#247 Victoria Dougherty: What People Want From Fiction, And The Art Of Worldbuilding
Victoria Dougherty is the author of The Bone Church, Welcome to the Hotel Yalta, and Cold. She writes fiction, drama, and essays that revolve around lovers, killers, curses, and destinies. Her work has been published or profiled in the New York Times, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. Earlier in her career, while living in Prague, she co-founded Black Box Theater, translating, producing, and acting in several Czech plays. Her blog – COLD – features her short essays on faith, family, love, and writing. WordPress, the blogging platform that hosts some 70 million blogs worldwide, has singled out COLD as one of the Top 50 Recommended Blogs by writers or about writing.
In this episode, we talk about fiction, and worldbuilding. We first focus on how to create compelling characters, and we refer to the Game of Thrones series finale as a bad example of it. We also explore the psychology of failed expectations. We then get into how people want meaning from fiction, and how tragedies like war might provide that. We also discuss popular genres and why they are so successful, and how politics and morality might ruin good literature. We finish by talking about how fiction can work as a thought-experiment, and how it is not so detached from things humans develop through culture.
Time Links:
Creating characters that are very psychologically distanced from the author
The Game of Thrones series finale, the psychology of failed expectations, and how to create good character arcs
What people want from fiction is meaning
Why war stories are so compelling, and how tragedy gives meaning to life
The appeal of popular literature, like romance novels
How politicizing and moralizing ruin literature
People need their systems of beliefs
Fiction is like a thought-experiment
Fernando Pessoa, and social conventions as fictions
Victoria’s new book
Follow Victoria’s work:
Website: http://bit.ly/2HoiQ0f
COLD (blog): http://bit.ly/2ZnyeUU
YouTube channel/vlog: http://bit.ly/2HkHoYc
Books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2PrstSz
Twitter handle: @vicdougherty
Support Victoria on Patreon! : http://bit.ly/31VXqj1