The fact that the motive for your entire plot is wildly implausible, and breathtakingly offensive, strikes me as somewhat important. I also want to point out that there are novels that aren't centered on rape. I know that it's unthinkable, but they do exist. Since you clearly don't understand the subject, you should choose a different central theme. By that I mean a novel that does not contain rape. I realize that I've said that before, and you seem to be utterly unable to comprehend the idea, but I'm going to say it again.
Yes I know there are stories that are not centered on rape. I just happen to want to finish this one first. I just want to finish one before moving on. However, you said that the motive for the entire plot is implausible. So all I have to is come up with a motive that will make the plot more plausible then.
You have systematically rejected any and all such motives, so it doesn't seem likely that that's ever going to happen.
No some people on here recommended a couple and I asked about them to others on a previous thread, and I was till told by others on here, that the suggestions were not good enough. But I would like to hear your opinion too ChickenFreak. What would be the best motive for a serial rapist to rape?
I've suggested severe childhood abuse many, many times. You have rejected that and anything else that doesn't paint rape as a natural consequence of not getting sex on demand.
Have you read any of John Douglas's books about the psychology of serial killers and other assorted predators?
Ryan. I haven't taken a single look at your posts and I won't start. Have you ever posted a chunk of your work on this forum for others to critique. If you haven't already, you could. Of course while taking precautions. From the posts I see here, people grow weary of your own posts. Instead of asking questions and receiving answers, why not get some critical feedback? As to the theme of rape; it's a bold one to take on. One that should be dealt with seriously and precisely. And not used to satisfy an author's want to interject malice into a character to bolster that character.
Ryan. Figure this out for yourself. This is your story. WHY do you need all of our opinions before you can move on? Just. Move. On.
Okay then, thanks. I will do that. I need to think in a different mindset too. I think I am playing too much by the "rules", or not thinking outside the box enough. Or perhaps I am too far outside the box, and I need to learn to keep the story approach contained. There is one thing I have noticed though. A lot of times people will point out holes in my story that I need to fix. Since I am into writing screenplays, I will watch a lot of movies and pay close attention to the writing. A lot of times in a movie, I will notice something like a plot hole, or an illogical or inconsistent character decision. I will often ask people, friends, or even people on the net, "why would a character would do that, and why didn't the character do this instead?" The answer I get from people is very often the same, which is "Because then the movie would be over". They say. So other stories seem to have holes or illogical character actions in them as well, in order to have certain pay offs, so I wonder what it is that I am doing wrong, that it's less accepted. Perhaps if I can figure that out, I can come up with a new way to approach and look at things.
Yes. I didn't mean to sound horrible in my post, but this might be a breakthrough moment for you. Think your way through any problem you discover. Don't expect the solution to jump out at you immediately. However, if you keep asking other people what the solution should be, you will never learn to figure it out by yourself. Learning to solve your own story problems is one of the basic skills any writer needs to learn. Then, once you've thought it through, identified and SOLVED any problems you discover, have the confidence to write what you think should happen. THEN when you get critiques, you can consider making changes, based on other people's feedback of what you have already done. However, even then, it's still your story, and you need to figure out how to plug any holes. If folks say your character is unbelievable, for whatever reason, and you agree ...then YOU need to figure out a way to make them more believable. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to change what the character does, by the way, or change the plot. Instead, you would try to find a better way to present the character (via inner thoughts, or maybe some extra scenes or information to make the readers understand the character), so the readers DO believe the character after all. Then, you let ANOTHER bunch of readers try your story out. If they don't mention anything about your character being unbelievable, then you have probably succeeded in plugging the hole. There isn't any point in constantly showing the same readers every little change you make. It's tempting ...I know. I've been there. But it's better to show new people, who aren't aware of the problem you just solved. That will let you know how you're getting on. This takes a long time, and can require a lot of trial and error. But if you fix mistakes, they'll be mistakes you won't make again. So you will be learning. Have faith that you'll get there. But, like learning to drive a car, you won't pass the test if somebody else has to take over the wheel every time you get into a tough situation. All you'll have learned is how to turn over the wheel every time you hit a spot of bother. Just keep both hands on the wheel, grit your teeth, and work your way through it. Unlike driving—which has its hazards—writing is pretty much risk free. The bumper you hit while writing won't injure you in any way. It will just be a gentle thump that makes you back up and try again.
Apart from rigid aherence to a completely implausible plot, and total disregard for all advice given, the other thing I (and I guess others) grow weary of with Ryan is that he hardly ever posts to help anyone else with their work, its all me me me leeching off the community rather than being part of it.
