Writing: Relating plot and character · 5:19am Oct 16th, 2012
(If you got a notification for this post, and aren't watching me, it's because it includes a brief analysis of some story of mine that you favorited.)
There are 2 areas where fan-fiction consistently falls down: Integrating plot and character arcs, and developing a theme. This post is about plot and character arcs. I keep seeing stories with colorful characters and well-formed plots that could have been great, but aren't, because the characters and the plot are each doing their own thing. I keep seeing writers worrying about grammar, pretty sentences, and plot holes when plot and character aren't working together, which is like giving a manicure to someone with a gaping chest wound.
A character arc is how a character, a relationship, or some personified entity such as a nation or humanity as a whole, changes or fails to change. (Or, in medieval fiction, including Beowulf and Le Morte' de Arthur, succeeds or fails in resisting change. Back then, change was bad.) Some genres, including comedy, mystery, and horror, don't need a character arc. The hard-boiled detective harks back to Beowulf, and resists change, or struggles just to stay (morally) where he is. But most great comedies, from Don Quixote to The Simpsons, have character arcs, and so do many of the best stories in all genres.
You may have learned in a writing class that a story has a protagonist with a problem, who overcomes (or fails to overcome) that problem in the end. But having a problem, a plot, a climax, and a resolution is not enough to make a great story. Even having all those things, and interesting and/or funny characters all with their own character arcs, is still usually not enough.
There are two further steps that can be taken:
1, The story is really about the protagonist confronting a more-important longstanding personal issue (the character arc) in the process of overcoming the plot problem. The plot isn't just any old obstacle; it's one that makes the character confront that personal problem. This is about as far as you can go if you have an epic in which little people tackle big problems, like Lord of the Rings or War and Peace.
2. Something I don't recall seeing in books on writing, but which shows up in a large percentage of great short stories, is that the story is more persuasive if the plot problem itself was caused by that more-important personal problem.
Why? One theory is that you want to make the story as self-contained as possible. Open loops, causal dependencies on events outside the story and outside the author's control, make it more difficult for the author to control the meaning and theme of the story. (Noir and existentialist stories deliberately defy this principle to portray reality as meaningless and unsolvable - that's why no one ever finds the Maltese Falcon, and you never learn why they're waiting for Godot. Novels have a related but more complex pattern, because they have many subplots and many character arcs. In a novel, an author closes loops by connecting them to other things inside the novel: One character arc causes plot which causes another character arc, and so on, so that the novel is a tapestry of inter-related characters and plots. There is likely, however, to be one big plot problem and one big character arc that are tightly linked.)
My other theory is simply that it prioritizes character over plot. The character problem causes the plot problem; solving the character problem solves the plot problem. Characters are more important than plot.
Step 1 makes the character arc depend on the plot. Step 2 makes the plot depend on the character arc, closing the loop and making the story completely self-contained. That gives us the following relationship between plot and character:
character problem creates plot problem
character tries to solve plot problem
doing so forces character to solve (or fail to solve) the character problem
the resolution to the character problem is made physically, tangibly manifest in the resolution to the plot problem
That gives you the canonical way to write a short story: Figure out the longstanding root problem; show how that problem manifests itself in a temporary, surface plot problem for the protagonist; show that the plot problem makes it necessary to solve the root problem; show the solution to the root problem in a concrete way in the solution to the plot problem. Then go back and throw out everything that doesn't contribute to that sequence.
An example from the show is Look Before You Sleep. Applejack and Rarity must sleep over at Twilight's. The opening minute shows them arguing because their mutual difficulty with each other is the character problem that will drive the plot. The plot covers repeated arguments between them followed by a crisis they must cooperate to resolve. The character arc is their realization that being able to be friends and work together is worth putting up with each other's quirks. Fixing the damage caused to Twilight's tree symbolizes fixing their relationship. The character problem drives the plot; the plot leads to the resolution of the character arc, and the character resolution is symbolized by the plot resolution.
