- Juliette Wade on How much description?
My general rule for description (of people or places) is that you need to stick with the rule of relevance: if it’s relevant, describe. If it isn’t, don’t. It sounds simple, but evaluating the degree of relevance in any location is where the tricky part starts. There are three big kinds of criteria I generally use to assess this: point of view criteria, plot criteria, and story criteria.
I get a lot of stories for Kaleidotrope where I learn more about a character’s hair and eye color than a do about who they are or why they’re doing something. Most of the time, if it’s just window dressing, you can drop it. Writing isn’t a visual medium. You have the reader’s imagination to help you, and moreover will often have a less satisfying story if you don’t let it. [via]
- I really like Warren Ellis’ challenge to artists to redesign Superman…as if the artists had never heard of Superman. Some of the results are really interesting.
- Along a slightly similar route, the Hypothetical Library: “imaginary book covers designed for actual authors.” [via]
- And along a very slightly similar route, John Seavey imagines a universe in which only the first Star Wars movie is canonical.
- And finally, I just like this quote from Jonathan Carroll, so I’m posting it.
writing
A possibly haunted house
Today was Friday, and there’s not a whole lot more to say about it except that. I wrote a little more this evening, which is tough to do while standing up on a crowded and bumpy train, but I like where the little bit I got down is headed. It may helps me get closer to where I think the story overall is supposed to be headed.
Then this evening, I watched The House of the Devil, which is an interesting movie. It’s a pitch-perfect homage to ’80s horror and sometimes really genuinely scary. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, it’s a movie that “understands that if there’s anything scarier than haunted house, it’s a possibly haunted house.” I’m not sure it’s a whole lot more than a skillful imitation of movies they don’t make a lot of anymore, but I enjoyed it.
Now I think it’s time for a little blind capping, then maybe the Burn Notice season finale and bed. That’s a halfway decent Friday, no?
The Thursday who was a man
Today was a lot like yesterday, just like yesterday was a lot like the day before. That tends to happen in the middle days of the week, and I suspect tomorrow will be a lot like today, except a little more Fridayish.
This evening, I met my parents at the train station in Hicksville, a couple of towns over, and we went out for dinner at a nice local Indian restaurant. My father had just been to the eye doctor to follow up on the procedure he had last week, which according to the doctor went extremely well. My father’s vision isn’t yet 20/20 in the eye, but he’s made a speedy and almost full recovery, which I think allayed some of the concerns he was having.
I did a little writing on the train, knowing that we might get home late and I might use that as an excuse not to, and I think I may be slowly getting past this stumbling block that’s kept me from moving ahead on this one particular story. (Despite having a pretty clear idea of where it’s headed and what happens next.) I think the trick to overcoming writer’s block is not to believe in writer’s block. On the walk to Penn Station this evening, I listened to Eddie Izzard in conversation with Elvis Mitchell, and Izzard talked about how the only way to overcome panic was simply not let yourself panic. It doesn’t help if you do, so you just have to force yourself not to. Easier said than done, maybe, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to do it.
(It’s a little like Jack says in this clip from the first season of Lost: “Fear’s sort of an odd thing.”)
And I watched the second episode of Saturday Night Live‘s first season, which is almost unrecognizable as Saturday Night Live. It’s a little less over-stuffed than the premiere episode, but mostly because it spends so much of its time being just a live music show. There were a couple of amusing filmed segments, and some surprisingly not-very-funny Muppets, but there weren’t any sketches, unless you count a couple of commercial parodies and “Weekend Update.” It’s like watching alternate universe version of the show, or at least very different than the standard Cliff’s Notes version you get in most SNL retrospectives. I don’t know that I enjoyed the episode, but Art Garfunkel was surprisingly good, so there’s that.
Anyway, that’s about it.
Wednesday various
- I don’t know, there has to be a better way to reform our failing public schools than by firing all the teachers. [via]
- Is it just me or is having Abe Lincoln say, “I’ve been a slave to vampires for thirty years” sort of in questionable taste? It feels like maybe it’s just me. Still, this is pretty neat as far as book trailers go.
- I admit it, I got a kick out of Hark! A Vagrant’s Canadian Stereotype Comics.
- Yes, and this font joke. [via]
- And finally, I meant to post about this when BBC Audiobooks America did their whole audio book by Twitter thing with Neil Gaiman, way back in October, but I just never got around to it. You can read the whole story here (or you can listen to the audio version here), but even I haven’t done that, and I contributed a line to the darn thing. They’ve apparently since done at least one other such story, with author Meg Cabot, but I’m much more interested in the experiment here than the results. It was fun to participate the day-of, but like Salon’s Laura Miller, I’ve yet to be convinced that the results are particularly readable to outside eyes.
Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason….At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” [Samuel R.] Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.
Which may just be another way of saying too man cooks — especially untrained cooks — spoil the broth.
A horny devil
I think I may have to finally cave on my (admittedly foolish) no-new-books-for-2010 policy, if only to buy a copy of Joe Hill‘s new novel, Horns. I’ve been a big fan of Hill’s writing since his debut short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, and while I didn’t think his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, quite lived up to those stories, it showed a whole lot of promise and was a really fun read. The new book sounds like it will be, too.
I particularly liked this recent interview with Hill at the AV Club:
AVC: Horror fiction tends to operate on a strict, E.C. Comics-style morality. In your stories, bad people still get punished, but there’s more sympathy toward people who make mistakes.
JH: There’s two things to say about that. First of all, I was talking to someone the other day who was talking about a line in the new Peter Straub novel [A Dark Matter], which I haven’t read. A character in the book’s saying, “What am I feeling here, horror or terror? I think it’s horror.†There is a difference. Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy. It’s really rooted in this notion of imagining what it might be like for someone else to suffer the worst. On that level, I suspect that horror fiction is very humanizing.
Though he goes on to acknowledge that
Okay, one of the great flaws of genre fiction is, characters understand each other. They talk about a situation, they trade information in a way that makes perfect sense to both of them. I almost never have conversations like that in real life. I think that one of the things you see in literary fiction is a much more honest and daring approach about character, where characters have a tendency to talk past each other. They’re each talking… This is something I learned from watching John Sayles movies. A couple who are in love will sit down at a table and tell each other about the day, and neither one is really hearing a word the other person says. They’re talking, the conversations are existing on two different planes. I kind of love that. Because real connection is rare.
Yeah, I think I’m going to have to read this book. Maybe Straub’s new novel, too, come to think of it.