Here’s a few things.
1. I’ve joined Ello. Not much to report so far. I’m alternately pleased and frustrated by the fact that it seems designed to be as different from Facebook as possible. I Iike the intent, but I really have no idea how anything works. Either I’ll figure it out or I’ll quit, and I’m not taking any bets on which.
2. This being the first Thanksgiving without my mother, I’ve been thinking about my parents, and something occurred to me about my father.
To some other members of my generation, my parents, and especially my father, represented intelligence and sophistication. They lived in New York City, went to jazz clubs and chamber music concerts, read widely (both fiction and news), went to foreign movies, and so on.
When I was on vacation, I stayed with a friend who knew my parents when he and I were kids, and he remembered my father as rather rough-hewn, blunt of speech, a practical businessman who’d never been to college.
And both of those things were true. I guess that’s another lesson for writers — people have many different sides, and they don’t show the same things to everybody they meet (and sometimes people just see different things, for various reasons).
3. I just watched Guardians of the Galaxy again. The first time I was still somewhat in shock from having just seen Lucy, so now I think I’ve got a clearer picture. Guardians was generally praised for its humor and irreverence, and it definitely has those elements, but the snark is just a thin outer coating for a very gooey center.
The intergalactic badasses on this team bond almost immediately, talking about friendship and getting drunk so they can reveal all their griefs and insecurities. It was one thing when Gimli and Legolas realized they were friends after two and a half endlessly long Lord of the Rings movies, but the Guardians seem to get to that stage before the opening credits are over.
(By the way, it’s particularly silly to feel you have to speed through these sorts of character arcs when you know you’re going to get sequels!)
That being said, Gamora is one who disappoints the most. It’s several big steps down from her initial (and wonderful) rejection of Quill and his “pelvic sorcery” to her final, cooing acknowledgement of him as her “Star-Lord.” James T. Kirk would have cringed at that one.
I still like the movie, but I think it is a bit of a problem when you end up liking the CGI characters more than the ones played by human actors.
4. I saw a documentary where Norman Mailer said he always felt good about his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, mostly because it had been so quick and easy to write. He said it was like a woman who had had 12 kids, but was always especially fond of the last one, because the delivery had been so easy.
I’m sort of feeling that way about my current story. It’s funny how that goes. Stevie One came together pretty smoothly. One Night at the Quarter was a lot of work. I think you can sort of tell the difference. Which isn’t to say that one is better than the other — Inherent Vice and Mason & Dixon are both great books — but as a writer I think you do feel a special fondness for the ones which were smoother going.
Part Six is posted, by the way.
I don’t know if I’ll join Ello… not a big fan of the design of the pages. I prefer Tumblr as my “anti-Facebook” site, the only drawbacks being that its target demographic is teenagers and it has an awful lot of porn.
People have a bunch of different faces for different situations, and it’s hard to show that in writing, especially in a shorter story… because the character might not seem “true” to his character. That’s something to think about.
I’m already stalling out on Ello. I’m just not getting how it works, though I’m still poking around.
Good point about shorter stories — you can only show so much. And sometimes characters can be effective with only one “face.” I always think of the movie Lone Star, where all of the major characters got a lot of depth except for one — a sheriff, only seen in brief flashbacks, who’s an absolute bastard. More depth and background would not have improved the character — quite the opposite.
That’s a great point about characters (and people in general). I’ve never thought about it much from a writing standpoint. It’s another great thing to ponder as I continue to edit that first novel with a fine-toothed comb. 🙂
That was one thing I thought about when writing Stevie One. The Jan Sleet mystery stories were narrated by Marshall, her “Watson,” who knows her really well, but how would Stevie see her, from the “outside”? That can be tricky when you know characters really well — to see their public faces.