An example from fan-fiction is bookplayer's "How to Do a Sonic Rainboom". You might want to read it now, because I'm about to tell you the ending. In this story, Dash refused to teach Scootaloo how to do a sonic rainboom, eventually taking the secret to her grave. Scootaloo is grieving for letting that argument split their friendship, but still trying to figure out how to do a sonic rainboom. Scootaloo's flaw is that she puts her Wonderbolt skills above her friendships and relationships (as indicated by the split with Dash, and with the mention at the funeral that "Scoot stood between Apple Bloom and Sweetie Bell, though they each had their husbands on the other side. Scoot didn't have anyone, there wasn't really time between practices and shows.") The secret to doing the sonic rainboom is that you can't do it for yourself. The character flaw was the real problem; the plot problem was just a manifestation of it.
The character arc doesn't have to involve a character flaw, and it doesn't have to be resolved. In some of my stories, someone fails to overcome a character flaw:
Sisters, "Betting the Moon": Luna in this story is foolish and unwilling to accept responsibility for her actions. This leads to her losing the moon and then running to Celestia for help. But the last line of the story shows that she learns nothing from the experience. That line is funny because you were set up to think that Luna was about to describe the lesson she learned, and instead she shows that she doesn't know she did anything wrong.
Burning Man Brony: The protagonist goes to Burning Man to take a psychadelic trip and figure out why he is obsessed with ponies. He meets the Mane 6, and discusses his problems with them. It becomes apparent that he's obsessed with and disdainful of both burners and ponies because he doesn't want to admit that they have the courage he does not to reach out to each other, to try to change, and to risk looking silly. Here I had a plot and a subplot, and showed that they both flowed from the same character flaw.
In Twenty Minutes, the problem isn't a character flaw, but a national flaw: the collective cowardice designed intentionally into the zebras' dysfunctional military society. Everyone in the story wants to treat the pegasus better; but they can't get together and cooperate because they're all rightfully afraid of each other. The protagonist does the only thing he can think of to help her, at great risk and cost to himself. It may or may not help her, but it solves his problem, which is not to let the government remake him into a cruel coward. The inevitability of his own death and that of his loved ones makes it more clear that that bit of soul-cleansing is his problem - survival is not an option.
There are further variations on the pattern. Existentialist fiction is a degenerate case of the pattern, in which the character's problem is being human, an insurmountable plot problem arises from that, and the resolution is to realize there is no resolution.
My story Big Mac Reads Something Purple uses a bizarre variation on this pattern. It has three alternate endings. In each case the plot problem is the same, but each ending changes what the original underlying issues were.
Something to Look Forward To is a fan-fiction that was written with skill and power, but which fails to do this, and fails as a story (for me, anyway) as a result. The protagonist is transported to Equestria, where he makes friends and has a family, then gradually falls out of touch and into ennui. His character arc is touching, but it has no connection to the plot of him trying to live in Equestria. The reader never learns what is driving him into solitude, or why the ways he tries to reach out to others fail. Without any explanation, there's nothing to think about, nothing to learn, and the story is emotional porn. Like a movie that jumps right into the sex scenes, it goes straight for the gut-twist and then ends when it's done, without ever connecting it to real life.
Take a more complicated case: My Little Dashie. The protagonist's problem is that he's a loser without social contacts or a job. This doesn't cause the plot; the plot and its resolution both fall out of the sky in a double deus-ex-machina. The plot temporarily ameliorates the protagonist's problems, but the protagonist never addresses his underlying problem, remaining a loser without a job or friends. Some people conclude that it's a bad story. But a story that is the favorite pony story of half the people you ask (yes, I've counted) is a good story, by definition, unless you have an objective way of evaluating stories. (If you do, please tell me.)
I might conclude that emotional porn is an entirely-valid form of literature, that just isn't accessible any more to people like writers and editors who think long and hard about literature, like painters can't appreciate landscapes that are just pretty without having a subtext. But My Little Dashie works for me (despite its flaws). Maybe because the reader can still connect it to his life - the reader feels socially isolated, has wished to meet a pony, and can imagine the pain of having that snatched away from him. The character-plot causal link is not important; it wouldn't prove anything about real life to show that a character issue caused or solved this completely-artificial plot. It is a Gedankenexperiment. It still gives you something to think about - would you give up your daughter and lose her in an almost-unimaginably complete way for her own good?
