bite-sized chunks

As I mentioned here, I’m looking into the possibility of moving this site to Drupal Gardens, and I happened on another Drupal Gardens site, www.susanmacphee.com, where I saw this article, “A Beginner’s Guide To Website Copywriting.”

These points are fairly standard instructions for how to write copy for the web (even the New York Times allows a slightly more conversational and informal style on their blogs than they do in their actual articles), but some of them also apply to writing fiction for the web.

When I started A Sane Woman in the late 1980s, I published it in little chapbooks, one for each chapter. It was written for that format, and when I got online around 1990 I found that it didn’t really work as a series of short BBS posts. So, I abandoned it (for a while) and started U-town, which was designed to work in short chunks of that size. This is pretty much true of everything I’ve done since, including the mystery stories I’m writing now.

Drawing the readers in is definitely a challenge (it’s a thing that TV has to do much more than movies, for example, since it’s a lot easier to flip to another channel than it is to walk out of a movie theater). When I first wrote U-town, the scene of Vicki on the bridge was in the middle. When I was rewriting, I moved it to the beginning, since it is much more intriguing (I hope) than the original beginning.

The “pyramid style” of newspaper writing (starting with “Who, What, Where, When, Why”) doesn’t mostly work for fiction, in my opinion. Telling a story is different from writing a newspaper article. When we see Vicki on that bridge, we know very little; and things are only revealed gradually throughout the book, including what “U-town” even is.

This applies very particularly in mystery stories, as talked about last time, but I think it’s true of fiction pretty generally.

On another subject, I just watched the movie Laurel Canyon, and I thought the performances were good (and, in the case of Frances McDormand, great) but the story was frustrating.

My main complaint is that everything that happens in the movie is pre-programmed and unconvincing, but it doesn’t pay off, since the ending is very ambiguous. You can have a loose, lived-in movie that has a low-key ending (Robert Altman did this a lot), or you can have a predetermined movie that leads up to something definitive and pleasing. But you can’t have a pre-determined movie (where, as Roger Ebert says, we uneasily begin to sense the presence of the screenplay) that doesn’t go anywhere. It’s like getting to the end of Murder on the Orient Express and not finding out who did the murder, or removing the last fifteen minutes of His Girl Friday.

Also, the actual scenes of music recording are not convincing if you’ve ever been in a recording studio, and (as another critic pointed out) all the music they’re making sucks. Someone from the record company keeps calling and complaining to McDormand’s character that the album she’s producing doesn’t have a hit single. I’m sure the record company woman was supposed to represent Corporate Pressure on Artists (she usually calls while she’s running on a treadmill), but if I was hearing the results of those sessions I’d be worried, too.