What we can learn about writing from...Polanski's The Ghost Writer

I liked this movie really a lot. I'm afraid of sounding like the NYT reviewer and going all hopelessly giddy over what on the surface is just an inane political thriller just because it's so nice to see something that's made by somebody who knows what they're doing and doesn't cut around so much that it makes you nauseous.

So, what can we take from this film?

1. People actually can mature as artists and get better and more subtle with age.

2. No matter how unremarkable your subject matter, presentation and style can make it fascinating. (The inverse of the Burton situation, come to think of it!)

3. Reinforce the emotional state you're trying to invoke in your audience. If it's suspense, make everything a little unsettling. If it's joy, get sunny little elements going. A lot of tiny, subtle things have a bigger impact than a big obvious thing. If you don't know what emotional state you're trying to evoke with a scene...consider that your audience may not either, and that often leaves them in various states of confusion, disconnection, or most likely, boredom.

4. Know what you're doing. Everything in your story has significance, and if you're just throwing words in there to fill space, that will translate into a story with less impact. Unless, you know, you get the monkeys-throwing-poo-at-the-wall effect and accidentally create something that resonates with the masses *coughTwilightGrishamDavincicodeCOUGH*

What we can learn about writing from...Burton's Alice In Wonderland

1. No matter how good your influences and source material are, or how great every element of the concept is, your final product can be a no-fun mess.

2. Even if your final product is a no-fun mess, it can be insanely beautiful and there's a lot of value in that.

3. However, added to the value is a fair touch of tragedy - why use that much beauty to present something so unwatchable?

4. Even great artists can't automatically pull off horrible clichés.

The Avatar school of really basic writing success

So, I went to see Avatar the other week. Did you? I bet you did! Did we like it? I thought it was pretty shiny...it kept my attention for three hours, which is a pretty handy trick. Made me a little motion-sick for a bit in the beginning though.

The storyline and plotting were extremely simple, which made me think this would be a great illustration of a couple of basic writing points that get made all the time and authors never seem to quite buy into. To whit:

1. "You don't have to overdo the back story. Readers can fill in a lot from just a few hints, and they don't need to know everything."

Authors love writing back story. They love their characters, know them inside and out, and want to tell you every little thing that the main character's best friend's great-aunt went through when she immigrated to America and endured great hardships.

There is, of course, a time and a place for back story. But what Avatar proves is that given the opportunity, audiences will happily truck along with the barest information. Did they tell us how that guy lost his legs, or what he and his brother did as kids, or where any of the minor characters were from, or what was going on back on earth, or how technology had gotten to awesome or the history of the avatar program or...anything? They did not.

They couldn't get around explaining why everyone's on this planet, so they show us that rock in that one tiny scene and tell us it's really, really expensive and it exists on this planet. Not who discovered it, not what it does or why people pay so much for it, just the bare essentials - it's a thing, and it's expensive.

Based on this absolutely scant amount of background, pretty much everybody on Earth was able to watch, understand, and enjoy this movie. And those points they skip over aren't boring, irrelevant ones. Any one of them could be a whole story on its own. Audiences would probably love to know all that stuff, if they had five hundred hours to spend watching the extended version.

Again, this isn't to say that you should oversimplify your work and cut out all the back story. It's just to point out how smart your audience is, and how much they can guess without being explicitly told anything.

2 - "Introduce important stuff early, in context, and be subtle about it."

I think there's a lot of fear, especially with less experienced authors, that readers will miss any point they aren't beaten over the head with. The danger is, of course, that if it's totally obvious that something is going to be relevant later in the book, readers won't get any surprise or pleasure out of the reprisal.

To be fair, Avatar is pretty obvious. It's clear that the big dragon thing will be relevant later, as will the thing where the people get unplugged and their avatars fall down, and the thing where the tree has the power to bring people back to life as their avatars.

But still, everything is introduced plausibly, in context, and as part of a scene and a plotline, which is where I see a lot of struggling occur among authors. If it's really important, make a scene about it. And be creative! Don't just force a scene where some random character happens to be talking about some topic that will be relevant later. Make it really fit, an integral part of the story. Unless, you know, you're writing a satire.

Goodness, I've rambled. I hope some of that is helpful!

The Reader

Well. So I've officially seen my one Oscar-nominee per year. Speaking of Oscars, it has come to my attention that the Dukes of Hazzard did not win any. Could somebody get on that? It had everything - a bar fight AND controversial material about the North vs South divide in the Civil War. It at least deserves a Pulitzer.

Anyway. I've been reading a lot about e-book readers lately. It really seems likely that they're the next big thing, and honestly, I like them. I didn't at first - I first saw one right around the first of the year in Chicago, and I thought it was neat but I didn't take it seriously. But the idea has grown on me. I do love physical books, and I would still want them, but I would never actually exchange money for a $30 new hardcover book. With all these readers, you can get free books, cheap books, and even with cheap books you know you're directly supporting the author with a big percentage of the sale. I think that's pretty cool.

But seeing The Reader...man, that movie captures the heart and soul of why paper books will never go away, and why nobody needs to be afraid they will. Everyone has those books, where it's just Franny and Zooey, or Alice in Wonderland, or whatever, but there's this one specific copy that means more to you than any photograph or memento ever could. You hold it and shivers go through you, and you open it up and you're a completely different person. You read it when you were feeling lonely when you were little, you read it out loud to your best friend or your favorite lover, you carry it with you no matter how many times you move and would weep at even the thought of leaving it behind. No electronic copy of anything is ever going to do that. You're not going to stroke your Sony Reader screen when you pull up a book you downloaded for your honeymoon.

That's all... I loved the movie, it was too long but it was beautiful and tricky and emotional and I'm quite glad I saw it.

007 Bond movies in 007 days!

That is correct - there is officially an upside to having this horrible, never-ending cold, and that upside is Bond. James Bond.

Here's the rundown:
Thunderball (1965): I'd remembered this one being boring, but it was not boring. Domino is pretty useless, but hell, James has got a jet pack! That flies! How do you improve on that?








You Only Live Twice (1967): Seriously, where do they get this stuff? Kissy Suzuki? Mini-helicopter battles? A volcanic crater with a false bottom that opens to reveal a monorail-equipped underground lair/launching pad for a "carnivorous space craft" that eats your astronauts for lunch? The death of his randomly Chinese girlfriend (the setting-theme is Japan, so why she's Chinese I could never figure out), the one who gets it when a ninja drips poison down a string while they're sleeping and she rolls under the string at the last moment - I saw this one when I was young and that image really stuck with me all this time. A+ for dying arrangements in this one.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969): This one was actually my favorite for a bit! It held up for three whole days, I think! This Lazenby fellow looks like a cartoon version of Bond, but it's okay, it's mostly his stunt double doing high-velocity bobsled fights anyway. And the nepharious plot seemed to involve curing the world's allergies...