Hopefully, she sticks with the popular guy and helps him become a good person by smiling a lot and using a touch of fairy magic.
Also, found a list Someone really worked their brainstorming for you. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RomanceNovelTropes
Do you think the ideas (the plot, the theme, the characterisation, the messages) are more important, or the language (the elegance of sentences, the word choices, the craft of language)?
Both. A good idea means nothing if it's poorly executed, and the writing can be the most elegant words ever strung together, but if the idea sucks... it still sucks.
Ideally both. A good plot or concept is key, but having the skills to effectively convey that to the reader through your sentence and word choice is also fairly paramount. No matter how good your plot is, you're not going to be able to communicate your point to the reader if you don't have the language skills to do so. Alternatively, beautiful sentences with no substance are like dandelion luff in the sunlight or the morning fog, pretty to look at, but ultimately worthless, entirely insubstantial, and unlikely to last.
If I have to choose, and assuming that the language portion of this choice is above and beyond mere correct use of language, syntax, spelling, etc., then I side with ideas. One of my favorite writers, Octavia Butler, has a rather "plain Jane" style in her crafting of sentences, but the ideas she explores and the questions she asks are profound.
This is how I feel - it's essential that the ideas are communicated in a way that readers can understand and enjoy reading about, but I don't care much about elegance of prose. I actively avoid things that are written in a literary or flowery way. Just give me the story straight up and I'm a happy camper.
Precisely. To draw another example, the genious of Stephen Hawking is not that he's the smartest man on the planet (I've read several rather sour grapeish articles extolling how many scientists are smarter than him) but instead his ability to take an utterly esoteric field of science and make it approachable and engageable to the Every-Person.
Yeah, it's a tough call. A great idea can be ruined by poor or just uninteresting presentation. My family are big readers and I don't know how many times we've been talking about books and said things like, "I liked the idea but it was so boring." But I think something can still be an enjoyable read if it's well-written even if the topic is overdone, so I might have to come down on the side of language, in concept - but in practice I'm more likely to slog through an unenjoyable style and forget I'm even reading something with a tired idea.
Both are definitely very important, but I'm going to have to side with ideas. The way I see it, if you have a good idea, adding great language will only make it better, and even if you don't add great language the book may still be tolerable. Having great language and no idea...well, you just have a jumble of nice words.
Language absolutely has to be good enough--below a certain standard of language, it barely matters how good the ideas are. But once you get the language up to "pretty good" then the ideas become the most important area for improvement. Except, language is the tool for expressing ideas. So whether or not the language is elegant or pretty, it has to be pretty darn good for expressing the ideas.
There is such a thing as writing for writing's sake; lets not forget poetry. Writing, storytelling and imagination are three separate skills, and they are all important in writing a captivating storybook. On the low end, I'd say it's easier to keep someone reading with nice writing and storytelling, than with a nice story alone.
I think language and wording matter the most until you reach a certain level. Even then, I do believe the writing can trump the idea. I know none of us really want to believe that. We want to think if our idea is good enough it will carry the story. And sometimes it does if you have a great editor who sees your vision. But no editor is going to fork over a ton of money unless you can clearly do something they can't.
This was a really hard question to answer. At first I was ready to shout out "ideas". But then when I read some of the answers already posted I realised, that's not true. I recently read a book which didn't have a story I cared for, or characters I liked, but the author pulled me through 800 pages because of her clear and engaging writing style. That was very interesting to me and I'm still trying to suss out exactly how she did it. I don't care for "beautiful" language in a book, but it has to be engaging. If it's not, then the best idea in the world won't help me finish a novel. But I've also put down a lot of books where the style was okay, but the characters were annoying, so...
I'll read further into a book with good language and bad plot, than I will the other way around. However, I will stop reading the book and forget about it. If the prose is all messed up, I won't get through the first three pages.
Either. I enjoy books by authors who are great storytellers, but whose prose is ordinary and also books by those with ordinary plots and ideas, but who can write up a storm.
I am kinda both based on genre really. Though language is a major factor as to whether I will read it or pitch it out. Some have written something fair enough to keep me engaged, but then throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to the other critical factors of story telling just having a concept fall apart. Plot-holes and deus ex machina really kill a story when they occur. Other times it can be the language being far over reaching to the point it does not fit with story at all, as if the author has to use a vocabulary heavy prose to complicate simple concepts, and just make a story 'sophisticated' word salad. Of course you get the ones that want to simply bash an idea over your head so much that you think that they really have less a story and more a personal rhetoric piece of propaganda. And the final one would be poor execution of a concept, where you can clearly see the author had no clue about what they were writing to begin with. Thus they show a lack of knowledge on what they are portraying due to little or no research, while making the point of the story fall apart at the seams. So from application to execution, there are just some that shouldn't write what they do, anymore than I should be able to teach advanced trig. (And I shouldn't, since I can barely use Algebra).
