Big Story Problems

Here’s a post at Writers Helping Writers: How to Fix Big Story Problems. This topic is fine, I suppose, in principle.

Here are the big problems the post points to — click through to read the brief comments about each of these —

–Not enough conflict

–Low stakes

–Passive characters

–Low tension

–Emotion is not on the page

–Lack of character growth

–Characters too perfect

–Motivation unclear

–Characters too happy

–Lack of relationship friction

–Plot too predictable

–Reader disengaged … … …

Did anybody pause at that last item? Because it annoys me that the topic of the post suddenly changed from “problems with the story” to “results of problems with the story.” Personally, I find it really annoying when the author of a post changes the subject without noticing. I’m like, Do not produce a list of items and change the subject partway through the list. Re-read your post before you hit publish and make sure the post is coherent. “Coherent” means that the whole post is about one topic OR that you handle the change in topic in some smooth way. The above list is not coherent.

Also, I think that list can be chunked up a good deal, plus I want to add big problems that leap to mind, but that are not on the original list.

–Not enough conflict, lack of relationship friction, low stakes, low tension.

–Characters too passive, too perfect, too happy, too unchanging, too petty, too selfish, too self-absorbed, too mean, too stupid.

–Emotion is not on the page, motivation unclear.

–Plot too predictable, plot driven by character stupidity, plot driven by characters who won’t talk to each other.

—Boring prose, boring characters, boring dialogue.

As you can see, I think the linked post left out two BIG categories of problems: character stupidity and boringness of the writing. I mean, I also included character unpleasantness, but I fully realize that some readers like reading about petty, selfish, self-absorbed, mean characters, for some reason.

In contrast, I don’t think it’s very common for readers to be thrilled by character stupidity. Any reader who notices that the protagonist is dumb as a box of rocks is probably going to be annoyed by that. Having other characters act as though the stupid protagonist is smart will be even more annoying once the reader notices that the protagonist is in fact dumb as a box of rocks. If the protagonist fails to realize something extremely obvious in order to drive the plot, and the reader can plainly see this extremely obvious thing, then that’s a problem. I’m thinking of Anne Bishop’s Invisible Ring here, which is the single book that leaps to my mind most forcefully when extreme character stupidity comes up. I had other problems with this story as well, but if I were creating a top (bottom?) ten list for Extreme Protagonist Stupidity, this book would be on that list, and probably pretty near the top (or bottom, whichever).

Boringness (what is the word for that? Surely there is a word for that? Do I mean ‘insipidity,’ maybe?) of the prose is also a major reason a story can fail, and this is so obvious that I’m not sure why nothing like this made it into the original post. When people say “wooden” or “flat,” then they mean “boring,” probably.

There’s no great solution to this except one. I have seen books with flat, boring dialogue and barely serviceable prose succeed just fine because of the storytelling. That’s probably the only quality that can rescue a book where the prose itself is not just plain, not just serviceable, but actually flat.

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