The essays and notes here are to be ignored by anybody with a sense of humor or who has no time to read, not stories, but about stories. These writings are not entertaining or exciting, nor will they offer solace to unhappy and stifled lives, or beauty tips to men who are learning to be beautiful. What they are is a bunch of tedious and sometimes stilted attempts exploring the techniques and dangers of walking on stilts along a balance beam; a balance beam, across of which is glory, and below which is – oblivion.
What I mean to say is, that these writings are a bundle of essays produced by a young writer concerning the craft of storytelling in books, in performances, in movies.
At the beginning, I might as well say what the approach is.
Firstly, I'll look at story structure, how it's built, what the acts are, what the conflicts are, what possible inciting incidences may are swaggering about the text. I'll be looking at the technical side of the story because I believe that the better the technique of crafting a story, the more engaging the story is.
Further explanation: by technical, I mean a group of techniques that have been found to keep the reader reading and invested (conflicts, goals, plots; you know, stuff that sometimes fall by the wayside in modernist, post-modernist, post-post critiques, so eager as they are to get to the meat of a story's overt significance and embedded significance). By engagement, I mean the reader is more likely to finish the story than to rest it on the bedside, to be buried under more promising books and the undeniable judgment of dust.
Secondly, does the story matter to the reader?
This is a bit of the X-factor, but generally I'm asking a story whether or not it is presenting ideas and a worldview which are stimulating intellectually, emotionally, or morally. Some stories don't stimulate readers in any of these ways, and some stories contain worldviews that I disagree with. For an example of both – Transformers 3! What I learned from Optimus Prime there was that I should never trust the hesitations and debates that happen in a democracy, but that the only people who can protect a country are its elite military troops who ignore the governments commands. An embedded worldview. One I find disagreeable. Not to mention the reduction of sexual dynamics to dork-gets-wins-trophy-girl-ism, a typical cinematic treatment. And one with which I quite disagree.
Good examples also abound, though I won't put them here. I'll write about them on this site. And as for unpacking this X-factor, of what makes a story matter, I won't jump into dissecting that here. Partly, because I don't know what it is. Maybe largely. But I have my hunches, and the purpose of this blog is follow those where they lead.
