Vaguely Literary Trifles

Courtesy of author John Scalzi, here are the
10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.
Do read his descriptions which are as great as the titles:

• An Algonquin Round Table Christmas (1927)
• The Mercury Theater of the Air Presents the Assassination of Saint Nicholas (1939)
• Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas (1951)
• The Lost Star Trek Christmas Episode: "A Most Illogical Holiday" (1968)
• Bob & Carol & Ted & Santa (1973)
• A Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski (1978)
• The Village People in Can't Stop the Christmas Music- On Ice! (1980)
• A Canadian Christmas with David Cronenberg (1986)
• Noam Chomsky: Deconstructing Christmas (1998)
• Christmas with the Nuge (2002)

Potter's Magic Rewriting

Just back from a month-long absence from the internet and I take the time to go to the movies !?! Where are my priorities?

Well, I'm stuck on the Harry Potter juggernaut. A willing passenger. After all, J K Rowling is a writer, and the movies do work off her books. I considered it reasonable research.

In preparation for the movie I reread the book. Needed to refresh my memory and prepare to identify characters and translate Hogwarts-speak into Muggle-speak for my hubby. The book is complexly written - and, yes, somewhat poorly written by comparison to the literary standard bearers. But it has complex characters and deals with the stressful realities and emotional confusion involved in a coming-of-age novel. The characters are practically members of our family - the good characters, of course. AND, I love the on-going story.

While feeling like I'm Mrs. Weasley, I'm watching the movie leave out events and sub plots. Conversations are swallowed up and bits of them are spit out by other characters in another scene. Losing those bits and pieces of the book feels like losing family treasures.

Yet, the movie would have gone on way beyond all reason if the book had been followed exactly. (Bladders need consideration!) The director/screen writers clearly had to condense and consolidate. And that's exactly what I must do to my own manuscripts; get them to zip along and keep my readers involved. Hey, I'm no J K Rowling! I can't afford to present an over-stuffed manuscript to an agent or an editor. This movie helped me see the value of tightening as you rewrite.

And, the climax in the movie blew me away - far better than the already action-packed book. Wow. The rewriting streamlined the story and ended it with a stronger bang. "Rewriting" is no longer a dirty word.

Are you a Potter fan? Does this strike you as an accurate assessment of the on-screen revisions? What do you think?

Write On!
Nan

Stud Fiction. Never Touch the Stuff.

On a flight, Gloria Steinem overheard a passenger claim that he never watched chick flicks. I’m weighing in on her proposal that we label his kind of films “prick flicks." Her discerning post is at once a defense of chick flicks and chick lit, and an effort to challenge the labels.

“Think about it: If Anna K arenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll's House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal? Suppose Shakespeare had really been The Dark Lady some people supposed. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as some Elizabethan version of ye olde "chick lit," only to be resurrected centuries later by stubborn feminist scholars."

At Time Goes By, you can read a discussion of matron lit, hen lit, and lady lit for 49 to 69 year old women readers presumably fascinated by hot flashes, aging parents, and widowhood. Along with “granny lit,” what’s next? “Roaster lit?” The terms are increasingly degrading. Steinem’s solution? We need labels for everything that’s not women’s fiction or film.

The time I was shot down by a publisher to whom I’d tossed a just-for-practice pitch of my not-ready-for-prime-time novel, my writing group gleefully coined a phrase for the high stakes novels he preferred: “Stud Lit.” Then a friend came up with “dick flicks.” Now Steinem’s proposing “prick flicks.”

And the point? Folks, it’s a really important one, and Steinem makes it well:

"Just as there are ‘novelists’ and then ‘women novelists,’ there are ‘movies’and then chick flicks.’ Whoever is in power takes over the noun – and the norm – while the less powerful get an adjective. Thus, we read about ‘African American doctors’ but not ‘European American doctors,’ ‘Hispanic leaders’ but not ‘Anglo leaders,’ ‘gay soldiers’ but not ‘heterosexual soldiers,’ and so on.”

