“We cannot resist this new Power. We must join It!”
A new Tumblr feed by Valerio Amaro presents this intriguing what-if:
“What would happen if J. R. R. Tolkien worked in advertising?”
The results are often funny, always cool. As Tolkien himself said, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us,” so take some of your time to check out One Ad To Rule Them All!
Juliette Wade’s TalkToYoUniverse blog, which focuses on worldbuilding, has long been one of my favorite writing resources. And, a recent post on one of my favorite films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, confirmed my enthusiasm.
It’s rare to see a serious function of storytelling applied to what many might dismiss as escapist fiction but, when you have a universal principle, by definition it must have no boundaries.
Take a look at Ms. Wade’s analysis. It will help you be a better reader, a better viewer, and a better writer!
In a piece called “One Wrong Move,” John Austin at Fresh Pulp Magazine brought up an important point about storytelling while discussing the film White House Down.
I won’t tell you what scene brought out this epiphany, but here is what John says about it:
… It takes very little to destroy something like a film. That one moment in “White House Down” made me regret the preceding 90 minutes. I felt stupid. I felt like the people who made the film were making fun of me. To my mind it was like they were saying “hey, let’s make this film with decent dialogue, great action, get the viewers hooked on it, and then make them eat a giant shit sandwich with this one sequence.”
I completely empathize with this “Aww, why’d you have to do that?” moment. However, we shouldn’t take this merely as a warning, but also an opportunity. It may be proverbial that any tool for good can be turned to evil, but the reverse is also true.
If One Wrong Move can spoil a story, then One Right Move can make it.
One well-done aspect of a story can really send its overall quality soaring. My favorite example is an acting choice made by Bill Nighy while playing Davy Jones.* When Sparrow maneuvers Jones into trading other people’s souls for his own, Jack asserts: “Now we’re just just haggling over price.” In response, Jones simply repeats the critical word, “Price?” and makes a plopping sound with a puff of air through his lips.
For me, that single sound—signifying both that he dismisses Jack’s self-congratulatory cleverness and yet is considering the offer—simply made the character of Jones. It was relaxed, unpretentious, and hinted at casual malice without being melodramatic.
Keeping in mind that the small stuff really can make or break a story can dramatically improve your chances of editing out your One Wrong Move … and saving your right ones.
_
* You’d think this trilogy is the only story I ever want to comment on, but I comment about it a lot because I believe its complexity and depth as story are massively under-appreciated.
I have written quite a bit about the dangers of the MFA as currently conceived: in response to Chad Harbach’s controversial Slate.com piece, on Ani Shivani’s skewering in the HuffPost, and my take on Lev Raphael’s confession about his fellow MFA students that Raphael himself wasn’t too happy about.
But I write mostly about the dangers to the market as a whole.
Yesterday, author Rahul Kanakia—whom you can read at Clarkesworld Magazine, the Diverse Energies anthology, et al.—posted a brief analysis on the dangers of graduate work in general to the individual (“Why you should never, ever get an MFA“) but in a way that demonstrates neatly the pyramid dynamic I see developing in publishing and the MFA system:
Another way to think about it is this: the supply of professorships is not increasing. There was a time, during the 40s and 50s (with the GI bill) and again during the 70s (when women and minorities started entering college in greater numbers) when colleges had to increase in size very fast. The supply of professorships was HUGE. That is not the case anymore. At best, the number of professorships will stay the same. More realistically, it is going to shrink. Basically you will only get a professorship if someone dies. Now, each professor advises maybe 40 or 50 students over the course of his or her career; and only the single best student is going to advance into his (or someone else’s) chair.
In a profession that seems particularly prone to positive thinking, head-in-the-sand optimism, it is refreshing to see a writer stating an uncomfortable truth so boldly and clearly. You can’t sustain an economy based on recruiting people to be recruiters of people who recruit. Eventually, you run out of suckers, I mean students to justify new professors.
