How do you separate the story from the circumstance or background around the story?

[rai]

This is a hard question for me to ask in a short way, best for me to give some examples of what I mean.

But the question is this: when you are reading a story or a book, how do preconceptions effect your interaction with the story?

For example, I am reading "Battlefield Earth" which is just OK. Not the worst but I have read better. I have not seen the movie yet, but from the first page of the book, I am thinking "Ok, Terl is John Travolta (also a Scientologist), he played in 'Welcome Back Kotter'. Forest Whitaker plays Ker (he also was in "Fast Times at Ridgmont High"). So even not having seen the movie, when I am reading the book my mind has a mental picture of the actors as the characters whereas if I had read the book 20 years ago I would have had a totally different view and maybe not even had any image of the creatures as humans in make-up.

Another example, I read the Stephen King books "Under the Dome" before "Tommyknockers" but I could not help but think of the similarities between them, or when reading "Under the Dome" couldn't help but draw comparisons to "The Stand" in that I was saying to myself OK this character in "Dome" takes the place of that character in "Stand" etc.. Or Stepehen King will write something and I will be like "Yep, there it is, that's his old trick"

I know more about the background of a book such as the GRRM "A Dance With Dragons" and the talk about how 'the knot' is going to be un-tied or other background of the story how long it took to write in relation to other books and the controversy of if/when it would be finished. This takes me away from the story as a story and makes me think: "I know this is a story, but also a means of Mr Martin to make a lot of money", how does this effect my reaction to it?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Re: How do you separate the story from the circumstance or background around the stor

king does definitely use some stylistic short cuts in his books, and I suppose if you churn them out as quick as he does, it's not surprising, but at his best I think there's few people better at drawing a character quickly, using their quirks to set them in your mind. And that, to my mind, pulls his characters out of the background.

 

[hopewrites]

Re: How do you separate the story from the circumstance or background around the stor

The only example I can bring up of where I have done this is the first time i read LotR was after I heard there was going to be a movie about it. And all through the book I was thinking "if i were a director I would do..." then when the movies came out years later I was not only comparing them to the book but to how I would have done the movies from the book.
other then that I cant relate because for me books are so different from movies, their communication goals are as different as their means. maybe it was Disney who taught me to separate them so fully. the first time I read a book because I heard the movie was coming out was Hunchback of Noter Dame. As a ten year old girl i was shocked appalled and enthralled by what I was reading but was utterly baffled as to how this could be made into a movie I would be allowed to watch let alone some three year old. The answer came a month later with the release of the film. The names of a few places, and the names of a few characters were kept and everything else was fresh and new. Utterly disgusted with the film for its discrepancy I had to give it credit for being a nice enough movie if you didnt know what it had desecrated. From then on I have held the same expectation of disappointment when going into a theater to watch a rendition of some book I have read.
Sometimes I was not far off, but thankfully more recently I have been. LotR set a new Book-Movie standard that has producers thinking twice about meddling too much with books they wish to profit from.

 

[steve12553]

Re: How do you separate the story from the circumstance or background around the stor

....But the question is this: when you are reading a story or a book, how do preconceptions effect your interaction with the story?....

I think you have a little problem with "suspension of disbelief." There are time when I am too aware of another form of presentation of a book and it bothers me for a while but if the book is good enough, I'll get past it. One example, I saw The Dresden Files on TV before I had read any of the books. I saw dark haired, attractive Valerie Cruz as Connie Murphy despite the description of short, blond Connie Murphy in the first book. That's hard to shake but it doesn't matter a lot as far as the stories. I'll live with that. There are many cases of that but if it matters to the story I usually manage to see things the author's way eventually. If not, the beauty of the written word is that the reader gets to fill in the blanks.

 

[Theory5]

Re: How do you separate the story from the circumstance or background around the stor

Well, it sounds like the authors play a large role in the books you read, and how you see them. I tend not to pay attention to the authors until I've read a few of their books, and even then I rarely pay attention to details about them. Occasionally I pay way to much attention to the book summary and then I wonder when the book will match up with the summary. I did that a while ago with the Planet Pirate Series. I picked up the omnibus based on the summary, but it turns out whoever wrote the summary was wrong, and they didn't match up with the story.

That confused me for a bit, so now I really don't hold too much faith in the summary.

 

[Talhe]

Re: How do you separate the story from the circumstance or background around the stor

I've had problems seperating the authors from their works. For the most part it involves their beliefs/actions outside of writing; if they're completely blatant and noxious, I can't go on. For example, Lovecraft's racism doesn't openly seethe in his writings (often), and Anne Rice's... 'Ricing out' only pops up briefly in her latter Vampire books, and is easily ignored. (I didn't think about it much at first, as it was Lestat voicing her views and he's a complete prat.) Granted, now that I know she wrote the 'Sleeping Beauty' trilogy I'd have problems reading her books and not laughing.

Other authors are more problematic. For Robert Jordan, his sexism, filler, and utterly mercenary attitude of stretching his series out like taffy became unbearable for me. Orson Scott Card was worse; I enjoyed his works as a kid, but as an adult I learned more about the man. I saw his insertion of his religious beliefs and modern politics into his works, and the decision made by the 'protagonist' of the Worthing Saga made me throw the book against the wall.