Watching "A Game of Thrones" made me realize an unrealistic component of most good fiction: characters, even ones living halfway across the world, tend to have way more back-story to their relationship than they should realistically have.
I wasn't doing that at all before, and I now realize that I was wrong.
This back-story provides an essential part of the fiction you are writing: it makes the characters love or hate each other with unbridled passion. Spectators (and actors, for LARPs/Interactive Theater) will mostly care about characters if the characters themselves are passionate about each other.
So, if you write a story about 2 war leaders trying to decimate each other's peoples, don't just make them hate each other because they're racist. Have the first protagonist's sister married to the other in the past, and then executed for adultery.
If you want protagonists to bond, they could discover they're brothers and sisters (like Kira and Cagalli from Gundam Seed) or fall in love with relatives (Harry Potter and Ginny, Ron and Hermione). Or maybe the grandfather of one of them had enslaved the other's grandmother, and although that is officially water under the bridge, the 2 protagonists will have a tension that will never let loose, and explode whenever you, as a writer, need it to.
Soaps have run on this stuff for decades, and Opera for centuries.
If you need convincing, I offer this challenge: read Frank Herbert's Dune, then read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Notice how dry Asimov's writing is. It is purely intellectual, it is ripe with the ideas of a genius, it is prophetic in many ways (e.g. miniaturization), it is a masterpiece, yet it is extremely hard to give a damn about any of it. Characters don't really care about anyone, so we, as readers, don't either.
No comments:
Post a Comment