SF/F stories that do not need to be written....

There are no ideas that can't or shouldn't be tried. How will you or anyone else know whether you have an interesting new twist on something if you don't write and then shop it around?

A good writer can make even a worn idea new or entertaining, again.

preyer said:

this happens more on the 'net than on the bookshelves (but not always), but what kind of stories have you seen so many times and in so many ways that it can hardly be expounded on?

i mentioned in another thread that for me it's the 'princess escapes/is thrown out/is usurped and has to live on her own. she learns about life, makes friends, and eventually returns to take back her crown.' usually, there are some friends thrown into the mix, characters you can see the author basing on friends and people in her high school class, maybe a teacher. another is indiana jones fanfics involving crystal skulls.

good gravy, people, can ya not think of anything better to write about?

another entire milieu of stories i can't bear anymore is vampires. oh, i know plenty of people still love this stuff, but, man, a person can only take so much, ya know? lol. post-apocalyptic stories where mankind is wiped-out from disease are usually pretty lame, too. some of them are like, 'have you even *thought* about what would happen if you woke up tomorrow and everyone was dead or dying?' 'let's go car shopping!' is about as bad a first-response as you can get.

i can't hardly say i'm sick of these stories because about three were enough to last a lifetime, these 'stories' without plot, characterization, any sense whatsoever. you know the kind i'm talking about, where flying submarines on their way to get tofu chili dogs and psi-cola and piloted by the author as the main character, betty boop, and some obscure cyberpunk thing, are shot down by roses fired from a long-haired hippie turtle's butt. please, these things are stupid, boring, and pointless, and the fact that you wrote one doesn't mean you should expect people to read it, so why shop it around to every third website with a writing forum as were you looking for a movie deal?

whew. rant over. thanks for listening.

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There are no story types I don't want to see more of. It's how the story is handled that's the problem. It's the endless imitators. But any idea and any story type can be made new and refreshing by a good writer. If they couldn't, we would have run out of things to write an eternity ago.

Dave's point about good writers not withstanding, I would die happy if I never read another epic fantasy that sounds like a retread of The Lord of the Rings.

Does that mean I should dump my The Duke of the Triangles?

Long live Oblio.

DaveKuzminski said:

Does that mean I should dump my The Duke of the Triangles?

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Ah, I can see it now...

Cue the orchestra! The musicians take a first look at the new symphony. The Duke of the Triangles takes his instrument in hand and steps up to the score. The first bar is a rest. The second bar is a rest. He scans the first page, then starts to flip through the score -- rests, all rests. Then at the end of bar 128, he gets to play one lousy note. It's marked "Piano". A triangle? Piano? Piano?!?

"I'm sick to death of this," he says, theatrically stamping his foot. "I won't put up with it. In fact, I don't have to put up with it, because I know where the conductor keeps the score. Nobody will notice if I slip a page or two extra in. Huh! This symphony is going to have something entirely unprecedented in the history of classical music -- a triangle solo!"

Evil laughter rings through the chamber.

Well, there are a couple of things I'm considerably sick of myself. But I won't get into writing off whole plots and milieus - after all, one hates to think what would have happened had QE1 looked at Hamlet and said, "What? Yet another rip-off of Kidd's Spanish Tragedy?" Still you do have a point that any fantasy book that starts off with the mysterious and ancient mage/druid/mystic showing up to pull the young halfthing/gnome/bobbit away from his peaceful village to defeat the imminent destruction of everything good and true by the Evil Lord of Death/Hell/Evil-Land... Well it's probably not going to be particularly clever in its writing either, is it now? (Yes, I'm looking at you, Terry Brooks.)

But here's one thing that gets me down: the writers who try to fit as many exotic names and made-up words in a sentence as it can syntactically bear, with a minimum of one per line. Now, I love exotic words and foreign languages. I'm never happier than wandering through the wild places in the Balkans that still suffer from the Great Vowel Famine of Ought Nine. That's not the problem at all.

But you know what I'm talking about - the prose that reads like

Young Kelliri would now have to face the wrath of Klang-Trimeton, the evil Lord of the plane of Rughfeqra. Unless Rutedno the Werchuk made it though the swamps of Fasgizz in time, that is. The difnu-flies would be a menace there. Kelliri reached out to Rutedno with the krilaling but got no answer...

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Or, to pick a particular sub-set of this class, anything written by AA Attanasio.

Which brings to mind another serious problem: SF novels written by people with no earthly idea about actual science. You know the problem: earthlike planets turn up in the middle of space with no star nearby or other source of warmth, breathable oxygen atmospheres on worlds with no life, alien critters who breed and grow with no respect for conservation of mass, and so on. I mean, if it would take a PhD in her own specialty to find the problem, no big deal. But if you're going to write science fiction, know enough science to explain what's going on, or at least know your limitations. It's not whether something is scientifically "impossible" (a nonsensical concept, actually), it's whether the world you're spinning is plausible. And that's something any fiction writer needs to bear in mind. It's a question of respect for the reader.

I even like unpronounceable names. I just don't like it when an author thinks he's really showing off his creativity with how many random letters he can string together.

I could go on, but I'm really just trying to run up my post count here.

And I rather like Vampire Hunter D but the story was nonsensical to nonexistent. Van Helsing, now, what a pity. Great (original) character. Unwatchable movie.

Nosferatu is still my favourite vampire movie. It was made back in the days before vampires had been done to death.

