As someone who's been married for 28 years (!), I like it. Evil Tortie's Dad is in charge of breakfast b/c he's better at it than I am; I do dinner b/c he's terrible at it.

 Reply

I think Russell hit it on the head: Who cares about labels? If a writer is a good writer then it should matter if they are producing SF or romance or cookbooks - it's going to be good if they know their craft.

I personally think William Gibson's best book post-Neuromancer is Pattern Recognition, and I have a hard time seeing that as SF. But it's a good book. Stephenson's Cryptonomicon isn't SF, but it's a good book.

If the author is good, then labels really shouldn't matter. Their interests, as Griffith said, will still be a part of them and it will still color their later work. As a result I'll read just about anything she (Griffith) writes and tend to enjoy it. The same goes for Stephenson or Richard Grant (if anyone recognizes him - and I don't mean the actor) and various others.

 Reply

Delaney, Catigan, Gibson, sure. But "Flatliners"? If it weren't for Baby Kiefer, who'd care to watch?

 Reply

Also, story is pushed forward by character. Story is the character's reaction to plot. The story would have been completely different if Oedipus would have been like "SCREW YOU ALL, I"M KING FOREVARRRRRR" and shot everyone down with a machine gun. That could have been his reaction to events, and the actions he chose when outside influences (the plot) came down on him.

Good stories put compelling characters in unique situations that they can react to and deal with in an intriguing way. Or even compelling characters in boring situations that they handle in new and intriguing ways. The story is the way it is because of the CHARACTERS. The plot is the crappy or imperfect or dangerous world the characters are born into (or fall into, etc).

That's the exciting part about writing. To see what these little creatures inside your head will do. Sometimes, you put them in a bad situation, and they react in surprising ways, that mean you have new problems to solve. Or you can force them to be automatons and make them trudge through your plot to get from one point to the next to the next like scenes in an automated diorama. The good characters can change the flow of events and affect their surroundings and not "play the game" any more. The bad characters (and stories) just keep running around on their little track, completely unaware that they could step off at any moment.

 Reply

That said, so called plot driven fiction can also work well; as long as the characters remain surprising and have a will of their own. They cannot be so tied to the writer's will that they don't come to conclusions of their own.

This is part of the reason LOST works so well this season. The characters are plot driven, but their reactions are surprising and do not appear to be just steps to satisfy the author's need to put them in a certain place. Notice that while their actions lead them places that they don't want to go (back to the Island, for example), it doesn't happen in an expected way.

The real magic of a good story are characters that become real enough that we care what happens to them. The journey and the development of the characters is just as important as the destination.

 Reply

Examples:

Twilight - ALL plot. Bad writing.

Most Ursula LeGuin books - Great plot. Great, thoughtful writing. The best of both worlds.

 Reply

That said, if I had to come up with a way to say it, I think that the author's is pretty close.

I'd probably express it as story is what happens, plot is what happens next. Plot is action, story encapsulates the action.

 Reply

I think this whole "plot-driven is bad" meme is some taint from the literary world. Without a good plot, you have a shapeless muddle that causes narcolepsy. Unless you're a genius. But you're not, you're a hack. So hack out an awesome plot and flesh out those characters (and let them do what they want- if they don't want to follow your plot, then scrap your plot and write a new one).

 Reply