So I think My Little Dashie shows that you don't always have to fit this pattern. But if your story doesn't fit this pattern, it ought to be because it's connecting to the reader and posing a serious character-related question in some other way. If you have an adventure story where something happens to kick off a plot, and then one thing leads to the other until some problem is resolved, that sounds like a complete story, but it isn't. You really ought to figure out how the plot and the characters affect each other, and then go back, rewrite it, and throw out everything that isn't part of that interplay.
I'm thinking about this because I just submitted a story, "Fluttershy's Night Out", which I struggled with to keep it from being emotional porn. For that to succeed, the story needs to point out a character flaw in Fluttershy, and I think that means the story events need to be at least partly Fluttershy's fault. It would have been easier to just make it a "bad things happen to Fluttershy, now cry" story. Some people will get angry at the idea that it was even a little bit Fluttershy's fault, but I think it makes it a better story.
Even doing all that still isn't enough to make a great story. A great story has a theme or two or three. Maybe I'll write a post about theme later, if I can figure it out.
:thumbs up:
I nod along as I read this, taking it in concept by concept... Then it hits me that, like so many things, that this is something that I already know. That I have always known this, relatively speaking, without really realizing it. And that's one of the reasons you are awesome. Thanks.
This has given me a lot to think about for my story...
"The Evil League of Evil
Is watching, so beware
The grade that you receive
Will be your last, we swear
So make the Bad Horse gleeful
Or he'll make you his mare...
Get saddled up
There's no recourse
It's Hi-Ho Silver
Signed Bad Horse!"
Somehow, as I stare at the lyrics, I find this sort of applies to the topic.
Immensely useful. Thank you, BH.
well, i was actually thinking of writing my own first story here, but u got me from that course, writing isn't that easy as i thought, lot of reconception to be done.
I mean everypony literally knows about it, but realizing it and taking it to the heart, that really takes some time, practice and most of all dedication.
not sure if i'm fitting for that
thanks for pointing those things out
mfg Nordic
Hmm. I don't think I've ever really looked at stories (not just fic) with this perspective before.
Interesting.
I'm tempted to disagree with the idea of character problems generating plot problems being appropriate for most types of stories.
There are many stories across all media that have the plot thrust upon the character, and while the character's personal development may become closely tied to the plot, with mutual resolution, the plot being generated by the character is just not feasible.
This is true for the vast majority of action or adventure storylines.
Unless I'm just looking at this wrong.
422235 the plot being generated by the character is just not feasible. This is true for the vast majority of action or adventure storylines.
You're right that this is true for most or at least a lot of action+adventure, not just my LotR example. It seems to be required in manga - a whole lot of manga starts HiE-like, with a clueless protagonist suddenly thrust into a crazy situation. I think they want to make sure the manga reader can imagine themself being the main character.
I think it tends to lend the most strength to a short story, which tends to need the cohesiveness of a protagonist-generated and a protagonist-resolved conflict more because there's just not as much time to properly give the sense of personal investiture. I think in a longer story there's more time to make your protagonist really invested in the plot without it having a strong personal genesis.
422267
That makes sense.
For instance, my favorite movie is The Fifth Element. That has a plot that starts out completely unrelated to any of it's characters (in fact one of the characters exists due to the plot) yet I have rarely seen a plot or resolution more tied to it's character arcs by the end of it.
On the other end of the spectrum is Serenity, my 2nd favorite movie. Now THAT is a plot generated by it's character and setting's issues.
422014 //static.fimfiction.net/images/icons/thumb_up.png
422374 When used possessively, "its" does not have an apostrophe
422024 Thanks! I'll try not to let it go to my awesome, genius-sized head.
422175 Do you mean I discouraged you from writing? I didn't mean to!
422282 That sounds plausible. The right answer is probably "D. All of the above."
Why do I feel as if I already read this? I mean this exact words... Have you posted something similar before?
Aside from that, absolutely agree...
430306 I wrote a paragraph about "How to Do a Sonic Rainboom" in one of my fic recommendation posts, which made the basic point.