Are those people casual viewers, or are they writers? Most modern horror movies make ridiculous amounts of money at the box office because studios focus on jump scares which work fantastically for trailers but suck at holding Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes ratings because relying on jump scares won't work over the course of a full-length movie. "Because then the movie would be over" is good enough for most audiences, but it's not good enough for writers. You seem to be asking "Do I do the boring logical thing for no emotional pay-off, or do I get the emotional pay-off by abusing boring logic?" Every time I've ever asked myself "Do I write X or Y," the answer has always been "Both." Find a way to make the logical thing be emotional and vice versa. In my UrbanFantasy novel, my vampire antagonist does not look like she did as a human, she looks like a Nosferatu-ghoul. She uses a ring that she's enchanted with a glamour spell so that she can make herself look human, but if she just conjured a human-illusion on top of her demon-vampire form, then she would look like you'd crossed your eyes to overlay a picture of a human on top of a picture of a demon-vampire, and that would ruin the point of the disguise. I could just say that the ring replaces her image instead of adding one, but that would take a lot of extra reality-warping that I don't want available to her (there are a few mages in my world who are powerful enough to do that, but I don't want her to be one of them). The ring can also make her invisible, which made my narrator wish that she'd modeled it after The One Ring instead of being more basic, but more importantly this leads to the science of invisibility. If light passed through your body without touching any of your cells, you can't see anything. I could've chosen to a) have her be one of the mages powerful enough to make herself invisible without blinding herself, referencing the science but ultimately ignoring it, or b) I could have had her be worse off when she's blind than when she's sighted because going back and forth between seeing and not seeing doesn't let her get used to it as well as somebody who's blind full-time would've been able to. What I did do instead was 1) establish her as being a terrifying fighter in her human disguise, 2) have her tell my narrator that she's a vampire whose ring allows her to go invisible without being disguised, but that disguising herself doesn't work without being invisible (without mentioning that invisibility=blindness, but having it turn out that my narrator knows this anyway from being a SciFi/Fantasy nerd who'd hung out with the smart kids in High School), and finally 3) having my narrator take this revelation very very badly that he “... just got beat up by a blind chick.” Given this use of science and logic rather than abuse thereof, can you guess why my vampire might want to be invisible, even when she's not disguised as a human? TLDR: Logical sense and emotional payoff are better than one or the other. Would you like to hear an explanation I found for one of the alleged "plot holes" in ABC's one-season series Forever that makes the story more logical and more emotional?
The other point of note on this is that while some movies have the occasional plot hole which is occasionally justified by "well if it didnt exist the movie would be over/boring" this isn't a justification for writing a script riven with avoidable plot holes , not least because decent director/producer doesn't want to direct/produce a film that critics are going to tear to pieces This is rather like the the previous discussion on another Ryan thread about suspension of disbelief - ie that you can suspend disbelief that xyz happens for plot purposes (e.g that vampires are real, magic works , the hero kills with every shot but the bad guys can't shoot for toffee or whatever) but that doesn't justify writing a load of unbeliavable tripe and say "oh but the audience has to suspend disbelief"
Whilst I find Ryan's post entertaining in a frustrating laughable way, Moose makes an excellent point. Ryan has well over 1,500 posts and I'd happily wager most of these are to do with his own work repeating the same threads and merrily ignoring 95% of the feedback he is given. The forum exists to help writers but it is a two way street.
Okay thanks. Basically I feel it's kind of a double standard argument that when I ask people why a character made this so and so decision in this script, the answer is "because then the movie would be over", but if someone were to ask me that in my script, and I give the same answer, the answer is not acceptable, the other way around, it seems. I have also rewritten a lot of the last half, and feel it's improved. It's a lot less ridiculous than it was originally. I feel the emotional pay off is a lot less dramatic though as a result. I kept the story universe, inside the box, but I feel like now it may be too contained, or too limited, since I didn't go outside the box in the last draft. As long as the reader, or audience, prefers a contained and limited story, and think's that might be more important compared to the most dramatic pay off I can think of. Cause the more dramatic and suspenseful I try to make it, the more ridiculous it seems to get, unintentionally. So I wrote it so that the characters make much more logical, contained decisions, for the last half, but at the price of suspense to a degree, I feel. But maybe that's better? If it's better, I just now half to apply the same approach to the first half, but having trouble doing to so, since I am not sure what the characters can do to from point to point B, if I don't go outside the box, and maybe get a little ridiculous. It was said that the plot holes are avoidable in mine though. I don't necessarily see them as avoidable if a character has to do a certain something to get to certain destination. I can try to get the characters there in other ways, but it seems there always has to be that one foolish character who has to do something foolish, to allow things to happen the way I want them to. Also, it was said that I need to devote more time to explain characters maybe, to convince the reader of the character's foolishness. However, since my story is being told from almost the entirety of the MC's point of view, all the other characters, the MC does not know well. They have hidden motives, the MC does not know about, and when they do something crazy and shocking to the MC, the MC is just as crazed by it as the reader, or so I intended. So is it possible to keep supporting character's as mysterious characters and have the reader think "this character is messed up in the head and I don't know why he is doing this, but I am sure there is a reason, that we do not know from the MC's point of view"... rather than the reader thinking, there is no reason at all? Sure thanks, what is it?
Forever was about a 200 year old doctor working as an ME for NYPD. Shooting, burning, car crash, no matter what kills him, he always comes back to life (naked in the nearest body of water). Plot hole: in the pilot, he's perfectly comfortable poisoning himself to find out how the victim-of-the-week died. In later episodes, he's terrified to die despite knowing that he'd come back to life. However: in the pilot, his only contact with the mortal world is his 70-year-old adopted son who's going to die within a few years anyway. He isolates himself from everybody else, but the course of the series, he starts opening up to the cops and assistant ME that he works with. Solution: every time he dies, he has to wonder if his resurrections have run out and if this new death will be the last one. When he's isolated from everyone else, he doesn't care if he dies for real, but his friends give him something to live for.
