What's an Adventure-with-a-capital-A?
I'd say as a benchmark, only those stories worthy of a full length Bernard Cornwell novel where the protagonist really is a protagonist and not just caught up in something bigger - Band of Brothers isn't an Adventure story - or a one-off-mishap - any of the various crash/wreck/wilderness survival stories.
If that's the definition, then generally when I read about a real life Adventure, it's not the only one that the protagonist has had. Some people just seek out adventure and if they survive the first one, they come back and do it again.
However, I note that in Fantasy in particular, it's common for the main character to be a reluctant adventurer and the real adventurer to be a secondary character. Partly this has to be seepage from the LOTR, but a trope from the Hero's Journey. So from that pov, whitroth is correct.
(I hasten to add that I am not an adventurer.)
]]>Besides, those folks who do have a Real Adventure in their lives (def, by Tolkien: you in a comfy chair, with a nice drink, by a fire, reading about someone else risking life and limb a thousand miles away), usually don't go on to have a second adventure. Those that seek them out get to be the classical definition of heroes: dead.
I think you'll find that that depends on the era and the people. William the Marshal had a wild time as a knight errant in his 20s, went crusading in his 30s, stormed a castle single handed in his 50s, led a massive cavalry charge in his 70s. Died in bed.
Don Pero Nino... his biography reads like the transcript of a historical roleplaying game featuring a highly skilled but not very bright cavalier.
Jack Churchill... and so on.
Point being that some people are adventurers by vocation.
]]>Yes, the character ends up in the reader's mind, but what they have is the same as we have from real people: a mental model based on experience of the character.
And that mental model is a predictive one. "What would Master Chief/Sherlock Holmes/Conan/Jesus do?"
So though not many of us remember specific Conan stories in detail, many of us know Conan's character by observing his actions and when we describe his character it is in terms of actions.
]]>Come on - in SF, esp. hard sf, how much is driven, not by character, but, how shall I say it, "The Cold Equations"? In that story, it's the equations, and the pilot and the girl show character... but really have no choices.
First - structurally - there are three characters in that story. The clue is in the title!
Second, they do have other choices, just not effective ones.
]]>The way I see it, structurally, (a) anything that DOES stuff is a character and (2) revelation counts as doing stuff.
So in...
Some of the best SF and fantasy is about describing an alternate 'world' and, if that is vivid enough, there may be little to no plot and shallow characters.
... I would expect the rhythm of revelation to form a kind of plot, perhaps built on reversals of expectation: "Look we're civilised, but we have gladiators, but they are volunteers, but they are still slaves, but rich women pay for their services, but they mostly live short lives, but some survive, but they become trainers..."
And I totally agree with:
To those of us for whom reading social nuance and other people is a consciously learnt skill, a major effort, and error-prone even then, books that are dominated by that are, at best, tedious and tiring to read and often highly confusing.
However, in my vision of how fiction works, the following is also character:
Conan: "I live, love, slay and am content. Civilisation: "I'm going to draw you in and then I'm going to slay you."
]]>Your example does seem to demonstrate that Mary Sue(-like) status is determined by plot, not character.
]]>I wager all of these, when they feel right, still partake of the structure of the story, and if long, are little mini tales.
]]>What I haven't said are what I think the laws of plot are...
]]>I'm not sure whether to thank you or curse you, but either way, well said. :)
Yes, the muse is a mixed blessing. Sorry!
]]>Agreed. These days I tend to put books down when I hit the dreaded wall of text that begins with "As you know....". Life is too short.
Yes, and the same goes for other "elegant" ways of seeding exposition. If it doesn't arrive as a beat in its own right, then it doesn't usually have a place. Even Herodotus - if I recall correctly - has a kind of contrast between his digressions and the action in hand.
]]>Because one of his legs is both the same like Dumarest and Dr Who and Roland and the screen Wonder Woman, he faces worthy opponents and perils and victory is often bitter sweet.
I wrote about this at length for Black Gate (still no Hugo, but we now have a World Fantasy Award, by the way). If you dialled back the opposition and, say, had Conan settle down in Tolkien's Shire to protect the hobbits from the fallout from the Ring War, then he'd suddenly be this all-travelled, super-cosmopolitan, uber killing machine; an embarrassing Mary Sue (using the looser definition of the term*). The same goes for most competent characters who protagonate. It's the plot that makes a Mary Sue, not the character.
This is because plot is character...
