I’m sure many of you have seen where the NY Times put together an interactive chart that asked people to rank all the characters in Game of Thrones on a good-evil/ugly-beautiful axis. The results should be of interest to storytellers. There is a clear bi-lobed cluster. You could argue of course that this is the result of the show’s producers rather than a statement on … Continue reading No such thing as a good ugly woman
One of the reasons Darth Vader is a timeless villain is because he’s Luke’s father. Luke, as the hero, represents us — either indirectly in that he fights for us, or directly as a stand-in, a power-projection of the self. Vader, then, in perverting his role as father, inverts it and becomes the antithesis of protector, and his betrayal of Luke becomes the betrayal of … Continue reading More on the Limitations of Writing Really Good Villainesses
I was listening to some lectures on the detective novel on the plane, and the dude really had some neat points. (Go figure.) But first, for background, you have to know that American detective fiction, sometimes labelled “hardboiled,” grew out of the English detective novel, which tended to be very genteel. The detective in the English stories, for example, was always protected by law and … Continue reading Setting and Hardboiled Detective Fiction
I’ve ignored it twice in my life. At least. Which is kind of a big deal. For those who don’t know, the Call to Adventure is the first stage of the Hero’s Journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 opus The Hero With a Thousand Faces. As with any seminal tome, there are those who take it a bit too seriously — there is something … Continue reading The Call to Adventure
Most of us have had the experience, probably quite recently, of scrolling through literally hundreds of movies on Netflix and not being able to find a single thing. Last night I ended up switching to my cable company’s On Demand section and still came up empty. But then something interesting happened. On social media, a friend posted about an old B-movie he was watching, a … Continue reading Why is there nothing to watch?
today my family invades my peaceful denver writing retreat. cue alien invasion film score. it’s always interesting to see the different reactions when i tell people i’m a writer. i’m almost to the point where i can predict it based on context, or even location. on ello or goodreads for example, most (read: not all) people seem to think — absent any other cues — that … Continue reading Oh, you’re THAT kind of writer
