The importance of telling a story

For me, story first, but grammar and spelling are important, too. It's like building a house -- the design and way it's architected, etc. etc. is important. But you can't ignore that hole in the wall, or the broken wood plank or that crack in the window. They're distraction. They won't make the house "bad" per se, but they marr it.

Grammar and spelling are your tools. Without them, you can't really build a good house.

Interesting concept....but when i read a story i become ingulfed in the whole thing.

If there are too many 'bad grammar' areas or poor workmanship of lines it makes me stumble in the flow.

I wouldn't enjoy the 'street talk' of the super young kids in big cities.
I don't do well with lots of 'slang' talk because it is not part of my world and makes it tuff for me to flow with the story.

I guess it's because I'm simple minded. (sigh)

Some folks like the Old English way of talking and for me it is hard to enjoy. I guess that's why there are so many different types of writing styles. But poor grammar should not be part of it.

I have to watch it because i over do the full sentence which takes the personality out of the speaker. I know 'real' people don't talk like that.

Thanks for the question, it's given me something to think about.

Love you guys........wendy......

Jealousy. We think we're better writers than them, but they're the ones making millions.

I was in a literary college class back in the 80's, when Stephen King was still being dumped on by the NYT Book Review, and so I never even looked at his work.

Then I saw Stand By Me, and wanted to read the book (Different Seasons), and I remember staying up all night to read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. I'd never done that before. Certainly not with any of the literary writings I'd been struggling through. I even remember feeling uneasy about it, like, "What's this guy doing? Is he somehow casting a spell?"

And of course, he was, and is. It's called storytelling.

In fact, it's funny you asked this question, 'cause just a few hours ago I typed up some notes of mine and found this bit about David Morrell's Brotherhood of the Rose.

i used to be a big king fan. then i turned fourteen. suddenly his stuff just didn't start to gel: he'd say things that were supposed to mean something to me in my real life i knew weren't true, some very broad generalizations built on the solid foundation of... assumption. i've said it before: you can't drive by a crack house and pretend to understand that world. granted, all i ever read of king was the horror books. steel's biggest problem, as far as i can tell just skimming through her books, is that she's a simplistic writer who uses the word 'and' in virtually every sentence. seriously. yet my wife loves her books, which on the surface seems to be nothing put pure fluff. i reckon it all boils down to the old saying, 'there's no accounting for taste.'

why do unpublished writers criticize these people so much? jealousy? nah, i'm not jealous of king. his horror never impressed me, and even less so once clive barker came out. just mho, though.

why would a young rocker go up to billy idol and shout in his face, 'you boring old fart!'? probably for the same reason billy idol did it when he was that age and felt he had the chops to fight for the top seat. probably the same reason old gunfighters kill so many kids looking to make a name for themselves. it's a circle of life thing, lol.

jealousy? no. i just want what you got, and i don't think you can hold your crown any longer, ya boring old fart. grandma stopped reading you a decade ago. your time has come and gone, quit resting on your laurels. retire. go to florida and let your blood get so thin you have to turn the heat on when it's a 112 degrees outside. write boring stories for the matlock generation. start ripping your own stories off because you're washed up, wiped out, scrubbed clean of anything new to say. long live and love me... until i start to suck, too, and magazines i've never heard of start bashing me. i've already got my condo in orlando scoped out.

where was i? telling a story... yeah, i imagine that being a storyteller, telling it well might be slightly important, lol. i suppose you could call that technique, eh? this isn't about the importance of characters and plot. storytelling is about how you combine those two, the 'style', the 'voice,' and it's one of the things i look at when reading a book. apparently i'm in the minority of people who don't like knowing within the first 100 pages that the protagonist is going to die by use of foreshadowing. spelling and grammar is important, but, eh, i shouldn't even notice it. if i do, then it's a problem. writers should know how to use a damn dictionary.

Telling a story is extremely important, and it's no coincidence that the best-selling authors are the ones who actually know how to tell a story. People have varying levels of sensitivity to prose (and incidentally, if someone's saying 'he's not a good writer,' that's probably nothing to do with his spelling/grammar, assuming he's published. His prose is probably just...bland). Real awkwardness and blandness are going to trip up some readers, but some are going to be too involved in the story to care.