This one of the posts I would point out to authors who are looking for a high-level view of the stories they want to right. It correctly identifies what makes a story functional, what makes it realistic and enjoyable, and what makes it meaningful.
Could you explain a bit why you like my little dashie? I'm a bit of a neighsayer there
It seems to fail on character development, rd acting in character, show not tell, deus ex machina, any lastng mpact, etc.
432890 Could you explain a bit why you like my little dashie?
When I read it, I see in my head the most-favorable re-imagining of the story. The protagonist doesn't develop because then the ending wouldn't be a Sophie's Choice. He has nothing, and if Rainbow leaves (and forgets him) it will destroy him. If Rainbow had acted in character, it would be less of a sacrifice for him, because she would still be the Rainbow that he knew. He has very little to offer Rainbow, and if she stays it will destroy her. He would rather sacrifice himself for her. That's the guts of the story.
I was going back through your blog entries and read this, and ended up reading the story.
While I do agree that the story is not perhaps as in depth into why the character did what he did... honestly, I think the actual point of the story is that the whole thing is setting itself up for the ending. This is the sort of story that would probably work just as well as a non-pony story. The man has found himself in a strange world, and the only thing he clings to in the end is his Bible. The Bible promises salvation - an afterlife, where you live forever amongst good people, having a wonderful time forever.
Celestia is crying because, in the end, the man found exactly what the Bible had promised him - and he wasn't happy. He had everything he could want by reaching out for it... and yet, did not choose to do so. He made himself unhappy, despite happiness being well within his grasp. She cannot force him to be happy.
So despite the only thing he clung to - the only thing he really seemed to value in the end - being his Bible, he does not grasp the irony of the fact that he already has what is promised.
I think in that regard, the story is quite reasonable. The story is ultimately not about him, but about the irony of man, and the fact that people don't recognize that paradise is theirs for the taking, not something which can simply be bestowed upon you.
I would say it is a bad story. The problem, ultimately, is that it is pure wish fulfillment... and I would call it a bad story because you can build that same story in your head, and make it yourself, and make it better. It isn't a story for other people; it is pure personal wish fulfillment. Something outside gives you meaning and purpose. The protagonist stands in for those people. It is the same as all the human goes to Equestria and character X falls in love with them/they save everyone/ect. I tell stories like this to MYSELF in my head, though they generally have more nuance than many of the stories with the same themes which show up here, they are, fundamentally, the same idea. Of course, I'm not human for most of those stories, but whatever.
The point is, if I want to make that story for myself, I can, and tell it in a way that most appeals to myself and my own sensibilities. I suspect that the popularity of said stories in large part relies on people who have difficulty doing this.
I tell myself stories constantly. I've told myself at least three so far today, only one of which was about ponies. I do so every day. When I'm in bed at night, I do the same. I do the same at other times.
So... something like that just falls short for me, and those who can dream up their own stories easily on a whim. Because we can do that, so we don't need someone else's clumsy attempt at doing so.
Even beyond that, it is very raw and obvious in its attempts at manipulating the audience. It is too transparent.
It isn't a good story. But that doesn't mean it isn't successful. But it isn't trying to be a good story, any more than Transformers movies are. They're terrible - completely awful - and yet many people enjoy them. I was not entertained by them, and they're the sort of movies which will be forgotten.
It is possible to write a good story which is also a successful one. Take Jurassic Park. That is basically a summer action movie... but it is a summer action movie which is actively a fairly good story, about the hubris of man, but also about the hubris of those who have forgotten that life will find a way - and that includes humans. Ian Malcolm might be right about the park not being controlled, but he's wrong about humans. Moreover, it invokes a sense of wonder in the audience.
But it is very possible to write a successful story that isn't any good as a story. Such stories are successful in their time, and then forgotten, chewed up by history and forgotten forever. This is why I don't think Harry Potter is a good story, even if it was a successful one.
If I had the choice, I'd write a good, successful story and make gigantic piles of money. But if writing a successful story will make you happy with the vast sums of money you get from it, why not?
That doesn't mean that writing a good story isn't worthwhile, though.
1680723
I think you're right! I didn't figure that out.
