I've been thinking about the big reveal in stories. You know, like the Big Surprise in The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense. There are a few reasons this has been on my mind.
- I just rewatched Fight Club, including listening to the commentary track by the director and stars,
- I just read a story which had a big reveal, and
- Of course, I'm writing mystery stories.
Mystery stories, by their nature, have a big reveal: the solution to the mystery. But I've never found that the mystery and its solution are the main reason I'm drawn to certain mystery series and writers. And, listening to the commentary track for Fight Club, it was pretty clear that the actors and director were far more interested in the reveal than I was.
For the actors, of course, it made sense, since they had to play the parts. But it wasn't what made the movie good, it wasn't why people quote it all the time, it wasn't why there's "Jane Austin's Fight Club" (google it immediately if you haven't seen it). And, if Fight Club was really just about guys beating each other up, why are the biggest FC fans I've known all young women? (Which is why the Jane Austin clip is so great.)
Why do I read and re-read the Nero Wolfe mysteries? Not because of the mysteries, though some of them are very good. But mostly to spend time with Wolfe and Archie and Fritz and Saul Panzer and Cramer and the gang.
On the other hand, though the mystery and the reveal are not the most important thing, you do have to handle them correctly. As I refer to here, one of the problems with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that it is a good mystery, surprisingly classical in its construction, but it isn't handled correctly. When the solution to the mystery is revealed over one hundred pages before the end of the book, the rest of the book inevitably becomes a letdown.
Full disclosure: I knew the secret in The Sixth Sense before I saw the movie, from reading reviews. Movie critics like to hint when they know something you don't, and if you put enough hints together you can get to the fact. I still enjoyed the movie. I knew the secret in The Crying Game for the same reason most New Yorkers did – they did a survey when the movie came out, and (for some weird reason) people in New York weren't fooled. But it was still a good movie, and not only because it quotes, more than once, the story of the frog and the scorpion from Orson Welles' film Mr. Arkadin.
With Fight Club I didn't have a clue.
Which brings us to spoilers, a topic I talked about here. The Time article I link to, the one that started me thinking about this, seems to have been removed (or at least the link now goes to a different, though related, article). I also had a link to an article on Slate about spoilers, and that seems to be gone completely. Conspiracy?
I also saw this article on the A. V. Club website: What really constitutes a spoiler?,which led me to this article, which talks about Cerebus, as I did here.
At least the A. V. Club leaves their articles online.
August 30th, 2010
This blog started five years ago today. In that time, I’ve made 280 posts, pretty much one a week. I’ve also made 404 posts on the utownwriting.com blog, which was started on May 6, 2007.
I learned that kind of discipline from Al Schroeder (among other places). He used to have an online journal called Nova Notes, which he updated every single day. Because I think that’s one of the most important things in any kind of writing: the discipline to sit down and do it on a regular schedule. Now Al does a web comic called Mindmistress, which he updates three times a week, plus other projects.
Plus, of course, I learned from Dave Sim and Cerebus. (Speaking of which, I was sure I did a blog post when Dave Sim reached the 300th and final issue of Cerebus, but I can’t find the post. I think it was before I actually had the blog. Now I need to locate it and post it.)
I started making my writing available online twenty years ago, back on the BBSs, and then on the internet some time later. My movie review site (www.u-town.com/movietown) has been up since 1999, and I had sites before that.
I said in that first entry that I wasn’t selling the novels, that I was giving them away (but keeping copyright, of course). Well, now I am selling A Sane Woman (for those who prefer real books), and I’m going to look into making it available for the Kindle, too. But I’m still giving it away as well.
Later: I was sure I’d written about the final issue of Cerebus, so I looked around, and I found a web page I’d sort of forgotten about. It was sort of a blog that I wrote before I had a real blog, just a series of posts in a long HTML file. I added those posts to this blog, with their correct dates, and you can see them here.
Even Later: Weirdly enough, since one of the old pieces I just posted here was about 9/11, this post ended up being #911 in the database (see the URL up there). Not that I’ve made 911 posts, but the database includes drafts and other things. But it’s still a weird coincidence.
Still Yet Even Later, Already: This question of persistence and determination reminds me of this post, also.
August 21st, 2010
I just got a check in the mail for $20.16.
(So, buy more copies of A Sane Woman. You’ll like it. Probably.)
August 16th, 2010
I'm thinking of creating a unified website, bringing this blog and the utownwriting blog together (though probably leaving the Sane Woman site and the Inherent Vice blogs where they are, at least for now).
WordPress (which I've been using so far) can't really handle the way I would want to keep the fiction and the blog posts separate if they were in the same site, but that will be easier to do with Drupal (which has "blog posts" and "news" and "books" as separate categories). Now I'm trying to decide between a self-hosted site (where I have to do all the maintenance and so on myself – which is a lot of work with a Drupal site) and a hosted site at Drupal Gardens (where all of that would be done for me, but where I would have fewer options for the site).
I will decide at some point soon. There are two new stories which are coming together, and if the new site isn't ready I'll start to post one of them at the utownwriting site.