Taste vs Grammar

Most of the comments about writers (that I have seen) refer to content over grammar. And content includes writing style.

Some people love flowery description, others want lean and mean. If you like one over the other, that is a matter of taste. Some people like virtually anything. They are easier to please, and don't care. As a reader, I'd prefer to be easily satisfied. But in one sense, you are what you are.

There are published authors who appeal to a specific audience instead of a broad audience. They have an audience, so they get published. But if you liken this to cooking, you have some people who cook for people with a narrow set of tastes and people who have a broad set of tastes.

People who do the former will prepare meals that will make some people gag. But as long as their audience likes it, they stay in business. Honestly, I have a sister-in-law that I call an "Anti-social" cook. She invites you over, and then experiments on you.

And there's nothing wrong in being an experimental cheif. But if you experiment, you'll find a lot more success stories if you experiment with things that you know are likely to work, like a different kind of beef stew, or some dish with chicken. But if you serve up eye of gnewt (sp?) served over toad testicles, don't expect everyone to jump for joy.

But my SIL would say, "I'm having pasta..." And you'd think conventional pasta with some familiar sauce...No Way! I hate to say it, but she finds a way to make any meal a game of "What in the world did she put in this?" and "What are those black things?"

Writing is a lot like cooking. Those who love meals cooked for a broad audience may absolutely hate someone's experimental cooking that some narrow audience loves.

I'd never insult another writer's work, for such minor cases. I think all writers should get the chance to be read, and not judged over superficial stuff.

Without a doubt the story is the most important

thing. After all, that is why your reader is reading. If you can tell a good story you are home free.

Keep writing!

As I've said before, I don't think it's constructive to point at a successful writer and say, "his/her book sucks."

I look at it and say, "what about this book works so that so many people want to read it?"
I think what you'd find is that it's a great story, well-written or not.

Story is important but...

I just finished a book that had wonderful ideas and a great story line, but there were so many formatting problems, grammatical mistakes and awkward sentences that it was extremely distracting. I had trouble telling who was talking most of the time. I don't usually get nit-picky with mechanics, but in this case, the grammar detracted from the story.

So, the story is important, but I think you need to keep an eye on mechanics as well.

Story. And funny enough spelling. Grammar if it works for the story, I have no problem with. But if it is just bad grammar then I toss the book.

Shawn

Story all the way

Personally I think its a balance. If one element (the story) can overpower or make up for the deficiencies of another element (spelling\grammar), then I still think a book will be a sucess. As other have pointed out this is why Dan Brown and Stephen King are so popular and sucessful.

But I don't think it goes the other way - no amount of proper spelling and grammar or even style will make a poor story sucessful.

So for me, its a balance heavily wieghted in favour of the story. The 'sweet spot' is hwere the story is good and the gramma and spelling aren't noticed (or don't detract from the story)

Of course the one thing that's missing, that is almost as important as the story is the style. Imagine if Carrie were written by Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson. That would be a totally different novel. And my wife wouldn't read it. Same story, but she likes King but absolutely can't stand Kerouac (to each their own ). In this case the style would negate everything.

So, a balance between story, style and mechanics, heavily wieghted in favour of story and less so in style and lesser still the mechanics.

unpub'd bashing pub'd

clotje:

Story is the first thing that sells in genre fiction. Style is what sells in literary fiction. In the former, it's what is said that is important. In the latter, it's how it's said that's important. I know, I know, very broad and very arguable distinction, but that's why literary authors and critics like excoriating the writing skills of genre authors and why genre authors like excoriating literary ones about things not happening in their stories. Literary writing possesses richness of language and expression that genre writing doesn't often exhibit. The difference has a lot to do with the purpose of each type of writing and its intended audience. Lot's of ink has been spilled on both sides of this fence, but that about sums it up.

I wouldn't want to eat everything made just because someone made it. (Fear factor anyone?) The reader/writer relationship is one of give and take. If they give me something good, I take it. Then I give them something good (my money) and they take it. Obviously "good" is in the eye of the beholder.

I anticipate some will like my writing. Perhaps some will love them. But others may use the paper from my book in a "Dances with Wolves" sort of way. (There's a scene where this soldier has to go to the bathroom and...aw forget it!) You get the drift.