You're really missing my point. You don't judge stories according to theories. You judge them according to how they affect the readers. If one affects hundreds of thousands of readers powerfully, but your theory says that it shouldn't, the problem is with your theory.
It is a bad story for you. Wish-fulfillment stories are good stories for many readers, and by good I mean that they like those stories. They are good for them like candy, not good for them like health food.
Let's suppose The Glass Bead Game is a good story. Is it a good story for a parrot? No; it will just confuse the parrot. Now, Jurassic Park might be a good story for a parrot, because they can figure out that the dinosaurs are threatening and very possibly get excited and follow the dramatic arc.
The variability of human intelligence, and more importantly, human education, is extremely high. If you found a way to place all existing intelligences on a scale of problem-solving capability, from bacteria to Jon von Neumann, so that position on the scale was proportional to complexity or perhaps number of problems they could solve, I would bet that for some reasonable scales, humans would be spread across more than half of the entire range. Many, possibly most, readers act and think more like an African grey parrot, or perhaps a beaver or wolf (they are all remarkably intelligent species) than like you. You might come closer to the mark by asking whether a story was good for a parrot than whether it was good for you.
1681697
I think it is actually a difference in perception of what makes a story good. Maybe in the very definition of "goodness" itself.
This may well go back to my general backing in design, and specifically in game design. I don't know how familiar you are with game design theory, so bear with me for a moment.
In game design, there is something commonly referred to as "skinner box techniques". This is a means of addicting players to your game. It isn't about increasing their enjoyment of the game, but rather of direct, raw influence on their engagement centers. Basically, the idea is that you give players some sort of reward on a semi-random but frequent basis - but not too frequent. By making it somewhat random, you make the players play more; by having it be fairly frequent, you again keep the player engaged. This is why random drops exist in so many games; it is the very premise underlying looters. But social games take advantage of the same techniques, by having players unable to do everything all at once, but recieving a periodic reward from the game, and further taking advantage of impatience by allowing them to pay to make things a bit faster... indeed, if you play many of these social games, the payouts are very frequent early on, and then decline in frequency over time, while still being dribbled out. The idea is to hook them, then keep rewarding them, telling them "you just got X!" or "Y just got done!", poking them into returning time and again...
These techniques work even if the game is quite terrible, and the addictive qualities are largely independent of actual "fun". But it is very engaging for players, it will keep some fraction of them coming back time and again, indefinitely, for another push of the pedal that rewards them with food pellets/in game rewards. These techniques are viewed as being pretty unethical, and are precisely what makes slot machines and similar things so addictive to gamblers. It isn't about FUN at that point - it is about stimulating people's reward centers so that they crave it. They will even tell you that they're having fun. But... well, are they? I have to question it, as such people end up quite empty. If they were truly having fun with it, I have to question why they feel so empty when all is said and done.
When I see a story like My Little Dashie, or hurt/comfort fics, I see the same thing. What you're doing is you're using very raw emotional manipulation in order to engage some audience. It isn't about making a good story - it is about taking these tools and making something that pulls on them in very transparent ways. But people are vulnerable to this - people write tons of absolute tripe using these tricks, and it works very well. My Little Dashie was an early example of this in the fandom - it appealed to a very specific sensibility that many bronies had. As such, it became immensely popular. But that doesn't make it a good story, or even the best story of its type that has been written by the fandom - it merely means that it manipulated people well early on and became popular. Published today, it would get a thousand upvotes, but it would not be nearly as omnipresent.
And while manipulating people can be a goal for a story, manipulating the reader into being engaged with the story isn't really the same thing as being a good story.
So I don't see My Little Dashie as a good story for the same reason that I don't see those games as good games - they may be successful at manipulating the reader or player, but that isn't what actually makes something good. Goodness is a quality quite separate from that sort of manipulation, and while a good story may manipulate, a story which manipulates is not good by nature.
In other words, I see a game like Portal as being vastly better than a game which gets played for a hundred hours per player, because Portal is very good, and isn't about manipulating the audience into playing it. I see a story like Trust or The Cost of Life as being much better than My Little Dashie, even though they have fewer readers, because there is more to the story - and neither of those stories are anywhere near as long or as popular as My Little Dashie.
