Write On! :: Discuss the art and craft of writing

Make a new account

Votes: 18
Results	\|	Other Polls

In real life, people don't need reasons that make sense.

Unsure - to me it is more like 'In real life, it is sometimes difficult to get a grasp of the reasons underlying a characters (persons, (even oneself)) behaviour as it is not usually explained or, if so, often in only fuzzy terms'.

And if one considers the CV aspect I guess there is more requirement for 'sense' than most can offer.

Finally, what in this world does make sense, even worse, what is 'sense' - ???

CC.
All that we C or Scheme ...

unexplained or nonexistant... either way there appears to be no reason for the action.

And I mean really, haven't you ever done something and then not been able to explain, even to yourself, just why you did it?

I also have a character in my novel grumbling to herself about one behaviour then grumbling about the opposite behaviour... inconsistent, but then so are people :-)
--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

So if you get right down to it, fiction that is really 'realistic' would almost by definition have no plot, little continuity, and unbelievable characters. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Actually, some authors have gotten away with such stories. Those authors got to be darlings of the literati. Many of the "classics" are of such a nature. Note that such ramblings tend not to become popular outside of the literati, however.
--
Someday I may have a .sig :)

ahh, yes, the main reason I don't read anything that is acclaimed as being good literature. I suppose some people like analysing books; me, I like enjoying them.

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

You're deliberately ghetto-izing yourself if you decide beforehand that you won't read something just because it gets good academic press. A lot of authors who write complex, realistic and sometimes difficult novels do it for exactly the reasons you write what you do: because they itch to tell that story, and this was the best way they could get it out on paper. Sometimes, very obvious action and reaction isn't the best way to tell a story, and sometimes, the inner workings of someone's psyche makes just as good a story, if not a better one, than the recounting of their external motions.

Hating a work because it's dense and requires some thought to get through is like blaming a detective novel because the author won't just come out and tell you whodunnit. Or like thinking mountain climing must be boring because it's slower and harder work than downhill skiing. If it's not your bag, then fine, but don't pretend you're a better person because you think you see through all the academic flim-flam, because believe it or not, there are people who read "those" novels because we like them.

[ Parent ]

Well, that was a bit of a generalisation. If something is acclaimed as being 'literary' and somebody recommends it because they know what I like and they think I'll enjoy it, I'll pick it up. I was more referring to the fact that I don't consider 'literary' to be the be-all and end-all of qualifications for a book.

Hey, I adore Shakespeare, and I just found a Chaucer website (via yahoo's random link) and read the miller's tale. Very nice (read: hilarious - people were staring at me because I kept laughing), so I bookmarked it and I'll be going back. ;)

I still get a kick out of the people who are offended that the Lord of the Rings is with the 'trash' in the fantasy section of the bookstre, and not with the literature where it 'belongs'.

At any rate, I sometimes seem to think that the world is here for my entertainment, so I find most things entertaining, and I seek out things that are entertaining (my definition, not the TV producer's definition, naturally). I guess this means that for the most part I prefer entertaining books over boring books. And I'm not afraid of hard work to get to the entertainment - another book I read and loved was le Morte d'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, even though it took me a page or so to get into the language, each time I picked it up. I made sure to read it at least an hour or more at a time, because it took so long to get my mind into the language pattern used in the book. Hm. I have to read that one again sometime.

sometimes, the inner workings of someone's psyche makes just as good a story

Yes, it does. I agree fully. It's the stories that don't have a point that I object to. Or the ones that are so boring that I never figure out what the point was, because the author spent ten pages describing grass (yes, I've read a book that did that. I don't know why I finished it - stubborn, I guess) just because the protagonist went through some. I've had some people point at a 'literary' work and say I should read it because it's 'good literature'. So I do, and I often find it pointless and boring (usually when the only reason they gave was that it was 'good literature'), and if I dare tell them I thought it was pointless and boring they think I belong in the ghetto ;)

Hell, if somebody who knew what I liked handed me a romance novel and said they thought I'd like it, I'd read it. Or at least read the first few chapters to see if it catches my interest, same as I do for any book.

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

There are a lot of good non-fiction stories; for a fun one, read Richard Feynman's autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! And Dava Sobel's Longitude is an engaging story about the invention of the marine chronometer. Heck, Mark Kurlansky's book Cod entertained me, and it was all about the history of a damn fish!

Good nonfiction, as well as good fiction, depends on the selection of relevant detail. Stories occur all around us, it's just that we don't have the luxury (in real life) to ignore all the extraneous details and focus only on what's interesting. A novel can skip lunch if the only interesting things happen at breakfast and dinner. People can't. (At least, I can't.)

Also, real life usually happens at a slower pace than most novels, which is why a lot of classic literary works (a lot of Dickens, or Hardy's Jude the Obscure) deal with the entire lifetime of a protagonist. It sometimes takes that long to describe the arc of a person's life. (On the other end of the scale, Grace Paley has a one-pager called "A Man Told Me the Story of his Life.")

Finally, a lot of good fictional works lend themselves to multiple interpretations, just like real events do. If a literary character is sufficiently complex, people's reactions will be as varied as they are to real-life figures. (Interestingly, though, this also happens with vague and cryptic characters as well. People just can't stand that void, it seems, so they fill in the blanks with details of their own devising. Hmmm....)

	is more boring than fiction	27%
	is much stranger than fiction	27%
	makes perfect sense; I don't know what you're talking about	16%
	is a story	27%

Realism in Fiction