h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

*If you can, give your characters (and the reader) a break and let them learn rather than perish*....but where's the fun in that? (Need a Letterbox smiley!)

I'm a great believer in the Reset Button of Fate, but some characters just deserve to suffer.

"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" (by Thornton Wilder) is a good treatment of this topic. Unless you aren't impressed by it, in which case I will pretend to have misunderstood. I may have done so anyway

There's a technical term for the concept of bad things not lasting forever, or things not being entirely good or bad, hot/cold, etc. The term will not come to me until it is way too late, if it comes at all..

Of course, if you're writing a story, you want your character to take a decision that lands her in trouble.
So you send your Jewish woman to Munich in 1938, and you give her no more knowledge of the situation there than she would have had at the time. (This is difficult in retrospect, because we know what happened.)Then you have her seized and detained. Then you press the Reset Button of Fate, in the shape of a meeting with a man who can save her, at a cost -perhaps a betrayal of someone else? Give her a terrible decision to take.Then you have a plot.

In "groundhog Day," the characters got to reset many, many times. This was not a typical story, though .

And we all know what happened to Tom Cruise...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1631867/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_11

I've never read 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey', thanks for the tip!

And I still don't know what happened to Tom Cruise, because...Tom Cruise. I guess I can go read it on Wikipedia.

I don't go out of my way to see Tom Cruise movies, but I also don't go out of my way to avoid them.

I sometimes feel nostalgic for the days when Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson stood for good, clean entertainment. And Woody Allen's worst fault was a pile of neuroses.

Just a note: every time I think I've written something that's not controversial about writing, people come along and object. I'm not accusing anybody of anything - it's not that, as an editor, I'm not reading good stuff here. But good can always get better. I mean, the idea is to get better at it, right? The same with the photography, the videos, whatever?

These strategies are just ideas to explore, to see if they take us anywhere. They'll work differently for different people. For example, obviously, the amount of stress you put on a character in a thriller will be different from that in a children's story. But the principle is sound that if you learn to stop yourself from putting pedal to the metal quite so quickly, you (and the reader) may find the journey more rewarding. And you will have to make decisions about what kind of universe you are in, how fateful decisions are, etc.

Next week, I'll offer some examples of what I think are good techniques for getting deeper into our stories. They're by award-winning writers. Some write about 'nice' things, others about things that are not so 'nice'. It isn't about that. It's about offering the reader an opportunity to go deeper into the heart of things by the way we focus our gaze.

Once upon a time, I wrote a book that I thought was worth getting published. I read some things about the process of tweaking texts for maximum editor acceptance, and came up with some ideas that seemed sound:

--Show, don't tell. Describing a whole lot of plot details is less fun for author and reader alike than proceeding with the story's actions and letting the reader make appropriate conclusions as to what is happening.

--it's okay to use "say" or"said" when a character speaks. This keeps the flow going. Asking a reader to stop and appreciate every synonym for "say" is not necessary, and you might lose the reader's attention if something more interesting is going on outside your story.

--There is something to be said for creating at least one relatable character in each of your stories. This lets the reader enter into the story and feel more connected to it.

--Writers from previous centuries often got caught up in describing scenes, sometimes to an excessive degree. I remember "Life on the Mississippi,' which had pages of description of the items in a riverboat captain's cabin. Samuel Clemens often seemed to be distracted. In his frog story, he led the reader a merry chase as he tried to get to the point of how the frog got chosen to be a racer. This was all very enjoyable, by the way. Clemens charmed the reader and got him (or her) on his side, so there was little chance of abandoning the story. If you don't have Clemens's gifts, though, you might want to get top your point in a straighter line. People these days have many distractions that Clemens's generation lacked...