If your goal is merely to sell a lot of copies, I think you can do well by looking at hurt/comfort fics and My Little Dashie and romance novels and other popular works to try and figure out what it is that manipulates the reader into wanting to read them. And that's a perfectly acceptable goal! Same as making a more-addictive slot machine to suck gamblers into playing more and giving you more of their money.
But I don't think that is about writing a good story. A good story is engaging, but a good story is about more than mere engagement; engagement is an attribute of a good story, but is not the whole of the definition. Nor is even affecting the audience. I think a good story does those things, but I think a good story says something or adds somehow; the reader is richer for having read it, beyond merely having read a few thousand more words. I don't think reading something like My Little Dashie really enriches the reader.
But that is my definition of a good story. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm right. It is just what I'm thinking of when I speak of it. It is perfectly acceptable to define a good story as being one that emotionally engages the reader and affects them. I just don't think of it as being what defines one.
1684445
I think we're somewhat like the descriptivist grammarian (me) and the prescriptivist (you). You're claiming that there is a set of rules that defines what is and is not a good story, even though you can't really figure out what they are. I'm like the grammarian who says we should just look at how people actually talk, and say that's correct English.
So I say that a story that people like is a good story, regardless of why they like it. Maybe you can analyze the meaning of "like" in some way that excludes addictions.
I'm sympathetic to your desire to say that Portal is a good game, while Cow Clicker is not, but who's to say that the enjoyment we get out of Portal isn't just a much more elaborate arrangement of Skinnerian reward-and-punishment signals? Skinner would have said that it was exactly that. Until you can define what a good game is, I think it's risky to start throwing things like Cow Clicker out of the set of good games.
1694842
Because it isn't a form of operant conditioning but structured problem solving.
1694960
Behaviorism is based on the idea that structured problem solving is built on operant conditioning.
I realize that behaviorism is out of fashion now in psychology. However, in artificial intelligence, where people have a better idea what they're talking about because they actually build systems and run them and see what happens, behaviorism is very much in fashion, only they don't call it that, because people yell at them if they do. I will also point out that the most influential paper in refuting behaviorism was Chomsky's article circa 1956 which I forget the name of, and that although people still regard that article as having refuted behaviorism, they would not defend the points made in that article anymore. I don't remember the details now, and I don't really want to get into that.
I'm not staking my position here on behaviorism being correct. I'm staking it on the certainty that intelligent behavior is produced by a multitude of neural impulses that are trained by some simple mechanism no more complicated or virtuous than operant conditioning. "Good literature", like the soul, is a magical term we used to hide our ignorance and/or conceal from ourselves the painful fact that the things we treasure most are merely an accretion of billions of tiny logic gates.
1696050
I actually think the real flaw with that idea is emergent complexity.
Sodium is a metal which explodes when we expose it to water. Chlorine is a poisonous gas. Put the two together, and we pour it on french fries and stick it into our wet mouth and call it tasty, and it neither poisons us nor explodes.
The same is true of all things. Computers are logic machines, but they allow me to do all sorts of stuff. Humans are massively parallel computing machines aware of their own calculations. We make decisions, we weigh risks and values consciously, we learn, we create technology, we do all sorts of things to build up ourselves.
I think the idea that down at the bottom we don't actually make decisions is actually just plain old wrong. We observe humans making decisions; we observe ourselves making decisions, consciously. Discarding the idea that we do so seems more than a little bit silly to me, given it directly contradicts our observations of ourselves and others. Does everyone make decisions consciously? Maybe, maybe not, but I know some people do so, and I know I do so, so, well, such is the way of things. We may be made out of meat and electrical impulses and chemical signals, but that doesn't mean we aren't more than the sum of our parts, much as computers are nothing but silicon and metals and electrical impulses that allow us to do all sorts of nonsense, like talk about consciousness via a text medium. The very fact that we are capable of observing ourselves changes things.