Steinem reminds us that if the chick flick label helps men know what to avoid, why is there no label to guide women to the ones we’d like to avoid? Furthermore, we don’t want viewers of glory-war and chainsaw-sadism and pain-seeking-babes feeling short changed. These folks need a label so they can locate their preferred flicks in reviews and catalogs.

As a writing-group buddy points out, writers of “women’s fiction” can’t find a graceful way to include the phrase in a query. It’s not a noun, so “...my 80,000-word women’s fiction...” doesn’t work, and making it an adjective as in “...my 80,000-word women’s fiction novel...” isn’t as elegant as “...my 80,000-word novel” or even“...my 80,000-word traditional mystery....”

Anybody out there have clout in the publishing industry? If so, while we’re at it, could we convince folks to ditch the word “cozy?”

– Lois

Hoist Upon My Own Tired Cliches

Here's a smorgasbord of cliches in word and deed-

A recent competition in The Telegraph asked contestants to "compose a piece of prose crammed with as many infuriating phrases as possible." The winning examples don't contain insults about mothers chewing cigars or sitting around the house. Mostly, they riff on the homogenized, sporty corporate lingo that saturates speech and e-mails with extra syllables while leaching them of meaning.

An eminently modern couple in New Zealand is fighting for a phrase seen most often in rap lyrics or text messages in order to name their son 4Real Wheaton. According to them, this name reflects their deepest feelings about the awestruck wonder of parenthood. Apparently, the spelled-out, concatenated phrase Forreal as a first name is vastly inferior. I would be surprised if any major database or official record system is designed to store digits anywhere in the first or last name fields. But how weak-spined it would be to let disruptions with identification for niggly things like school, medical records, credit or benefits stop one from reaching new heights of nomenclature by imposing today's catchphrase on one's own child. 4Life.

Last, here's a set of forty hackeneyed cliches that are claimed to exist only in the movies. Some are purely visual, but some are practically mold-covered plot devices I still find in newly published books. Are you guilty of using any?...Me? Oh, never. Probably never...Okay, not since last week, but I took the pledge and I'm 7 days clean. I'm worried how I'll fare once I actually start writing again though. I'm sure it'll be harder to keep the high road then.

P.S. I think we've got the house.

Caché: Missing That Story Dream

In the spirit of Clare2ey’s post earlier this week, as one of the masses I’m speaking my mind on the subject of story...with a plea that we all just stop messing with it.

Does a work qualify as a story when it doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Well maybe. Is it story if nothing happens? Well, nooooooo...not unless it holds our attention some other way. Don’t get me wrong...I love Virginia Woolf...but even she offers events, few though they may be. Is it story if something happens but the reader/viewer is left uncertain as to what? What if the audience is expected to participate in the telling?

Maybe I’m just too conventional to appreciate experiments in storytelling. Or maybe the question isn’t so much is it story? but instead is it delicious? And there’s the rub, of course, since my cup of tea may well not be yours.

We can be pretty certain that a book or film will appeal to at least somebody if it has the standard elements: interesting theme, plot, structure, characters, setting, style, and tone. But even with all of those things going for it, a story will leave readers or viewers cold if it doesn’t hold their attention...or they can’t identify with the protagonist...or the concept just doesn’t strike them as hilarious or compelling or beguiling or charming. Take your pick.

All of this is an approach to – you guessed it – another film that lends itself well to a discussion of writing.

I didn’t much like Austrian Michael Haneke's "Caché,” (“Hidden”) a much-lauded psychological thriller. Here’s the blurb from Netflix: “Winner of the Cannes Best Director Award...centers on wealthy French couple Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), who begin receiving threatening videotapes and phone calls. Eventually, Georges realizes who the perpetrator is but refuses to tell Anne, causing a rift. Flashbacks of George's childhood reveal the mystery, a story that illuminates France's damaged relations with Algeria.”

