What I Look For In A Story

Intro/Overview

My brain sometimes likes to blog in the middle of the night. I wrote this thing and I wanted to share it. It's not what I usually do, but I figured I'd share it anyway. Please don't be turned off by the blocks of text.

SPOILER WARNING

There might be spoilers for The Twilight Saga, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Angel, His Dark Materials, Shrek Forever After, The Hunger Games, Torchwood, Doctor Who, Dragonriders of Pern, and Dollhouse. I say might because I'm not sure exactly what I wrote or if it contains anything that might be considered a spoiler. Just be aware that I talk about a lot of stuff.

What I Look For In A Story

I know I do an awful lot of reviews on this blog. I'm forever saying that I'm really into characters, but I've never really gone into why that is. So I want to talk about the stuff I look for when I'm getting to a story. This applies to books, movies, fanfiction, and TV shows, not specifically to the printed word.

The first thing I look for in my stories are relatable characters. If I don't find a character to latch onto, I don't get engaged. That character doesn't even necessarily have to be the main character or my favorite character. Nine times out of then, the character we as the audience meet first isn't the reason I ultimately stick with a show or keep reading a book. For example: The Twilight Saga. I don't read any of The Twilight Saga books or watch the movies for Bella or Edward or Jacob. I read and watch The Twilight Saga to see what happens with Alice, Jasper, Rosalie, and Emmett. All of whom get little screen time/book time. My TV show example: Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel. I started watching Angel because the first episode I saw featured Faith Lehane. I went to watch Buffy because I wanted to know Faith's backstory. I kept watching both shows because of Willow, Wesley, Fred, and Faith. I relate to and like these characters more than I like Buffy or Angel.

The second thing I look for is story. You can have great characters, but if your story is crap, you've lost me. I'm not just talking about the play-by-play here, either. To me, a story needs to gather up the characters and desposit them believably into a world that makes sense for them. The world around the characters needs to feel real to me and feel real to them. What the characters do to reach the endgame or come to the conclusions they do needs to make sense with how they and the world around them is established. The storyline should carry the characters through a journey that makes sense. There's a reason I had a gigantic problem with the His Dark Materials series. The world-building was largely great in the first book, but then fell apart in the later ones.

Fanfiction and movies often fall into problems with story. Fanfiction authors manage to disregard certain story elements more often than not. Looking back at my Minority Within Minority story, I was gigantically guilty of this myself. My characters did things that didn't make sense and didn't do things that made sense for how I'd created them. As for movies, the lack of or inconsistency in story can drop me a lot faster than almost anything else. Take Shrek Forever After for instance. I personally felt like this movie didn't need to exist. I get where the writers were trying to go with it, but the storyline was just ridiculous. I loved the first three movies and I loved the characters, but the story of Shrek Forever After didn't work for me in the least bit.

The third thing I look for is whether the story is a sequel or a spin-off or not. Oftentimes, I'll read or watch something because it's related to something else. If the first book in the series catches me, I'll read the second one. I'm actually going to cite a book series that failed to catch me here: The Hunger Games. I read The Hunger Games and have no desire to read either Catching Fire or Mockingjay. I was far more invested in the story once I saw the movie and I'll probably see the next ones. As for spin-offs, I'll definitely check out the spin-offs if I'm love the first thing. The same works in reverse. I watched Angel and Torchwood before I saw Buffy and Doctor Who, for example. I'm also more likely to check out a book or movie or whatever if it's set in the same world as the thing I'm interested in. For example, books by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and books set on Pern by Anne or Tood McCaffrey. I understand and like the worlds created by the authors and I really enjoy the stories of the people inhabiting them.

I also want to add that I have a lot of patience with slow-burning payoffs so long as they make sense. Dollhouse springs to mind here. A lot of people had problems with Dollhouse for various reasons. I've heard part of that had to do with how slow the slow-burn was. Dollhouse often came off like there was no concrete storyline because it was slowly building the mythology and characters up to their final forms, as it were. We got a glimpse of the characters' final forms during the last and unaired episode of Season 1. People who didn't necessarily enjoy the normal Dollhouse episodes really enjoyed that one episode and wanted more. When they didn't get it immediately in Season 2, they were extremely disappointed. Personally, I loved the individual stories and the slow buildup to what eventually happened. That kind of buildup was necessary to completely get invested in the characters based off the show's concept. If you didn't care about the characters under their "doll" selves, you didn't care about what ultimately happened to them. At least, that's how I see it. Slow-burns in stories give more time to flesh out the characters and the world around them. I like that.

But anyway, I'm digressing. These are all the things I look for in stories... which is a lame way to end what was essentially an essay, but I've always been really bad at endings, if you hadn't noticed... if you had no idea, well... welcome to the blog?

Love ya, Jessie.