Sta.sh
After being on DeviantArt for a few years now, I've noticed patterns in people's stories. Patterns, that I can't say I've ever seen until I started using the internet. I believe that's because these kind of patterns are thoroughly unprofessional. The pattern in short is this:
Character = victim
Plot = bad things happening to said victim
Maybe this sounds harsh. It's not if you understand that is ALL there is to these stories. They take any character, hurl them into a tragedy and that's it.
Let's get this straight: We do not know your character well enough to care about them yet. No matter how bloody and gutty their injuries are, no matter how many of their family members are deceased, no matter what their boyfriend did to them, no matter what kind of disease they have, WE. DO. NOT. CARE!!!!!
These kind of things are sad in themselves, but WHO is this person we're supposed to feel so horrible for? Establish THAT. It should be your absolute FIRST priority: no exceptions.
No more pasting faces onto the same cardboard-cut-out sob story protagonist.
If you want readers to care, you must FIRST GIVE THEM A HUMAN BEING TO CARE FOR.
If you don't, yes of course you are still going to get comments from emotional people who find your story intriguing. That is not the point.
The absolute WORST thing you can do is (I hate saying this), taking comments from people on the internet seriously (about your writing, that is).
People who have no CLUE about literature will post comments on the most unprofessional writings and say things like, "This made me cry. You are like the next J.K Rowling."
DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE MADE THINGS LIKE TWILIGHT AND 50 SHADES OF GREY POSSIBLE.
All I'm saying is that if you think things like Twilight are insults to literature, I beg you to take the advice given above. If not, what can I say but: carry on. Let the age of Mary Sue begin.
We need to remember: a rich story is made up of so much more than only one element; it can't rely only on being "dark," or "tragic" or "romantic." These things are for bringing out emotion. It's ESSENTIAL that there is something worth being emotional ABOUT.
That is how you tell a beautiful story.
And even then, if you give us something we truly care about, you'll realize "I can make something even less tragic happen and it will have a much greater effect now."
Sometimes you'll even realize that being subtle is even more disturbing and "dark" than going all out.
I said it before, I'll say it again: drama is the anti-suspense. Drama needs something to feed on or else it is dead.
It's up to you to make casual, every-day scenes interesting too.
Humor is a particularly wonderful tool for making characters appealing. The more appealing the character, the more the audience will care when they suffer.
Think of your favorite cartoon character. Now imagine if they died. Not a funny, cartoon-ish death where we know that they'll be all right again in three seconds.
Pretend they came to a permanent end that was actually portrayed very tragically and non-sarcastically.
Kind of leaves you with a disturbed feeling, doesn't it? If this is the way you want your audience to feel about your characters, then follow this example. It doesn't mean your character has to be as silly as a cartoon character, it just means we should feel like we know them in such a way that we can feel their pain.
In short: don't give us another card-board soap opera. Give us something to love.
No more "I'm going to drench this character in blood and my story will automatically be deep!" If that's as deep as you can get, you must be very shallow indeed.
EDIT: CLARIFICATION
I'm saying that introducing the character should be first *priority,* not necessarily the first thing in the story. The point being, don't write a story that you worry about the character second to the soap opera.
Of course many stories (Harry Potter included) start off with bad things happening. This is because they're crucial to setting up the entire story. The point is not to expect your audience to be scandalized yet.
Also, when you read this guide, assume I'm talking about writing seriously. I'm not picking on those of you writing for practice/fun/etc.
This is a concern because things like this are being published these days. If this isn't your goal, carry on by all means.
I posted this because it's getting to the point where there is no unique style. This is the style that most beginners (and therefore most people) tend to use. I'm not picking on beginners, just pointing out not to settle with the first, most obvious style of writing that no one encourages them to grow beyond.
Are there people who enjoy this kind of writing? Of course. But why is it all we should be content with?
The attitude should be something like this: make the character deep enough for whatever you're writing.
If it's a short deviation, naturally less so than in a novel.
Same if it's not the point of the thing you're writing (say you're just trying to bring out a moral or something).
However, if you expect to write a sob story this is highly important.
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First, it's no wonder you are “only now” seeing this stuff and especially on the Internet. Writers have always told stories that range from good to bad, and for a long time publishers were the only ones who let this stuff be seen and they tried to weed out or at least improve the bad stuff. With the Internet, anyone can put their story out there, even the bad ones. It's good of you to speak up and help others be more critical in their writing, but please don't make it sound like this is only a recent thing.
Second, don't make the assumption that “bad things happening to said victim” is bad writing. If the hero isn't faced with challenges to overcome, would anyone really care about them? So yeah, stuff will happen to our hero and a lot of it will be bad; what defines a hero is how they act afterward. We want our biggest heroes to have faced equally large challenges, so why is it surprising that many of those heroes would have faced tragedy and been defined by it? Having tragedies define a character is no worse than having triumphs or humor define them, and all it does is help them define themselves in a certain way that has been popular for as long as people have told stories. Having ONLY tragedy define them is certainly unprofessional, but I will refer you to my first point.
Third, how can you say that tragedy is ALL that happens in “these” stories? I don't know what “these” stories are but if I did, maybe I could point out how they are not ALL tragedy. Maybe you just didn't like “these” stories, which is totally your choice to make, and so chose to only remember the parts you thought were bad, which for you were the tragic parts. Obviously you think that humor is a better and “particularly wonderful” brush to paint a story with, so it wouldn't be surprising.
Fourth, and this may be tangential, how can you say drama is the anti-suspense? I'm actually pretty curious about this one and hope you will further explain it to me. There must be a difference in our definitions of drama and suspense because I'm pretty sure they're nearly the same thing. I can see how 100% drama would kill suspense, but so would 100% humor. I'm not worried about the long-term health of Wile E Coyote – falling from high places or starvation for example – because I know he will only ever be “hurt” to a humorous degree.
