Movie Openings vs. Book Openings: Outside-in vs. Inside-out

I know I said my next post would be about language and dialect in crime fiction, but as you can see that’s not the case. I’m still going to do it, it’s just I’m planning to use James Ellroy as my example and the books I own of his are in a box somewhere in my parents' basement. I’m moving soon and will have access to them then, but until then I’m going to procrastinate and talk about the difference between the opening minutes of a film vs. The opening pages of a novel.

Last night I watched ‘Alien’ for the first time. Everyone’s got a list of classic films they haven’t seen, and the Alien movies are on mine. My plan is to watch them all before Prometheus comes out so I can stop feigning enthusiasm whenever I’m talking about it with my fellow film geek friends. Anyway, after a long credit sequence, the movies starts off with several outer and interior shots of a spaceship. We don’t see any people, just long empty hallways (I tried to find the opening scene on Youtube, but the best I could find was here. Skip over to 2:27 to get past the credit sequence). Its a few minutes before we see any human beings. The movie starts outside (literally, with the shots outside the spaceship) and then shows us the world in more detail (the shots of the inside of the ship) and only then shows us the characters.

Schopenhauer, Music, and Writing

Sorry for the no-show post last week, I was on vacation.

German philosophers have a reputation for being depressing, and it’s easy see why when they’ve got a nihilistic heavy-weight like Nietzsche on their team. But while pretty much anyone can quote Nietzsche (sometimes without even realizing it) not as many people know Arthur Schopenhauer. A 19th century writer, Schopenhauer did nothing to break the ‘German-philosophers-sure-make-you-want-to-cut-open-a-vein’ stereotype: his philosophy was a purely pessimistic one, purporting that desire could never be fulfilled, only negated.

But everybody’s got to have something that makes them happy, even a sourpuss like Schopenhauer. For him it was music. Not opera, not folk songs, but just pure instrumental music. To Schopy music in its ‘purest form’ represented the purest expression of ideas, the closest the external world could get to expressing man’s abstract inner thoughts.

As a writer, I often think about Schopenhauer’s take on music. I often listen to music as I write. Sometimes I do this for very base reasons, like to get my blood pumping and psych myself up for another round of writing (the Mortal Kombat theme is my go-to song for this. In fact I’m listening to it as I write this blog post). But more often than not it’s because the song has meaning to me and relates to the story in my mind. It’s not as simple as say, listening to a song about cowboys while writing a western. For me it’s more about how the mood of the song captures something that I’m trying to express in my work. For example, I recently finished a novella that was largely inspired by the sense of unease I get when I listen to ‘I Am The Walrus.’ Lately I’ve been listening to MGMT’s song ‘Electric Feel’ on repeat as I try to find a way to translate the smooth elation I feel whenever I hear that song. Often I will get an idea from a specific lyric, but more often it’s the music itself that gets to me. I like it when a song can make me feel something so deeply that in turn I want to figure out how to express that same feeling through a totally different medium.

And with that note, I should get back to writing.

The Importance of Red Shirts

Recently, a beta reader who was looking over a novella for me said she wasn’t surprised when a certain character died: something about the guy just marked him as a ‘red shirt’ from the start. At first I was a little concerned. This character’s death was supposed to be a turning point, an event that showed that we were moving into the climax of the story and that things were serious now. If this guy seemed like a red shirt, that might dampen the impact of the moment.

(Point of interest: The term ‘red shirt’ comes from the original Star Trek series and refers to the fact that whenever an away party beamed down to an alien planet, there was generally one red-shirted crew member who got eaten/phasered/wasted by the bad guys. I hope that was educational for you. Next week I will explain the term ‘Jump the shark.’).

My Favourite Joke and Thoughts on Beta Reading

A young mother gets on a bus with a stroller. As she’s paying her fare the bus driver looks down at her child and says “Gawd, what an ugly baby!”

The woman is too shocked to respond. She pushes the stroller down the aisle and takes a seat next to an older lady. The older woman looks over and sees that the woman’s face is scrunched up as though she’s about to cry.

“What’s wrong, dearie?” the old lady asks.

“The bus driver just now, he really insulted me,” the woman said. The older lady scowls at the back of the bus driver’s head.

“Well, that’s not right! You shouldn’t just take it. At the next red light, you should go up to him and tell him that you’re not going to take that kind of treatment!”

The young mother looks down at her sleeping child and brushes the curls off his forehead. She nods, her jaw firm.

“That’s right,” she said. “I’m going to do exactly that!”

“Good!” the older woman says. She gestures at the stroller. “I’ll look after your pet monkey while you talk to him.”

Ba-dum tish! Okay, it’s a cheesy joke, but I find it sadly relatable. Whenever I ask people to read an early draft of a story I’m working on I worry that I’m like the mother in the joke, convinced that my baby is the most beautiful baby in the world where’s in reality it looks like a hairless lemur.