Would That I Might

While it is true that a story must be coherent and sensible to readers, it is also true that a story which does not have surprises of one form or another will be rather dull and boring.  For a story to work, their must be some agitation to the plot: if everything happens as one would anticipate, there is no point in the piece.  Towards that end, VanderMeer presents the concepts of interruption and contamination.  These both present ways of imbuing a work with unexpected elements in a way that will shake up the story in exciting and intriguing ways. Interruption is the simpler of the two concepts to understand, and it is largely focused upon the action of the plot itself, as it refers to a moment in the story when an unexpected event intrudes upon the narrative.  This can be something unexpected and disconnected from the plot up to this point, such as the arrival of an unexpected guest in the middle of a dinner party, or a sudden accident that shifts the focus. ...

Their are times when a story will seem to begin to open up.  It is often at a moment when things feel stuck, and suddenly it becomes obvious the next beat that needs to happen.  At least, it feels that way to me.  It could just be that I do better when I back myself into a corner, that the pressure forces my imagination into gear, but often the new ideas feel somehow like they have already been there in the story.  As if my unconscious had been foreshadowing the coming action even before I was aware of it.  So, I tend to suspect that it may be, rather, that my unconscious is trying to give me a chance before it barges in and shows me what was already supposed to go there. Aldous Huxley wrote almost entirely in trance, or at least that is the story that I've heard.  He would sit down and go into an alternate state and wake up with the next section of his writing.  That was his process.  Indeed, he even worked extensively with the noted hypnotist ...

It makes sense that, following the sections on cutting and inter-cutting scenes, the next section would discuss the question of what scenes can be dismissed entirely in a narrative, relegating important information to summary or other forms of description.  It can be quite useful for a writer to recognize that not every moment in a story needs to be shown, and that even a seemingly important or climactic scene can, at times, be removed in a way that improves the work overall. Of course, to remove an important scene, a writer needs to be able to make that absence work for the reader.  If a story sets up a confrontation between two individuals and then simply skips it, that can easily be jarring enough to derail the reader's momentum.  For instance, if we return to the example story that was in the post on inter-cutting, imagine if the scene cut with the woman chasing and finally catching up to the teen girl she thinks stole her phone.  Now, the scene cuts away, and ...

I did more work on that Bimble story, but didn't start on the other work yet.  I have a few ideas that are racing to come out, but I want to get some things straight in my mind first.  For one thing, I am considering the question of how to incorporate certain ideas.  I have this one character in my mind, a figure that I have made up to be a sort of historical character, and I have a good sense of who the guy was.  He's an odd character, intentionally, but draws on a lot of real life figures for inspiration.  I'm still working out the entirety of his "story" but I am thinking that he is going to be a background figure, not one that is necessarily spoken about in his own piece, but who will be referenced throughout. For example, I have an idea that this man owned a large and eccentric house that has been repurposed.  One of the stories is set in this building, and the story of the building itself will be incorporated within this story, allowing some element...

A short discussion on inter-cutting scenes within a story is presented next in the chapter.  The first point raised within this section is to discuss how shifting from a scene to another can work to keep reader interest and stretch it across a scene that they might otherwise have less motivation in reading.  In essence, the desire of the reader to resume and conclude one line of narrative is cultivated by ending a scene before that strand of plot has fully resolved.  By switching, at this moment, to another thread in the narrative, the reader's desire is allowed to build.  If done well, the scene or scenes that come before that resolution will earn their own power, but without disrupting the forward momentum that is built by the desire for a resolution. This can, of course, be done poorly, where the scenes that are inserted do not have enough interest for the reader, and thus become annoyances that are delaying the real gratification.  It may even be that some...

I spent much of today attempting to write, but I did not get all that far.  I've continued work on the Bimble story, but the new story is proving difficult.  It was not entirely a wasted day, though, as I came up with a number of new ideas that I think will make for good stories in the near future.  It may be that I will work on one of those right now.  I also have a fair bit of development in terms of one particular character that will figure somehow in all of this.  Most of what I've been thinking about does interconnect and revolves around Florida, and I like having a sort of center around which to wind the ideas. The second workshop in the course at FAU was this evening, and it seemed fine.  We didn't have any actual workshop to do this week, but I handed in the first chapter of my novel.  Honestly, that only occurred because I didn't get the writing done that I had originally planned, but it's probably for the best anyhow.  I think it might...

The discussion in Wonderbook of film techniques has me thinking about a movie that I think of as probably the greatest work of cinema, and that is 2001: A Space Odyssey .  Now, when I call it "the greatest work of cinema", that is, obviously, a huge statement, and I have not seen every film ever made, and, what is more, I am not saying that this is my own personal favorite movie.  The reason I have for thinking that 2001 represents a particular pinnacle can be explained with a single criteria, and that is the inherent filmic nature of the piece.  In essence, the story of the film cannot be translated into another medium without altering it in ways that require, either, massive deformation to make the story function, or abandoning the underlying intent and meaning of the work to render the same sequence of events. Many people will argue that this cannot be the case, since Kubrick based the movie on the Arthur Clarke novel, but this is inaccurate.  Clarke wrote the ...