why a story didn't perform well

[jehoram]

I've written over 300 stories here.

Truth is, every story is a roll of the dice. Some are just riskier than others.

You've got the think like a buisness-person. What does the audience want?

And this is advice I cheerfully ignore, because I'm not really in the business of finding out what an audience wants. I don't care what it wants. I only care about what I want to write, and want to tell. Sure, I like it if other people like it, too. But as for ways of keeping score, like author ratings or monetary gain, they don't interest me. If I were writing this shit for a living, I would be intensely interested in trying to figure out what readers want, and pandering to them in hopes that they would give me money. But this is a free site, and I like it that way.

 

[jehoram]

Yes, this was about a movie scene for the Battle of Waterloo.

The stunt people on that film look like they earned every nickel.

 

[gunhilltrain]

The stunt people on that film look like they earned every nickel.

Movies about moviemaking are kind of "meta," if that is the right word to use. Here is a movie called Waterloo inside another one called The Day of the Locust (it's supposed to be the late 1930's). The novel by Nathanael West has the set-collapse scene. However, West could create it without using stunt people or anything else beyond his typewriter.