I am quite enjoying C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, a fantasy novel with an interesting colonial setting, somewhat reminiscent of North Africa under French rule. I was at first very intrigued by the cover, that you see below, and so I took advantage of the preorder Amazon service, and basically I forgot about the book until it popped up in my reader. Nice and smooth.
I am pleased to report that the book, a tale of rediscovery of one’s roots and of revolution, is as good as the cover, and as it is the first in a series, I will for once contradict my previous posts, and go on with a trilogy. Mind you, I still love novellas and stand-alones, but there are exceptions, and The Unbroken is certainly one of those.
It is always a pleasure to have my conviction confirmed, that we are living in a time of high-quality publishing when it comes to imaginative fiction. To lower the bar somehow, I will have to write more stories…
Last night I spent (or wasted) a few hours trying to explain to a contact of mine why writing is hard. Because this guy was like, “hey, I’ve got this great idea, the story will practically write itself!” and from there it was all downhill to the classic “you just got to sit down and write it, right?” Wrong.
So I asked him to give me the short summary for “Casablanca”, the 1942 movie. Because it’s a movie everybody knows, and because it illustrates perfectly my point. The short summary my friend gave me goes more or less like this…
During WW2, in Casablanca, Rick Blaine is the owner of a night club. When his former lover appears, together with her French Resistance husband, Rick needs to straighten his relationship with her, while staying one step ahead of the Nazis.
Which is a viable capsule plot for Casablanca, and it has all the “great ideas” – star-crossed lovers, war, political intrigue, exotic locale, Nazis. Nice and smooth. Now write it.
“What do you mean, write it?”
And I explained that a great idea is indeed a good starting point, but then you need to develop it. You’ve got to find a way to present Sam, and the Peter Lorre Character, and the Sidney Greenstreet character… you’ve got to figure out the scenes, what happens when, what to show and what to imply. Write the dialogue. Create a sense of continuity.
“Let’s say I give you two hours. Can you write me two pages of Casablanca, your own version, in two hours? I’ll be back later.”
And I went and watched the movie we’ll discuss tonight on our podcast. When I got back, my contact told me it doesn’t work the way I said. Writers don’t do it like that. One does not write like this, one has to wait for inspiration. At this point I reminded him of the time when he asked me for a story, 6000 words in ten days – “all you have to do is write 600 words per day. Easy.” What about my inspiration, then? What if I had to wait for the Muse to appear for one week? “You’re the writer, that’s your business.”
A business a lot of people think they know better than we that do it.
There’s been a lot of talk about a director’s cut of a superhero film, recently. Everybody’s going on about it. The problem is, I am rarely interested in superhero movies – let’s say I still love the old Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder Superman movies (well, the first two, at least) and after that … yeah, OK, Michael Keaton as Batman, maybe a few others. But I am not a big superhero fan to start with, and so I am not at all invested in this latest release. But there are other movies that have come out in a Director’s Cut, and that I would be interested in catching. So, why not today?
And when one talks about director’s cuts, Ridley Scott must be the world championship holder in the category. How many times did he recut Blade Runner? And in 2005, his Crusader epic Kingdom of Heaven was distributed with 45 minutes cut after some test audiences groaned, and later re-released as a Director’s Cut. I saw the theatrical release, and found it boring and unsatisfactory. But up until today, I had missed the Director’s Cut. So today I watched it.
I’ve just read an interview with a popular writer in the self-help field. Her books sell like in cartloads, and she claims her success is due to the fact that the Universe sends her messages through car number plates. Like, she’s walking down the street and sees a certain combination of letters and numbers on a car’s license plate, and its meaning flashes in her mind, and she knows she has to do something – or not to do something.
And, really, anything that floats your boat is fine.
I do not believe the Universe sends us anything – but I believe that sometimes we read or see or hear something that clicks with where our thoughts are going, with the place we are in in that moment, and it feels right. And maybe it won’t save your life or make your business a success, but it might save you one hour, and that’s enough. In the end, a license plate, the side of a pack of cornflakes or a holy book, as long as it works is fine with me.
Case in point, I just stumbled on a quote that saved me one skipped lunch and one whole afternoon of useless anger and frustration – that’s a big thing, given my current state of affairs. The quote is as follows
“The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine… And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:”… there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.”
― Harlan Ellison, The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective
Harlan Ellison said it, and it’s enough for me. Now, lunch.
One of the authors I always look up to in order to improve my craft is Rod Serling, of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery fame. Apart from the awesome quality of scripts, it’s in his views on imaginative fiction and society that I usually find powerful, intelligent ideas. If you are not familiar with them, check out Youtube – a search for Serling’s name will bring up interviews and actual masterclasses he recorded, and are worth every minute spent listening to them, taking notes.
And today a friend posted this image on their Facebook profile, and it was another eye-opening moment.
Today I was talking to a friend about learning the basics of film language in order to write reviews that do not suck. She’s a very serious, thorough person, and so she was looking for a basic primer on film language. This made me think about a long time ago, the late ’80s, when I started reading books about movies, and those books were about film noir.
Because let’s admit it: you are working on a full-time ghostwriting gig, you’re getting ideas for stories you don’t have the time to write, you keep spotting interesting open calls from high-profile magazines, all of this makes you supremely unhappy, you’re tired as hell… why not go and buy a stack of books you’ll never find the time to read?
Karavansara 