Oh okay. So the plot hole is, is that the main character keeps changing his mind about whether or not he fears death, is that it?
Essentially, yes. Nobody within the show recognized the fact that he felt one way at first and a different way later, so it was easy to get the impression that the change was inconsistency ("the writers forgot what they wanted the character to be like") rather than progression ("the change was part of something else that the writers were doing anyway"). Whatever you do in your story, do it on purpose. Normal people are not rapists, so if you're writing a person who commits rape, make it clear that she's A Rapist. Her motivation should explain what she's doing, but the narrative around her shouldn't normalize what she's doing because she's wrong that her justifications are good enough.
Oh okay, thanks. When you say that the narrative is normalizing her actions, what is it about the narrative that is doing so? I mean the other characters in the story are shocked and appalled to discover what she is doing, so if the other characters are alienated by it, is that not enough to make her seem abnormal within their universe?
It's basically the difference between Dexter and Death Note. Both series are about villain protagonist vigilante serial killers, and both have characters who consider the serial killers to be evil. In Dexter, however, the detectives trying to arrest the Bay Harbour Butcher are portrayed as not understanding that the Bay Harbour Butcher is saving people by killing criminals, whereas in Death Note, the detectives trying to arrest Kira are shown to understand that saving lives does not justify mass murder when there are other ways to save the innocent without killing the guilty. It's not enough for the actions themselves to be appalling, you have to show that the train of thought leading to the action is just as appalling: "Rape is appalling, but she couldn't get any action consensually so she was desperate, so sad that she was forced to do something so horrible" versus "Rape is appalling, and she thinks that she's justified because she couldn't get any action consensually, but the vast majority of people who don't get as much sex as they would like do not turn to violence" In my Doctor Who fanfic, I was careful to portray my vigilante serial killer villain protagonist along the lines of Death Note rather than Dexter by showing that you do not need to use her methods to accomplish the same thing that she's trying to do. I'm also trying a new direction with my Urban Fantasy novel: in "Gemini," all of my villains either thought of themselves as the good guys or didn't care about being the good guys or the bad guys. In my UrFan WIP, most of my villains recognize explicitly that they are different from normal people, they just don't think there's anything wrong with that, they think they're the lions in a world run by the gazelles. One of the lines I'm hoping to use at some point – if not in this first book, then in one of the sequels instead – is: "You describe yourself as being Lawful Evil!" "You say that like it's a bad thing!" I've also come up with a backstory for my characters a few months into the writing which I'm having an interesting time adding into the book itself because the character who's unconscious for most of the plot has turned out to be the most psychologically interesting, so now I have to show her characterization from my MCs' perspectives while keeping the focus on her rather than using her as a set piece to focus on how my MCs have been affected by her life and personality whereby one of my characters was raped at 15, ran away from home after everybody blamed her for getting the guy in trouble for what he did to her, then by the age of 22 has started making headlines as the deadliest female serial killer in American history: the police have conclusively connected 19 murders to The Richmond Ripper, they suspect her in dozens more of which she was responsible for 11, and she has killed 17 people as an enforcer to a drug dealer that she doesn't count in her "high score" because she wasn't killing them as a serial killer, she was just getting paid to do a job. Thing is, she would not like hearing somebody tell her that she became a serial killer because she was raped as a kid. She comes down very strongly on the side of Nature over Nurture, and she would tell you that there are millions of people in America who go through the things that she did, but who don't turn out the way that she did, opposite the hundreds of people in America who turn out the way that she did without going through the things that she did, and that she feels she has a lot more in common with Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer (serial killers with no history of abuse/neglect) than she does with Oprah Winfrey or Lady Gaga (trauma survivors who have never murdered anybody). She takes great pride in being a Chaotic Evil serial killer who doesn't like being told what to do, and if she were ever identified, arrested, and given an interview about her career as The Richmond Ripper, she would not want to give her rapist credit for having any kind of power to make her into something that she didn't already have the potential to become. He did not win by breaking a good person and turning her into a monster like himself, she won by already being enough of a monster that she was able to take advantage of a form of therapy that would not have been available to her otherwise (and yet even then, she would be the first to admit that the rush of power from stabbing and beating guys to death was only a stop-gap measure and that the group sessions and anti-anxiety medication she later started had proven more effective for dealing with her panic attacks in the long run).
The difference is that you could close a lot of your plot holes without the "movie being over", so when you say it its an excuse not a reason... Also that's sometimes a reason/excuse for one plot hole which is script essential - but your story is riven with tens if not hundreds of plot holes, like the literary equivalent of an Edam cheese , and you can't excuse them all (well you can, but not if you hope to get published or produced)
Okay thanks. Aside from that whole blood in thing from before, what are the other plot holes? I thought it was just the one I was down to now, but what are the other tens of them?
