. We fall in love with their souls." - Anon
"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend." - Paul Sweeney
(Couldn't decide which quote to use so I used them both, as they are both so true.)
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Fiction
Fiction is something humans have created to represent everything that they do not perceive as "real", yet history is the fiction we write to convince ourselves. Fiction is the first form of complex storytelling, used to generate moral lessons or explain something we could not understand. Fiction has THOUSANDS of sub-genre, each with at least several sub-sub-genre. The vast diversity means that each person is bound to find some they love and some they hate for any of a vast variety of reasons. I like fiction with a good plot and an involving story, if it can make me cry, laugh, smile, and hate; then it is a good story to me. What I have difficulty with are short (really really short) stories, often due to the lack of substance and the sheer majority that speed through the plot.
On that note I am unsure of what i think of Sharon Krinsky's Mystery Stories. Each story is barely a paragraph long but each is said in a way that they are coherent and complete. In the story The Talking Cat it uses small simple sentences yet manages to say exactly what it needs to to progress the story along, it even manages to use a plot devise of mystery as you do not know any of the characters yet when read they seem to be all there. Perhaps I am simply impeded by my dislike of such fiction to make a full analysis and critique but it seems that it is by all definitions still a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Each story in this section of the packet has this astounding ability to instantly generate relate-able characters and tell something to the reader all in a single paragraph. The concise manner of writing is commendable and I can see a bit of myself in each piece, generated on each character by my own mind from the lack of description by the author. It is much like taking a manikin and making it a person, it is not that it is now a person but rather that we perceive it as such.
"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
-The King; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
On that note I am unsure of what i think of Sharon Krinsky's Mystery Stories. Each story is barely a paragraph long but each is said in a way that they are coherent and complete. In the story The Talking Cat it uses small simple sentences yet manages to say exactly what it needs to to progress the story along, it even manages to use a plot devise of mystery as you do not know any of the characters yet when read they seem to be all there. Perhaps I am simply impeded by my dislike of such fiction to make a full analysis and critique but it seems that it is by all definitions still a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Each story in this section of the packet has this astounding ability to instantly generate relate-able characters and tell something to the reader all in a single paragraph. The concise manner of writing is commendable and I can see a bit of myself in each piece, generated on each character by my own mind from the lack of description by the author. It is much like taking a manikin and making it a person, it is not that it is now a person but rather that we perceive it as such.
"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
-The King; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Thursday, February 6, 2014
City Eclogue
Okay, straight to the point then: I. Don't. Like. It.
Every page has some change to the structure on both a sentence level and a page level. Words are missing, sentences drop off randomly or after a noun without an object. Reading these pages makes me feel kind of sick. It feels like looking at what should be a beauteous landscape or mural, and finding pieces gouged out randomly and in large number. It is missing a sense of completeness and coherency, something to hold it together.
There are a few poems among the dribble that have a wholeness about them. one such poem is Alpine Glow In Magritte Landscapes. It has a center page alignment with a plethora of small stanzas, about one to two lines long each. Though the occasional long space feels off, I remind myself that it is better than missing parts and the space merely acts as an emphasized pause before continuing with the thought in a coherent manner. The vocabulary in the poem generates a sense of vast beauty and minuscule perspective.
When it comes time to write a poem with this book as a reference I might be compelled to do re-writes, to fill in the holes. Perhaps it can tell a story rather than flash memories in rapid fire, clean up the mess in this metaphorical city. However that is only my opinion. I can applaud and respect the work this artist has created, it is a piece of them and more likely makes a whole different kind of sense in their eyes. Their work is published, mine is not; I should work on that before I generate full criticism.
People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. - Calvin (From Calvin&Hobbes by Bill Watterson)
Every page has some change to the structure on both a sentence level and a page level. Words are missing, sentences drop off randomly or after a noun without an object. Reading these pages makes me feel kind of sick. It feels like looking at what should be a beauteous landscape or mural, and finding pieces gouged out randomly and in large number. It is missing a sense of completeness and coherency, something to hold it together.
There are a few poems among the dribble that have a wholeness about them. one such poem is Alpine Glow In Magritte Landscapes. It has a center page alignment with a plethora of small stanzas, about one to two lines long each. Though the occasional long space feels off, I remind myself that it is better than missing parts and the space merely acts as an emphasized pause before continuing with the thought in a coherent manner. The vocabulary in the poem generates a sense of vast beauty and minuscule perspective.
When it comes time to write a poem with this book as a reference I might be compelled to do re-writes, to fill in the holes. Perhaps it can tell a story rather than flash memories in rapid fire, clean up the mess in this metaphorical city. However that is only my opinion. I can applaud and respect the work this artist has created, it is a piece of them and more likely makes a whole different kind of sense in their eyes. Their work is published, mine is not; I should work on that before I generate full criticism.
People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. - Calvin (From Calvin&Hobbes by Bill Watterson)
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