I’m convinced that the reason I didn’t like the film, despite the great concept that sold me on it in the first place, is because the filming of Caché wasn’t storytelling. It makes hints at a story, but demands of viewers an engagement in the process and finally the burden of deciding what really happened. Second, it never settles on a point of view. Instead, the director achieves the visual equivalent of a journalistic point of view, but in doing so only ramps up the artful confusion.

Everything in the film is intentionally ambiguous. The videotapes seem threatening, but not really. The Algerian from Georges’ past has a grudge, but when we’re introduced to him, he seems quite harmless. If he’s harmless, then the perpetrator must be his son. Only the son, too, seems benign, so now our hero’s beginning to take on a bad odor. Only we sort of sympathize. After all, his sin was that of a small child. So far so good; we’ve got complex characters. But we never get a solid feel for anyone’s motivation. And without motivation, although we see things happening, they never make much sense. There are layers and layers of subplots merely hinted at. The wife’s relationship with a friend (are they or aren’t they?). The young son’s growing anger (is he just going through puberty? or is he being influenced by the Algerians?) And what the hell happened at the end anyway? I recommend a very large screen, because the director planned for some viewers to see one thing in the final scene, some another.

Sounds interesting, right? The film has all the story elements. Fascinating theme (all that’s hidden will be revealed so everyone’s accountable in the end). A plot with all sorts of great conflict. Style and structure are intriguing (long-shots before each scene, the still camera). Intriguing characters. Great setting (an affluent Paris neighborhood in sharp contrast to its seedy outskirts). Deliberate and effective dark tone.

So am I too uptight? Not enough of an intellectual? The director’s considered a genius, so who am I to argue? I’m missing two ingredients, and this analysis reaffirms their importance. To me, at least.

First, a sense of confidence in the storyteller...the one who’s supposed to lead us by the hand through a story, for heaven’s sake. I don’t like constantly being jerked awake from my story dream when time after time I hit a brick wall, forced to make yet another decision because, by golly, Haneke hasn’t made it. What he’s decided to do is play a psychological game with both hero and viewer.

Second, that slippery element called point of view. In this film we never know with whom we should identify. This is intentional – yet another aspect of the film’s ambiguity – but it sure doesn't work for me. The whole purpose of point of view is to give us a character’s perspective, to allow us to experience events through her eyes or ears. If she’s got attitude, we’ve got attitude. If she 'sees' the world through auditory signals, that’s how we perceive too. Gradually we come to accept her motivation because we’re right there in her head. Multiple pov can work as long as we're quite sure whose head we’re in at any given moment. If the pov’s omniscient, we’ve got the narrator’s solid perspective. And that’s where the film failed me. The persistent journalistic point of view gave us no way to interpret events. A journalistic pov can work well at the start of a novel or film, where it provides an eerily broad view. But we must eventually be allowed to get inside someone’s viewpoint.

Not in Caché. So is it story? It sure isn't storytelling.

–Lois

Who's Calling the Shots?

I’ve always been intrigued when authors talk about a character who ‘takes over’ as if the author is just along for a ride. I’m as eager as any writer to meet a strong character...one whose voice I can simply sit down and record on paper as she speaks. Perhaps I’m too new at this game to have met one.

Stranger Than Fiction (Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman...what are you waiting for!) portrays such an author-character relationship. Critics seemed baffled as to how to bill this film (comedy? drama? romance? fantasy?) which, although nominated for a Golden Globe, received mixed reviews. Frankly, I don’t see how anyone but a writer could appreciate all of its nuances. But it’s a must see for novelists. (And graphic artists, who seem as excited by it as I am.) The DVD’s worth owning just for Emma Thompson’s role.

It was mind-blowing to see the author-character relationship enacted on screen. We’ve got the character. He’s begun to hear his life narrated while he lives it. We’ve got the novelist, who is brewing and testing out possible endings for his story. Finally, we’ve got the renowned professor of literature in an earnest attempt, for the sake of the character who appeals for his help, to arrive at the author’s identity and the character’s fate by methodical means. First he determines the book’s point of view, from a recitation of a single omniscient sentence. Next, its genre, from the character’s recent experiences. Finally, his destiny, from a description of the author’s tone and voice.

