I am just not sure to what extent randomness is acceptable in story telling. People need patterns and connections. They need to know why. Everything has to have a reason.
Random things are acceptable when they serve a purpose. If the hero meets some random dude in a city who ends up being a retired warrior that joins the quest, that's just fine. Good luck, fate, inexplicable attraction of warriors. For whatever reason, it is fine.
Random things with no purpose are perplexing. If some dude starts a conversation about biscuits with the hero which has no relevance whatsoever to anything past, present, or future in the story, we scratch our heads asking what the point was.
And random things with unfortunate circumstances are bullshit. There is no reason for the hero to twist his ankle while walking around town. All it did was hurt him, weaken him, and slow down his journey. It's even worse when his best friend dies from an unrelated house fire.
People are fickle. They hate randomness and they hate predictability. But if you aren't random, you're predictable. What's a writer to do?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The idea is to twist randomness into something related.
ReplyDeleteMany things seem random but aren't when you have the proper context.
I know I've been guilty of this.
You say something and I say something out of the blue. Except that it really made sense to my mind because I had a context that you didn't,
The random house fire could actually be caused by the villian.
And if the hero twists his ankle he should just rest at an inn for the night. six gp heals all.
A perfect example of the point. We cannot handle true randomness. Everything has a purpose. If there is no reason for it to happen in a story, it is awful. If it looks random, there must be a reason. But why?
ReplyDelete