demarcation lines?
Feb. 26th, 2008 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seldearWhat's the difference between an okay story and a good one? An acceptable book and an excellent one?
I mean, there are a lot of 'okay' stories. And then there are some that zing you. I have trouble personally identifying why some stories zing me, while others are 'hmm...okay'.
Fandom tends to kinks. People have a softness for certain types of stories. Fluffy romances, BSDM kinks, hard emotional angst, the tough hero who has a dark past but a heart of gold and a soul of marshmallow when it comes to the beautiful smart heroine, secret lives, whatever. That's fanfic.
In original fiction...you don't always know that you're going to get your kink out of a story. Sure, some genres are obvious. Matthew Reilly, Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy - these authors have a certain type of story and a certain style in writing them. But others are not so obvious.
Diane Duane's Young Wizards series caught me because of the mix of wizardry and science - the science within wizardry and the practicality of its use. And the protagonists were real kids - fretting about being bullied, their schoolwork, their parents, their relationships - the business of growing up at the same time as stopping entropy.
I liked Kylie Chan's Dark Heavens series. Australian heroine in HK, dealing with Chinese mythology. I bought the book on the strength of that alone. An apparently normal human shown a world that exists side-by-side with the 'ordinary' one that she's always known.
Naomi Novik's Temeraire series was recced to me by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saramund. This time, it was the blend of historical and mythical, the practicalities of dragons in our own world, seamlessly there, rewriting history with their actions.
Diane Duane gets better as Young Wizards goes along. More complex, more...adult, more developed. Given that she's written the series over the course of twenty years, it's not surprising.
Kylie Chan didn't seem to improve as the books go along, and I'd say my interest levels went down. Maybe it's because she wasn't introducing anything particularly new and it felt like she was leading the story around by the nose just to fill pages.
Naomi Novik seems to have kept her keel straight and on course as far as the writing goes - although the story twists have definitely grown more intricate with each turn. I finished the most recent story Empire Of Ivory last night and was in awe of its complexity.
I'm not quite sure where that went.
Oh. Okay. What tends to grab me hardest is the worldbuilding and the plot with the characters coming close after. I can like a character, but if the plot makes no sense to me (like a character refusing to go into protective custody with the FBI after seeing the faces of plotters who caused environmental terrorism, because if she does she'll be letting the terrorists win) then I'm out of there.
What grabs you in a story? The characters? The plot? The world? The kinks? All of the above? And which is most important to you as a reader?
I mean, there are a lot of 'okay' stories. And then there are some that zing you. I have trouble personally identifying why some stories zing me, while others are 'hmm...okay'.
Fandom tends to kinks. People have a softness for certain types of stories. Fluffy romances, BSDM kinks, hard emotional angst, the tough hero who has a dark past but a heart of gold and a soul of marshmallow when it comes to the beautiful smart heroine, secret lives, whatever. That's fanfic.
In original fiction...you don't always know that you're going to get your kink out of a story. Sure, some genres are obvious. Matthew Reilly, Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy - these authors have a certain type of story and a certain style in writing them. But others are not so obvious.
Diane Duane's Young Wizards series caught me because of the mix of wizardry and science - the science within wizardry and the practicality of its use. And the protagonists were real kids - fretting about being bullied, their schoolwork, their parents, their relationships - the business of growing up at the same time as stopping entropy.
I liked Kylie Chan's Dark Heavens series. Australian heroine in HK, dealing with Chinese mythology. I bought the book on the strength of that alone. An apparently normal human shown a world that exists side-by-side with the 'ordinary' one that she's always known.
Naomi Novik's Temeraire series was recced to me by
saramund. This time, it was the blend of historical and mythical, the practicalities of dragons in our own world, seamlessly there, rewriting history with their actions.Diane Duane gets better as Young Wizards goes along. More complex, more...adult, more developed. Given that she's written the series over the course of twenty years, it's not surprising.
Kylie Chan didn't seem to improve as the books go along, and I'd say my interest levels went down. Maybe it's because she wasn't introducing anything particularly new and it felt like she was leading the story around by the nose just to fill pages.
Naomi Novik seems to have kept her keel straight and on course as far as the writing goes - although the story twists have definitely grown more intricate with each turn. I finished the most recent story Empire Of Ivory last night and was in awe of its complexity.
I'm not quite sure where that went.
Oh. Okay. What tends to grab me hardest is the worldbuilding and the plot with the characters coming close after. I can like a character, but if the plot makes no sense to me (like a character refusing to go into protective custody with the FBI after seeing the faces of plotters who caused environmental terrorism, because if she does she'll be letting the terrorists win) then I'm out of there.
What grabs you in a story? The characters? The plot? The world? The kinks? All of the above? And which is most important to you as a reader?