“Wow,” you say. And rightly so.

This would make a great party game. (Be sure to invite a few avid readers – you’ll need to pair them up with less literate friends.) Rip two chapters from the middle of a bunch of novels and describe the narration and a couple of salient events to a partner whose job it is to guess both author and ending. You only get to read aloud one sentence.

But I digress. In Stranger than Fiction, although our character puts up a struggle in his own cause, he is ultimately subject to the mercies of his inventor. It’s meeting him that undoes her. She is clearly gratified to see him fully – and unerringly – realized. “Your hair! Your eyes! Your shoes!”

Sadly, my own characters seem quite shy. So far I’ve had to coax them out of hiding, and while over time they do reveal themselves in enchanting ways, they certainly haven’t led me by the nose. Despite having let them know I’m a team player, they seem inclined to defer to me. Judging by the corners I’ve painted us into, we might do a whole lot better were they stronger-willed.

–Lois

Raising Emotional Stakes: Taking a Lesson from The Matador

Thank God for DVDs. I didn’t catch The Matador when it was released in theaters over a year ago. Then again, back then I probably wouldn’t have recognized the terrific lesson the film offers fiction writers. A lesson, that is, in developing seedy characters that readers find themselves loving despite more refined inclinations. In this movie we not only identify with a truly vulgar hit man – we find ourselves rooting for the kill.

Lest ye doubt, allow me to enumerate the many fine qualities with which this character arrives on stage. He’s rude. He’s crude. And yes, he is lewd.

Let me say right up front that if you’re likely to be offended by soulless standup sex – even if it is performed by Pierce Brosnan – you might want to give this film a miss. You’ll lose out on something special if you do, however. Because we begin to know this guy just as soon as we see his mechanical, off-hand, misogynist attempts to de-stress following each kill (he might as well be f___ing a mannequin). The camera work’s not pornographic, nor remotely titillating. This part’s not filmed to shock so much as to help us get this character.

Writer/Director Richard Shepherd takes advantage of our expectations for the stereotypical assassin. In fact he counts on our expectations in order to build emotional tension. He draws us in because the guy’s so not like we are (right?) and we’re repelled at the same time we’re curious. We’re not certain what this guy’s gonna do, and we’re more than a little worried about it. In fact we’re downright uncomfortable. (I particularly enjoy watching this kind of film – in some ways like Pulp Fiction though not nearly as bloody – with my spouse. When I’m disturbed, I know he’s about ready to get up and leave the room.)

Shepherd draws an exaggerated character, but he does so with a light touch. This makes him interesting without turning him into a caricature. And then the director starts to play against the stereotype. We learn that our truly offensive assassin’s lonely. He’s kind of anxious to please a guy that he meets in a bar, a polar-opposite niceguy played by Greg Kinnear. Still repelled by our assassin, we don’t know what to make of him. But his poor social skills are so over the top that we’re fascinated, so we stick around to see what he’ll do when the director forces these unlikely buddies to interact.

Here’s where we get well and truly hooked. We’re not watching a transformation – our hit man doesn’t lose his undesirable traits – so much as we’re starting to make excuses for the guy. He so wants to make up for his bad behavior that we’re relieved when Kinnear gives him a second chance. He tosses off whoppers so effortlessly we’re willing to believe him. He’s so inept in all matters besides f___ing and killing that we’re disarmed right along with Kinnear.

Since I don’t want to give away the ending, I’ll need to be careful here...no more fun details! Shepherd layers on the vulnerabilities through both action and back story. Finally, we get the twist, the masterful flaw that’s so unexpected – one that so beautifully plays against the stereotype – that we’re totally identified. And it’s startling. Because we find ourselves in our assassin’s shoes at a most unsavory moment.

Nothing dull about this movie. And yet it’s not at all your typical action film. I’m totally impressed, because it achieves what I hope to – someday - in my own stories... characterization so riveting that the plot’s at once surprising and inevitable.

–Lois