Like any other writer, I have very strong opinions (or so I would imagine I do anyways) about exactly what it means to produce, or to read, a very good piece of writing. It is obviously avery important subject when it comes to writing and it is one I have tried to understand and to think of and ponder again and again. Typically the one conclusion that I often tend to come to, over and over again,is that modern writing has been, in my opinion, completely polluted by plot, and I really do not understand exactly from where the obsession has arisen.
To me I think that I have always looked at writing like being a good Friday night out somewhere: The night does not have to be 'plotted', and it does not need to even achieve anything, or get anywhere, it just needs to be in a good atmosphere and with some good people (characters), and that is enough. Yet for some people it seems that this idea of the plot kills absolutely everyhing else, and they are not only, in my opinion, obsessed with their character achieving something, but often they are obsessed with something being achieved literally every chapter or so. In the name of the plot obsession they actually wind up sacrificing emotions, and simple passions, becasue the modern writers actually are never allowed to just paint what you could perhaps call 'still lifes'. A story for modern people, it seems to me, can never just be about a couple arguing in a room, or a man sitting at a bar drinking and feeling sad about something mysterious. It always has to be about someone doing "something" - like catching a train, to go to the airport, and to then go find some ancient hidden manuscript, et cetera et cetera.
I really just can't figure out from where this obsession came and I often think it is the biggest shame of all time, because many of my favorite books actually seem to have no real "plot", and I read online about how people 'do not understand them' when they read them, and I am always perplexed by how someone could not understand certain stories I hold dear, but then I remember, and I realize, that every time these people open a book, they open it up not expecting to feel something, or even to see soemthing, but rather to just accomplish something or achieve something very specific. A mystery must be uncovered. A character must have some sort of tragedy. Something improtant must be lost. Someone has to be killed. Etcetc. Granted, these are all fine things, but they are not why I read and why I have always kept reading, and they are certainly not why I write.
For me the joy of reading and writing is often to simply evoke a certain feeling or a certain atmosphere, and thats why I really do say it is like going out for the night, or eating, or going on a date with a particular type of girl or boy, etc. I want to go the beach, so I begin to write about the beach, I want to hunt a tiger, so I write of hunting a tiger, I want to kiss a woman, or to get someone stabbed by a woman, so I write of kissing a woman or getting someone stabbed by one, so on and so forth. I do not think I have ever in my life sat down with the idea of a plot in my mind (and sometimes this makes me very sad because, again, I can see everyone is obsessed with it) when I write. I instead just sit down with these feelings. How do I want to feel? What do I want to feel? What sort of song do I want to sing here? What do I want to taste? Do I perhaps want to create a character and just be a bully to them? Or get them killed? Or make them fall in love? Etc.
What I find so funny about this method of both reading and writing is that, when you read with this in mind, you'll often start to see -- again just in my opinion -- how badly some of our most popular books tend to sink, because you'll start to see that the characters them often do not seem to feel much of anything, at all. The new characters are always very busy but they never seem to actually stop and smell the roses, you could say.
Even many books, Ive noticed, modern books, that try to set a story of mystery or intrigue in some "exotic locale" often tend to not even be bothered with describing the locale beyond a certain point. It is almost like nobody in this modern age still remembers what it is like to actually stop somewhere, and to really get to know a place, or a thing, or a room, or a person, beyond a thinly veiled stereotype. Everything is perpetually glossed over, described very quickly, usually in a way you have seen it described before, and of course the characters are only thinly painted, because in almost every book all of the characters only exist to bring the "hero" (a concept I despise, in many ways) to whatever his or her next stop is.
The books of the past were not perfect and I have quarrels with those too, mostly because many of them were prudish and what not would be my biggest complaint, but I also cannot deny that the books of the past were often beautifully descriptive and evocative of certain places, or countries, or people or rooms, and this elaborate description was offered to the reader because nobody in those old books was so obsessed with getting to the end, and getting a "prize" or a "reward" or a "magic key" et cetera, as quickly as they could. In fact, when it comes to my experiences with most old books, I honestly have no idea what the endings in most of them were, and when I try to think of them and when I read them, even some old books I read recently, I don't even know what the endings were about, or what the "plot" was.....
What I instead remember are the feelings the books gave me about the places or the people in them and nothing more. And this is generally the same with films as well, which of course film writers think that plot is oh so important, because the audience is even simpler when it comes to films; but in the end, the plots of the films disintegrate quickly once you put them up against the feelings the film evokes, in terms of memory. I have written before of how most of the popular films, in my opinion, are really more popular for their feelings rather than their plots. I think plot is largely an illusion. This isn't always the case but oftentimes, if you look twice, you'll see that it is. Especially with any film where some sort of different costume is included, feelings, 'vibrations', and atmospheric ideas of some sort, are more important than plots. I do not watch westerns, for example, for the plot. I watch it to feel like I'm in a western. Nothing more.
In many ways, I think the characters could probably do just about anything in them and I would be intrigued. A story about a young woman trying to build a house with her husband in the WIld West, could probably keep me just as intrigued as a story about a man being hunted by Navajos in the same place. And yet we don't generally see a story about someone doing anything simple like that. It always has to be some sort of enormous event that is going off in the story. Its not good...
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