In conclusion, tragedy has always been a popular element for writers to use in their stories and is not necessarily a bad way to define a character. If a writer uses tragedy to define a character, they have not already made a mistake. I agree that tragedy can't be the only thing a writer uses but I don't agree that everything out there right now is all tragedy. Also, I am in full agreement that we should never take comments from “people on the internet” at face value, especially the overly positive ones, so good on ya for saying that! Thanks for reading this!
I wasn't saying these kind of things are only written now, I just said it's something I've personally been noticing recently (which I have).
Bad things happening to our characters is by no means necessarily bad writing. That was never my point. The point is that it *can* be (and that that seems to be the case a lot of the time these days).
I never said I prefer humor to tragedy. I was pointing out how humor is a handy tool for keeping tragedy in check (and vice versa).
I'll try clarify what I meant about drama being the anti-suspense a little better. Drama (or what I meant by that) would be something "interesting," (like getting married, dying, being injured, etc. Not even necessarily a bad thing). Suspense is when we're waiting for something big (drama) to happen. Instead of diving right into a tragic occurrence, wouldn't we care about the characters more if we knew more about them first?
It's about balancing really. A story would be equally badly written if it was just mindlessness about characters going around doing nothing special.
So all in all, I may have seemed to pick on tragedy, but in the long run, my point was more: keep it balanced. It works both ways. x]
Yeah, after a quick re-read of the piece I'm not seeing what I thought I saw on this point. If anything, I was reading too much into those 'ALL' statements you were making, but now I see those were referring only to the bad stuff … which is a bit circular in logic, but whatever.
The way you simplify your argument against bad writing early on to be, “The pattern in short is this: Character = victim [and] Plot = bad things happening to said victim” would imply that you believe bad things happening to the characters is bad writing. Personally, I think the point you make later about sob story characters being bad writing is much better, and calling them sob story characters says something very different then calling them victims to whom bad things happen. The difference is in how they react to their misfortune, which is why I mentioned that in one of my points.
You didn't outright say you prefer one to the other, but it seemed pretty obvious. You wrote an entire piece about how badly tragic characters can be written, and then made that point about how humor is, “particularly wonderful” to use; I'm sure you can see how that all seems to a reader.
I think I would define drama and suspense in the same way, so I'm still not sure how you could say that drama is the anti-suspense. To my lights, suspense is a specific moment within drama; in other words, any moment of suspense is also drama, while not every moment of drama is also suspense. Say a character is dying: that would be suspenseful and dramatic. When the character has died, that would be dramatic but we would no longer be in suspense. I agree that first learning to care about the characters will later heighten any tragedy involving them, but I'm not sure what this has to do with the question of whether or not drama is the anti-suspense. You say, “I said it before, I'll say it again: drama is the anti-suspense.” Do you have an earlier piece where you talk more on this?
I'm in complete agreement on the whole Keep It Balanced approach. There's a reason we have a laughing mask and a crying mask as the symbol for the theater. Honestly, I'm kind of against the way DA suggests the work I submit can only be categorized as one or the other.
Yes, I do have other deviations about writing. I mentioned something about drama and suspense in my "Anti-cliche list." Sorry if I was using the term suspense a little incorrectly, that was probably a bad word choice on my part. The point is really just about letting us get to know the characters first so that we'll be more eager for interesting things to begin happening to them.
Sorry if it seemed like there wasn't enough clarification for some of this. That's why I'm glad there are comments XD
It was either terrible poetry or terrible prose in which basically a person got thrown into the most desolate, horrific, cliché, situations ever. And…that was about it.
But at least I'm glad I can look back on those works and cringe.
Lots of people say that fanfiction is terrible, and of course there are examples of this - like My Immortal, which will make you want to tear out your hair after reading a few chapters of it. But there are other works that I find beautiful and moving and fantastic that make you care about the character and have you crying and tearing up inside when you read about something terrible happening to them. These also tend to be the works where the small things - just the very small things, mind you, just the small slights or just the small comforts - make me really seem to see what's hidden underneath the surface.
And also, looking back in the kinds of stories that I liked a few years ago, I realize that a great many of them were just what you advise against: sob stories where the character is flung into a horrific situation, like rape, and then the enemy suddenly becomes a best friend and then bam! Romance. And when I reread them, I realized that I didn't like them at all this time around. They seemed shallow.
…Honestly, I don't know what this comment is. It's terribly random and I'm quite sure it's deviated from the topic a fair amount. I'm sorry.
But I just wanted to thank you for posting this, because this definitely applied to me when I was younger. But if nothing else, at least I realize that this sort of writing is never really a good thing - and though I won't be writing any novels anytime soon, I'll try and make changes to how I write on smaller scales. Though I generally write (shorter, my first poems were an obscene length) poems and flash fiction pieces, than much that's too substantial.
Thank you for sharing this. I don't consider myself a writer nor a person who delivers good criticism on writing pieces, but I just love reading and I hope that's enough.
While fanfiction is more than often average or bad (a few I've been pleasantly surprised), I've read more stories and watched more movies with blatently bad writing.
As far as Genres are concerned, I find Romance and Westerns to have the lowest quality control, while in movies Action, Drama and Horror (my favourite genre by the way) having truly atrocious storylines or plot devices.
Mary Sues may be the biggest and most obvious target, but it's some of the plotlines and stories that infuriate me.
One of my least liked plot devices is the threat of rape. It is extremely rare for this to be used well, and while the media wants me to be horrified and disgusted, I tend to roll my eyes and say "of course!".
Ever notice most victims of this cheap story writing are women, children, minorities and disabled people?
Long story short: Yes, original media representation isn't great with storytelling either, no wonder aspiring writers often get it wrong.