I haven’t been posting about everything I read lately. To be honest, the constant updating was a bit tedious and the feedback lukewarm.
But, every once in a while I find something that is just too good not to pass on. The short story “What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia is one of those stories.
This is a good example of fiction that breaks the “rules of writing” successfully. For example, the protagonist-narrator is largely passive while the other characters take action around her. Also, most of the story is dialogue. Lastly, a lot of the information you need to understand the story is established by telling, not showing.*
Yet, this is a well-written, emotionally engaging story nevertheless. The language is touching, the character interactions natural despite the strangeness of the main character. I believe these aspects of story-telling are far more important to literary quality than most of the mechanistic advice we typically read in writing blogs and books. I encourage writers and readers to take a look!
And, once you’ve read it, take a moment to think about how perfectly the title matches the precise boundaries of the story.
_
* This final point might be more a consequence of length than style; if Kanakia were to make a novel of it, he might show more.
After cleaning up from Hurricane Irene (and doing a little expansion along the way), Vermont’s famous Bartleby’s Books re-opens for Black Friday. A huge win for indie bookselling. And, across the Connecticut River, New Hampshire’s RiverRun rents a new location in the same neighborhood that will save the indie bookstore a remarkable $50k/year!
An intriguing new study on library users shows that (among other things) 50 percent of patrons report buying a book by a writer they first read in a library.
Hey, Nelson, why didn’t you identify today as Thanksgiving? And, what the hell is “Brumalia” anyway?
Well, I have been avoiding the use of moveable holidays to identify the dates in my daily reading. Also, I lament the fact that we have reduced the three-day Thanksgiving feast to a single day (yeah, yeah, I realize that a lot of people take a four-day weekend) so I thought I would honor the 30-day-long Roman feast of Brumalia instead, as a sort of protest against our truncated festivity.
Now, what have I read this morning? Continue reading
Of course, the big news in the literary world is the passing of Anne McCaffrey. The best tribute (I have read) to this amazing author is by Juliette Wade, who discusses how McCaffrey brought genre definitions into play with her Dragonriders of Pern series. Also at Wade’s Talk To YoUniverse blog: an excellent piece on how hard choices for your characters require consequences.
Melville House, one of my favorite sources for publishing news, details an intense and disappointing exchange between blogger Jeremy Duns, who outed the plagiarism of Quentin Rowan, and the latest accused plagiarist Lenore Hart. (By the way, considering that her subject is Poe, Lenore Hart must be a pseudonym, yes?)
BEST READ OF THE DAY: Josh Getzler at Hey There’s a Dead Guy gives us a truly remarkable insight into the writing process by showing us how a writer feels when he’s given the opportunity to enjoy his own writing as a reader. There is so much that can be taken from this piece (for writers and readers) that I won’t say more. Go check it out.
Yes, this photo is meant to be self-deprecating. Thank you.
I know you guys (the writers … guys and gals, technically) love yourselves some good query advice. So, here’s something I read at Hey There’s A Dead Guy: Benjamin LeRoy‘s “Three Tips for Querying! (Because everybody loves a list).” And, yeah, we do love a list. Also at Dead Guy is an interesting piece about that unfortunate dust-up over FridayReads.
GalleyCat discusses the movement to create a Literature category at YouTube. I’m all for it! And… as if the Quentin Rowan scandal wasn’t bad enough, Melville House reveals yet another case of blatant plagiarism in publishing. Continue reading
Wow, I spoke too soon. Normally I publish the daily reading around noon, and I should have waited today, too. Lots of cool stuff since then.
Ellie Robins at Melville House talks about a Guardian piece on Melville House‘s Not The Booker Prize party, in which Sam Jordison discusses “whether literary criticism [in broadsheet book reviews] adds anything to our appreciation of books, and whether the limited pools of reviewers and books reviewed skews the picture of what there is to read out there.” Continue reading
