I’ll ramble a bit, if you don’t mind. This post is somewhat connected to the Things I learned from the Movies post a few days back.
Sort of like a reboot.

Last night we were reading a passage from a novel, me and some friends.
It’s a good exercise, reading aloud, and see what it sounds like. It helps a lot.
Robert E Howard used to speak aloud the passages he was typing, or so they say – and it’s a good practice… well, ok maybe not bellowing out loud each and every phrase, but reading some passages aloud helps.
Anyway, the thing we were reading was incredibly bad. But really bad.
This was just some people sitting around a table, having lunch (roast with potatoes, that sort of stuff), and it was supposed to be a quiet naturalistic scene, with some sort of emotional charge underneath.
It was ghastly.
The prose was stilted, the dialogue was made of wood, the whole set up lacked life, rhythm, humor, that spark that brings the scene to your mind’s eye.
It was horrid, and it failed on every point. A disaster.
We laughed a lot, we cringed a lot.
But mostly laughed.

And so it happened that me and my friend Lucy just ended up saying the same thing:

But did this guy ever see a movie in his life?

Which led to an interesting discussion, and it was fun because Lucy is a writer and a movie montage and editing expert¹, and I’ll try and summarize it here, for your entertainment. Continue reading →