A friend of mine has very nearly finished writing the definitive vampire/occult/theological/detective thriller. It's very good and wholly original, and you should all definitely buy it when it comes out

My own favourite vampire film is Blood Ties, in which the vampires are actually a surviving remnant of a more predatory sub-species of Homo sapiens.

Mr Underhill said:

Well, there are a couple of things I'm considerably sick of myself. But I won't get into writing off whole plots and milieus - after all, one hates to think what would have happened had QE1 looked at Hamlet and said, "What? Yet another rip-off of Kidd's Spanish Tragedy?" Still you do have a point that any fantasy book that starts off with the mysterious and ancient mage/druid/mystic showing up to pull the young halfthing/gnome/bobbit away from his peaceful village to defeat the imminent destruction of everything good and true by the Evil Lord of Death/Hell/Evil-Land... Well it's probably not going to be particularly clever in its writing either, is it now? (Yes, I'm looking at you, Terry Brooks.)

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Or Terry Goodkind. Someone tried to get me to read Wizard's First Rule and I had to give up after about 2½ chapters, before I was permanently brain-damaged by the sheer howling boredom.

On the other hand Tad Williams' enormous Memory, Sorrow and Thorn quadrilogy takes an entirely fresh look at LotR (it's suposedly set in the same world, only on a different continent and a thousand or more years alter) and in my opinion does it better than Tolkein, at least as far as character and species development goes - although someone really should tell him that malachite is green not black!

preyer said:

hey, if it's possible to make vampires new and refreshing, i'd look at it. 'if' being the biggest word in the english language, lol.

come on, y'all, isn't there *something* you're sick to death of seeing regurgitated over and over and over and over again? 'refreshing' often means 'oh, i haven't seen this idea in ten years. i'll reminensce.' sure, i imagine there is a good vamp story out there.

somewhere.

it's just a matter of slogging through the swamp of average-ness at best and weighing the search against the finding a good story. it would have to be a quest i'd really have to be into.

i'm with zane, i'll more than likely never pick up another LOTR-type trilogy again. maybe if it got absolutely rave reviews and recommended to me personally, otherwise, i mean, what's the point of reading the *exact* same thing yet once more? i'm actually pretty easy to entertain, i just know what i like, and the abovementioned stories are, to me -- stories that do not need to be written. ...with the caveat that they suck, which most of them do.

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I don't like pale imitations of good novels, regardless of the plot or anything else. But there is no idea that can't be done in a new, refreshing way, there are simply too few good writers to get the job done.

To some extent, I think this has something to do with the attitude you take into it. Sometimes I run across new writers who are still thinking pretty much like fans. They write fan fiction by stealth; that is, the main characters aren't called Frodo and Sam, but they might as well be. But if you approach it more like a writer, intent on developing your own ideas, there's no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to choose whatever elements are going to work for you and your story. For example, who'd have thought anyone could do anything decent with English boarding school fiction until J K Rowling came along?

But that story of the two aliens throw off their home planet to a nice warm rock three steps from a big star to give birth to nice little boy who like wearing any form of a moustache until a mean kid of another religion made him walk like a duck and the girl who couldn't care less about being a wife and mother until a big strong man came along to show her how long hair and castles are groovy.

Oh wait, I should have put that in Share Your Work.

there are two reasons that many boooks are like Lord of the Rings


people trying to capitalize on LotR's success by rewriting it: bad

people who understand that the epic fantasy was around before TRolkien and that it is a powerful and interesting style, and choose to write a book using the same plot structure as tolkien: good.

Slush

preyer said:

try telling that to those authors who just *know* their story is somehow far and away better than the thousands preceeding it, lol. james, haven't you said you've sat in your fair share of slush piles? i'm sure you've seen your share of these kinds of stories. how far did you have to read them to decide 'this is crap. next'? for some of these things, being a good writer ain't gonna be enough-- you're going to have to be a *great* writer for my money.

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You're right. I usulally made it about three pages in before moving on. Yes, it does take a great writer to make something like this workable. But it happens. Far too rarely, but it happens. Every now and then you pull out a story and just can't put it down. Often the plot will be old and tired, but what the writer does with it is amazing.

And, yes, merely being good isn't enough. If you're simply good, you'd better be original, too.

Me? I hate the "young boy of low station with special powers for which he feels guilty", one of the reasons my protagonist is a 30-something knight of fearsome reputation.

That said, some of the kinds of stories you guys have been dissing, really belong to genres, e.g. complaining about vampires novels is like complaining about westerns.

fallenangelwriter said:

there are two reasons that many boooks are like Lord of the Rings


people trying to capitalize on LotR's success by rewriting it: bad

people who understand that the epic fantasy was around before TRolkien and that it is a powerful and interesting style, and choose to write a book using the same plot structure as tolkien: good.

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Not in my opinion. The same plot structure as LOTR almost always makes for bad fiction. Copying the plot structure is what gets so many writers rejected.
If you want to get away with copying the plot structure of LOTR, and some writers do get away with it, you'd better be a God Almighty good writer. You'll have to create characters so real, dialogue so good, and a story so strong that the editor and readers will overlook the plot structure.

SF and fantasy are modern takes on the traditional folk tale (all those miraculous ships, heroes who could go seven leagues at a stride, castles of glass, wizards, mechanical flying horses etc. etc.) and as such it's probably inevitable that "self-effacing boy with lowly status but miraculous powers" will be a very common theme, because it's one of the most popular and ingrained of Western folk-tales and has a starring role in our collective sub-conscious.

And the one about the band of comrades going on a quest for a magical object and battling monsters along the way is just good ole' Jason and the Argonauts.