71–80 of 104 posts
Pretty much all of my favorite pulp sci-fi stories use at least two of the items on the list. Of course, that's reasonably forgivable because: 1. They used more than one 2. They were published long before this list was made. 3. Pulp [edit] e.g. 5,271,009 by Alfred Bester hits at least 4 of these while also poking fun at various wish-fulfillment stories
> Fatness is used as a signal of evil, dissolution, and/or moral decay, usually with the unspoken assumption that it's completely obvious that fat people are immoral and disgusting. My favorite novel that uses this trope has to be A Confederacy of Dunces.
"As you know, Bob..." crops up in just about everything Neal Stephenson does, although I've always thought it's better framed as "Right, I had to learn a *lot* about 17th Century French Naval vessels / encryption / diving equipment / evolutionary biology / the semiotics of theology / whatever else, so now *you* get to learn it too!" I actually quite like those bits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a big problem for serialized stories now that fan theorizing on the internet is so common. A good plot shouldn't be completely predictable to your audience, but events need to flow from one to the other because characters and their worlds should have consistency. This creates predictability and means some small percentage of your audience can now guess what is going to happen. That was fine a decade or two ag…
> When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled. I disagree wholeheartedly. The big problem with every single writer nowadays is a complete and total inability to stick the ending . I'm really trying very hard to come up with a TV show, book or movie that I thought really stuck the ending in the last 10 years (I'm being generous…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hasn't it been said there's only 7 basic stories in the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots or something. But who cares that The Lion King and Hamlet may be the same story at the base, they're certainly different enough to be enjoyable each in their own right, and I wouldn't substitute one for the other in some strange form of economization.
See also: Soviet folklorist Vladimr Propp identified 7 typical characters and 31 basic structural elements in fairy tales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp#Narrative_struc... Another interesting classification discovered from Propp's Wikipedia entry: Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of folktale types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%9...
Consider some basic stories like:
* a person travels backwards through time to prevent a tragedy.
- By doing so they cause the tragedy to occur.
- On returning to their own time they discover the tragedy was necessary for their society.
- they discover the person didn’t exist and become them.
- they discover the person isn’t as heroic as they hoped and coach them.
They see hundreds or thousands of low-quality stories for every high-quality story. And nobody wants to be told that the reason that they aren't being published is that their story sucks.
But everyone sane can see that their story might have been done before, perhaps too often -- so it doesn't hurt as much to be told that your story is being rejected because it's on this list.
If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much. Once you subtract the ones that are either just straight-up wish fulfillment, or otherwise reliant on racist/sexist/ageist stereotypes, a lot of the ideas listed here are still perfectly good ideas for a story. They'd be more than "original" enough to drive an episode of Black Mirror…
Even then, I can recall very good reads (or watches) that could readily fit squarely in one of those boxes but are either very well executed that you either don't see it coming, or even if you do you continue nonetheless, or that have specific context or otherwise build up that makes it very good even if it can be narratively distilled down to a simple this or that.
Also also, this list seems extremely small when compared to tvtropes.org with which, when I catch myself running down that time sink again, I always end up thinking that every single plot has already been written though sheer bruteforce.
IOW _execution_ also matters.
I am also tired of following American news
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled. I disagree wholeheartedly. The big problem with every single writer nowadays is a complete and total inability to stick the ending . I'm really trying very hard to come up with a TV show, book or movie that I thought really stuck the ending in the last 10 years (I'm being generous…
I could give you a list of endings that I thought were great, but if you can’t think of a single ending that you found satisfying, that sounds more like a you problem than all of humanity simply stopped writing good endings.
That's so very not the case that the person complaining either isn't looking very hard, or else have such narrow taste that they're excluding most works without even considering them.