 Action/Adventure: January 13, 2016 Issue [#7401] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: 2015 Newbies Jumping into Action Edited by: NaNoNette  
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| Hello writers and readers of action and adventure, I am NaNoNette , your guest editor for this issue. |
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2015 Newbies Jumping into Action
Who says the act of writing and reviewing is anything less than heroic?
Joining this site in 2015, these newbies jumped right into our shared writing adventure.
Keeping up with a little tradition that I started in 2010 to highlight the newbies who joined the year prior, I offer you this assortment of activities and written pieces by Writing.Com newbies of the 2015 vintage. I would usually use my first contest and activities newsletter of the year to do so, but I am no longer the regular editor of that one, so I shifted to this action/adventure newsletter for this year.
Please make these newbies feel at home by taking part in their activities, writing for their contests, and by sending them helpful reviews. Writers in the action/adventure genre can always use somebody else to read over their action sequences. Although I am not a newbie to this site, I know that my action scenes lack in comparison to many other writers. Getting some good targeted input helps the writer and the reviewer.
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Comments I got for my last Action Adventure Newsletter "Main Character Syndrome" .
Shanachie  wrote: I've read two series recently where the main character is not only in peril, but actually dies at the end. I was actually MORE annoyed when the death happened to the main character. So I guess it all depends on the reader.
Interesting. Of course how much a character grows on you will influence how much it affects you if he dies in the end.
Joy  wrote: Your son is very smart. I had never thought of the main character in such terms.
Unfortunately for a few of my main characters, once in a blue moon, I let them become the loser in a winning sort of way with a willing sacrifice or a moral learned.
The main characters don't have to end up being perfect winners, even if the readers' sympathies are with them.
True. It's not so much that my sons want the main character to always win. It's more that modern story tellers make many of their heroes larger than life, which actually diminishes the peril for them so much that kids don't feel anxious for them anymore.
Dream ~★~ Justly  wrote: While it may be very common nowadays for main characters to have their "guaranteed victory," it isn't/hasn't been always the case. Take the old Shakespearean tragedies -- Romeo and Juliet didn't get their happy ending, and Hamlet's quest for revenge destroyed him. Even a lot of older fairy tales didn't have completely victorious protagonists. (The original Little Mermaid had a heavily-moralized "death" after her prince married another. No Disney happy ending there!)
Tragedies haven't really been the modern fashion, though. People like seeing the good guys win. Disney's fairy tale versions have been wildly popular for over 50+ years because of that, among all the other stories of serialized heroes. Could it have something to do with a shift in perspective after the World Wars? Who knows.
But there are ways to write stories that make the "protagonist" a little less obvious, a little less guaranteed. Taking your sidekick example, what if the main character fails in his goal, and it is suddenly up to the sidekick to win the day? There's lots of things like that which could be done to change up the hero-wins-all narrative.
And I've run on quite long enough.  Thank you for the newsletter!
Older stories tend to be more gory. Especially anything older than the 1970s and the fairy tales in particular. My kids are from this century, so they aren't getting the full experience we got.
Elfin Dragon-finally published wrote: Ah the dreaded "Main Character Syndrome". Personally I think you can solve this glitch in one fell swoop. Let the main character die in the end. Jim Butcher did this with his character Dresden and poor Dresden ended up being a ghost. Now there's some serious drama for you. I haven't read the next book in the series yet, so I'm waiting to see how it goes. But I've always been of the opinion that a main character doesn't always have to win for the novel to be good.
Not all characters will win or live in the end. Luckily there are still such stories around.
Maineiac wrote: The boys have a keen insight into the "Main Character Syndrome". I would suggest that it is incumbent on the author to find a way to remedy this, if he intends to keep the reader's interest. One way to do so is to share the title of "Main Character" among several different characters. A carefully developed character, a leading protagonist, who suddenly dies, will can serve to increase the surprise to the readers as well as cause them to move away from the Syndrome.
It's a tough subject for modern writers to come up with stories that aren't predictable.
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