If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.
Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
You do have to wonder how Jack Bauer, maverick hero of '24,' can stay hidden for so long when no matter where he goes, he always seems within range of a TV camera. Or six.
In TV and movies, you kill yourself spending all this time to think up the symbolism or what if that deer that runs across your hero's path somehow conveys what's going on inside your hero's head? When a lot of times, you just want to hear what he's thinking.
One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.
I'm going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It's like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he's stuck - in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.
I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.
Every show needs a jerk. I guess I'm that guy.
'Jurassic Park' isn't about the bad luck of three people who keep getting thrown into the same situation.
It's an interesting plot device to enter in a third wheel - it always helps raise the stakes for all parties involved. But often, those characters can be one-dimensional.
I mean, the first 'Back to the Future' is kind of a perfect script, I think, in terms of handling time travel the best. It depends on your definition. To me, that means it effectively uses it in the story.
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.
In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
Nobody's ever really dead on 'Game of Thrones.'
Since the Greek myths, the greatest stories are premised on the idea of, 'A stranger arrives.'
Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.
Using supernatural beings to build the perfect weapon? Intriguing idea." "Not really," I said. "They did it on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A sub-par season. I slept through half the episodes.
I am not into this old-school way of doing things, where you kill characters, and you bring them back, and then you kill them again, and then you bring them back, and their deaths mean nothing.
There's always a villain in every book, in every movie. In every story you have the hero and what he wants, and that is the MacGuffin. The whole thing is about who's gonna get the MacGuffin. This piece that this Ace of Spades blog wrote is that's how the media covers [Barack] Obama, and I have observed this in different ways over the years.
The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.
The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.
I feel like science fiction can get a bad rap sometimes because people make something just to throw an alien in it or just to make it weird, and it doesn't really have a story.
Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.
I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.