So yeah, we may be nothing more than logic gates down at the bottom, but that's like saying a computer is nothing more than silicon and bits of metal stuck together; it is true, but it isn't really a very useful description of what a computer is. Knowing how a computer works on the most fundamental levels is vital to building them and to programming them, but it doesn't mean that computers aren't "more" than logic gates. The same is true of humans as well, except even more so.
I think the behaviorists suffer from a false sense of greater knowledge; they saw something important, but then overapplied that knowledge to explain everything, when in fact it is merely a piece of the puzzle. It is like when people find out that life isn't fair or that people are jerks, and then use it as a justification for being jerks to everyone without understanding the concept of reciprocal altruism or why everyone hates them specifically - everyone is like them, right? They see things, right? But they don't.
Logic gates are very simple on the lowest of levels, but complicated chains of logic gates are much, much more. A program like Skyrim is nothing but a series of logic gates, and yet, we have a simulated world in there. So while stimulus-response behavior is certainly a thing, I think the very fact that humans are capable of breaking out of said loops suggests that the idea that we are nothing more than such is wrong - not because it isn't important, but because it isn't the only part which is important, and that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
I think this is probably part of why understanding consciousness is so difficult; it is like looking at a computer program without being able to see the code. It may be "nothing more than logic gates", but it is vastly more complicated than even any computer program is, and is capable of observing and altering its own functionality to some extent, as well as of decision making and value-weighing. As we actually observe these end outputs, the idea that they don't really exist is highly questionable in my eyes.
I don't think good literature is quite the same thing as the idea of the soul, something we are quite confident does not exist at this point. Good literature is rather one of those complicated things which I strongly suspect is a combination of the subjective and the objective, which is to say, there is probably not one "perfect answer", no one "great piece" which is just THE best. I think there are rules that make things "good" or "bad", and we do know some of them, but I don't think we know all of them. But just because we don't understand all the rules, and just because there IS a subjective component to it, does not, I think, invalidate the idea that some stories are indeed better than others - the very fact that we can practice writing, learn more about it by doing and study, edit stories to make them stronger, and otherwise do such things suggests very strongly that there is something very real underlying it that we are gaining a better grasp of. If it did not exist, we would not be able to strengthen ourselves as writers beyond a certain point, and yet I don't think there's any real indication of some sort of peak of mastery of writing - or at least, if there is, I have never observed someone who was there.
I think part of the issue is also with definition, though; audience is, I think, a part of what goes into writing a story, as do other things like your purpose in writing, and so you may optimize for different things. Indeed, this may be part of what prevents something from being a perfect piece of literature; different things require different trade-offs. Flow, description, characterization, dialogue, worldbuilding, all of these things pull away from each other - if you want to describe some sort of fantastic scene, a city full of wonder, that is going to pull away from your narrative flow. Dialogue may help you build the world up, but depending on the sort of story you're writing it may or may not advance the plot nearly as much. Characterization helps you make the world become more alive, but it can be difficult to integrate into everything else. So perhaps the truth is really that every work is optimizing for different things, and while it may be possible to raise them all to greater heights, it may not even be possible to write a single work which raises everything to the maximum possible level, as it would end up being too long to be as punchy as something which was shorter but more to the point. A story which is written for a popular audience may have different characteristics maximized than a story which is written for the purpose of writing Literature with a capital L, and the work for the popular audience may simply not be as enduring as something with deeper ideas.
But then again, there have been popular works which have survived well over the years, and things which were once regarded as Literature which now gather nothing but dust or are indeed seen as clumsy by new generations with new eyes rather than reverence for what was.
I'm rambling. I'm not sure if I really have an answer for what makes for good literature, and I'm not sure there is an absolute answer. But on the other hand, I do think it is likely that there is some underlying skill, some fairly large objective piece to it that allows us to become better writers.
1696111 The position I'm taking is the same one the behaviorists took in reaction to introspective psychology: when you don't really know what you're doing, or what you're observing, just talk about the things you can observe and measure, not about theoretical abstractions from those things. I can't define "good" (in your terms) well enough to use it confidently, but I can easily count how many people said they liked a story. I am not convinced that there are enough gains from any existing theories about what is good to justify the risk of overlooking something important when we depart from observables.