I agree, in my case my FMC will reach the final conclusion of her psychosis, ending her struggle. Oh I agree, I wouldn't kill her in the middle, it will be at the very end after the climax.
Don't forget the example of Psycho, in which what seemed to be the MC died in the shower in the middle of the film.
So what? How many best sellers this year ended with the protagonist dying? What percentage of first sales had that situation this decade? How many films ended that way last year? Do we really want to do something to minimize the probability of selling our first novel? After you develop a following you can write any kind of story you care to. But if you want to sell your first novel, telling the acquiring editor that the hero dies at the end will be as well received as "And then the little boy woke up and the entire thing was a dream."
If I'm ever feeling overly happy, I know I can just read any of your posts, Jay and bring myself down a couple dozen pegs. This is my story. The story is a tragedy. The MC pays for her poor decisions in the end. The story mst be written and, in my opinion, can't be cheapened by a forced HEA.
If you ask me, (which you didn't, but I'm responding anyway) this is the kind of advice that knocks people on their ass for no apparent reason. No one ever became great by following all the other sheeple around. You have to take risks, and do what feels right. It's far more rewarding than just doing the expected thing, in the expected way, until you get enough fans to do what you want. Don't you think those fans will feel cheated? I would. I'd rather them know what they're getting up front. But maybe that's just me.
@JayG: Jay, I’ve disagreed with nearly everything you’ve said about writing since you got here, but I’ve kept my mouth shut until now because it’s clear that we’re not in the same business. It turns out many other members here are also not in your business. You promote the views of writers like Dwight Swain and Jack Bickham. You’ve said that Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer is the best book on writing you’ve ever come across. On that recommendation, I’ve been reading it. (Also, I love books on writing and I’ve read dozens of them – maybe over a hundred.) I’m halfway through and I probably won’t finish it because Swain has nothing particularly useful or inspiring to say to me. Here’s the thing: Dwight Swain was a hack. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way; I think he would have agreed with me. The author of such novels as Terror Out of Space and Bring Back My Brain! is clearly not aiming for a Pulitzer Prize. He called what he wrote “commercial fiction”; most of us would call it pulp fiction. The models he cites in TOTSW are writers like Clifton Adams, Carroll John Daly, and Lester Dent. Has anybody ever heard of these guys? (Okay, I’d heard of Dent, because I read some of the old Doc Savage stories when I was a kid. Even when I was twelve, though, I could tell they were garbage.) I looked them up. They wrote pulp fiction. Disposable fiction. I checked on Amazon, and Swain’s stuff is practically all out of print, as is Bickham’s, as is Daly’s, etc. It was disposed of. The advice Swain gives is for wannabe hacks. He keeps telling us what the Reader wants (you do too, by the way) as if a) there’s only one kind of reader, and b) this reader hates reading and is constantly looking for any excuse to stop. My guess is that most of the members here would not recognize Swain’s “Reader” in themselves – our members have (for the most part) reasonable attention spans. I am (and I think many other members here are, as well) a member of a different class of reader: the reader who wants to be amazed, the reader who wants his mind blown. The formulas you and Swain keep advocating will never blow our minds. They will never shock us, astound us, dazzle us. They will, frankly, bore us. These formulas keep leading to the same old story over and over again. They lead to disposable fiction. That’s why most of us in this thread disagree with you. That’s why we’re willing to try a story in which the MC dies – even and especially if the MC is the first-person narrator. Sure, it’s unconventional, but that’s why we’re interested. We want to be challenged. The same old thing – the conventional story told conventionally that Swain keeps advocating – holds no interest for us. Will this make our first novels harder to sell? Sure. But the reason we write is we want to create something new, not to churn out yet another predictable story, completely interchangeable with thousands of others. Sorry if that sounds harsh - it isn't meant to. /threadjack
Yeah, you have to decide what you want to write. If you want to write generic fiction interchangeable with a lot of what is on the shelves, fine. Nothing wrong with that. But you don't have to write that, and I for one am glad not everyone does.
yes, steerpike... as there's really no other way it can be interpreted, is there?... which is why i dislike first person present tense and see it making no sense...
How does it not make sense? It's a story recorded entirely through one character's eyes. What they know, you know. What they see, you see. It's no different than the way you go through life every day - it's just someone else's life.
Yes, yes and again yes! And this, JJ, is why I dislike formulaic approaches. Because, dollars to doughnuts, at some point in writing the story that must be written, something called for by the formula will not fit, and when that happens, the only viable choice is for the formula to end up in the dumper. I get what @JayG is saying about writing anything you want to after you have a following. But here's the thing: what are the chances that the following one has cultivated by cranking out beach reading will suddenly be willing to make the leap to your highly literate, dark-humored, hero-dies masterpiece? Or that the agent who represented your other work would be prepared to represent it? Or that the publisher who's been pumping out your previous work (on paper or in bandwidth) would be prepared to make the leap with you? Or that the writer who feels (s)he's finally gotten moving will be willing to take the risk? We are all, to some degree, risk averse.
I don't agree. I've read books where the first person narrator dies without having the opportunity to record the events that transpired, so that can't possibly be the correct interpretation in that case. In my personal reading, I never make those assumptions unless the author provides something more to indicate that is what they're doing. I think readers tend to be sophisticated. They recognize the artifice at work in a piece of fiction, and they recognize stylistic decisions such as POV as sometimes being just that - a choice of style, without the intent that the narrative is the recorded past recollection of the narrator.
