Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Mr first guest post on Bookgoodies.com recently appeared. It's entitled: "Plot or Character: Who's in Charge Here?" The title pretty much speaks for itself. You can read it at: http://bookgoodies.com/plot-or-charac...

I agree that no one cares how exciting a plot, action, or danger is if the characters aren't compelling.

All action sequences are ultimately the same. In Greek myths, it was a volcano or a lightning bolt and in today's world its a hostage situation or a terrorist threat. But it ultimately doesn't matter. The results are the same: characters scurrying about; grabbing for weapons; racing for shelter or hanging from ledges. Action is abstract; psychology is concrete. Characters make the difference in a reader's interest.

Ultimately --at the end of a book or a movie--no one is going to remember the fussy technical details of the complicated heist or the prison-escape. They remember the last emotional scene before the heist began (such as the gang boss warning his lieutenant not to betray them) or they remember the first emotional scene to arise afterwards (the boss and the lieutenant glaring at each other over the loot).

As humans, we're engineered to key in on facial expression, body language, and emotion because on a primitive level this is how we detect threat.

When you read a lengthy technical manual on structural engineering; what do you remember of it? A series of diagrams makes no real impression on us.

In a book, when an author describes a break-in or a prison escape, that is a rather homogenous stream of information--just like a manual or set of diagrams--but no peaks or valleys on the emotional plane. Its character which makes us keep reading.

There's a lame 'screenwriting guru' out there who insists that what James Bond does; makes him exciting. He says we wouldn't watch Bond for any other reason than the action sequences. Totally wrong; as there are many knock-offs and copycats of James Bond action in dud-movie after dud-movie and they all fail. But its Bond we keep going back to; because of his character. Because he is cool no matter what he is doing.

Well spoken, Feliks. The key in my view to the worth of a book is if it stays with you. And most that do are because of the characters. I think of Odysseus, Ahab, Dracula and Remedios the Beauty...and of course many more. But there is more to it than that, and what we all must confront as writers. And that is the magic, the thing that pushes us over the top. It has nothing to do with sales or with the current flavor of fashion...it does have something to do with the long hours revising, the brutal self criticism....look at the torture Dylan Thomas went through to complete a poem...but there's even more than that, because ultimately there are a million factors you have to get just right....and we fail all the time, even though we can never accept failure as an option. I think a true writer lives with a lot of misery; I was fortunate to live with a woman who I call Mom who somehow made me into a cheerful sort of guy, and so the misery is generally bearable. Work, work, work, and hang on, usually by a tenuous thread, to that vision.