![]() ![]() And the world isn't over if you do it, either. There's definitely times when we simply just need to be told something. I don't care at all if the story has all the arcs and acts in place if the last third of a movie or a book doesn't contain interesting situations. Too often it feels like the last third of a movie is only all about getting the necessary "final acts" and "character arcs" done. Usually, even if the movie or the books is still good when it ends, they get remarkably weaker the closer to end they come at least when compared to the introduction stage of the story. Movies and books that truly hold their interest until the very end are super rare. To me, most of the movies are at their best during the first quarter of the movie where the people are introduced and where the world is being created by showing interesting scenes about that world and the people in it. To me, the absolutely most important thing in any fiction is to create a world. There is so much more to an interesting character than having him or her go through certain types of motions to get to a desired ending. While that's kind of there, it's about breaking it down even further and seeing how certain things reinforced other things and if the writer was betraying their own intentions.Īre the people and situations interesting? If you're someone that just learned about all these techniques, like I once was, you tend to take a quick look and go "oh, well there's just no good character arc", and call it a day. Look at pieces individually and figure out what worked and didn't work, and then come up with your own reasons as to why it didn't. It's one thing to say, "great, I have a character arc with lots of foreshadowing!" but it's another thing to actually look at it and say, "does this arc even make sense? Does it help what I'm trying to say? Is the constant foreshadowing taking away from other elements of the story?"Īs for critique, it comes down to the same thing: Don't penalize a writer for not adhering to rules. ![]() He's an intensely memorable character.įor the record, I don't think this comes down to people adhering to rules, it's people doing a poor job of writing and just using "rules" as a prop. But he acts as a force that drives home the thesis and changes the minds and opinions of not only the people in the movie, but also the audience. Think about Atticus Finch while not the protagonist, I'd argue he's a central character that never has an arc. I think you can have an unchanging main character who acts as a "force" that changes the environment they're in. I don't think that's necessarily true, although a lot of it comes down to semantics. For example, one of the biggest rules of all time is that your main character has to have a character arc. ![]() Rules get warped over time when I think it comes down to simpler elements: character motivation, pacing, and thesis reinforcement. 4, 5, and 6 acts can actually be super helpful in storytelling. Overadherence to rules makes us get stuff like the slavish devotion to 3 act structure which isn't even all that effective all the time. I think you have to have a strong understanding of why people follow these rules before you start bending them and doing your own thing. But on the flip side of that, don't break rules just to break rules. Don't follow rules just because they're rules, break rules when they help make the point better. However, what I learned over time is that creative license is definitely in effect as long as anything you do is reinforcing what you're trying to do. I used to be like this, and by admission, I still kind of am. Apparently people have this mindset of "overpowered characters are bad!" Ironically this will lead to weaker, "realistic" characters looking more overpowered if taken so thoroughly at face value. Wouldn't it be actually far more worse if the foreshadowing is always hammered a lot?Īnd we're not even getting to character writing. From what I heard people complain about "lack of foreshadowing" despite the fact that ever so often you actually get hints of certain events, even if just once. So much so that apparently you have people complaining why "A and B interact with each other so much yet we don't see A and C interact at all!" despite A and C interacting quite fine, just not the focus and are mostly just passive background scenes.Īnd then there's foreshadowing. Like for instance, we all know show don't tell. It seems to me that a lot of people take the supposed "storywriting rules" to heart they learned from those help books or those websites that criticize teenage/amateur writing, immediately criticizing the work because they spot it, but often forgetting that these are more like guidelines and that usually these things have to be viewed within the context of the story. ![]()
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