Monthly Archives: March 2011

THIS is why I read romance

I love Jennifer Crusie. She is so many of those words that don’t mean much one after the other, like wise, funny, insightful, sympathetic, sexy and incredibly human. Or rather, her writing is. I don’t know the woman personally.

I just read Bet Me, which Crusie says she wrote in ’92, but couldn’t get anyone to publish till ’04. “Editors were universally unenthusiastic about it, which was just inexplicable to me.” To me too. I loved this book, and I see people calling it their favourite Crusie all the time.

I don’t really want to do a review so much as say: This book is an affirmation. And not in a new agey way, where you’re saying something over and over, like “I am a successful writer” and feeling more fearful every time you say it, because someone somewhere is sure to notice how unconvinced you are.

This book is affirming in the kind of way that makes me feel braver about being alive.

Not a feeling I get when I read Peter Temple and I’m stuck in a car with his displaced detective who’s looking at the grey gobs of fat on the cold hamburger he’s about to eat. Truth did grow on me more the more I read, but it never once made me feel this internal glow.

My aversion to reading gritty “realist” fiction has given me hours of introspection. Do I read romance just to escape, is that a bad thing, and is it wrong to look to fiction for this feeling of encouragement and hope? (And is that feeling synonymous with escape? And is that just about the most depressing thing in the world if it is?)

I don’t want to give the impression that Bet Me is all sunshine and rainbows. Funny thing, but when characters and their surroundings are too peachy, a romance novel just leaves me with a hollow, itchy feeling. I think it portrays love in just about the most realistic way possible: the terror when you face actual love, and the courage it takes to believe in it. (You can go here for my impassioned argument that romance novels depict a realistic experience of love. Ah, bless.)

I’ve been brainstorming the second half of my novel, and am completely daunted by the task of making sure my characters’ potential pays off. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is: Why romance? What am I actually trying to say about love? I’ve come to a general conclusion which is that, for me, love gives life meaning.

The more specific expression of this is starting to come through in my heroine’s emotional evolution. She goes from: life = surviving to: even though life is all about surviving I will live as though it’s not.

I cracked the Moment of Capitulation!

yesterday I had an epiphany about the moment of capitulation – to my mind the hardest part of a romance to write well. It is the moment when the hero/heroine give in to being together, which means it’s also the moment when all those conflicts you’ve worked so hard at to keep them apart for a whole novel are no longer enough to keep them apart.

You can see why is so often feels contrived and unconvincing.

When my hero’s deception becomes clear to my heroine, things fall out between them. Trust is broken. And here’s the difficulty of capitulation – how do you come back from that? In a convincing, this-love-is-forever kind of way?

So here’s the epiphany: That crisis does break something between them. It does make it impossible for them to be as they were. So what it has to do instead is make it possible for them to be together in a new way – the experience of the crisis has to transform them into the people who can love forever.

I know. I should be knighted or something.

I praise the dialogue

I’m still going on about Doctor Who, if you’ll forgive me. This could continue for some time…

So. The new Matt Smith Doctor has just crash-landed in the garden of Amelia Pond (7, Scottish) then insisted that she feed him until he finds food he likes (“It’s like eating after you brush your teeth; everything tastes different”).

He finally settles for fish fingers dipped in custard. So you really need to read this dialogue in the context of a glorious madman eating fish fingers and custard at the kitchen table of a tough little kid, who looks on with dawning adoration.

Doctor: So your aunt, where is she?

Amelia Pond: She’s out.

D: And she left you all alone?

AP: I’m not scared.

D: Course you’re not. You’re not scared of anything. Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of a box, man eats fish custard and look at you. Just sitting there. So you know what I think?

AP: What?

D: Must be hell of a scary crack in your wall.

Argh, the brilliance. I read a sequence like that and I know I will write forever and never be as good as I want to be.

Why I think it’s so good:

Firstly, his triplet about the box, the man and the fish custard is hilarious. It sums up the whole scene so far, it sums up his character and it puts he and Amelia on a particular footing. It heightens the fairy-tale feel of the new-era Doctor Who. It emphasises the alien-ness of the Doctor and the ballsy spirit of Amelia Pond. It makes you laugh.

