I get the A.Word.A.Day emails every day, and yesterday’s was about “agathism,” which I thought was a coincidence since I had just talked about Agatha Christie in my last post, but it turns out the word is not related in any way to Dame Agatha.
Oh, well.
I’ve hit a bit of a roll on my new story — I finally got to a scene that has some momentum. Until then it had been basically me pulling the story along, paragraph by paragraph, like dragging a heavy kid on a sled.
(This may be why I stay away from metaphors.)
I would consider starting to post it, except that it doesn’t have a title yet. That’s one of the things that’s specific to writing serial stories — you have to commit to the title at the beginning of the process, rather than at (or after) the end. So, I view this as part of the process — if the story isn’t clear enough to have a title, it isn’t clear enough to start posting either.
I have always stayed away from “trauma plots.” I have characters who have suffered various kinds of trauma, and that informs their actions and reactions, but that’s knowledge I hold — backstory, not story. And I have characters with what are generally considered mental problems and I’ve never given a “reason” for their condition.
This part of the article caught my attention specifically:
Classics are retrofitted according to the model. Two modern adaptations of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” add a rape to the governess’s past. In “Anne with an E,” the Netflix reboot of “Anne of Green Gables,” the title character is given a history of violent abuse, which she relives in jittery flashbacks. In Hogarth Press’s novelized updates of Shakespeare’s plays, Jo Nesbø, Howard Jacobson, Jeanette Winterson, and others accessorize Macbeth and company with the requisite devastating backstories.
Reminds me of Orson Welles’ take on Iago. Various productions and adaptations of Othello have conjured up a reason (or reasons) for Iago’s actions, but that’s a modern sensibility. As Welles put it (paraphrasing here), everybody who’s spent any time out in the world has met an Iago or two.
Needless to say, “Rosebud” from Citizen Kane was not Welles’ idea.
Microsoft Word is a terrible tool for writing, because it’s not designed for it. It’s designed for corporate word processing (and, more recently, simple desktop publishing). It has every tool you could possibly need (well, in theory), and 98% of them are useless, at best, for writing a story, or an article, or a college paper.
But I think the bigger obstacle to getting words out of your head and “on paper” (or wherever) is the internet (and, I guess, more recently social media, although the Web can be plenty distracting even without social media).
After reading this article, I even considered buying myself a reMarkable tablet, but it costs $400 dollars, and it would not be the perfect writing tool for me, because there is no perfect writing tool for me. For me, the best writing tool this week is whatever I wasn’t using last week. I am currently using iA Writer, also mentioned in the article, but of course it won’t last.
To some extent, I’m like Agatha Christie — I write in or on whatever is closest to hand. My current story already exists in several different places, and I’ve started a new section of it in iA Writer, without looking back at what I’ve written before.
I’ve been writing down scenes and ideas as they occur to me, but so far nothing has coalesced for a new story.
The other thing I’ve been doing is re-reading the first three stories in the current series (“The Marvel Murder Case,” “The Town Hall Mystery,” and “The Heron Island Mystery“), mostly because I knew there were some threads which I wanted to pick up again, but I also found some little, tiny glitches here and there (word choice, punctuation, etc.).
So, I’m thinking this would be a good time to go back and fix those. Not for the “Heron Island” story — it’s too soon to work on that one again — but the other two could benefit from a little (just a very little) polishing.
Also, having gone back and re-read the first two stories, I’m starting to feel that the story which should come next is not the one I’ve been assuming I ought to be writing…
Anyway, following up on my last post, Legends of Tomorrow has just had their 100th episode, and it was wonderful.
Gideon, who was the AI on the team’s (now destroyed) ship the Waverider, has now joined the team as an actual person, and the episode was a trip through her memories, including a lot of appearances by actors who are no longer on the show. It was nice to see all the familiar faces again, and the episode made excellent use of the fact that Amy Louise Pemberton, who has played Gideon since the first episode of the show, has a really good singing voice. There are also a couple of inside jokes based on the fact that over the years the show has had a lot of British actors playing American characters.
Also, regarding Doom Patrol, I loved this clip (and the episode it’s in). The young girl in the woods is Kay. She’s the core personality of Jane, who has 64 personas, all created to protect Kay, who was a victim of abuse growing up. She (Kay) usually stays in the Underground (Jane’s subconscious), but obviously she hears what Jane hears, and she decides to start dancing to the music, prompting Jane and then the other characters to dance also.
(I also love how Rita, the second person to start dancing in the real world, begins by standing, squaring her shoulders, clenching her fists for a second, and then moving forward onto the dance floor. She’s a studio-trained Hollywood actress, and that’s a nice moment of her “getting into character” for the scene.)
