What is a good story?

A good story comes from a character and not a plot. A character whose ideosyncracies, desires, likes and dislikes makes the story. A plot is for entertainment, where the characters are like puppets on a string pulled by the storyteller. S/he makes the characters fit his or her plot. When you create a character out of the human charcteristics around us and set the character in a place or situation, it makes the character come alive in the story. In telling the story, you become the character, so to speak, thinking his thoughts, living his dreams, and suffer and enjoy with him in his pains and pleasures. The entertainer on the other hand is meant to titillate the senses with extraordinary events happening to soulless characters whose only reason to exist is to react to events romantically. A character in a true-to-life story reveals some aspects of life we have not hitherto known or did not consider them deeply enough. S/he behooves the reader to consider looking at life together in a sympathetic way in order to uncover things that have remained buried in the reader's mind. Expose the hidden and gray areas of life and reflect upon them: this is what a character does in a serious novel. A story driven by the plot does not share this sentiment, this invitation into a deeper exploration of life; it is content to remain on the surface, for its primary objective is to keep the reader entertained. Entertainment helps to forget one's troubles, though one must return and face them once again afterwards. A character-driven story on the other hand comes to grips with an existential question and invites the reader to take the difficult journey alongside the character; the reader is not promised a fantastic journey, but needs to pause often in his daily routine life and travel with the character - not necessarily at one go, but a few paces at a time.

Patterns and Art

Patterns are repeatable units. A structure that repeats itself is a pattern. A large structure is built of smaller structures which are themselves made of still smaller structures and so on. This is the basic organic principle that governs all things. Men like Christopher Alexander and Joseph Campbell have discovered these repeatable units in their respective subjects of study - architecture and mythology respectively. Many people have adapted their findings to other subjects with some success. Alexander's architectural patterns have inspired the architectural patterns in software and culminated in the seminal work Design Patterns by Eric Gamma et al. Campbell’s patterns have unleashed a flood of how-to books from the movie world led by notables like Christopher Vogler and Syd Field.

Patterns are meant to solve problems that recur in the design of systems. Systems design is a major challenge to the architect who faces problems that have already been faced by his or her predecessors and solved in the same way. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, the architect has access to patterns that can be successfully re-used. They help build systems with ease and avoid mistakes that the pioneers have made while building their systems. A structure based on identifiable patterns is easy to manage and maintain. It is also possible to be more productive, since much time is saved by using existing patterns.

But patterns do not solve all the problems. As the need for designing complex systems arises, the architect faces new problems for which there is no precedent. The patterns that have been discovered so far are no longer sufficient to address the new situation. The architect is then forced to come up with something absolutely and creatively new. This is and has always been the challenge: to create something new. One wonders how the mind that has always been trained in the mechanics of an internal combustion engine has leaped into designing a gas-turbine engine that set man free from hugging and crawling on the land to soar over the earth. It must have required a great leap to break through the pattern of thinking in his time.

Patterns are good for solving mechanical problems (electronics included), but to use patterns in art is to deny that faculty of the mind which relies on intuition and stresses the faculty that builds and innovates but does not create. There is an element of spontaneity in creation that is sorely missing in works that have been carefully but mechanically crafted. Patterns may be necessary for mechanical systems; but even there the mind is ever challenged to innovate. Without the creative spirit behind it, even innovation is a mere novelty.

There is no pattern in the lines, curves and shapes that one sees in the sky of an evening when the dying Sun torches the sky and sets it ablaze in a riot of colors. Every moment there is a different stroke, a different hue, a different sky, a different tone of the light, and above all, a different being watching it. Creation is unpremeditated, spontaneous and free. In art, while a pattern chains you, creation sets you free.

Writing is not a craft

Writing is driven by the Muse, the source of the writer's inspiration. From the flash of the idea to the completed text, it runs like a river freely flowing, bound only by the constraints it has placed on itself.

What is written may be edited, re-written or tossed out altogether, but that is a different matter. One writes because one has something to say. And to say it well, one writes and re-writes a number of times. One is not writing to an audience or has a reader in mind. One writes for one's own satisfaction, for one's fulfilment. It is an expression of oneself in myriad ways. And one hopes that it will also interest others sufficiently to read through what one has written.

In a script for a movie, on the other hand, the compulsion is different. The script writer focuses on the audience; rather, he knows his audience and what they expect from the script. The script writer puts in effort to create the effect that the script produces. It is intentionally done, carefully planned and executed with skill.

The novel or the short story are not intended to address a specific audience, nor is it is designed and crafted for any purpose. An artist draws a picture because s/he sees the world in a certain way. It is his or her own personal expression. It has no critique or the viewer in mind. It is there because someone pictured it that way and gave expression to it. The same to my mind is true for the author.

To apply the techniques or the craft of movie-making to writing a novel or a short story is to defeat the very purpose of the Muse, who is hovering over the writer in mysterious ways. The techniques of the screenplay work for the movie, since movie-making is a craft and not an art at all, in my opinion.

Perhaps this is the reason that most writers don't like to talk about the art of writing fiction, though there are many schools teaching it. It is perhaps more useful to discuss one's work in a school with other writers, and also discuss what similar works have been handled by the masters (not the technique, but the content).

Above all, I think writing comes from writing, lots of writing and reading, lots of reading.

There is the matter of the structure of story telling. Again, it is a matter of craft. Every artistic work has structure, no doubt. But to put it into repeatable patterns is to turn it into a craft. While craft might determine success, it cramps the writer into a stylistic straitjacket and may fail to fulfil his basic need: to flow with the Muse.

Writing Seminar - Day 4

Day four began with a round up of significant points from the previous session. Viewed the beginning and ending scenes from Hitchcoks's Vertigo. The dramatic structures of the story as adapted to the screen has been discussed in detail.

Robert McKee's book on Substance of a Story has been the rallying point to all discussions related to story writing. Mckee wrote from the perspective of cinema, a medium that required a different orientation to the story. The audience has a pact, so to speak, with the director; they have agreed to come together for exactly a fixed amount of time in which the director displays his skills in riveting their attention to the screen for that duration. The screenplay writer aims to satisfy the needs and expectations of a fly-by viewer who wants to be entertained rather than enlightened, give over to maudlin emotions over incisive thinking, suspends his disbelief in order to experience a variety of thoughts and feelings over quiet deliberation and so on.

However, what is being emphasized in the seminar, and rightly so, is the basic structure of story-telling which applies with little variation to all genres of story.

Many novels have been dramatized for the screen; however, authors have always felt the loss of the substance of the story, for melodrama is all-important in the movie.

In any case, now the focus of the seminar is shifting to our own writings - novels and short stories - and this brings back to center stage the raison d'etre of the seminar - to write and review what is written and to write again.

All said and done, kudos to Markus for carrying it off with such authority on analysis and bringing the craft - art apart - of story telling closer home.