Super easy, barely an inconvenience

Well tomorrow I will start annoying my alpha readers to start sending in their questionnaires if they haven’t already. Guess I’ll find out what the people think.

Today’s title comes from this channel I’ve been watching on youtube. I can’t recall the exact name but it’s something like screen rant. The main line of videos are these sketches of a screenwriter presenting their ideas for a script to the movie studio executive. They make fun of a lot of recent movies. At some point in each video the executive will ask if they can do something with the story and the screenwriter replies “super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

Whenever I hear that I am reminded how, when writing, the goal is not for things to be super easy, barely an inconvenience but for the characters to struggle and work towards achieving their goal. It’s a very boring story if it simply follows the main character as she goes from victory to victory (Oh hello Rey in The Last Jedi) as the reader will feel that she hasn’t worked to achieve anything. As most people in the real world have had to work to achieve their goals this makes the main character someone they can’t identify with or root for.

No writing this week but I’ve finally finished all seven books in the Familias Regnant series by Elizabeth moon, having read the last three this week. On the whole I enjoyed the series though I like the last two books the least. I felt a lot of time was spent on minor characters doing unimportant things that detracted from what the main characters were doing. Also the scope of the novels was larger so I felt it was a bit less personal and less detail oriented. For example, a space fight between loyalists and mutineers is reduced to a line saying the three loyalists’ cruisers destroyed the two mutineer cruisers. No space battle or anything. Of course if you are trying to put a lot in a book sometimes you can’t go into details for everything. The author, in the end, writes what they think the reader needs to hear to envision the story. The problem is that when you have a whole chapter dedicated to a minor character killing off another minor character and when you have as second chapter devoted to another minor character investigating her feelings that the first minor character murdered that other minor character, you can tend to feel ripped off when a space battle is reduced to one line. Granted there were no main protagonists or antagonists on the ships in question except for one minor antagonist that got killed off when the ship he was on exploded so it might not have been the most important but that wasn’t the only moment either.

But all in all a good series and I do recommend it if you are looking for a good space opera series.