The Moral of the Story

In 2012, a thread on the NaNoWriMo Plot Doctoring forum asked, 'What exactly is it that makes a story worth telling in your opinion?'  One commenter of many claimed that 'fiction [doesn't need to] teach you a moral lesson or even have a moral outcome'.  To this, I replied:

When we talk about stories having morals, though, we generally mean one of two things, which in practice often overlap but are probably worth distinguishing:

1. The story shows approval of characters, actions, or situations in accordance with the demands of an ethical system (e.g., the kind people win and the mean people lose; the poor are happy and the rich are sad; the people who care deeply about things are shown favourably and the cynical people are shown unfavourably); or

2. The story illustrates a general truth about the world or human nature (e.g., slow and steady wins the race).

Register, Part II

Adapted from a post from 2014 on the NaNoWriMo Fantasy forum, in response to a writer who requested tips for 'developing a good fantasy voice' for high fantasy.

A fantasy story of the kind that you describe will have two different categories of voice, the first of which is the speech patterns of the characters.  These should naturally vary, not only from character to character, but also by context.

Register, Part I

First posted in 2013 on the NaNoWriMo Plot Doctoring Forum, in response to a writer who wondered what would happen if he wrote in a 'casual' style except with 'somewhat archaic and uncommon' adverbs, such as 'peradventure', 'hitherto', and 'forasmuch'.

The main problem I foresee is not one of comprehension but one of register. For anyone unfamiliar with register, I will explain, as well as I can:

Register might be described as the level of formality and technicality of a piece of writing. For example, in English, 'The king hired an assassin to kill his rival' is probably medium-register. If he hired a 'hit-man' to 'bump him off', that's fairly low register; if it were the 'head of state' trying to 'eliminate his competitor', that would be slightly higher but more technical-sounding; and so forth. In other words, register is the 'feel' of a passage. It's influenced not only by vocabulary but also by sentence length and structure and word-order.