Jonathan Hallock
Freshman Composition 151
M. Hoggard
Essay #3 Final Draft 3/27/06
A thousand words is worth a picture
Writing a story is deceptively simple. To write a story you just need to string together sentences describing a series of events; anyone can do that. Writing a good story, however, is very difficult, and takes a great deal of practice and hard work to accomplish. A good story needs characters that are interesting, vividly detailed environments, and above all must remain interesting to its intended audience. As inexperienced a writer as I am, I have read a great deal of books, and will try to explain what has made them bland or excellent in my eyes.
All stories have characters, but great stories have characters you understand and care about. A well-developed character will feel detailed, allowing the reader to get some understanding of his or her motivations, feelings, actions and goals. As a reader, you will learn to anticipate a well-detailed character’s decisions before you read them. A poorly detailed character, however, can leave the reader with the impression of the persona as being nothing more than background noise of no real importance. Special attention needs to be given in stories that involve “villains” or “bad guys.” In murder mysteries, for example, many times a wrongdoer is left without any explanation as to why he is a wrongdoer, being evil simply because “it’s what bad guys do.” The details and motivation of a good bad guy are just as important as any other central character.
The environment of a story is important as well. A good writer will keep his intended audience in mind at all times, and choose his words carefully to paint a vivid and colorful picture of the environment he is trying to convey in his work. Without a properly detailed environment, the story can come across to the reader as something entirely different from what was intended. Using words that are unclear or providing excessive amounts of detail can become as bad as not providing enough detail, drawing the reader out of the story and subtracting from its level of immersion. Great care must be taken to find a proper balance between too much detail and not enough. Stephen King or Tom Clancy are good examples of writers who, though they write excellent stories, can use excessive amounts of detail and subtract from the overall appeal of their content. A good writer can turn a simple idea into several pages of descriptive content, but such practices can easily lose a reader’s interest in the subject.
To be effective, any story needs a plot that is understandable and makes sense. While a good story will always contain a cohesive plotline and path towards a specific outcome that the reader can easily follow and understand, breaks and chops in the story arc are sometimes quite effective as well. Mysteries and stories with reversed plotlines are good examples of works that use broken story arcs to add to the level of immersive detail by making the reader fill in gaps of detail on their own. Explaining who the murderer is in a mystery at the beginning of the story would create a more straightforward plotline, but would be much less interesting to read. Breaks and plot reversals can quickly become confusing however, and one must be careful to not lose the reader entirely. The movie “Memento,” for instance, is told in segments, entirely in reverse of the actual plotline, and borders on a razor’s edge between being too confusing, and a great story.
Any regular story will feel like simple words on a page, but a good plot draws the reader into the story, making them care personally about the characters and situations involved and putting a personal desire into seeing a specific outcome. Detailed characters invoke empathy in the reader and detailed environments make the reader form a personalized picture of the written word in their minds, feeling as though they are a part of the story. The level of immersion relies as much on the reader as the effort the writer has taken in constructing his plot. Again, having an intended audience in mind throughout the writing process is very helpful in knowing how to produce a desired reaction with written work.
Above all else, a good story must remain entertaining. A story with all the qualities of a good story without being entertaining is simply not a good story. No amount of content can make a story worthwhile if no one has the desire to read it. A decent writer can keep his intended audience in mind and pander a little to remain entertaining, by presenting what he knows his audience will respond to, but mostly it simply relies on imagination and creativity to make a unique world and plotline that strikes a cord with a reader.
Video games have the unique ability to express the details of a story almost entirely through visual means. Rather than describing in detail an environment and getting an uncertain result, a game can simply show the player exactly what is intended. First person shooters and role-playing games rely heavily on visual input to develop characters and environments for the player to interact with, describing key portions of the plot in an easier, yet more rigid fashion. Allowing less creativity in the way the player develops the environment personally than a reader of a written work. The level of immersion available to a story told in a first person game is worth noting however, as the ability to make the player feel directly involved in the plot is readily apparent.
Overall, any great story will be entertaining and involving to the reader, while presenting an interesting and understandable plotline filled with detailed individual characters no matter what type of story it is. A good writer can present a world with his words, and a great writer can literally make you care about that world, and feel attached to it. After finishing a good story, you feel closure. After finishing a great story, it sticks with you for days afterwards, your mind wandering to it at any idle moment, feeling sad that you have finished something you came to enjoy.
Writing is much like painting. Anyone can write a story who understands the language, just as anyone can paint a picture that has an easel and a can of paint. Very few people however can write a story that is legitimately great, as only a handful of people can paint a masterpiece. It takes a lifetime worth of dedication, constant practice, talent and a little bit of luck. Great authors are artists in the purest sense of the word, using their words as brushes to paint pictures in a reader’s mind exactly the way they intended.
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