Books: What are you reading tonight?

[LetItBe]

Starting 1776 tonight.

[pryor15]

i went through a bunch of stuff when i was in Maine for 2 weeks, including:

Suite Francaise (Irene Nemirovsky) (i very much recommend this)
The Great Escape (Paul Brickhill)
Generation X (Douglas Copeland) (i liked it, but i thought i would have liked it more)
Hey Nostradamus! (Douglas Copeland)
The Autograph Man (Zadie Smith)
A Man Without a Country (Kurt Vonnegut)

right now i'm reading this:

[pryor15]

[ QUOTE ]
*Note: For those dealing with considerations like word or page limits, like short story and scriptwriters, or who simply don't want to write 1200 page books where nothing much happens for extended stretches, a "write it till you find it" type of approach to writing is also particularly inappropriate.

[/ QUOTE ]

not that i'm defending King's approach or anything (or criticizing it, b/c it's hard enough to write as is...if you find a system that works for you, huzzah), but that approach can work if one is a ruthless self-editor, wouldn't you think?

[Blarg]

I don't think it will work well for the majority of people.

You tend to write differently for different lengths of material, because you have to. When you have to make major cuts, you're very likely to face a task not of editing, but of a lot of rewriting or even complete reconceptualization.

For instance, you can space out expository passages in a longer work, to make them less cumbersome and keep the work flowing. And you can have more of them. But say you have to start cutting a whole lot. Then you may find the story doesn't make much sense anymore. The story starts to fail. So what do you do? You can't really get rid of the exposition, but you can't keep it either.

Solution: You cram your exposition into some poor character's mouth who now has the task of getting away with speaking in a way that's dull and unnatural, maybe even comically so. (This is the part that often makes me roll my eyes watching movies. Bad Writing 101.) You've turned your character fairly baldly into a mechanism rather than a human, and you'll probably get caught at it.

The same thing goes for setting scenes, casually revealing dialogue slipped out here and there, little things that make the work flow and make sense and come together. Left with a lot of editing to do, you have to dump a lot of them, and may never find a way to get that wholeness of the work back, because it was written to be whole at a much different length, not the one you've got. The natural pace and flavor of a piece, and the motivation for characters, can vanish and leave you with a clunky frankenstein of a script stitched together from sexier sources.

Can you do it? Maybe, especially if you're Stephen King. But the man is world class at it, he has no length restrictions, and he has the experience of decades -- and he still screws up at it frequently. What chance do the rest of us have of consistently putting Humpty Dumpty together again?

It's just a naturally very hard way to go about things. It sets up a lot of problems up front, and it depends a lot more on luck and innate talent to get things right once you've got the ball rolling in random directions for indeterminable periods. If I have a story that's going to need to be done in 120 pages, writing one that will only properly pay off in 240 will likely make me choose different subject matter, different themes, more characters and viewpoints, different subplots and more of them, and radically different pacing. These are things that editing isn't the best tool in the box to fix, because the problem isn't the number of words. The number of words could be just right for a different kind of story. Writing within restrictions isn't just about the quantity of pages. When you write within restrictions, you change the nature of the work.

An example is to be found in your own short films. Was gravida coming out well a matter of editing out the car chases and the pursuit of a great white whale? Was the relatively stationary camera and quiet story with a limited number of sets and special effects in any way an accident? Writing within your restrictions made you choose the type of story, the setting, and the pacing. You knew where you were going, and that's how you got sensibly where you did. You clearly did a lot of thinking it out in advance.

[pryor15]

[ QUOTE ]
An example is to be found in your own short films. Was gravida coming out well a matter of editing out the car chases and the pursuit of a great white whale? Was the relatively stationary camera and quiet story with a limited number of sets and special effects in any way an accident? Writing within your restrictions made you choose the type of story, the setting, and the pacing. You knew where you were going, and that's how you got sensibly where you did. You clearly did a lot of thinking it out in advance.

[/ QUOTE ]

well, that's just because the stunt guy quit on the first day of filming [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[pryor15]

also: blarg, those are some really good points regarding overall tone and such that i hadn't really taken into consideration

[orange]

Blarg,


Check this and other volumes out if you enjoy the X-men. It starts from the beginning and is now about 60 issues into the series. It's really great stuff IMO if you like the X-Men. The Ultimate series is a revamped comic of many different superheroes (Spidey,X-Men,etc), sort of for new comic readers who want a fresh start. (and don't want to shift through the hundreds of original copies of X-Men and its variants).

If you like Wolverine/want his origin, check out:



Origin, the tale of Wolverine's past. Good stuff.

[John Cole]

Wittgenstein's Mistress and The Last Novel by David Markson

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein

[odellthurman]

I just finished reading Glamorama and Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis. I thought both books were OK, but I didn't enjoy either nearly as much as American Psycho.

I also just finished The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. It was a very enjoyable book, although again, not as good as her first book, The Secret History, which is fantastic.

Right now, I am reading Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer. It is a non-fiction look at the Mormon Church, focusing on fundamentalist Mormons. I'm about halfway through, and it is very interesting.

After I finish the Krakauer book, I am going to read Phillip Roth's trilogy - American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain.

[Enrique]

I just started reading Cryptonomicon today. I got it for Xmas a couple of years ago and didn't start it until today. Someone mentioned it on the "Favorite Book" thread and there was also a thread about loving Neal Stephenson a year ago, so I gave the book ago.

Talking about recent books I just finished reading:
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson last week and I loved it. It was very funny and I enjoyed the tales of the Appalachian Trail. I am doing a road trip from SouthWest Texas to New Hampshire starting three weeks from now, and I think I will include a couple of hikes from the AT on my roadtrip, in particular the Delaware Water Gap and Greylock.

I also just finished Cloud Nine by Luanne Rice recently (after Walk in the Woods). I enjoyed the book a lot. I bought it because it was $0.25 at the local library, and then ended up enjoying the book a lot. About hope and love.

The other book I have read in August was A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald. I read his blog on Salon.com every morning and I read his previous book How Would a Patriot Act? so I knew I would find the book very good. I think his way of writing following facts is really good. I thought the book was excellent.