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As with other things, it's some of each. As well as identifying the elements of your creation that make something appealing. Dan Brown is the quintessential ex
by ohjeez 9y ago
As with other things, it's some of each. As well as identifying the elements of your creation that make something appealing.
Dan Brown is the quintessential example of a horrible writer who is nonetheless successful. By any measure his prose is terrible. His fact checking is nonexistent. (In the first book, the hero looks out the window of a bathroom in the Louvre towards the Eiffel Tower, and you can't see the tower from there.) ...And yet he is a good tale-spinner and excellent with "and _then_ what happened?" plot, so it works.
One very successful fiction writer pointed out to me years ago that fiction can rely on several items: voice, plot, character, setting, etc. So "being a good writer" is just an overall label that obscures those things. Ideally an author is great at all of them, but few are.
And as the same author pointed out, if you write (and want to make a living at it), you have to publish, and you have to get noticed. There's an old saying that books don't become bestsellers if they're hidden in a trunk. In the olden days when book publishers ruled the earth, an author could rely on the effectiveness of a good agent or publisher (and the luck involved in finding one). Now, the author has to learn to present herself with confidence, which does not necessarily come naturally. It becomes another relevant skill that has little to do with plot, character, etc. -- rather like the skill of getting your own butt into the chair in the first place.
That does indeed map to tech skills. Just as a thoughtful writer (and reader!) identifies the various parts of the novel, so too does a thoughtful developer consider her tech skills (idea generation, debugging, team building, whatever). And the ability to communicate/market is among them.
- ggg9990 9y agoI think that for plot-focused fiction, “terrible” writing is better —- the Count of Monte Cristo would have been worse if it developed the characters better.
- ohjeez 9y agoI see what you mean, but I'd argue that stories succeed when they have more than one of these attributes. (And I'd enjoy the argument. This is a fun two-beer discussion!) Sometimes the absence of an attribute encourages the reader to fill in the blanks; readers' own imagination is an important element. So if the characters are undeveloped but the worldbuilding is superb, the reader supplies what the story lacks.
- BeetleB 9y ago>His fact checking is nonexistent. (In the first book, the hero looks out the window of a bathroom in the Louvre towards the Eiffel Tower, and you can't see the tower from there.) ...And yet he is a good tale-spinner and excellent with "and _then_ what happened?" plot, so it works. It works because people read fiction for good storytelling, not for the facts within. I can't see how getting that detail wrong makes him a poor writer.
- ohjeez 9y agoIf you know a fact-as-presented is wrong, it throws you out of the story. Fiction requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But you should not have to hang it until dead.
- slededit 9y agoMost people don't know (or remember) all that much detail. I've been to both the Louvre and Eiffel Tower and wouldn't have blinked at that sentence.
- ohjeez 9y agoI agree with you. But that individual fact isn't the point. Each of us is sensitized to different things. A doctor friend watched less than 60 seconds of the original "E.R." TV show because in that minute he saw someone use an IV upside down. That made the entire show untrustworthy. It rarely takes a lot of effort to get it right. Why not do so?
- dragonwriter 9y ago> It rarely takes a lot of effort to get it right. Why not do so Because, contrary to your claim, it takes a lot of effort to get it right, since there are a near-infinite number of ways every individual element of description or presentation can be wrong. And it's often a high cost:benefit ratio, because most errors will only be noticed by a small share of the target audience and will only break suspension of disbelief in an even smaller share (conversely, getting it right will often strike non-experts wrong and break suspension of disbelief; verisimilitude in fiction is not actually about matching reality, but audience expectations.) So, except on the things about which your target audience is particularly knowledgeable and concerned, accuracy may not be worth the effort put into it.