RE: Addicted to Fantasy – Fuel for Dreams
For me the best fictions are about good character development.
You know the feeling when you feel connected to some characters and you care about what's going to happen to them during the story.
Note that this goes as well with the bad characters. A bad, believable and interesting character can sometimes make the story.
There was a time when Stephen King was brilliant at making the reader care for his characters. Sadically sometimes that central character we ended up getting attached to would die suddenly in the middle of the story. How twisted!
Sadly in my mind King lost his inspiration with his last good story: The Green Mile.
I remember when I was in college and the story was being published in episodes every 3 weeks... I would wait feverishly for the next installment to be available and then read it in a day followed by another long wait until the next episode...
I agree with you. I think good stories are about good character and relationship. You can't have a good story if you ignore character dynamics, I think those are really important, too.
Oh yes. Some of my favorite book characters are bad ones, precisely because they're complex.
Oh my god, seriously? I had no idea The Green Mile was published in episodes, that must've been agony! I wouldn't be able to take it...:o
Hmmm I'd say there have seen some good ones since, like 11/22/63, Duma Key, Under the Dome (really good, imo), Bag of Bones and even some of he Dark Tower novels. But yeah, he has been slowly...fading, which is heartbreaking.