]]> Before you skip to the comments section to craft a detailed refutation drawing on both timeless classics and recent Science Fiction, ask yourself: given that the author controls all the action and the reader experiences the story in the order presented, what part of the depiction of character isn't plot?You might say something like, "If they live in a windmill then that's not plot". However, the windmill implies backstory - plot that happened before this story began - and the moment when the author choses to show us the car and windmill is part of the plot, for example, as a way of setting expectations about the quirky character, or as a revelation about the character's secret life.
For me, the revelation that "plot is character" dissolves many popular critical terms.
Take, "the characters were thin". Many classic books renown for their rich characterisation are actually rather short by modern standards(*). The Great Gatesby weighs in at 47K. Catcher in the Rye, 73K. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about 50K. Of Mice and Men, about 30K.
How do they fit in that rich characterisation? By having plots that force the characters to show us who they really are far more effectively than could any literary character sketch, no matter how elegant and insightful. So if the characters seem thin, then perhaps the story needs more plot.
Conversely, the same goes for, "the story was too slow paced". Some really big fat volumes are riveting reads right until the end of the series.
How do they manage to have plots that stretch so very far? By having characters who generate plot by being themselves. Powerful, complex characters on all sides take a long time to battle it out. So if the story seems slow paced, perhaps it needs more dynamic chracters to make stuff happen.
Similar reasoning suggests that exposition is also plot.
Going back to that windmill: because the experience of consuming story is linear, the presentation of information is also part of the plot. We see this in movies when the we cut from the kissing couple to the sniper who's already in position. The sniper has been there all along, the timing of that reveal is part of the plot.
Thus, "too many info dumps/ too much exposition" can't usually point to a problem with quantity of information.
For a start, novels belonging to the genres Crime and Hard Science Fiction are almost by definition built on the presentation and uncovering of information. Nobody complains that Ellis Peters has too much exposition. Adept authors present information as part of the plot, even when seeding it for later or just giving us texture. For example, in one of his Sharpe books, Bernard Cornwell manages to give us a detailed explanation of how a flintlock musket works by simple dint of having a malignant sergeant accusing the hero of selling part of it for profit.
Going further, some authors make an art of the intriguing info dump: Charlie, of course, plus Douglas Adams, Garrison Keillor, Umberto Ecco, and the Father of Lies History himself, Herodotos. They make the info dump a story in its own right - flash fiction, if you like, anchored to the main story. Herodotus gave his name to a particular technique for doing this: Herodotian Ring Composition.
In a nutshell, Herodotus was big on asides like this...
The Athenian fleet pulled into Boros, an island famous for its intelligent sheep.
The story goes that Zeus once pursued the nymph Calliope across the Peloponnese. Spurning his attentions, the nymph turned herself into a ewe. Undeterred, Zeus cornered her on the cliffs near Tiryns and consummated his lust. However, afterwards he experienced disgust and tossed the ill-used sheep into the sea. The now-pregnant ewe swam one hundred leagues to Boros, where she spawned a race of sheep renown for their disquieting intelligence and the knowing looks with which they lavish human males.
It was on the very beach where Calliope once came ashore, that the Athenian fleet made landfall. One of the officers remarked that there was no sign of the flocks of famous sheep. The commander deduced that the Spartans must be waiting in ambush. However, he ordered his men...
So when readers complain about the info dumps, it usually means that they need to be better integrated with the plot, or need to have their own mini-plots.
For me, all this unpacks the infuriating advice you sometimes hear from veteran writers: Don't worry about all that literary stuff. Just write a good story.
It's all plot.
M Harold Page is the Scottish author of The Wreck of the Marissa (Book 1 of the Eternal Dome of the Unknowable Series), (epub here) an old-school space adventure yarn about a retired mercenary-turned-archaeologist dealing with "local difficulties" as he pursues his quest across the galaxy. His other titles include Swords vs Tanks (Charles Stross: "Holy ****!") and Storyteller Tools: Outline from vision to finished novel without losing the magic. (Ken MacLeod: "...very useful in getting from ideas etc to plot and story." Hannu Rajaniemi: "...find myself to coming back to [this] book in the early stages.")
]]>And for a followup - how does parenthood change one's perception of Darth Vader's experience in Episodes V and VI?
Darth Vader is like the alcoholic birth father who somehow manages to squeeze in some late life redemption. I have little sympathy for him.
The Force Awakens, however... a bit of a gut punch.
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