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The storyline of action and reaction is tediously predictable, and the ending is that islamic terrorism wins: "Islam has nothing to do with killing gays, but the individual citizen's right to keep and bear arms does."  https://youtu.be/zL_zP2pHp3w    "What difference at this point does it make" that I lied it was a Christian's youtube video which led to deaths of Americans in Libya, said the Butcher of Benghazi. Or that more people died on 9/11 in a religious war than in four centuries of the Spanish Inquisition that ended centuries ago?  There is no honoring the innocent dead in all this political-hack talk either way, only by Americans taking the path illuminated by the truth.

Sure, the 'speed of a dragon' can be a metaphor for the speed of, let's say, light, so he'd scoff at both Star Trek's Transporter and Warp Drive as Einstein would to this day be skeptical.  And I'm not impressed with lit. agents' sense of haute culture - only a sense of what might different in the same way, creme brulee, not donuts.

I don't think he ever explicitly wrote what you have him write in terms of one-time/one location, and it was staged drama he wrote about and not the novel/short story which is a wholly modern art form. Once Europe rediscovered the ancients for the Renaissance until recently in TV and film, drama followed and for the most part stayed with his discipline for centuries.  Also consider the longest continuously published story, Homer's The Iliad, for some 2600+ years: one limited period, less than a year, within a much longer period, a decade, mostly about a squabble between Agamemnon and Achilles during which the war had neither started nor ended. There is something intense experiencing that story than a TV mini-series on the Trojan War.  Even what I consider a good movie on the story, though amended to include a beginning and an ending The Iliad never did, Wolfgang Petersen's Troy made the mistake, for commercial purposes, of diffusing the story. The dramatic story was always about the struggle of Achilles versus Agamemnon at one time and one place, and the reasons for it, and Achilles' killing of Hector, who had been stopping the Achaeans' advance for most of a decade, was nearly incidental, but it was in this movie where I never seen before in film this primary drama, but no one gave Petersen credit. So, in that way, you are correct, the modern audience for drama has generally grown out of the Aristotelian model, but I maintain that there is something awry for the novel treated a proto-scripts for TV and film when the novel has always been as both an art form and commercial commodity something to offer much more than TV drama -- either along Aristotle's model or today's muddled mess of mediocrity.

Elucidate please.  I'm not buying this book.

I used to fight the "restrictions" of the 8-point story arc [ http://www.changingminds.org/discipline … nt_arc.htm ] until I sat down and tried to analyze where my and other's stories failed, and it is so easily explained by failure to outline the plot in such a fashion even if not strictly so.  It is particularly difficult to follow all 8 points in succession for very short stories and for long multi-plotted novels, but I have found the most common failure of stories/novels on TNBW is failure to establish "Stasis"; the reader is expected to just jump in the middle of everything.  The [anti-8-point arc with strong stasis] is the fad in TV scripting by two minutes of out-of-context action then 'let's flashback earlier and then give context'  The Night Manager on a cable channel is singularly annoying in this way, and after 3 episodes I thought I could be bound to a hospital bed and never have the time for this back-and-forth jerking around in time and place. I never liked soap operas, and the nighttime versions thereof, for this reason because no such TV writer had any intention to contain the story within a single arc whereas, at least, each episode, ought to have a beginning, middle and end, and you are wrong that it is "normal" to do without one-setting, real-time restrictions and such drifting away had more to do with short attentions and carelessness about understanding a story.

POV strictly means differing from first to second or third person in the telling, and I don't mean that, or that is limited. In Flowers for Algernon the main POV  is first person who goes from moron to genius back to moron. That is using multiple POV -- not to mention the interspersion of other POVs from others at times. 

Moreover, I also mean that the author must be willing to express neutrally viewpoints but not cast -- directly, at least -- as either anti- or pro-protagonist. You don't see that in sci-fi/fantasy. The evil character does not say something 'evil' in  order to contrast with the 'good' the good  character says, for example.

The style must be strictly disciplined in order to convey the meaning, though encrypted in a sense, to those who are used to the same ol' stuff.  My first rule is regular alternationp
: The Legend of the Boy Who Knew Nothing of Christmas strictly alternates between the neighbor's POV; the boy's POV; the neighbor's roommate's POV - as does The Night of the Rising Sun Over Baghdad. among the AI. I do not tell whose POV via dialog tags or omniscient narration but leave a key to finding out.

This is not good enough IMO.

IMO it really is, or an imagined antagonistic viewpoint.

I've been meaning to post something on this topic in the Literary Forum but have been held up by the fact that I cannot finish Max's Achilles because of the struggle on POV.  What I mean to say is that neither limited third-person, and especially first-person limited, is good enough for my purposes but rather it is more like dialog that is perpetually switching between multiple first-persons and interspersed with limited third person having the effect of overall omniscient narrative but only ever presented by "first-persons".

To reach navigation from the name button at most right top (Portfolio ... Logout) on a Tablet, MS not Apple, (that is: by touching rather than clicking) is almost impossible. Once you touch the button and get the menu then reach to touch the next item, they all disappear. If you use two fingers very quickly, it can be done after a few tries.

That was the most interesting opinion he had, but to the extent I understand what it means, he is wrong in several ways. The most extensive generality is that it is a rare thing for an author to ever write in anything but a single (his own) point of view (*).  An egregiously fallacious multi-POV technique is head-hopping with italicized "thoughts."  Nonsense. That is still the author merely telling the reader what that character is thinking at that moment in probably the most annoying way. If 'craftmanship' means strict omniscient narration with no internal dialogue, I'm fine with that, but it has been losing popular appeal among those who think reading offers something that the visual arts do not usually: head-hopping, internal dialog, etc.

(*) as a bit of self-promotion, I am doing multi-POV in my Remembrances trilogy where there is no author's POV (even in narration), but only rather a slight bias toward one of many co-equal POV's

I'd also recommend Flowers for Algernon for an author's successful genuine shifts in POV.

Okay, because you were able to interpret the author's shoddy writing and rambling insinuations [he actually did write 'I looked L'Amour and the cowboy genre...'  you quote] can you tell me what's his point? Write simply for simple people like them stupid cowboys who took deep pride in the country and people?

"So: what else made them work?"   Hey go read this entire book [Grant/Brings the Lightening], I'm not telling, the author orders us.

The admonition for commercial success is so often given to write for your audience and “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” [H.L. Mencken]

By this I am reminded of a joke by the master of dry irony, Emo Phillips:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

Much like mixing Christian Literature genre with LGBT with a dash of vampire mythopoeia.