cornerofmadness

Look, I have a topic and everything. I call it the 'make your characters do something dumb to advance the plot' trope. Between watching Buffy and reading The Dead Path, The Unremembered and Leviathian lately, this has bubbled up to the top of my mind.

You know what I mean, the characters do or don't do something that makes no sense. BtVS and AtS were great for characters not communicating information that any normal person would or someone would do something incredibly dumb that even the most brain dead would realize it (looking at you, Xander). Still loved the show but winced every time this would happen.

In the aforementioned books, I nearly quit reading all of them at these parts. The latter two books both contained similar situations, the older leader character says 'don't leave the shelter' and sure enough in both cases, even knowing the dangers go and do it. Leviathian is at least more acceptable since the boy in question is a young teen and he's trying to help. In the Unremembered they're about to undergo their welcome to adulthood ceremonies, countless creatures have tried to kill them, they're on the run and they decide to go party. Uh what?

This is the sort of thing that really can make me stop reading and put the book back on the shelf. Most of the time it just feels like sloppy writing. To give Leviathian credit, it deals very well with the aftermath of the stupidity so in a sense, it really did need to happen that way. Most of the time, however, I could think of at least three or four other ways to get to the drama without some character acting like an idiot.

I try to craft a story so that my characters don't have to act like a dumbass to get the drama to work. Granted, most of us Do make bad choices from time to time. I'm thinking more of the so completely obvious bad choices here. I'd rather not see characters go there. This is sometimes harder to avoid than one would think, especially in cases like BtVS when you have these super powered villians. You have a character with nearly no vulnerablities so then what? It takes some careful thought and planning to work around this.

How about you? Does this sort of thing bother you? How do you avoid?

Yearly word count -

39497 / 125000 words. 32% done!

Camp Nano - I'm using Riding with Strangers - NOT the word count I have already but I want to take this novella to a novel so I'm sure I have that 50K left to go. If not, I'm oddly NOT that jazzed to 'win' camp nano. I just want to get this moving. I know I need to add in more red herrings. We need to see the bad guy way earlier and more often. We need to see his girlfriend. I might have to adjust the time line to have some of it happening in nov after Halloween or else it has to happen much faster. Hmmm. Also I need to see at least two more of the victims before they die. Well one victim doesn't even exist yet and the other we only hear about as being a bitch after the fact. I need to see her earlier though that means adding in a third pov, Lily's which allows me to see the murderer through her eyes (since I really do not want to do a pov from his eyes). From those of you who've read parts of Riding with Strangers (or would like to), let me know what you think/ ask to see it.