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[personal profile] owlectomy
One thing I've noticed is that people get married to their stories.

Brief digression about what I mean by story: it's not everything, but it's larger than plot. What Happens contains character and motivation and theme and plot and structure; but it doesn't contain description and prose (in writing) or cinematography and direction (in film)--it doesn't contain the other crucial part of the piece, which is how you evoke the world and the characters and make people believe in them. That is my weak point, absolutely; I'm one of those people for whom the story inside my head is much better than the story that comes out.

(Since much of this thinking was prompted by Rent, I'll say this: that Rent succeeds as well as it does is due entirely to the sheer exuberance with which it's pulled off, the lyrics, the music, the passion. Anyone can write a starving-artist story, or a people-die-of-AIDS story, and perhaps too many people do).

It may not be entirely right to distinguish the macro level from the micro level so sharply. But while I'll completely agree that little tics of style can undercut a story, I'm not a critic, and I'm not into close textual analysis, and I don't notice how it happens. It happens, absolutely--subconsciously--and sometimes I'll even notice how a stylistic thing plays into the larger story.* But mostly I'm pretty clueless.

I used to frequent a chat where, among other things, people brainstormed their plots. And one thing I noticed was that writers, especially the newer ones, would not want to abandon any element of their story once they'd decided on it. And this isn't because of massive hatred of rewrites, which I can at least relate to! Rather, it's because they know what they want, and they can't envision any other way...

Damon Knight, in his excellent book on short fiction, says that when you think of a solution to some story-related conundrum, you should discard it and think of five more solutions. This is because the first four or five ideas are going to be cliches, he says, and he has a point. But I think what's really crucial here is the ability to look around and examine alternatives. Not doing so means that, when you're faced with one of those conundrums where the parts of your story just don't work together, you don't just see the two bad alternatives. You look at what comes before, and what comes after, and you look at whether there's anything else you can do to entirely erase the problem.

And this may be the closest that I've come to a definition of craft, in art: craft considers every alternative.

*Rent-related example which was only noticed, I believe, by [livejournal.com profile] meaghanchan after she bought me the Rent music book: the song lines arguing with each other in "Another Day" are in different keys.

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owlectomy

December 2024

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