Writing Woo
Jan. 8th, 2007 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI'm a big consumer of books on writing. Usually in a very casual way: I have yet to find a book-length treaty on the subject that couldn't be summarized into a few pithy sentences. Some books are better than others at delivering on the promise to be worth your time than others. Robert McKee's Story is one of my favorites, and Self-Editing for Writers is another. Both make a big deal out of the 'beat' of a story, out of making each exchange between two characters, or between the character and his environment, mean something to the reader, and that's one of my favorite insights: don't look at each paragraph, but at each burts of paragraphs where the characters change: learn something or react in some way.
There are a lot of terrible books out there, written by people you've never heard of, that don't teach you anything. And there there are the maddening, infuriating texts where a gem of an idea is scattered through far, far too much dross to make the effort worthwhile.
Into that category I must drop Dramatica: A New Theory of Story. First, the writers are obsessed with process and formula. They break down the entire notion of "a story" into a collection of boxes, and then draw them out. Every story has four plots; every story has four major characters; every story has four themes; every story has four movements. And then these get arranged in a colletion of nifty 2x2 boxes and whammo, you have every possible idea you could need to write a best-seller. They use bizarre terminology like "storymind" and "throughline" (apparently because "theme" and "plot" are too much). It's like Writing Woo (to steal Orac's term).
Some of the invented terminology is even survivable, like "contagonist": someone who is not opposed to the protagonists' initial goals but who becomes a hindrance as the story progresses: the example given is the traditional police officer whose advice to do things by the book becomes a barrier to the hero's need to stray outside the letter of the law to catch an exceptional criminal. But I don't know that I'd use it myself.
This book shoves a lot of traditional writing advice into these "everything has its opposite" boxes, to the point where your story needs to be broken down into a 64-box grid of the charaters, their motivations, their normal mode of evalutation, their mode of responding, and their purpose. It's actually a nice list in some ways: will your character wait for solid proof, or go with probablies? Is your character interested in knowledge for its own sake or carnal satisfaction, and so on? It's the artificiality of the grid system (which is clearly intended to sell the Dramatica software package, an expensive chunk of woo) that bugs the hell out of me.
In the end, the best advice is still "have wolves chase your hero up a tree, make it cold, make it rain, have lightning strike the tree, set the tree on fire, have a volcano blow up near by, and have children come and throw rocks at him." If you need an outline, and a guide to show you how your impassioned but passive heroine is balanced by a reactive but rational hero, or vice versa, while facing a proactive, rational villain, you can do it on paper, and you don't need this book.
There are a lot of terrible books out there, written by people you've never heard of, that don't teach you anything. And there there are the maddening, infuriating texts where a gem of an idea is scattered through far, far too much dross to make the effort worthwhile.
Into that category I must drop Dramatica: A New Theory of Story. First, the writers are obsessed with process and formula. They break down the entire notion of "a story" into a collection of boxes, and then draw them out. Every story has four plots; every story has four major characters; every story has four themes; every story has four movements. And then these get arranged in a colletion of nifty 2x2 boxes and whammo, you have every possible idea you could need to write a best-seller. They use bizarre terminology like "storymind" and "throughline" (apparently because "theme" and "plot" are too much). It's like Writing Woo (to steal Orac's term).
Some of the invented terminology is even survivable, like "contagonist": someone who is not opposed to the protagonists' initial goals but who becomes a hindrance as the story progresses: the example given is the traditional police officer whose advice to do things by the book becomes a barrier to the hero's need to stray outside the letter of the law to catch an exceptional criminal. But I don't know that I'd use it myself.
This book shoves a lot of traditional writing advice into these "everything has its opposite" boxes, to the point where your story needs to be broken down into a 64-box grid of the charaters, their motivations, their normal mode of evalutation, their mode of responding, and their purpose. It's actually a nice list in some ways: will your character wait for solid proof, or go with probablies? Is your character interested in knowledge for its own sake or carnal satisfaction, and so on? It's the artificiality of the grid system (which is clearly intended to sell the Dramatica software package, an expensive chunk of woo) that bugs the hell out of me.
In the end, the best advice is still "have wolves chase your hero up a tree, make it cold, make it rain, have lightning strike the tree, set the tree on fire, have a volcano blow up near by, and have children come and throw rocks at him." If you need an outline, and a guide to show you how your impassioned but passive heroine is balanced by a reactive but rational hero, or vice versa, while facing a proactive, rational villain, you can do it on paper, and you don't need this book.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 10:09 pm (UTC)Depending upon your bend, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway might also help. Burroway's book is a textbook and has assignments at the end of each chapter, in case you need a kick.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-09 02:30 am (UTC)Thanks for the recs! I think I'll see if the university library has them.
Appreciative Sar