This week I started re-watching the movie Fugitive because I remember liking the plot and fast paced action. At the time time I started reading Ready Player One.
The first thing I noticed is that Ready Player One has way way more detail and background on OASIS, the online world, as well as back story – then the movie version. The first few chapters are almost all back story. There is very little going on in the main characters life. The backstory is interesting though because it is all about 80s nerd culture.
The Fugitive is super fast paced without any other real subplots. It doesn’t use any time to explore a culture or slow down for any reason really. Even something that seemed unrelated, like the landlord’s son getting busted, has a repercussion later: the son then rat’s out the fugitive Kimble.
So while I think the Fugitive plot points would work fine for a novel. And the structure would be helpful also – meaning when things happen etc. However, what makes really good novels work – or at least the ones that I like – is some deep dive into an almost culture aspect. It doesn’t to be videogames or comics like Ready Player One. In Moby Dick, there was a deep dive into whales and whaling culture. Michael Crichton would do a deep dive into science in ways that the movie versions did not.
I guess if you compared this though to Stephen King and the book The Shining, there isn’t so much an exploration of a culture but there is a ton of back story and exploration of that backstory. It goes into detail to help with understanding motivation.
Ready Player One gets away with long discussions on back story and exposition because it set up early on a protagonist we like. Someone we can root for. An underdog. Then the book set up the hunt – the contest. So the reader is more willing to sit through backstory because we are trying to find the clues also. We are invested.