The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by A.R.Yngve:

So a "fake" band like Spinal Tap becomes real by playing like a band.

In that spirit, let's make a Gedankenexperiment: a writer stages a series of elaborate events in his life, and then writes about them as "true life experiences."

For example, he can hire people dressed as cops to pretend to chase him, or fake an attempt on his life. Suddenly his boring life has become an action-packed drama ripe for exploiting!

Comedian Andy Kaufman did something similar with his public stunts.

I dunno... Spinal Tap has performed music before an audience, it's documented in the movie, so you COULD say that the band SORT OF existed for the purpose of the film...???
:-S

The "Kitten Rule" makes sense.

I suppose it could have been worse... what if James Frey had turned out to be more criminal than his book suggested? (For instance, how would Oprah have spun it if her Special Guest had been revealed as a rapist? Or a child molester? Or a serial killer?)

She'll do more thorough background checks of her prospective guests from now on, that's for sure...

If this were the 1980s, someone would re-label Frey's book as "postmodern non-fiction."
Or how about "Post-Authentic"?
;-P

Remember, All Writers Are Liars...

Perhaps Thalberg was misquoted, and what he meant was: "Women who are like the characters that Margaret Dumont play in the Marx Brothers movies do not like Marx Brothers movies."
:)

Larry Brennan wrote that
these niche audiences want detail and closure, because they know that they might never see their favorite universe/characters again.

Makes sense... so I'll try to organize my own niche "pro-brevity" audience. We'll push for 90-minute Special Editions of movies, special 60,000-word Stephen King novels... and 5-minute Family Guy edits filled with only funny jokes.
;-)

Serge: What puzzles me is not so much that pacing & parsimony problems exist in fiction (books, movies, what-have-you), but why so much of them right now.

We live in an accelerating culture: everything seems to go faster, and yet films and books just get longer and more long-winded. I expected the opposite development: that books and films would become shorter and more "spare," almost to the point of resembling Cliff Notes and music videos. But that hasn't happened.
:-S

Bonniers wrote:
One of these days, I'm going back to try to figure out how Brown does it. It's more than the cliffhanger chapters.


Now the shocking secret can be told: the publishers took a cue from the "poisoned bookpage" murders in THE NAME OF THE ROSE... and laced the page corners of each copy with heroin!
;-)

I propose the "Mary Sue Litmus Test": simply replace the protagonist's name (in this case "Ayla") with "Mary Sue".

If Mary Sue seems an appropriate name change, then the book IS a de facto "Mary Sue" story. (Try this on other best-selling books! You'll be surprised.)

Carrie S. wrote:
Yngve: Thing that weirds me out about the Stone Age books is how they can go from a technical discussion of different kinds of grass to Hot StoneAge Sex in the space of a page. I actually tend to skip the sex scenes, as I seem to lack entirely the "finds porn arousing" gene. Which means I've noticed how bad the books are. :) It's like, OK, what's Ayla going to invent this week?

-Oh, I dunno... the wheel, maybe. ;-)

In Jean M. Auel's defense, I want to say that the Good Parts (omnicompetent Stone Age heroine discovers neolithic contraceptive, has great sex without getting pregnant) must have been successful with a lot of readers.

Suppose the author had "shaved off" about 50% of the "boring parts". The books would be much shorter, but the sex scenes would stand out EVEN MORE. Would this have embarrassed the readers so much, they wouldn't have dared to buy the books?
(Just teasing... ;))

Please, Teresa, resolve the Time Paradox of modern fiction: if people's time is getting ever more precious, why is every new Harry Potter book longer than the previous one? (Shouldn't it be the other way around??)

It's not just the issue of shaving off "boring parts". Fiction is getting more long-winded. Why? (And it's not just books. I recently sat through Peter Jackson's interminable KING KONG. The original was barely 90 minutes.)

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of overripe bananas? The Shadow knows... HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

Smurch, I do believe you're right about Eco's essay on pornography. My memory failed there... but still, it made for an interesting juxtaposition about "boring bits" in a story.

(Related question: were Jean M. Auel's Stone Age romances more or less based on the same principle as pornography: long boring bits building up to hot sex scenes? Or is that an unfair assessment?)