Secondly – and I cannot emphasise enough how good this is – the light-hearted chat has been working all that time on another level, that pays off with the line “Must be hell of a scary crack in your wall”. See, the Doctor could have just said that straight off. He could have gone on about how bad and terrible the crack is, what it is, why it’s scary. Instead, he has already established beyond doubt that Amelia Pond is no ordinary girl, that she doesn’t scare easily. Then leaves it up to the audience to imagine how bad it would have to be, to scare her.

The old “what you can imagine is worse than what I can show you” chestnut.

It doesn’t only work on that level, either. It shows you how clever he is – how not only the dialogue, but also the Doctor, is working on more than one level all the time. He’s befriending Amelia, putting her at her ease, finding out information he needs to know, and at the same time he’s looking for this – for signs of how serious the situation actually is, beyond what can be said directly about it. It creates complexity and depth of character.

Lastly (probably not lastly, really. This dialogue is infinitely good) all the questions in this dialogue are vitally important for the overarching plot of the season. There’s something that’s not quite right about Amelia Pond, and it’s all here in this dialogue. You realise only in the last episode of the season that the Doctor was working on a third level in this dialogue the whole time, asking apparently harmless questions and drawing conclusions from their answers far beyond what we hear.

Add to this Matt Smith eating custard off a fish finger, and you have a scene so good it makes me fizz.

“I don’t want to go”

The Doctor is such a great character – he has enough internal angst to keep a show going, and beloved, over 31 seasons. Pretty epic personal angst.

(For those of you who haven’t spent the last week sick in bed watching Doctor Who, he is the last of the Time Lords – and was pretty much responsible for his whole race, and home planet, being wiped out. This doesn’t only make him an orphan, it also makes him one of the only people as smart as himself in the universe.)

One of the many things I love about the show is how they keep him neutral. Most of the time, of course, he’s saving the day and looking pretty fantastic. But it’s a fine line he walks, and evil, all-powerful genius lies just on the other side.

They’re not afraid to use the darkness in him as a kind of spice in the dish of good.

A great example of this is the very last scene with David Tennant as the Doctor. You would assume, in farewelling the most popular doctor ever from a hugely popular family tv show, that the BBC would attempt to make it ok that he’s effectively dying. Not so.

Tennant looks right ahead, and his face kind of falls apart with feeling, and he says, “I don’t want to go.”

And then he goes. Regenerates. Becomes a different man.

The new Matt Smith Doctor is my favourite, but even so, even knowing who Tennant Doctor was making way for by dying, that one line made it very hard to see him go.

I applaud the bravery of it. It preserves the deeply flawed nature of the Doctor – the essence that keeps us watching.

excitement!!!

I have only just caught up with the fact that Spielberg is making a motion-capture Tintin movie. That alone I could probably take or leave, but add these facts to it:

The screenplay is by Steven Moffat (Matt Smith-era Doctor Who) and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz); it’s produced by Peter Jackson; and the cast includes: Jamie Bell as Tintin, Andy Serkus as Captain Haddock and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as Thompson and Thompson.

Eeeep!

And lastly, the stills look amazing.

No one seems to be able to agree on the release date, but sometime round Christmas this year is looking likely.

creative thinking

this post is not about writing.

You know when someone throws a spanner in a plan, and it looks like whatever you were going to do is now undoable? And as annoying as that is, there’s that tiny part of you that’s relieved, because whatever effort you were going to have to put in is now unputinable?

The kind of creative thinking I’m talking about is when you reach that kind of dead end and instead of listening to the relief and thinking “That’s that, then,” you think the problem all over again, but this time as though you just need a new solution to it. It isn’t a dead end at all – it is solvable.

This may seem obvious. It’s something that’s taken me years to learn.

Example: a very good friend of mine, who’s very pregnant, has been missing her globe-trotting husband terribly, so I invited her around to dinner. I just got back from shopping at the South Melbourne Market for all sorts of yum things, when I got a message from her. Her back has made her immobile, and her dog bit into a battery.

So there’s the disappointment, and there’s the relief. Another quiet night at home.

