books?

[Flack]

When I was in my writing program I was working on a novel. It was a little out there. It was about this guy who was a gun for hire and basically he got killed and due to a glitch he got into heaven and ended up there with this magic rifle. This same glitch was letting demons and monsters into heaven and nobody in heaven had any weapons but this guy so he became really important. I had six or seven chapters done and my professor read it and said, "you gotta ditch the gun." I was like, the gun is the whole point! And yeah, the gun was gonna break toward the end and he was going to have to come up with a different solution, but she said no, the gun has to break in chapter two or three. It was the same problem you're talking about. My prof said a lot of novels started going that way after people who grew up on video games started writing books.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Wait, why did the prof want the gun ditched?

[Flack]

Because it made the protagonist too powerful. Even more so than in movies, protagonists in books have to have constant conflict. It's all that "no, but" and "yes, and" stuff. It's all about hitting your protagonist with conflict and challenges around every corner. That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

[pinback]

but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has left the chat.

[Tdarcos]

That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

He never read Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. "Doc" Smith. The protagonist can do everything, including advanced mathematics, spaceship piloting, and when stranded on a planet, starting from virgin wilderness and a damaged ship along with a lady friend, single-handedly creates a hydro generator for power, mines the iron ore and other elements to make steel, builds the spaceship replacement parts, flies it into space, travels to a comet, mines the comet for certain ores, brings it back to his smelter to turn it into that element...

[AArdvark]

I turned a Doc Smith story in The Polar Treasure. It was a difficult read