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Boardwalk :: Forum List Writing Topics Fiction
antryg
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Click here to see the profile of this user 		Re:The focus in fiction - 08/22/2006 Great insight Robert. I was thinking about the Pern books as well. I loved the creation of a whole new world, filled with wonder but where people were still the people we know. Those characters really came alive to me. I wanted the next book to see how they would grow and what they would do.

Any good book is going to need all of these ingredients but our focus determines which shelf we go to when we search for a book. Knowing what the audience is looking for helps the writer to craft a story that will be well received.
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Robert the Bard
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Click here to see the profile of this user 		Re:The focus in fiction - 08/22/2006 Character, and world development and interactions. I'm a huge Tolkien fan, and when you read his works, the story driven ones, you come away feeling as if you could feel what the chars felt. He never got overly carried away with description, but by the end of "Felloship", you knew the characters, and had a good idea how they would react to a given situation. They had become almost friends.

Another author who did that for me was Anne McCaffery, in the original Dragon Riders of Pern series. She had you feeling like you were on the field for the dragon impressions, hoping a dragon would choose you, because you knew what the bond was like. To me, these are the important characteristics. These things make the world seem real, and that you can become, or have become, a part of it.

When I say world development, I'm not talking about how many leaves are on a tree, but I want to be able to feel how "creepy" a forest is, or how friendly. I want to know how dark a cave is, but not to the point of rediculousness. I have seen discussion of authors that feel like you need to know the color and texture of the buttons on a tunic, but unless one of those buttons is pertinent to the story, I don't need, nor want to know.
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antryg
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Click here to see the profile of this user 		The focus in fiction - 08/22/2006 For the sake of discussion, I'm going to break down a work of fiction into several components.

We will call them: Characters (this would include character development and interaction between characters)
Setting (the location of the story ie. real life, idealized past, imagined future or fantasy world)
Story ( are you willing to accept one big lie, everything realistic, the author has freedom to define all the rules)

I'm sure that you can come up with other important components as well and there is some overlap in the ways I've defined these distinctions. Which one of these though is what draws you to a particular work?

For instance, within the sci-fi genre we can have a story about an imagined future. Are you drawn to the hard science type such as Asimov where we can imagine science leading us to the time and place of the story and science is used as the conflict point as in his Robot stories? Do you prefer the creation of a time and world such as Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings

The draw of romance novels seem to reside in the character development and how the characters interact with each other. Fans of horror may not care if the characters do anything but react to the action around them, the story events are paramount.

So, if you are reading for pleasure, what do you choose?

Personally, all of these things are important in my choice. I first look to setting. I want something in a world unlike my own so I go to the sci-fi/fantasy section. I further refine my search based up the story. Sometimes I want a space epic and so I'll choose something by David Drake or David Weber. Why them? I like their realistic use of science within the story. They also develop characters that I care about.

Now I've logically shown how I choose a book yet when I look on my shelf I see that it is writers who develop great characters and have great character dynamics who are represented by multiple volumes.

How do you choose?
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Boardwalk :: Forum List Writing Topics Fiction