Certain zealots -- people with a CinemaSins obsession with "plot holes" -- think of this as a critical flaw in a story Even if the plot doesn't have "holes" they get up your ass about how the plot needs to have a "structure", Hero's Journey shit Don't take them too seriously
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
It's like getting all pissed off at Van Gogh because he, unlike his colleague Emile Bernard, didn't make nice clear outlines around the shapes of stuff he painted "You should be able to tell what a drawing is of if you subtract the color -- his paintings are NOTHING but color"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
Nothing about Moby Dick (an example I'm kind of fixated on because it's this byword for "long, boring novel" that I read at a young age and fell in love with) would be improved by making the "plot clearer"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
Moby Dick -- like all books -- is actually a story about only one character doing one thing, the story of the author writing the book Melville's OOC digressions about whaling and shit are just as much part of "the story" as the actual shit happening on the Pequod
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
Moby Dick is a book about Melville being a weird dude whose life was all distorted and twisted and warped around this part of his life most people find horrifying and disgusting and scary -- his career of murdering beautiful creatures at sea and slicing off their fat to sell
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
The book is a book about a man trying to make a human connection, to get you to understand this strange alien world that made up such a huge part of his life Geeking out at you about all the knots he learned to tie is one tactic The made-up story about Ahab's leg is another
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
But they are all part of the same thing Just like Hal Incandenza's personal life story is only one thread in Infinite Jest, and possibly not even the most important one
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
(DFW's story "Octet" is one that stuck with me a really long time, because it's a story where he literally *gives up on telling the story* halfway through and just starts talking directly to the reader through the fourth wall about why he's writing the story)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
I have always aspired to be able to write that kind of thing and make it work, which is very difficult but very powerful when it works Just admitting to the reader "I don't think I can make this story work, and frankly I'm not doing great personally right now"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I wonder if they also complain how 17776 never gets around to describing the future of football.
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CS Lewis once talked about being baffled by how aggressively well-meaning readers can ignore the point of what you were trying to do with a book and why maybe you should be careful whose advice you take
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
He said a friend of his wrote a script once, which, like Tolkien's stuff with the Ents, was inspired by the Birnham Wood stuff in Macbeth The point of it was trees gradually becoming sapient and mobile and going around killing people for cutting them down
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BetaDecayPlus
It was, admittedly, a hackneyed horror movie cliche, and in order to try to make it work as a script the writer plugged in a generic action hero guy and gave him a love interest he ends up hooking up with by the end of the story etc. And he sends it to a professional editor
1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes - Show replies
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