Some notes for discerning readers · 7:21pm Oct 3rd, 2014
Today someone asked me for some advice on what it is, as a reader, to distinguish what makes a story good or not. So I tried to answer, and hey, maybe some of you'd care to see it as well:
Hello. I'm glad you think I'm worth an opinion on what to look for when reading a story, and on what it is that distinguishes good stories.
Before I really get into trying to give you the best answer I can, I need to say that your question is vague. Very vague, and I understand that. I've been there myself, knowing there's something there but not really knowing the questions to ask. So let that be my first answer to you - being able to see into the heart of a story (so to speak) is a skill that can be learned, and its natural to start out feeling a bit baffled as to what you should do next.
The next answer is this - read. Read lots of stuff, and different stuff, and from stories to blogs to opinion pieces to news paper editorial rants. That's just good all-round advice, really.
I understand what you mean when you say it's one thing to see the mechanical proficiency of a writer, that is, their grammar and another to see if what they've written is actually any good. I know that for myself these days, I'll know everything (more or less) of what I'll need to know about a story in the first page, and everything after is essentially just watching the details shuffle about and reaffirming my first impression.
For me, what I look for in a story is the emotion, the soul even, much more than the technical execution. For me, a story at any given time must be doing one of three things:
-It must provoke an emotion. Any emotion applies. Some of the best stories I've ever had the pleasure to read are nothing less than a tornado of feels, whiplashing about with each page. But what I'm really saying is that a story has to make me care. This is why in writing it's such a huge matter to make characters relatable. When you can associate yourself with a character, you inevitably care about them, and through them, the story. I do not believe I've ever seen a strong story with bad characters.
-Or it must be giving me an image. This could be a scenic view, or a glimpse into a culture, or somebody's daily life, anything that paints a picture capable of taking my awareness from Here and Now to There and Then. Broken footprints climbing the side of a snowy hill. A woman beating the dust from carpets from a Victorian Mansion's balconey. A gnarled oak, splintered and scarred along its trunk, bulbous, oozing and scabby where the bark has healed. Anything that fires the imagination and makes it want to keep on firing.
-And thirdly, curiosity. Part of what I look for when considering a story is how a story reveals itself to me. From the writer's perspective I'd call that Pacing, but as a reader what I mean is the ability of a story to make me want to see more and, conversly, it's ability to show me more, at the pace the writer wanted.
One of the commonest failings I see relates to the second, to imagery. Exposition comes all at once, with no reason to care about any of it and no curiosity about what was or what will be. If you look back to those three examples I gave, they all come with something that hopefully provokes interest - what we call the hook. Who struggled up the snowy hillside, and for what? Who's this woman beating dust from carpets? What mansion is this, who's is it, is it hers? Even the tree is unique and interesting - what happened to it? Why this tree in particular? Where is it, is that what's relevant? Is it weird to feel empathy for a wounded tree?
To get back to the point in hand, it's difficult to bring you a neat, concise, formulaic answer, especially when the nature of the question and the nature of the subject are both so abstract. But I can say these things with some certainty - the heart of all stories is communication, and the heart of all communication is evocation - that is to say, the ability to create a thought, perspective, awareness or feeling in the audience. I'd go so far as to say that all faults in storycrafting eventual come back to that basic trueism.
A hugely important aspect to all of this is Suspension of Disbelief. Essentially what that means is, given the premise and setting of a story, are you willing to believe that the story could play out as it does? This isn't to say that unlikely things shouldn't happen. Not at all. Are you willing to believe? Beautiful stories present to us unlikely, essentially impossible ideas all the time - that the heroes hold out against all odds, the lovers reunite with a chance meeting years later, that the cure is found just in the nick of time, and we are not just willing to accept as plausible, but want it, even demand these moments. All because we care.
But if a story hasn't made us care, then the only thing such scenes evokes are alienation and disgruntlement. A reader should never get the impression that the writer has had to force something to happen. It should happen almost as if our desire, as readers, for these developments has made it possible, if that's not too dramatic a way of putting it.
In its simplest form, it reduces down to this - The more we care about a story, the more stunts it can get away with, because we won't want to call it out.
A hugely fun and enlightening site you might consider is tvtropes.org - it's a huge crowd-sourced wiki of storytelling tropes, the conventions of stories.
I hope I've helped you in some way with improving your appreciation for reading.
Yes, I like this blog very much. I'm adding this to my favorites for constant going over. Thanks very much for sharing and for your time. :D
Posts like this always make me go back to my stories and wonder to myself: "Is it really good enough?"
I guess that in a sense you accomplished the very thing you were trying to describe in the blog post: It makes me care about the subject matter. Which leads to the following question: Is what you're describing unique to mere story telling? Or would every aspect of writing (from a manual to school books) benefit from a 'make the reader care' approach.
2504408
I'd say it does. It's actually the biggest challenge for the media advertising industry at the moment to get into that, because the current generations are so resistant and cynical to any form of advertisement (ie, we refuse to care about their mercantile message, and distrust it, because we're not convinced that such advertisments don't really care about us.
The success of Blendtech's "Will it Blend?" online video campaign and the Old Spice Guy video's are examples that successfully adapted and worked - we felt something and in feeling something, in some small way, cared.
For me personally, I'd find it a great benefit in any kind of writing, even technical writing like your examples of manuels and school-books, if they had little anectdotes, or silliness, or whatever that can just wink at the reader and show that there was a human at the other end of it too. Not everyone would agree with that opinion, mind you.
I'll forgive you for calling it mere storytelling because I understand what you meant
, but yes, I'd say that being able to put a bit of vested emotion into writing, and communicating that to the reader, would benefit most if not all formats of writing.
2505425
Which makes you wonder why the people that write those things (or order them to be written) haven't caught on to that simple fact yet. As far as I know literacy has been around for a good long while now; it's like we're in a sort of... second dark age, where the way forward should be clear but people refuse to take that first step towards it.
2505426 I disagree. If ignorance seems more widespread in this day and age, it's only because we've become more aware of it and address it more forcefully.