This is an excellent point. When you publish anything, you establish a brand. Your audience now expects a particular kind of story from you. If you published science fiction, you get tagged as a "science fiction writer" and if your next book is a Western, you'll alienate (see what I did there?) a lot of your readership. I suppose literary fiction is largely exempt from this kind of branding; people expect wild things from writers who've demonstrated the willingness to abandon genres and formulas. Some writers have had to use different pseudonyms for each genre they write in just so they don't confuse the audience.
This reminds me of JK Rowling writing The Casual Vacancy under a pseudonym. It was her first book after Harry Potter and was dark and twisted and vulgar. Rowling was interviewed in The Guardian concerning the response The Casual Vacancy would receive. She said "I just needed to write this book. I like it a lot, I'm proud of it, and that counts for me." Referring to her initial idea of publishing under a pseudonym she commented, "I think it's braver to do it like this. And, to an extent, you know what? The worst that can happen is that everyone says, 'Well, that was dreadful, she should have stuck to writing for kids' and I can take that. So, yeah, I'll put it out there, and if everyone says, 'Well, that's shockingly bad—back to wizards with you', then obviously I won't be throwing a party. But I will live. I will live." I don't know if that supports JayG's position or not, but I wonder how much she wanted to write this book when everyone else wanted another Harry Potter. She just needed to write it and didn't care if everyone hated it.
It does if you assume he was only talking about writers who establish themselves with multiple international best-sellers augmented by multiple film rights sales.
The death of the MC doesn't neccessarliy mean that you backed the wrong horse. Maybe it was some sort of self-sacrifice, maybe his or her death was inescapable anyway. I can think of many circumstances under which the death of the MC would actually provide a stronger ending than one in which he or she would life. I personally think that Harry Potter would've been better if Harry had died, but that's just me.
Thanks for mentioning this. This is how I often feel like when reading rules and guidelines about what one should write and how if they want to get published. It's like what we novice authors are doing is inventing torture devices -- yet somehow we want to sell them to non-masochists too. I'm not saying we shouldn't listen to those with experience, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I disagree. In 3rd person we try and try to make the reader involved, to put the reader into the characters' shoes, or let them explore the world with the characters. It doesn't make any sense either, but for some reason so many people still love to do it, still love to read, even though it's really non-sensical if you get to the bare bones of it. That's why I don't give a crap if the novel is written in 1st person & past, yet the narrator dies at the end. I know I'm reading a work of fiction anyway and when it's engaging, enjoyable, and gives me something to think about, whether it's in past/present, 3rd/1st/2nd becomes less significant. To me anyway, as a reader. Damn straight. If writing a surefire sell (as if that existed) feels wrong, why on Earth should we waste what little time we have on something unpleasant -- the chances of making money out of writing are low enough anyway, so it'd be nice to get to enjoy the process instead of wasting a year scribbling down that 70k 3rd person HEA erotica about werewolves and zombies frolicking in a post-apocalyptic world... Okay, come to think of it, I'd probably have fun writing that, but maybe you get my point. There's enough boring stuff one has to do to get by anyway, like pay bills, go to the doctor, meet relatives, hoover, remember to like your best friend's newborn baby's pics on FB, etc. So I'd rather enjoy writing, even if the stuff that I write is not likely to sell instantly. Good point. I guess one just has to make a decent amount of compromises with their first manuscript (like cut down the word count and perhaps avoid chapter names and italics) and once they've landed an agent, gotten something published, one can starts expressing themselves more freely.
Minstrel, as beautiful a sentiment as this is, I'm wondering if you need to ask your eye doctor for a better pair of glasses. There are numerous people here who for a certainty would be interested in this formula, whether they feel comfortable admitting it or not. Hence the various threads and excerpts based on Hunger Game-esque plot lines and George RR martin knock offs.
Sure there are. That's why I said, quote, "I think many other members here...". Note that I did not say "all other members" or "everyone else." I was careful not to speak for everyone, because, as you point out, numerous people (here and elsewhere) like reading formula fiction and desperately want to learn to write it. I was simply standing up for the rest of us, because it seems to me that @JayG thinks everybody likes formula fiction and every writer should write it.
I totally agree with Minstrel here. Formula fiction is essentially throw-away fiction, and some people love 'light' reading. Nothing wrong with reading formula fiction, any more than reading a newspaper or magazine—but it's a time-passer, and not much else. Nothing wrong with writing formula fiction either, if getting published within a particular genre and reliably paid is your primary goal. More power to your arm. However, I want to be proud of what I write. Churning out a piece of throwaway formula fiction that ticks all the must-do boxes, and comes complete with an obligatory happy ending is NOT why I write. I write because I have a one-off story to tell, and I want my readers to identify with my characters and maybe even relate their experiences to real life. I certainly want my readers to enjoy reading my tale, but I also accept it won't appeal to everyone ...no more than reading formula fiction appeals to me. I've heard it said that you should write the book you want to read. That's certainly my own philosophy.
I like both. I read formulaic best sellers, as well as "literary" fiction, or classics, or more experimental work. If everyone wrote the same sort of thing, no matter which of these categories it fell into, I wouldn't be happy about it.
Guys(meaning Minstrel and Jannert), I'm with you 100%. It's good to aim high, but something to keep in mind..sometimes before going big, you have to start small, right? I occasionally wonder if its not better to write something simple and straightforward, first, and once critics are laving you with praise, then start spanning your horizons.