And then I thought – well why don’t we just go up to her? Cook the dinner at her place? The part of me that felt the relief thinks it’s an excessive thing to do. The other part of me thinks, Huzzah! With just a tiny bit of creative thinking, an evening I’d given up on as a dead end has turned into an excursion into the burbs, the company of one of my best mates, and a nice dinner for her.

It’s a good model for living, I think.

Hot Fuzz is a perfect movie

punkt.

just watched it again, and I’m still in awe of it. The characterisation of Sgt Angel is flawless, from the cop so good he has to be banished from London for making everyone else look bad, to the small town citizen who can get his Bad Boy on.

The bromance as the central relationship is simple but impeccably woven into the story arc, holding it all together (Simon Pegg’s face, when he thinks Danny’s in with the baddies breaks my heart, in the good way).

The crime and investigation are so much fun and executed with a deft layering that turns it into bloody brilliance.

And lastly, the whole thing is made in a slick, visually beautiful style that carries the beat of the story to perfection. Did I mention this is a perfect movie?

before you move house, ask yourself this:

are you ever planning to emigrate to another country?

We’re just going through the paperwork for special k’s permanent residency, and one of the forms asks him to list every address he’s lived at for the last 10 years. We’re six years back, and 11 addresses in. Then it starts to get a bit blurry.

Since I left home at 18, I’ve lived at 19 different addresses. And that’s only counting places I a) lived at for longer than 3 months or b) moved all my stuff into.

The future prospect of filling out this kind of form never entered into the decision, but it really should have. Still, good news! We’re about to cross the one year mark at our flat, with no plans for moving on. A record!

Are you a stayer or a mover?

who framed Doctor Who?

I did!

Our most recent class assignment for Desktop Publishing was to create a 4-page magazine of our favourite tv show. It may not entirely surprise you that I chose Doctor Who. The text didn’t have to be original, so most of it’s just ripped off the BBC website, and a Guardian article (I bastardised the interviewer’s name for the sake of space…Sorry Mr Hattenstone!). So the text doesn’t make much contextual sense. I’m pretty pleased with the pictures and layout, though! I love doing this stuff:

the little Daleks by the page numbers came from this font

and I got the headings and footer font here. There are a few versions of this font floating around, but I recommend the one I’ve linked to, as it’s got numerals and some symbols as well.

the brilliance of Terry Pratchett

when I was young and my older brother was reading Terry Pratchett, and my younger brother was about to start reading Terry Pratchett, his books still had those dizzying, vulgar (I’m not sure whether I mean that in a positive or negative sense, but I’m sure that’s the right word) covers. I thought for years that his books must be a surreal and adult romp through some incomprehensible world.

Not all of that impression was wrong, but having now read almost every Discworld book, I know that not much of it was right.

I’m reading his second-to-latest book at the mo, Unseen Academicals, and it’s coming home to me all over again, just how well he writes characters. Specifically, characters who are pretending to be something they’re not – or pretending not to be what they are.

(I realise those last two pretty much say the same thing, but there is a huge difference. It reminds me of an anecdote Michael Caine tells about his early days of acting. He was on the stage doing his very best “drunk man walking”, when the director stopped him. “I see a sober man walking in a squiggly line,” the director said (though he may not have used the word “squiggly”). “I want to see a drunk man walking in a straight line.”

Both amount to the same thing, but are completely different. The difference between a character putting their energy into pretending to be something they’re not, and putting their energy into pretending not to be what they are is what makes Terry Pratchett great.)

His characters are complex. They are unreliable narrators, because they’re not always honest with themselves about who (or what) they really are. Their motivations are not what they appear to be. Or else they have two opposing motivations, and you never know which one will out. It’s nature v nurture battling it out inside one consciousness.

It creates narrative traction like nobody’s business, because whilst you’re following the bigger-picture narrative and trying to figure that out, you’re also working away in the back of your mind on what this character is hiding from you. It never feels coy, because they’re almost always hiding it from themselves, too.

Very often, when the conflicting parts of a character come to a head, there’s a moment where free will determines the outcome of this one struggle, which most likely determines the outcome of a larger struggle. A character’s own nature sets the stage and writes the drama for their own moment of epiphany.

The next thing is figuring out how the hell he does it.