What is the making of a storyteller?

[Cognisant]

I read "Amped" by Daniel H. Wilson, it took me a day, it was alright.

Thing is I can write better than that and I'm certainly not the only one, heck [MENTION=491]NoID10ts[/MENTION] is writting a book and it is better than that, there's certainly fewer plot holes (there's A LOT of plot holes in Amped) which got me thinking, what is it that makes this book or any other a best seller?

I created this thread in the philosophy section because I think the question is essentially a philosophical one, what is it that makes us want to occupy these alternate fictional worlds?

[Adaire]

Ponder Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey...

Ponder why most women seem to adore it...

Ponder suicide...

[Cognisant]

True.

Still I think good storytelling is in part a measure of imagination and how effectively someone can make the unreal seem real, and also in part being able to tap into people's emotions, understanding what they care about and why they care about it.

Amped was primarily a superhero fantasy, the protagonist starts out as nobody and through a series of events finds himself becoming increasingly powerful, but there's also a love interest in there and a morality pet that gets beaten up, in the end what ties it all together is the moral that technology is merely an enabler, whether it saves us or destroys us will be up to us to decide.

From a literary theory perspective this is just more of the same-old same-old with a topical theme, a cheeseburger of literature, it was good but not great.

A great story is like Tsutomu Nihei's manga "Blame!" (pronounced "Blam" as in the gunshot noise) which in my opinion is a masterpiece because there are many points where the downer ending has come and you think the story is over, but it continues, it's Sisyphean, and I've never encountered another story quite like that, so devoid of hope, yet inspiring precisely because the protagonist continues in spite of the utter hopelessness as if driven by something deeper than hope, some kind of profound existentialist understanding that precludes the necessity of hope it seems.

[redbaron]

I don't really consider a best seller to be a good book. Popularity is a poor indicator of quality.

As to why some books sell better? The same reason crappy songs become popular. Entertaining the fantasies of the masses and juxtaposing them with a relevant moral dilemma of today's world?

Sounds like the kind of book that would get rave reviews and receive more merit than its worth to me.

[Da Blob]

The secret to storytelling involves multiple factors. One could see the process as one of 'mind control' in that the author must be skilled in directing focus and maintaining the attention of the reader/listener on the narrative.


I think great writers, must be great readers first, so that when they are editing their own work they can fully immerse themselves in the reading as if reading something written by an Other for the first time.

It doesn't hurt to understand the limitations of language and create sentences and paragraphs that assault those boundaries, in such a manner that readers on the other side of the Wall, the receiving side, have enough 'smuggled' information to reconstruct the original story or construct their own story. Hemingway said the best way to become a good writer of books is to learn the skill of writing great paragraphs.

A good story is one's own story, so if a writer allows for a generic POV for the main character, then more readers will claim his or her story as their own. As in dreams, once a reader/dreamer identifies with a character and begins to co-author a story in their own imaginations, then a major hurdle has been surpassed.

[Grave]

Any good story must involve the swaying of emotions since it is art. I think what most people here are reffering to is the quality of the writting, however, what a storyteller, and any other artist, really needs to aim for is the excitement of the story. It does depend on the crowd he's writting to, because the crowd needs some sort of involvment, there needs some emotional attraction, and a crowd especially the so-called "common folk" does not always look for quality. You can argue that classical music is better than pop music in its quality, however, good being a subjective, most people will say that pop music is better being highly opinionated in their own right. Yet, there are certain skills a good storyteller needs to attract to emotions, and you can say that these skills are also part of the quality.