I don't think dissing the masters or the successful is just a old guard-new guard thing. For instance, Virginia Woolf is a famous stylist, not really involved in stortelling IMHO. Mrs. Dalloway has to be the most tedious thing I ever read, and that includes the first chapter of Ivanhoe where the MC is tending pigs. I don't like horror, but Stephen King is a fine writer, worth reading just for his characterizations. Yes, he can tell a story, whether or not it is a story I want to read.

Frankly, I have little patience with sloppy writing, but, if a story grabs me, I skim it, ignoring what irritates me.

clotje said:

I've noticed that some unpublished writers keep running down certain published authors, saying that their writing is not good.

Click to expand...

That's because some unpublished writers don't understand why a popular, successful writers is popular and successful. They can see the flaws, but can not recognize the appeal.

It's a weakness.

Both story and grammar are important to me--but then I tend to be a stickler about grammar when it comes to the written word (written meaning books and business correspondence, not necessarily online). However, I do think story is the most important. If the story is absolutely riveting and there are a few grammar errors it won't bother me much. Now if we're talking repeated grammar errors and typos on each page then the story probably isn't going to be able to counteract that for me.

In a professional, published work, it seems to me that "perfect grammar/spelling" is a given. What's to argue about, there? There's nothing to say. Just do your darnedest to make sure that it doesn't happen to you. That, by the way, is totally within a writer's control.

In my opinion, a good story is also a given. Of course, that's more open to debate (genre fiction vs. literary fiction, all that). Things like spelling and grammar are a lot less open to debate, IMHO.

You never see them making movies out of books because of the excellent grammar.

Lies, damn lies, and aesthetics

Oh dear, everyone's heavily into stories, and I seem to be the odd one out here. But that's not unusual.

I've always liked stories, but reading something that's a deliberately contrived pack of lies is appealing to me less and less as time goes by.

Endless repetition of the same old plot lines assembled and told with minor variations seems to me an exercise in futility - writing and reading for the sake of it.

Perhaps it's an age thing, but now I'm only interested in true lies rather than false ones. I'm looking for the 'art' in fiction. Not necessarily arty farty - two page descriptions of a trembling leaf, with the sun sparkling in the dewdrop cupped in its fragile embrace. No, I want the moment of silence - the time when you have to put down the book and absorb the passage that has just stopped you in your tracks, to consider the truth of it in all its revelatory beauty. Something about life that you possibly already knew or half suspected but have never seen expressed in words in so perfect a way.

It's the same moment of silence as the one you get in front of a painting that moves you; or when listening to a favourite piece of music; or the sublime dish with flavours and textures so subtle that you don't want to analyse them, you just want to revel in their sensory delight.

Having written this, I've just realised that I might be barking up the wrong tree in my writing. I'm trying to write mainstream/commercial fiction for the intelligent reader, where the story is OK but not the principal driver. I'm more interested in the milieu and the themes than generating a whole bunch of tortuous cliffhangers 'because one should.' But it's more than possible that I'm writing neither in a sufficiently story-driven way to appeal to popular fiction fans nor in a literary-enough way for the cognoscenti. Back to the drawing board, perhaps.

But there's no question in my mind that in genre fiction the story is everything as far as the reader is concerned. I've compared notes with intelligent, literate friends about certain popular fiction titles we've mutually read, and have been surprised to find they didn't even notice the appalling style, laziness of word choice and overall cheesiness of them. They just 'enjoyed the story as a good read.' Nuttin' wrong with that. But it means that now I have (to some extent) a writer's sensibilities, it's even more important that I should succeed as a writer, because I'm ruined as a reader.

Story is more important to me than anything else. Second is spelling. Oddly enough, I can handle less than perfect grammar but if words are misspelled...pffftt, forget it.

I think it's all part of the same thing. Is there really a reason why a riveting story should be cheap on the prose? Should a poetic masterpiece always be boring and aimless?


A good writer should know when to switch gears, and how to do it without burning out the clutch. I once made this analogy for shifts in POV. Why shouldn't it be possible to go from 3rd limited, to objective, to omnicient and back again, switching out characters? Why shouldn't it be possible to write things plain and simple when it's called for, and get poetic and flowery in other spots?

The only reason any expert can give for not trying these 'stunts' is that if you do it wrong, you'll suck. Well, that's true of everything. It's no reason not to push yourself and learn.