Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Wish I hadn't read that...

Labrat
if it sound like I was trying to say what are good story topics and what weren't. I was just trying to say what I enjoy and what I find bothers me in a story topic. For me rape in a true life news story or fiction story is very upsetting to me. For me it is one of the most horrific things that can happen to a woman OR man short of being murdered. I also guess that I'm overly sensitive to murder because when I was a teenager my uncle was murdered.

So again I was NOT SPEAKING IN GENERAL TERMS but on what I PERSONALLY find difficult to read.

SO I'M SORRY if I offended anyone. I have nothing but EXTREME ADMIRATION for all authors here. Writing a story is something I'm unable to do although I have tried. So I think I have just a very tiny glimpse of how hard it is so I am in AWE, EXTREME AWE of those that are able to write.


Now before I put foot in mouth again (up 18 hours now) I will leave the boards and go to bed.

Hey, it happens, kmar. It's one of the hazards of posting in this kind of forum, where we can only rely on the printed word and not facial expressions or tone of voice or...well, whatever.

We can't always be so on the ball that we scrutinise every word of a post before we hit send to make absolutely sure that our intent is crystal clear. Sometimes the odd 'we' slips in where we mean 'I'.

So - don't worry about it. Just so long as authors are clear that they are free to write what they wish and readers are clear that they have the absolute right not to read what is posted, we're all cool.

Thanks for posting to clear up the misunderstanding.

BTW, I wouldn't say you were necessarily over-sensitive because you don't like certain plot themes in stories. It's all a matter of taste. There are stories I don't enjoy that others love and I don't think I'll ever understand why...but there you go. There's absolutely nothing wrong in preferring non-dark story themes and although I enjoy that genre in the main, I can certainly understand those who say that life is angry and violent and disturbing enough that they'd want to escape it into something lighter in their reading matter.


LabRat

LabRat quoted my objection to Evas øye, where I complained that the plotline was totally unrealistic. And then, Labby, you said this:

Well, point taken, so I have to explain a bit more clearly what I mean. I've read books that have been harrowing and utterly heartbreaking, but I've been able to admire them anyway, because they have been so good at describing "the human condition". To me, Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet is a case in point. Everything is there, the young lovers' giddy infatuation with each other and a rigid and unforgiving society dominated by two opposing families who would destroy their children's union at any cost - and they do. Shakespeare's genius is that he makes us, who immerse ourselves in his drama, feel hopeful that things will end happily for Romeo and Juliet after all. We feel the young lovers' hope and optimism. And then when everything ends in utter tragedy, we realize how all-but-unavoidable this devastating ending was. The story of Romeo and Juliet is so tragic and yet so satisfying because the plotline is so compelling and so plausible (okay, I don't believe in Juliet's "sleep-death-potion", but I'm willing to regard that as a minor detail).

So Romeo and Juliet is a believable story that believably ends in tragedy. The thriller by Sidney Sheldon that you mentioned is an unbelievable story that unbelievably ends in triumph for the protagonists. That is the kind of story that, if you don't mind my saying so, is ever so slightly reminiscent of our favorite TV show, Lois and Clark. Because the character of Superman is totally unrealistic, and the idea that Superman would be able to lead a double life by donning and doffing a pair of glasses and fluffing up and smoothing down his hair is of course totally impossible. And the idea that an alien from another planet would look exactly human, and the suggestion that (practically) everybody in the world would happily welcome a superpowered alien - well, don't get me started on how unreaslistic that is.

And yet I love the happy story of Superman. Why is that? It's because I love reading some stories that end just totally unrealistically happily. It's a thrill to imagine that the most wonderful things could happen. Also, I love to fantasize about how the laws of physics don't apply anymore, so that a man can fly - well, I love to fantasize about it, but I'll scoff if someone asks me to believe in that kind of thing in real life.

So what did I hate about Evas øye? Here's what. There is nothing exhilarating or thrilling about it, there are no delightful flights of unrealistic fancy, and yet the story is totally unrealistic, and it is totally heartbreaking.

Why would I want to have my heart broken over a story that is never going to happen in real life? By reading about Romeo and Juliet I can learn something very important about the human condition. By reading Evas øye I learn nothing, and I have my heart broken for nothing.

Ann

Read this thread with interest. Not entirely sure what provoked it, but obviously there was a Lois and Clark story recently that didn't have a happy ending.

So I started thinking about what type of story I like and found that I'm a bit of a split personality . When I read a Lois and Clark story, I definitely want a happy ending. In fact, I tend to wait until the story is posted on the archives and read the last few pages to make sure there is one before reading the rest of the story. I can stand any amount of angst if I know that the happy ending is coming. On the other hand if the story doesn't end with Lois and Clark kissing, I usually just move on to the next story.

However, when it comes to non-Lois and Clark fiction, I'm not quite the same way. For example, my favorite living (or, well, he died a few years ago, so I guess 'current' would be a better word) author is Leon Uris. And yet he often kills off at least one of his major characters at the end of his books.

On the other hand, the death usually does not feel like simply a plot point. It always feels almost essential for the proper telling of the story. For instance, if all the main characters had survived in Mila 18, which is a story about the Jewish uprising in the Polish ghetto during WWII, it would have been quite unbelievable.

However, he always leaves the reader with hope. For instance, in that story, SPOILER the book ends with the Jewish fighter's Christian girlfriend telling her priest that she has to leave the Catholic church because she's pregnant with the hero's child and she's determined that he be raised a Jew. There are tears rolling down your cheeks when you read it, but you're left with this feeling of hope for the future - that a part of your hero will survive. The enemy has not won.

Now, I have read that book too many times to count, and after writing this may even go read it again . So to say that I like unqualified happy endings, or don't think a book is worth reading if it doesn't have one, wouldn't be true.

On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure what makes a book or a story worth my time. I just know what I like when I read it.

ML

"A Prayer for the Dying" by Stewart O'Nan.

<SPOILER>It's about an entire town dying of a disease (yellow fever, maybe?) a few years after the Civil War. The protagonist is the last one alive and he goes more than a little crazy. And the act he commits while grieving for his wife freaked me out so much that I'm not even going to say it here.</SPOILER>

It seriously disturbed me and, five years on, I still feel a shiver thinking about it. It was recommended to me by my husband, who seriously should have known better. We'd only been married about 18 months at the time and I guess he didn't realize how sensitive I would be about that kind of fiction - it had never come up before.

The interesting thing is that I am a lot more sensitive than I once was. I used to enjoy reading about WW2, both fiction and non-fiction, and now I simply cannot take it. Well, I still enjoy stories about the homefront, human interest stories, stuff like that, but I can't handle accounts of battles or pretty much anything involving the Nazis or the Holocaust. I even had to give away a complete Bodie and Brocke Theone series that, once upon a time, I had enjoyed very much.

Interesting, Lisa.

[spoilers below]

I think it's the Theone series that I started and read several of the books before the end of one so irritated me that I didn't read the next one in large part because, from the description, the young widow of... Moeshi? the Jewish boy and Muslim girl who both converted to Christianity then got married and he was killed the next day - wasn't going to be in it at all and I wanted to know what happened to her. I realize in that day and time, it was unlikely that they'd get a happily ever after but a girl can dream and his death caught me off guard. Not to the point I wish I hadn't read it but to the point that I haven't read any more of the series...