strangedaze

Key word: sex but I agree 100%.

Hodge, love the reference to JD. Nine Stories has to be one of my favorite pieces of literature and I routinely fall head-over-heels for A Perfect Day...

That's a good example, I think, of writing that's carried by its style and characters. Or, even though I'm not its biggest fan, Catcher in the Rye. Or The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence. Or anything by Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero comes to mind).Or, duh, anything by James Joyce.

I agree with Maia: if you're going light on plot, go heavy on characters and writing style. In fact, if you're going heavy on plot, still go heavy on characters and style (read into that what you will). You hear the same thing repeated over and over again: Character-driven fiction is what sells. I can only speak for what I like to read, but the books I've enjoyed most have strong, real characters.

.peace.

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patthager

I think even good plots and settings depend upon not how developed, detailed or intrecate they are, but on how solely much the reader would enjoy personally playing the part of someone in that situation. It's a characters enviroment.
Ok, Shakespear does have good storylines, but a lot of them aren't in coventional format. Theres a few characters, and they are THE characters and basicly the only forces through out the book, and half the time his books (or plays or novels) take on the format of a conversation.

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mammamaia

OT:
'back in my head'! [sorry, couldn't resist]

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bob rulz

Well, Seinfeld was a character-driven show with no plot that was popularized as the show about nothing.

And people loved it!

Yes, Seinfeld is a TV Show, not a novel or a play, but it's the same concept.

patthager

I mean, down at that universe, or up into the sky to see if there is any fingers clasping the outer rings of the milky way.

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bobwriter

A single title comes to mind: Romeo and Juliet. How many treatments of that story have come along? Innumerable, some good, some lousy, a great majority mediocre but all with one thing in common; a simple plot.

Whether captured in the flowing poetry of Shakespeare or the lazy prose of a modern hack, it's still just Montagues vs. Capulets or Hatfields vs. McCoys--boy meets girl, girl meets boy, love ensues, family intervenes, all ends tragically.

'Ordinary' storylines aren't the ones that have been used before, they are the ones that we've all read before. The challenge is finding and using a fresh voice to tell an old story.

Good luck, carry on.

Hand

I wrote a short story once about a writer writing a short story about a murder, and how he's murdered while writing it. Both stories were hackneyed, but it was funny because the writer was completely oblivious to the fact he was being killed off at the same time he was writing about his protagonist being killed off, and how he attempts to avoid cliche at all costs while his own murder is so ridiculously cliched you'd think he was locked in a closet his whole life.

Ordinary's fine, but it has to be different. People don't want to see the same old boring shit they've seen innumerable times before, no matter how trendy the packaging. Alternately, extraordinary's great, but it has to be well-written, because a brilliantly original idea can become obscenely mangled with overelaborate concepts that leave readers thinking "what the hell did I just read?".

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