One thing that’s been new in this season is that Kay, who barely spoke in the first season, is becoming much more vocal and assertive now. She’s growing up, and healing, and this is unnerving to some of the other personas. This is a very interesting development, and I’m interested to see where it will go.
Also, a propos of nothing, here’s some Arcade Fire:
Specifically on the subject of sex, it bothers me more and more that the Marvel movies are so sexless. Not that movies have to actually show sex, but it’s weird to have a huge cinematic universe were nobody ever seems to think about or want sex. Movies from the 1940s, for example, never actually showed sexual activity, but some of them were drenched in sexual thoughts and feelings and desires.
And this is specific to Marvel movies (there is sex in DC movies, for example), and it’s specific to the Marvel movies which were made after Marvel was bought by Disney. Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, introduced in the first Iron Man movie, which was pre-Disney, are clearly living and sleeping together.
2) I have the Washington Post app on my tablet, and they have a section called “Good News.” Most of the articles on the app change frequently, because the world is like that, but the few “Good News” articles are mostly the same, day after day after day, so it’s basically a reminder that there’s not a lot of good news these days.
Or you could skip the article and just watch the video (which is much more fun):
That has never failed to put a smile on my face, and I usually watch it once a day. I get particular pleasure from the fact that Dave Grohl sets the tempo at the beginning on the guitar, and Nandi follows it on the high-hat. But when she starts on the snare drum, she pushes the beat a little faster, which is absolutely her job at that moment.
3)
I’ve embedded this clip before, and I’ve watched it many times, and I’ve watched reaction videos to it, but I just noticed something about it that I never saw before, and which nobody in any of the reaction videos has noticed either (though I’m sure somebody somewhere on the internet has noticed it before me).
Sansa Stark and her sister Arya are pretending that Arya is on trial, to catch Lord Petyr Baelish (“Littlefinger”) off guard as Sansa starts listing his crimes against the Stark family (and the realm as a whole). This obviously works — Baelish is fumbling, trying to assess his danger moment by moment, nowhere near as smooth as he usually is.
But there was a big fat clue right in front of him which he didn’t see. And which I didn’t see either, until now.
Arya is the one on trial, theoretically, but nobody takes away her weapons. Her sword (Needle) and her Valyrian steel dagger are still on her belt.
Arya is a Faceless Man, a master assassin, and she has killed a lot of people. Some online sources credit her with more kills than any other human character on the show. And Sansa knows this — she’s seen her sister in action.
If Arya had really been on trial, they would have tried to disarm her.
But, as I say, it slips right by. Until you see it, of course, and then it becomes “obvious.”
I do wonder if the writers thought it through like this, or if they just got lucky. I’ve had that happen — I read one of my old stories and I see something that I never thought about before and it happens to fit exactly correctly anyway.
Is it better to read five books once each, or is it better to read one book five times?
If you want to choose a good car to drive, it’s probably best to do research on a bunch of different ones, do some test drives, ask around from people who know cars, and so on.
However, if you want to figure out how to build a car, you might want to take one car apart and put it back together again, and then maybe do the same with another car, and so on.
When I first bought Inherent Vice (on my lunch hour, on the day it was published), I started to read it, and I ended up reading it pretty much continuously for the next five months, from the beginning to the end and then back to the beginning again, including listening to the audio book version many times. I figured out some interesting things about the book, wrote a lot of blog posts about it, and added extensive notes to the online Pynchon wiki.
I’m not sure if I learned any useful lessons to apply to my own writing, though. As I’ve mentioned before, when I’m reading Pynchon I’m always aware that any one of his sentences is better than any sentence I have ever written or am ever likely to write. So, not much to learn there.
Anyway, I am still poking around in Across the River and into the Trees, and I now have a second theory to add to my first one. I’m still testing them, though.
On the other hand, I’m definitely not going to devote five months to this project. There is pretty much no chance that I will figure out something which will elevate Across the River… to the level of Inherent Vice.
“I’m reading Across the River and Into the Trees now, which is interesting. It’s taking some work, but I think I’m beginning to understand what he [Hemingway] was going after. As he said to A.E. Hotchner (talking about this book, and critics), ‘In this book I have moved into calculus, having started with straight math, then moved to geometry, then algebra; and the next time out it it will be trigonometry. If they don’t understand that, to hell with them.'”
(This post has a lot of links, mostly to videos which — I hope — help make my points, but they’re all optional, so I put some of them at the end. I’m hoping I make the argument clear in what I’m writing.)
