Post by account_disabled on Dec 30, 2023 17:42:19 GMT 12
What makes real life and the stories told in novels and short stories different? Can everything that happens in reality really be transformed into narrative, into stories to read (or film)? I could answer these questions with a concept already expressed several times in some of my articles: a story is a story if it is worth telling . Which, put like that, says everything and says nothing. Such a concept provokes a further question: when is a story worth telling? Last year I tried to express the meaning of history , which I can summarize in the 5 passages that characterize it, according to the cartoonist Will Eisner: Introduction or setting Problem Address the problem Solution end All this brings us back to the dramatic arc , that is, to that imaginary curved line that unites the various passages and, above all, shows the evolution of the initial facts .
In short, a story is the result of a series of transformations : an initial episode causes various consequences that affect the lives of the characters involved until reaching a conclusion. Real life is not enough to create a story What Special Data works in reality may not work in the novel. If I remember correctly, this is what I read in Hans Tuzzi's essay How to write a detective or other crime novel . Yes, I fully agree with this thought. Life is life, fiction is fiction. They are two parallel worlds. I'm not interested in reading real life stories, otherwise I wouldn't buy novels or go to the cinema. It almost seems like I don't care about people's problems. Actually what I mean is that real life stories are fine as articles or essays, but not as stories, unless they are "fictionalized".
And here the question arises spontaneously: what does it mean to fictionalize a fact? I still use Will Eisner, who listed the 3 elements that must be present in a story : Provocative or attractive incipit Contents Reader's surprise All of this could very well be missing in real life. Of course, my failure in the fifth year of high school was a nice surprise for the reader (read: my mother reading the paintings), but it's certainly not good enough to make a story out of. As for the contents, it was precisely their absence that made me fail at school. And the incipit was never there: I didn't really start studying. A story missed from the start... Jokes aside, a story is made up of more or less obligatory passages and elements that make it "compelling", forgive me for the abuse of this term.
In short, a story is the result of a series of transformations : an initial episode causes various consequences that affect the lives of the characters involved until reaching a conclusion. Real life is not enough to create a story What Special Data works in reality may not work in the novel. If I remember correctly, this is what I read in Hans Tuzzi's essay How to write a detective or other crime novel . Yes, I fully agree with this thought. Life is life, fiction is fiction. They are two parallel worlds. I'm not interested in reading real life stories, otherwise I wouldn't buy novels or go to the cinema. It almost seems like I don't care about people's problems. Actually what I mean is that real life stories are fine as articles or essays, but not as stories, unless they are "fictionalized".
And here the question arises spontaneously: what does it mean to fictionalize a fact? I still use Will Eisner, who listed the 3 elements that must be present in a story : Provocative or attractive incipit Contents Reader's surprise All of this could very well be missing in real life. Of course, my failure in the fifth year of high school was a nice surprise for the reader (read: my mother reading the paintings), but it's certainly not good enough to make a story out of. As for the contents, it was precisely their absence that made me fail at school. And the incipit was never there: I didn't really start studying. A story missed from the start... Jokes aside, a story is made up of more or less obligatory passages and elements that make it "compelling", forgive me for the abuse of this term.