How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

That and which. There's a difference. A lot of people don't know that. ALOT. (That's a joke. Look carefully.) Here's the basics - if the clause introduced by that or which can be taken out of the sentence without affecting its central meaning, use a "which" with a comma in front of it. If the clause is required, then use a "that" with NO comma. Some examples: The cars, which are on the lawn, are broken. - this means that the cars that are broken happen to be on the lawn. "Which" indicates a non-restrictive clause; a clause that provides more information about the noun in question, but that information is not essential. It's a "by the way" statement. The cars that are on the lawn are broken. - this means that the cars that are on the lawn are broken. "That" indicates a restrictive clause; a clause that provides essential information about the noun in question. Is this a big problem in fiction? No, not r...

Yesterday, two things happened. (Okay, a lot of stuff happened - here are the things I want to talk about...) (1) I read on a blog - I can't recall which one - that you need to make your characters likable in the first chapter and reveal their flaws later. (2) I went to critique group. I had a moment of panic about the first thing, because my main character S is not likable in the first chapter. She's not a monster or anything, but she's been put in a situation that she hates and she acts out against it by being mean to people who are nice to her. Several of the people in my critique group were concerned about how mean she was, in fact. But making S likable in the first chapter doesn't work for the story I'm going to tell. S cannot be happy or friendly or nice in the first chapter, because if she is, then I've got no story. So that piece of advice sucks. What doesn't suck, though, is the second thing - my critique group. Because even though they were concer...

Okay, here's the thing, I have a degree in English, which means that I'm supposed to have all of the "high culture" tastes like Shakespeare and postmodernism and blah-de-blah-blah, and I do. Shakespeare's great, and postmodernism is fun, and, most of the time great literature is great for a reason, you know? But it can't be Shakespeare all the time, and some of the time when I'm not reading Shakespeare, I'm watching disaster movies. I love them. All of them, even the really bad ones, like "When Weather Attacks" (aka "The Day After Tomorrow") and "The Core" (which is super crappy). "Volcano" and its superior but lesser known competitor "Dante's Peak." "Armageddon" and its inferior and lesser known competitor "Deep Impact." "Volcano," "Twister," "Avalanche." Classics like "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure," and rema...

because I already pay waaayyyyy too much for cable and internet, so until I got hooked up with Netflix, I didn't have a chance to see The Wire. I watched all of season one and am in the middle of season two, and, frankly, Holy Shit but this is a good show. It was created by David Simon and Ed Burns, the same guys who created Homicide:Life on the Street. David Simon is also a former journalist for the Baltimore Sun and the guy who wrote the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which is the nonfiction book the tv series was based on, and the best damn book about police work ever. In short, these guys know what they're talking about when they talk about Baltimore and when they talk about police. The Wire is a show about the police in Baltimore. The first season is about a squad that's trying to bust a drug gang. This makes it sound boring as hell. It's not. The show gets into the hearts and minds and politics behind both the police work and the drug gang. One the ...

I read The Ruins by Scott Smith today. It was one of the rave books of the summer, and has been on my list for a while. I don't know how I feel about it. On one hand, it was very compelling - I read the whole thing in about three hours, because I simply couldn't put it down - but on the other hand, when i finished it, I felt a little empty. I think that's because one of the elements of the plot just didn't synch up properly, to me. HERE BE SPOILERS: In particular, the Evil Vine of Doom (EVOD), while gripping during the first read-through when everything is new, just doesn't make much sense when you think about it afterwards. So, there's the carniverous, possibly intelligent, obviously scary EVOD thing, right, and our four heros stumble on to the hill where it lives and are trapped there. Okay, fine, that all makes sense in the little world of the novel. But if the EVOD just wants to eat them, then why does it wait so long, until they are injured? Why doesn'...

This last week I read Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis. I'm normally a fan of Ellis - I find him funny, and I find his protagonists incredibly sad and touching (particularly Patrick Bateman of American Psycho and Victor of Glamorama) and I don't mind the sex and violence ( more about how I seem to identify more with male protagonists in another entry ). But I'm a little disappointed in Lunar Park. I think this is because the protagonist of Lunar Park is Bret Easton Ellis himself, and that ruins the charm for me. Obviously, the protagonist isn't actually Ellis - it's Ellis in the same way that Philip Roth is the protagonist in The Plot Against America or Operation Shylock - but the thing that made Ellis's protagonist's tolerable, even sympathic to me, was that they were ever so slightly exaggerated to make his point. They were not real. Their vacuousness and blank affects were part of what made them interesting and intriguing. But when the author puts himself...

My one pet peeve (ha! like there's one) is sloppy writing. By that I don't mean the random misplaced comma or dangling modifier, which, hey, it happens, even with the best of editors. I'm talking about events in a story that could easily be taken care of, had the writer thought for a second about what needed to happen. My most recent example comes not from a book, but from a television show: Battlestar Galactica. On a recent episode (and the following might be spoilers - consider yourself warned), a member of the crew keeps looking up at the hills. Eventually, he walks up the hills and discovers a magic temple that's, like, the answer to all things, or something (I'm a casual watcher at best, can you tell?) So, my complaint is this? Why the hell does this guy keep looking up at the hills? What's up with that? It's just plain sloppy. The situation could have been handled in about, oh, a HUNDRED different ways. Maybe something from the magic temple glinted in ...