Yesterday was IM gaming day so not a lot of work got done. I read a bit more of Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters. Ugh. I started skimming, just looking for the Aristotle quotes and pondering them.
Something good did come out of that. Aristotle said (and I'm paraphrasing) that audiences will not reward a story where a good man suffers tragedy or where a very bad man gets rewarded. He also says that a bad may suffering a tragedy also doesn't work. So what does that leave? For a drama, you need a morally compromised man who brings about his downfall due to an error in judgment. Aristotle considered that to be the most effect plot at working an audience's emotions.
Now I love villains and I like writing interesting villainous characters. But I also prefer heroic protagonists who succeed due to their own efforts. Still, it's an interesting idea. One I may toy around with. Smooth Charles is a bad man or at the very least, a morally mixed man. Maybe I should make the next Smooth Charles story more tragic, where Smooth gets done dirty because of a mistake in his own judgment. It might be a good way to torture a protagonist, something I need to work on. (I always want to help my characters succeed. I don't mind wounding them, making them lose or get humiliated but I'm always rooting for them to succeed. Probably a personal flaw in my character.)
Anyway, that was good food for thought. Again, but an annotated version of the Poetics and not that frelling book I'm struggling through. (Seriously, I normally read hundreds of pages a day and this little flimsy thing is less than a hundred and I STILL haven't been able to force myself to finish it)
Food for thought even thousands of years later.
Something good did come out of that. Aristotle said (and I'm paraphrasing) that audiences will not reward a story where a good man suffers tragedy or where a very bad man gets rewarded. He also says that a bad may suffering a tragedy also doesn't work. So what does that leave? For a drama, you need a morally compromised man who brings about his downfall due to an error in judgment. Aristotle considered that to be the most effect plot at working an audience's emotions.
Now I love villains and I like writing interesting villainous characters. But I also prefer heroic protagonists who succeed due to their own efforts. Still, it's an interesting idea. One I may toy around with. Smooth Charles is a bad man or at the very least, a morally mixed man. Maybe I should make the next Smooth Charles story more tragic, where Smooth gets done dirty because of a mistake in his own judgment. It might be a good way to torture a protagonist, something I need to work on. (I always want to help my characters succeed. I don't mind wounding them, making them lose or get humiliated but I'm always rooting for them to succeed. Probably a personal flaw in my character.)
Anyway, that was good food for thought. Again, but an annotated version of the Poetics and not that frelling book I'm struggling through. (Seriously, I normally read hundreds of pages a day and this little flimsy thing is less than a hundred and I STILL haven't been able to force myself to finish it)
Food for thought even thousands of years later.
RSS Feed