HP, you should see Roger Vadim's film BARBARELLA. The set pieces are dreamlike and spectacular, you won't care about the plot. Very European.
:)

"The primary is thriller or horror or whatever. The secondary is usually a romance, but it could be a whodunit or a coming of age or a troubled marriage story. All the high points of the script come out of the primary genre. All the lower points of the script that space out the exciting high points and give the viewer a lull advance the story in the secondary genre."

I've got to remember that rule. Thanks for the link to Martell's site.

Teresa suggested that a submachine gun could greatly simplify the plots of Harry Potter and X-men stories. True. But then you also get Arnold Schwarzenegger's spoof of HAMLET (as in the film The Last Action Hero)... or Indiana Jones shooting the big swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

"When you've got a machine gun, all plot problems start to look like targets."
;-)

I've often thought: "The middle in a book is often where it gets bogged down and the plot starts to creak. So why not just get rid of the middle?"

Well, why not?

The Italian semiotician/writer Umberto Eco wrote an essay about the necessity of having boring segments in porno movies, between the sex scenes.
Eco explained that each "boring" bit is necessary to give the voyeur a chance to relax before the next "good part". A porno movie consisting of ONLY sex scenes would be too tiresome.

Can the same be applied to literature? Actually, I'm not so sure. Yet, I can't understand why most new novels are so long, when everybody complains they are short on time.

Hypothesis: Today's book-reader is so stressed out from the overload of modern life, she needs to slog through 100 pages of boredom just to wind down enough to appreciate the Good Parts. It's the light salad before the big steak.

In other words, the boring parts are to fiction what the boring parts are to pornography.
;-)

It's an amusing little story, full of satirical in-jokes - but wasn't the Internet designed to survive nuclear war?

What probably WILL happen is that the Next Big Thing in communications makes the Internet obsolete.

(Picture a story with aging, cranky bloggers in a retirement home, who refuse to get plugged into the global NeuralNet...)

Best of luck finding a solution, Teresa -- but thanks to the networking powers of blogging and the Internet, your chances are better than bad.

Don't lose hope; as you can see, people are coming together to help. I'm sure it's going to work out somehow.

I did a Google search on pemoline in Scandinavia... it seems to be unavailable or restricted here, and is mentioned in the local news only as a "banned substance found in athlete". :(

I remember this:
1. Saddam Hussein waging a pointless long war against Iran in the 1980s, with enormous casualties;

2. Saddam Hussein destroying the wetlands in southern Iraq, ruining the livelihoods of the native peoples there;

3. Saddam Hussein gassing and massacring Kurds (was it tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands? That I don't know).

My memory is long. Genocide was on the agenda before the Americans entered Iraq, and perhaps the Iran-Iraq War distracted Saddam from his long-term agenda to crush Sunni and Kurd resistance -- that, and his lust for Kuwaiti oil fields. He was "my enemy's enemy" (i.e. a buffer between Iran and Saudi Arabia) until he "outlived his usefulness."

And now what? Tribal bloodlust for a while - the Sunnis will lose, many are probably going to escape to Saudi Arabia - and then, hopefully, the beginnings of democracy.

If the superpowers do nothing, events will play out to their conclusion, and we can look comfortably look away, shake our heads and say "They're such barbarians".
If the superpowers do intervene, we in the West have to suffer the inconvenience of bodybags shown on TV. In any case, my country isn't involved, so I have no stake.

I can easily imagine a bloody civil war in Iraq after the U.S troops leave -- and the outcome is more or less given.

The Sunni minority vs. Kurds and Shi'ites... the Sunnis are going to be massacred, and the world will stand by and watch and say it's "terrible", just like with Rwanda in the 1990s. The only thing that prevents this genocide is the U.S.troop presence, but it won't last forever...

I can't say I reproach America for at least TRYING to avert genocide.

So, has anyone attempted to patent magic?

"A technology by which favors are traded from supernatural powers."

Jokes aside -- this patent silliness has to end. Or lawyers will take over America! (Ooops, too late. ;-))

Comment statistics for A.R.Yngve on the Making Light blog

Total: 26 comments. View all these comments on a single page.