I’ve been planning for a while to write a blog post called “Little Jolts of Pleasure,” about how movies and television shows please audiences on a moment-to-moment basis, and then it made me think of the big kerfuffle a couple of years back when Martin Scorsese said that “Marvel movies aren’t cinema.”
I thought at the time that there was probably a case to be made, but that Scorsese did a lousy job of making it. He’s operating within a fixed set of assumptions, and he made an “argument” that seemed mostly designed to get nods and Likes from people who already share those assumptions.
But, since I really don’t care about what’s “cinema” and what isn’t in the first place, I dropped the idea of writing about it. “High art,” “low art,” “literary” vs. “genre” writing, “cinema,” “film,” “movies” — whatever. Seek out the good and avoid the crap.
I thought about the classic movie moment when, in some form or other, the cavalry arrives to save the day. Audiences yell and cheer and pump their fists and share a moment. I haven’t seen every Marvel movie, but there are certainly a bunch of those moments in the movies I have seen. And that’s fine — everybody loves the arrival of the Big Damn Heroes (not from a Marvel movie).
But then I started dipping into videos of people watching episodes from Game of Thrones at a place called the Burlington Bar. And some of it is people really enjoying Sansa Stark finally getting the better of master manipulator Littlefinger, and Arya Stark leaping in at the last possible moment to save her brother Bran, and also the rest of humanity (spoiler).
But then there’s the “Loot Train Attack,” where everybody cheers the fact that Daenerys and her huge Dothraki army and her giant fire-breathing dragon are attacking the (evil) Lannisters, and in the process burning soldiers to death (cooking them inside their armor, in essence) and destroying a year’s worth of grain for the entire region, and you can see the people in the bar gradually quiet down as they see how brutal this all is. Dragons, if they existed, would be a horrible weapon to use against soldiers armed with swords and spears and arrows.
Even apart from the fact that, before the entire series is over (spoiler), Daenerys will burn an entire city to the ground (after the city surrendered to her), this is terrible to watch. The music brings this out wonderfully, too. I particularly love a shot of two horses galloping away while pulling a burning wagon, obviously trying desperately to escape the fire that’s attached to them.
Marvel movies don’t do that. When the cavalry arrives, in whatever form, you get the big rush of “Yeah!” and you can sit happily with that feeling for as long as you want.
Even Captain America: Winter Soldier and Captain Marvel, which dealt a lot with “who can you trust?” and “who should you follow?” ended up with the main character definitely on the side of right, and the bad guys established as obviously and completely evil.
To bring this back to mystery stories, because everything relates to mystery stories, this was one thing I really liked about the Ellery Queen mysteries (the good ones). As I’ve talked about before, they occasionally examined and played with the general “mystery –> solution = triumph!” formula. Sometimes Ellery solved a mystery but held back the solution because of the harm it would cause, or he had trouble figuring out the best way to deal with what he (and nobody else) knew:
A man is haunted by nightmares that he killed his mother when he was young, though it was generally held that she had committed suicide. Ellery investigated, and he discovered that, in reality, the boy had (accidentally) poisoned his mother. So, Ellery constructed another explanation to try to help relieve the man’s torment, rather than reveal the truth.
A man — a husband and father, an apparently nice guy — is accused of murder. After he is convicted, mostly due to circumstantial evidence, Ellery is called in to try to save him from the electric chair. Ellery “fails,” but he later reveals to one person that he had solved the case, and the nice family man was indeed a nice family man, and he was also a murderer. Ellery, who was obviously still somewhat conflicted, had decided it was better to let everybody think that he (Ellery) had failed, rather than to have him explain that their beloved husband and father was guilty.
If you do this on a regular basis, then it becomes another gimmick, another cliche, but if an audience goes into a movie knowing there’s absolutely no chance this will ever happen, then it really is an amusement park ride.
And so I think Scorsese’s argument is specifically about Marvel movies, which are all centrally planned out and controlled by Disney, rather than “superhero” movies or “action” movies or “genre” movies in general. In Alien, only Ripley survives, and there was no guarantee that she would. In the Marvel world, she’d be guaranteed to survive because Sigourney Weaver would already be under contract for three sequels.
By the way, I’m not holding up Game of Thrones as great art (for one thing, there are still some seasons I haven’t even watched, and the last few episodes definitely suck), and certainly it delivered a lot of great, unambiguous “the cavalry is here!” moments, but in GoT you can’t always rely on the fact that 1) the cavalry will show up in time, 2) the cavalry will win, or 3) the cavalry actually represents anything good.