RATE: characters/plot/style/ideas in novels & plays

[Benny Bunter]

Silly question in a way, but just go with it for the sake of conversation.

I'd probably go:

Characters
Ideas
Style
Plot

Hard for me to choose between the top three, but I'm fairly sure plot is the least important to me, thinking of my favourite books and plays.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Let's include films too, might as well

 

[IdleRich]

Trite answer but it's hard to pull them apart. Also, though I just said otherwise, plot can be really important if it's good. That said there are some books - and films in fact - where I don't care what happens, just love being in the world they create or conjure up.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Or you could just take an example of book/play/film you enjoyed and rate the elements accordingly

 

[Benny Bunter]

Trite answer but it's hard to pull them apart. Also, though I just said otherwise, plot can be really important if it's good. That said there are some books - and films in fact - where I don't care what happens, just love being in the world they create or conjure up.

Is there anything you can think of where plot would rate the highest above all the others?

 

[Benny Bunter]

I suppose I'm thinking of stuff that you really really like and consider top tier,and whether you have a tendency to value some elements over others personally.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Obviously it depends a lot on the genre, but I think the creation of genuine, legendary but human characters is what I most respond to when I think of my favourite books and films, and possibly the hardest to achieve?

Bringing in film (and plays, if you're not just reading them but actually seeing them) complicates things obviously because the charisma of the individual actors comes into play.

 

[IdleRich]

I think as a rule - to elaborate slightly on what I said above - I love immersing myself in a world and that world is normally a mix of description and characters filtered through style.

I love some books for plot (I think) but they are probably more simplistic escapism maybe. Let me think.

 

[Benny Bunter]

There's a Borges lecture out there somewhere where he talks about the books he loved as a child - Don Quijote, Father Brown, Sherlock holmes - and realising as an older man that he didn't really care that much about the fantastic plots anymore, but what he really believed in and what mattered most were the characters, as if they were real people, that they could take you anywhere cos they seemed real.

Which is a bit ironic cos Borges own writing was more about fantastic ideas rather than real characters. But still...

 

[IdleRich]

GK Chesterton was probably a genius but is, for example, The Man Who Was Thursday plot or character driven or what?

 

[IdleRich]

I think title driven, you hear that title you wanna read that book... or is it just me?

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah that is an intriguing title. I haven't read any Chesterton yet but I really want to after hearing Borges talk about him.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Leopold Bloom seemed like a real person to me, and when Ulysses went away from him I wanted him back.

The same with certain shakespeare characters like Falstaff, and a lot in Dickens obviously.

 

[martin]

Style higher for me. Examples that come to mind are Jim Thompson and Chester Himes; you can get the same plots from most crime pulp of the time (and similar characters) but they blew it over the rooftops. Imagine Cormac Mc Carthy writing The Getaway, it would have been garbage.

 

[sus]

Every fiction writer ever in the whole world if you ask them what comes first characters or themes they'll say, characters first, themes follow and emerge from characters, if you get the order mixed you'll never write anything good

 

[sus]

Personally I'm a style/ass man.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I think if a writer, or an actor, manages to create just one truly great for-all-times character, that leaves you wanting more of them whenever they're not present, then that can be enough to carry the whole thing, whatever other deficiencies the work may have.

 

[Benny Bunter]

But the truly great characters are relatively rare.

 

[sus]

Oakley Hall's Warlock has some lovely ones

 

[Benny Bunter]

In English lit, at least, the creation of properly distinct human characters seems to have started with Chaucer.