A great writer is a great storyteller. Walking down the street twiddling your thumbs? When I read this I thought immediately of Thomas Covenant when he is walking down the street and we are introduced to him. The action of walking down the street was never made interesting, but what we learn while he is doing so is. (That is how the first book started, wasn’t it?) Anyhow, a boring plot with dull characters and no conflict will never be interesting no matter how much of a word master someone is. The story is everything.
I think most of the time, people try to hard to come up with great plots, but the story doesn't follow suit. I think good writing can be about anything, from a man walking down the street to chasing monsters through the Swiss Alps. It all depends on how you say it. Can you write a great story about a man waling down the street. Of course. But, like architectus said, it probably wouldn't be about him walking down the street anymore. Then again, Is Catcher in the Rye about Holden walking through New York or what he's thinking about? Maybe that's splitting hairs. Anyway, the point I want to make is that you can write a great story about anything, and it can be great writing. But I basically agree with what whoever started this thread said. So yeah.
Perhaps this is redundant but I feel it needs to be said: your comment is entirely subjective--there are plenty of great works of literature that revolve around little or no story whatsoever. Likewise, there are stories with amazing plots that are appallingly written. If being a great writer was as simple as having a great story, it'd be a lot easier to become one.
My thoughts exactly! Don't oversimplify. There's almost always more to the story. (Perhaps it's a reverse Seussian Mulberry Street? Everything in the world is happening around this guy - murder, assault, bank robbery, police chases, weddings, bar mitzvah, birthday parties, clowns, balloons, the whole proverbial 'magilla' and he doesn't see any of it.) As you can see, that quite dull sounding jumping off point could lead to so many different interpretations. Dull little man walking down the street twiddling his thumbs? Depending upon your degree of imagination, even that could be exciting and, depending on one's lack of imagination, something like War and Peace could be made to sound pedestrian.
I would love for someone to point out to me a great piece of literature that had a terrible plot and little conflict. Perhaps, as you say, I have not yet experienced them.
That isn't what the poster said, though. All he said was: That's only a summary of the storyline. It isn't the plot, nor does it presume that the character is uninteresting or that there is no conflict. Make sure you understand the difference between plot and storyline.
Virtually any fiction or plays by Beckett, the majority of the fiction of Elfriede Jelinek (both Nobel prize winners), a few of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, The Road by Cormac McCarthy....and that's just by a quick glance at one of my bookshelves. As has been pointed out, literary fiction is full of work that is not driven by any particular plot or character, but by language and style. The same isn't true for genre fiction, but that doesn't mean that such books don't exist.
I looked up The Road by Cormac McCarthy in Wikipedia. It had a good size plot summery full of conflict.
I don't think the summary describes what I'd call a "plot," having read it, so much as maybe a tenuous storyline that sort of emerges as the characters simply experience their "world." I mean, just because a story is unconventional (and THE ROAD is that) doesn't mean it cannot be summarized for all kinds of reasons, including book jacket blurbs, film pitches, and certainly a Wikipedia description. Neither the kind of character development, nor the "conflict" in this novel is probably what a reader would anticipate from a more conventional (certainly a mainstream) novel (although maybe you've seen the movie--I haven't; that might give you a different take than reading the book). You could say that Beckett's UNNAMABLE is a story about a mind that finds itself in a dying body stashed in a flower pot (if I remember), a vantagepoint from which this mind observes himself, his own thoughts, and his surroundings, desperately despairing that he cannot prevent himself from continuing to think. It's truly not exactly a plot. Or, maybe more to the point, the work itself is not driven by any particular storyline trajectory. In my mind, this was more a reading "experience" than what most conventional readers would probably demand or expect (or want) from a "story." "Conflict" (or "tension) comes in all kinds of forms, really, not always from a "plot," per se, or a protagonist/antagonist kind of relationship. But, now that I think of it (with respect to the lack of conflict or tension), what about Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES, which is a series of stories about imagined cities presumably told to the Kublai Khan by this fictional Marco Polo. A delightful, highly imaginative fictional travelogue! I don't recall much of anything I think I would've called conflict or tension. In fact maybe its absence is one of the interestinig qualities about this particular story. Trust me, there's fiction out there that redefines fiction. There's a ton of stuff that's jaw-droppingly creative! But now I've forgotten the topic.:redface:
Somehow I missed your response. Anyhow I can see that the wording above could be interpreted differently. I don’t read that as referring exclusively to plot. At what point, though, does the story become more about a character rather than the twiddling of thumbs? If the character is interesting, I think the story would quickly become about that character.
