So I've been reading The Three Musketeers (translated into English because I don't hock and spit well enough to speak French), finding that I'm totally impressed with it in spite of myself. Here's a very incomplete list of faults:

- Alternating third-person omniscient and pseudo-third-person limited with jarring POV shifts

- Unbelievable character interactions (including plenty of "well, this is how they thought back then" excuses)

- Unnecessary asides (though it styles itself as historical, which makes it somewhat excusable)

- Lots and lots and LOTS of "tell, don't show"

- Totally over-the-top in just about every way

On the plus side, it's terribly witty and well-paced, and it has interesting, colorful characters, and a great story. In other words, mechanics aside, it's just darn good storytelling.

To avoid the "This thread belongs in Published Hooks & Books" replies, I've developed a more general opinion about this that I'd like to share. (Okay, so maybe I developed it in spite of that.) Here it is: I think I'm spending too much time on mechanics and not enough on storytelling.

It's like buying a Ferrari because my, um, house is too small.

Yet, at the same time, I get the feeling that I have to spend a lot of energy on good mechanics to impress a publisher. Judging by the success of certain books we've discussed recently on this forum (with much hocking and spitting of venom), I'm almost certain there's a disconnect between what impresses readers and what impresses writers. What I'm less sure of is whether there's a disconnect between what impresses writers and what impresses publishers. I think it's true, though. I think publishers may be a little more impressed by what will impress readers.

Maybe storytelling gets less attention because it's harder to critique. It certainly seems like a forum for story ideas (analogous to the Fragments and Feedback forum) wouldn't go over very well. Maybe we're afraid people will steal our good ideas, so we stick to safe topics, like mechanics. And then, after sticking with that safe topic, we start to think it's of prime importance, because, after all, we talk about it a lot.

Maybe I'll just stick to impressing myself. For the moment, I'll concentrate on just telling a darn good story.

The writing mechanics are there to help us with the clarity. It's not always necessary to use them, but it's important to know why you're not using them in your writing. It's like building a house. You've got all these tools to construct this architecture, but you have to know which tools to use and why you're using them. It'd be ridiculous to use a saw when what you need is a hammer. Then there's even subtle differences, like if you're going to nail something together or use a screwdriver. It might even be a personal preference thing, like what color of paint you want to have. Writing mechanics work the same way. Know your tools and use them the way you want to tell the story you want to tell.

As far as The Three Musketeers go, I've been thinking about similar things with Ben Hur. The story begins with a lot of things that normally would irritate people on Fragments and Feedback. Intrusive narrator, no name for the character, omniscient viewpoint, and the like, but none of that bothered me while I was reading, because everything was clear.

Which has led me to wonder about the purpose of literature back then and today. Reading Ben Hur, I've felt a rather cinematic quality about the whole thing. There are scenes there that feel like they are coming from a movie, when I realized that that's what is going on. Starting from the nineteenth century on backward, there was no television, so even when a person went to plays, they couldn't get a visual glimpse at magnificent landscapes or societies. But in literature, they could. These days, we don't really need omniscient viewpoints to get expansive visuals because movies have satiated that need for us. What literature offers now is emotions and thoughts.

I'd like to clarify one thing: by "storytelling," I mean what you tell and the attitude and voice with which you tell it.

I think readers are fine with any mechanics and rule set as long as it doesn't hurt to read and it's clear. What they're really looking for when they pick up a book is a good story. As horrible as Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling might be and as derivative as that teenage yokel is who penned Eragon, they all spun a good yarn.

I'm not saying mechanics are unimportant. I'm saying I've had my priorities mixed up for a while--thought I could take any old interesting idea and turn it into a great novel as long as I wrote it well enough. No dice, I think. My stuff was boring.

And I'm blaming HATRACK! Hatrack, darn you! You thought you had foiled my evil plans for literary domination, but I'm BACK! Bwahahaha!

There is a difference between grammar and good style. PoV use is a style, not grammar. Style is a tool used in storytelling. It is not necessary, but it helps a lot.

That's why its important to try to get people to read your whole piece and this forum has a set up for that - you can solicit readers, or start up groups in some forum whose name I've forgotten. So I think that, as long as we utilize those aspects of the forum, then we may be saved from mechanics pedantry.

Almost none of us can "learn" storytelling.

It's just that simple. Sure, you could say that storytelling is harder to critique, but that's not really the case. It's just harder to criticize usefully without simply taking over the story, telling the writer all the clever ideas and characters and dialogue that you would put into the story.

I can tell if the story is working or not, and I don't refrain from giving a few pointers on story if they occur to me. But it's also the kind of thing you can only judge in the context of the story as a whole, you can never tell whether the story qua story is working just from a synopsis and certainly never from an opening fragment.

You have a pretty good point, trousercuit. I've recently discovered plenty of books that are not all that great on the mechanics end of things but have somehow made it past the publishers. I begin wondering why, and then I realize that they are actually pretty interesting stories.