Gilligan's Island Syndrome and authors

[Particle_Man]

Is this like why Tom Cruise should not have used a relative as his press agent?

 

[jasper]

hate to say this but weber with Honor Harrington series.
Honor given substandard ship(s) discovered bad guys. Bad guys make mistakes. Bad guys die. Honor loses people or body parts.
Now Jordan I quit reading on the "Lazy Afternoon Book" I forget which book # it was but the action too place over just under a day. For 700+ pages.
Clan of Cave bear series.

 

[Rackhir]

hate to say this but weber with Honor Harrington series.
Honor given substandard ship(s) discovered bad guys. Bad guys make mistakes. Bad guys die. Honor loses people or body parts.

I think that's being a bit harsh on the Honor Harrinton books. Its hard to show how terrific and heroic your heroine is if they have an overwhelming force as well as a superior one. If the books do have a flaw its more towards Honor being an "Uber" character area.

 

[nothing to see here]

It's this reason I quit reading Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and several other authors years ago.

Stephen King? Don't get me wrong, he has his flaws, but formulaic doesn't appear to be one of them. Outside of his general habit of making every third or fourth book he writes centre around cataclysmic events originating in a small New England town, the number of different genres he attempts are more diverse than any other mainstream mass-market writer i've encountered.

If you look hard enough most mainstream genre fiction get's forumlaic. While I never bought into all that..."man vs man", "man vs nature" literary plot dichotomy crap...there are only so many fundamental ways to create the necessary conflict/tension necessary to move a plot forward.

An American Film-school academic named Ronald Tobias, wrote a book about a decade ago listing the '20 master plots'...it's a good list (I've attached a copy of the list I found online) -- albeit a debatable one. It reminds us that, while creativity is infinite -- narrative structure is much more limited. Anyhow -- I've attached his list here (which coincidentally is not a bad source when you're looking to theme your next adventure)

Quest
Adventure
Pursuit
Rescue
Escape
Revenge
The Riddle
Rivalry
Underdog
Temptation
Metamorphosis
Transformation
Maturation
Love
Forbidden Love
Sacrifice
Discovery
Wretched Excess
Ascension
Descension

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Barbara Hambly, while I like her quie a bit had at least two serieses with the exact same freaking characters! There was the woman from modern earth thrown into the fantasy world, the eccentric older wizard/master swordsman/annoying ubermensch (who she falls in love with), the well meaning but ultimately demeaned young man who can't keep up with either of the main characters, and a few formulaic supporting cast members. All right, I get it, you find men your own age shallow and incompetent and want to live out heroic fantasy beside your ubermensch life partner based on an older college professor you had a crush on! Can we move on now?!?

 

[mojo1701]

Barbara Hambly, while I like her quie a bit had at least two serieses with the exact same freaking characters! There was the woman from modern earth thrown into the fantasy world, the eccentric older wizard/master swordsman/annoying ubermensch (who she falls in love with), the well meaning but ultimately demeaned young man who can't keep up with either of the main characters, and a few formulaic supporting cast members. All right, I get it, you find men your own age shallow and incompetent and want to live out heroic fantasy beside your ubermensch life partner based on an older college professor you had a crush on! Can we move on now?!?

I couldn't stand her two "Star Wars" books I read. Well, I tried to read the second one.

 

[jcfiala]

Lilian Jackson Brown was doing this for a while in her 'The Cat Who' books. But you've got to give it to her - she eventually realizes she's stuck on a formula and then does her best to get out of it.

Some of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels have an unfortunate sameness to the flow of them, but he's also been working on disrupting that. (For one, he's writing different series with other co-writers, and for two he's retiring Dirk and using his two children as main characters.) Hard to say if they'll both work.