On another subject, I've been thinking more and more that the new Wifi Kindle may well be the best Palm replacement I'll be able to get. The problem is that there aren't really any PDAs any more which aren't phones. I like a device for reading and writing, and there's no reason it has to be a phone (with the monthly charges that phones have).
The Kindle won't fit in my pocket, but:
- It's not a phone
- It's cheap
- They don't make (non-phone) Palms anymore
- You can add your own content to it via USB (for free)
- You can add comments to the content (like writing in the margins of a real book)
- It's cheap
Of course, they're not available yet, so we'll see. But it looks likely.
August 16th, 2010
I've watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it was interesting to see the differences between the book and the movie. Many things were handled better in the movie (as I thought they would be), but I do wonder how many of them were changed because the screenwriter and director realized that there was room for improvement, and how many were simply because there wasn't enough time to follow what was in the book.
Of course, there will be spoilers. Press "show" to go further.
show
For one example, there's Cecilia Vanger. In the book, Blomkvist sleeps with her, on a semi-regular basis, until she runs into the inevitable fact of his long-term affair with Erika Berger. In the movie, she expresses interest but he declines, apparently because she is a suspect in the murder he is investigating.
This is a reasonable qualm, and it indicates that Blomkvist (in the movie) has better judgment than Blomkvist (in the book). But there's also the fact that Cecilia Vanger is clearly emotionally troubled (at least in the book), and his sleeping with her casts his later relationship with Salander in a different light, as if he has a particular attraction to emotionally troubled women (from whom he will then keep a certain emotional distance because there is always Berger).
In the scene in the movie where Cecilia Vanger indicates her interest, I half-expected Blomkvist to say, "I'd love to, but this is only a two-hour movie! Hey, meet me after the credits."
For another example, in the book Blomkvist's daughter pops in to visit him for no good reason. He's clearly not that interested in her (and neither is Larsson), but she appears just long enough to give her father a key piece of evidence in the case, and then she leaves. Deus ex machina, and so clumsy that it's actually rather endearing. But in the movie the daughter doesn't appear, and Salander comes up with the key piece of information. Which is better in every way.
(Hey, spoilers coming. I warned you.)
There is one thing I really miss in the movie, though. There's a scene, after Martin is dead, when Frode, the lawyer, comes to visit Blomkvist and Salander, conveying a message from Henrik Vanger that the case is over. The book will not be written, and the story will not be told.
Until this moment, these three people (Blomkvist, Salander, and Vanger) had the same goal, to find out what happened to Harriet Vanger. But suddenly, the mystery solved, they have different goals (because they really had different goals all along, but they didn't realize it).
Vanger wants what is best for the Vanger family and the Vanger company, which is for nobody to ever find out what happened. Blomkvist, the crusading reporter, wants the story to get out, but he knows that he is being bought and has to do what Henrik Vanger wants. Salander can't be bought (as she points out in a wonderful moment when Frode forgot she was even in the room because as usual she was more absorbed with her laptop than anything else), but she also realized that there will be no gain, and more women will be hurt, if this comes out.
This is a wonderful scene, including the additional message that Vanger still considers Blomkvist his friend (which is clearly true, within the confines of an employer-employee relationship), because it reflects a lot of knowledge of how people think and act. There are disadvantages in having a novel written by a journalist, but there are moments when it becomes a good thing. And it's also interesting because, although Blomkvist has appeared throughout to be a wish-fulfillment character for the author (both are middle-aged crusading journalists, but Blomkvist is also inexplicably attractive to pretty much every woman he meets), he is not the moral center of the book. Salander is. She is incorruptible, she is clear on right and wrong (she is similar to Rorschach in many ways, but with very different politics), and in this scene Larsson is obviously in agreement with her.
In tech geek news, I was dissatisfied with the "Recent Posts" links over there on the right, since I wanted it to show only the real posts, and not the ones which are merely plugs for new stuff over at utownwriting.com. So, I poked around, and found some PHP code that would do the job, placed in a "widget."
I've ignored widgets until now, but it turns out they're ways to customize the blocks of links over there on the right. Until now, I've done that manually, like adding the list of characters. And the new widget worked fine, but it turns out that once you enable widgets, all the stuff you coded manually gets wiped out. So, I had to scramble to recreate the "Characters" listing as a widget.
But now I can't remember if there was anything else over there. Characters, recent posts, categories, meta. I think that was everything...
August 9th, 2010
So, it turned out that…
Hey, not bad company. I pasted in the first chapter of A Sane Woman, so it got a pretty big sample to work with. Based on the comments I saw, a lot of people get “Dan Brown,” which most of them found disappointing.
I did love one comment: “JAMES JOYCE BITCH!”
One person pasted in some Vonnegut and it came back with Kurt Vonnegut, so that’s something. And Stephen King is not really an influence on me (mostly because I was writing this way long before I ever read anything of his), but there are definitely similarities.
The first thing I ever read by Stephen King was The Green Mile,, which I talked about here and here.
August 9th, 2010
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