When is a story not a story?

I'm reading Maggie Stiefvater's book Shiver, about a girl who's in love with a werewolf. I think she might be one herself, not sure. I just started it. It's one of those YA books where nothing really happens. I find that un-compelling even though it's a perfectly fine book. This seems to be more common with SF-ish ones. Why do you think that is? Sometimes people fall in love with worldbuilding and utterly forget that they have to TELL A DANG STORY. Something gripping that makes me want to turn the pages, sheesh.

There are enough clues that I'm certain what's going to happen. Even if I'm wrong, it's not a state of being that makes me carry the book around the house and read ahead breathlessly. And I'm home sick today. See. 

Who is it, Niven? I think Niven. The one who wrote dozens of stacks of novels that are all worldbuilding and no story. Worse is when someone is working out ideas about something and using characters to discuss it. Oh just kill me now.

So I'm in love with my new novel in progress, but I had always planned out this whole side of the story I was going to tell from Apollo's point of view, you know, explaining all that, but I'm absolutely not going to do it. But I am going to let people in the book think it up as a daft scenario among other daft scenarios. You don't have to explain magical realism--in fact, not explaining is part of what makes it magical realism. Even if it's more like Classics-al realism. Anyway I think it's infinitely more fun if we don't really know if someone is crazycakes or experiencing the ancient divine, or maybe those are the same thing anyway.

I mean, if you need the world to give you something, you find a way to make it give you that thing, and you see it the way that you personally would see it. Interpretation is reality what with how we don't have one without the other.

If your brain is peopled by saints, when someone appears who doesn't fit into the normal human world, you see a saint. If it's aliens, you see an alien. If it's classical mythology, you see the gods and the people from the myths. If it's tv, you see the characters and the actors. I'm certainly guilty of that one. When I first got here to not-Hollywood, I kept thinking I saw actors I recognized. My brain was set with that filter.

When I saw a hawk flying over carrying a snake, my mind went straight to ancient portents.

I wish we'd seen a lot more about how polytheism works in a modern setting in Caprica. You know I loved Caprica all kinds of ways, though I found almost all of the characters pretty hard to like, for various reasons. But my favorite thing is modern polytheism seeing devotion to various things as religion. Devoted to sports? Your god is x. Devoted to knitting and quilting? Your god is y. It's a way of seeing what's already there. We ARE already devoted those ways so calling them gods is perfectly logical.

Anyway, now I'm thinking a lot about the What's Going to Happen page-turning urgency of this book and I'm not so sure it's there yet, though there's definitely a lot of Is She Bananacakes? going on. But just like with Shiver, that's not enough. Must think about the story on top of that. I just thought of something between the end of that sentence and the beginning of this one, something that's already in what I've written so far but wasn't turned into story.

I have to go write that right exactly now.