The Well-Tempered Plot Device

[Pielorinho]

My housemate sent me a link to an article about writing crappy Science Fiction. It's a pretty snobby, insulting article -- but it's also pretty funny. And if you're willing to be branded a crappy DM by this fellow, he's got some useful advice on constructing plot devices:

http://www.ansible.co.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html

Daniel

[edit: changed link to top of article instead of bottom of article. Doh!]

 

[Psion]

Heh. That was pretty funny. Loaded with cynical deconstructionism, but funny.

I especially like the Staff of Plot thing, and anything that slams Donaldson's writing can't be all bad, right?

 

[Deadguy]

I must admit that I am left with the feeling that the author doesn't get SF&F. He seems incapable of seeing the story and setting from within itself. Everything is about the "author" arbitrarily setting conditions, as though exactly the same does not apply to all other literature. The more limited tapestry on which most fiction is worked, based in the modern day or in history, is nonetheless replete with equivalent arbitrary choices made by the author in order to tell a story!

So, no, I didn't find it funny. Just the standard hackwork of a snob that doesn't understand the appeal of the truly imaginative.

 

[Henry]

Heh. That was pretty funny. Loaded with cynical deconstructionism, but funny.

I especially like the Staff of Plot thing, and anything that slams Donaldson's writing can't be all bad, right?

I sall not go one about Nick Lowe's opinions (after all, the article is 16 years old), but Calling The One Ring from Tolkien one of the biggest "Plot Coupons" in SF History means that this Author has an unquestionably huge set of Brass You-Know-Whats. Male or female, Nick Lowe has 'em.

Gotta Admire him for that, though.

 

[Pielorinho]

Well, even though I mostly disagree with his thesis, I still thought he was funny. Calling Donaldson's work "so flatulent that you have to be careful not to squeeze it in a public place" makes me giggle.

And yeah, I think that he's criticizing standard SF with the wrong tools, sort of like a classical music critic blasting Nirvana for overreliance on a single melody without sophisticated development. Other critics of SF focus more on the mythological feel of SF, and they get things righter. After all, some of the better-known Plot Devices out there include the golden fleece, the holy grail, Excalibur, and ambrosia and nectar.

If I criticize a Charles Dickens novel for its lack of mythological resonance, I'd get laughed off the block. So should this guy be.

That said, though, I still think he's a hoot to read. And gettin past his silly condemnations of plot devices, he's got some useful tips for campaign structuring. I like how he divides plot devices into three categories:

1) Coupons to collect (get all of these, and save the world!)
2) Vouchers to redeem (get out of jail free!)
3) Deus ex machina (step into the campaign in disguise and get things moving!)

These can be useful tools for a DM, as long as they're used subtly and judiciously. And though I laugh at this guy's essay, and use his advice, I won't invite him to my game .

Daniel

 

[MaxKaladin]

Good lord, what an incredibly offensive person!

Ok, literary criticism is valid but this guy goes far beyond legitimate criticism when he starts insulting whole categories of writers and their readership:

Armed with this knowledge, you are now equipped to go out into the world and create science fiction stories worse than any that have gone before them. The earth will tremble; railway bookstalls will burst with the fruits of your typewriters; small-time hacks like the vermin who write for Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine *** will be swept away by the new torrent of drivel! From this moment on, the universe is yours. The only thing that could possibly stand in your way would be a united resistance from those contemptible snot-gobbed arthropods the readers themselves, crying out against cheapskate exploitation fiction and demanding stories that can hold the road without the author stepping in every five pages to crank the bloody things up. Small chance of that, eh?

The comics have always been a kind of elephant's graveyard of antiquated plot devices, because they've always existed under the three ideal conditions for the genesis of bad plotlines: serial format with regular publishing schedules, an audience of adolescent Americans (arguably the lowest form of intelligence in the galaxy), and truly terrible writers.

I suppose this is the kind of backlash you get from literary types when they realize that most people prefer coherent and entertaining books to the trash they praise.

 

[Psion]

I sall not go one about Nick Lowe's opinions (after all, the article is 16 years old), but Calling The One Ring from Tolkien one of the biggest "Plot Coupons" in SF History means that this Author has an unquestionably huge set of Brass You-Know-Whats. Male or female, Nick Lowe has 'em.

Thing is that from an analytical standpoint, he's right.

Of course, the point of contention I have is that the denigrating tone that implies something is wrong with that. He drones on about the masses of SF readers that swallow this sort of thing, which has a rather familiar ring to it: how many of you are tired of hearing from elitist snobby gamers how the D&D players are the uneducated masses?

In the end, it is some very good analysis and in some cases I think he has a point; when tritely used as in The Dark is Rising, it does seem rather cheap. The analysis is good. The judgement that he hangs on it that using plot devices is necessarily hackwork is just good old fashioned cynical elitism rearing it's head.

 

[willpax]

The tables turned

For a fairly amusing demolition of award-winning "literary" postmodern fiction, check out this article from an older issue of _The Atlantic Monthly_:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/myers.htm

Not only are his examples hilarious, he actually engages in a coherent defense of so-called "genre" fiction.

 

[Pielorinho]

Re: The tables turned

Willpax, thanks for the link! I've read about three quarters of it now, and I'll make a quick comment:

I like Cormac McCarthy. He's weird and disturbing and has great images, and his books pull me into them very strongly. So when this guy started trashing McCarthy, he lost this fanboy.

At any rate, three-quarters of a way through the essay, he mocks another writer by saying (supposedly in the writer's voice), "Now read on, and remember, the mood's the thing."

Well, yeah. Sometimes, the mood IS the thing. But this guy is judging mood-building books by bad standards: he's knocking them for being contradictory, or for using more words than they need to use to describe a scene, or for being implausible, or for not being translatable into simple language. None of these "problems," I think, are actually problems when you're trying to build a mood.

The article is interesting, and pretty well argued. I just don't necessarily agree with it, any more than I agree with the first article. I think they have similar problems, much as they'd hate to admit it.

Yanking this back on topic: can a good DM use Cormac McCarthy/Anne Proulx techniques to build a mood? If so, how?

Daniel

 

[Desdichado]

I don't see what the big problem is. Sure, there are a lot of hacks in the business. What he says if mostly true. As someone else pointed out, the only real disagreement with him is the implied conclusion that plot devices are necessarily and irredeemably bad. At times, they are completely appropriate, and his examples of plot devices in The Lord of the Rings for instance, is not only appropriate but necessary for an author trying to recapture northern European mythological resonance, for example.

And I did like some of his little snippets of wisdom. I nearly laughed out loud at the comment about being careful to squeeze Donaldson in public it's so flatulent, or giving enemas to the Muse...