But I don't feel for the characters...
Whenever I see a beautifully crafted sentence, an imaginative combination of words that perfectly describe a mood, a feeling or a sensation, I wish I could do that.
Some writers are mostly interested in language rather than character or plot and this shines through everything they write. I, on the other, am not. I'm no prose stylist. I am not likely to overwhlem my readers with the sheer beauty of an image I have conjured with words. I just can't write that way.
But, then again, that is not what I am interested in as a writer (although I enjoy it as a reader). I'm interested in ideas. I lean more towards concepts - I want to make a point about human nature, about society or whatever. I may do this through black humour or allegory.
This can sometimes lead to my stories having no real characters in them because they aren't stories about characters. They may not even have plots as such. Sometimes I simply write about a situation and put people in to bring the situation to a head.
Critics point this out to me as a shortcoming so maybe I need to work on it. But the problem is that I don't think it is a shortcoming at all. Someone recently said of a story of mine that "the characters simply feel like devices to move the plot along". My thought was "yes, that is exactly what they are... because the story isn't about their characters". There was a reason why I didn't develop them as "real" characters; if I thought the overall point of the piece would have been enhanced by further developing the characters then I would have done it.
Different stories perform different functions: some describe the minutiae of everyday life, some are metaphors for an aspect of society, some are character studies, some are manifestations of an abstract idea. Likewise, different readers have different tastes and have different preferences for what elements are present in the fiction they read.
Each type of story needs to be judged with different criteria because their aims are different. Each story needs to be judged for what it is and not for what the critic may prefer it to be.
Some writers are mostly interested in language rather than character or plot and this shines through everything they write. I, on the other, am not. I'm no prose stylist. I am not likely to overwhlem my readers with the sheer beauty of an image I have conjured with words. I just can't write that way.
But, then again, that is not what I am interested in as a writer (although I enjoy it as a reader). I'm interested in ideas. I lean more towards concepts - I want to make a point about human nature, about society or whatever. I may do this through black humour or allegory.
This can sometimes lead to my stories having no real characters in them because they aren't stories about characters. They may not even have plots as such. Sometimes I simply write about a situation and put people in to bring the situation to a head.
Critics point this out to me as a shortcoming so maybe I need to work on it. But the problem is that I don't think it is a shortcoming at all. Someone recently said of a story of mine that "the characters simply feel like devices to move the plot along". My thought was "yes, that is exactly what they are... because the story isn't about their characters". There was a reason why I didn't develop them as "real" characters; if I thought the overall point of the piece would have been enhanced by further developing the characters then I would have done it.
Different stories perform different functions: some describe the minutiae of everyday life, some are metaphors for an aspect of society, some are character studies, some are manifestations of an abstract idea. Likewise, different readers have different tastes and have different preferences for what elements are present in the fiction they read.
Each type of story needs to be judged with different criteria because their aims are different. Each story needs to be judged for what it is and not for what the critic may prefer it to be.
posted by Steve Kane at 1:32 PM
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