Once, in a writers’ workshop, the presenter said that good fiction dwells upon one protagonist, looking at the world through her eyes as events unfold, events that fundamentally don’t change anything at all, and that the only arc, the only change throughout the book, was the protagonist’s view of events and the lessons she learns….
Tag: reader expectations
Plotting Whiplash
I remember reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever as a teen and feeling frustrated. At the time, I didn’t have the experience to define the source of that frustration, but later in life I was able to put my finger on it. I was reading good-sized books about epic fantasy adventures,…