StanleyWheeler

"I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness."
--Thoreau


I cast a book into the chasm this week. I never heard it hit the bottom. Although that may sound like a reference to the way I publish my own books, it's actually about a book that I was reading which I cast off; I'm not going to finish it. The story ceased to interest me. I didn't like the characters and I discovered that I didn't really care where the story was going. It was a book that I picked up for free and thought it would be a quick read, a break from Brandon Sanderson's Oathbringer.  I saw that I still had 22 hours of Oathbringer left and I needed a break. Even a tasty main dish benefits from an interesting side dish. I chose the free book as the side dish. At about 40% or so through that book, I saw that I still had approximately 11 hours of reading left. I considered the characters--there wasn't one that I liked. The main character, while sympathetic, acted too foolishly to tolerate any longer--I really think his own people would have killed him. He was, I believe, about to go on and become mighty and powerful in a war that seemed too contrived to me and which featured that which has a tendency to push me toward the realm of daydreaming about whether I would rather have a root canal or a kidney stone--demons. It featured demons. So into the chasm it went. Many people have rated it highly and the author has a nice style. It just wasn't for me.

Brandon Mull spoke in one of Sanderson's videos about characters. If I remember correctly, he said something like, "I make up stories about imaginary people doing things that never happened, and I want others to care. How do I get other people to care about what a centaur says to a 13 year-old girl in my story?" (I've put that in quotes but it's not an exact quote). He placed characters at the head of his five point list for writing a great story. The story lives or dies by its the characters. One of my sample readers congratulated me on the excellent character development in the early chapters of Threading The Rude Eye (He said that he liked the battle scenes too, but this bit is about characters). He may not have heard the French girl's accent in his head quite the way I did when I wrote it, or admired her caramel colored eyes, or enjoyed the subtle and not so subtle insults delivered by the former Japanese peasant become-successful-English-businessman, but he did enjoy something about the characters. If he can find some interest and pleasure in learning about the players in my story, my creation has been at least partially successful. I'm confident that he'll like where the characters go and the arcs through which some of them will travel. The action and combat in a story are fun to imagine and to write, but if the characters don't matter, the combat and its results lack importance and impact.

I know what you're thinking:

Speaking of combat (which is my understated way of segueing into a completely different topic) I engaged in an epic battle in the ongoing campaign against the prolific growth of plant based lifeforms surrounding my home. It was the first battle of the season. The enemy had gathered in numberless hosts. The Craftsman warmachine fired to life with the first turn of the key. It did insist on a shot of go-juice, and a morale boosting harangue in the form of compressed air blasted into three of the four tires, but it performed without protest. While I listened to episode 2 of Supernova in the East from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, the warmachine slaughtered the grassy foe with both blades whirling like twin cyclones that spewed verdant corpses like a grossly efficient abattoir roulant. (It occurs to me that "roulant" is not an English word; it should be--it sounds better than saying a "rolling abattoir"--although, "slaughterhouse on wheels" probably conveys the idea just as well but then I don't get to sound like a pretentious bore who slips in foreign words for artistic effect while attempting to fill that empty void where self-worth is supposed to be located. "Empty void" is redundant but I like it for the three syllable emphasis that using "void" alone would not achieve).

Finally, sometime this week I slipped in (meaning I "found time for," not that I "stepped upon and fell to the ground as a result")a little Charlie Chaplin. I thought this was a scream. My favorite scene was the duel/wrestling match. The title is "A Burlesque On Carmen." Enjoy it if you get time.

And uberfinally, the progress on Power to Hurt continues with the 14K mark having been passed.