More on Avatar: three similarities to Titanic

Yes, I know I've already done a post on Avatar, but it's still very much in my mind at the moment (probably because I keep going to see it), so you might just have to put up with this for a while.

I know that Avatar has more in common with Aliens than it does with Titanic, but there are three notable similarities between Cameron's last two blockbusters, aside from the one piece of music that always sets me to thinking that the ship's about to hit an iceberg (it's in "Scorched earth" for anyone who has the soundtrack).

(i) the defining image. Both films have one image, above all for me, that encapsulates the unfolding disaster and that will forever remain in my memory. Both images do not include any of the main characters from the film, but are absolutely striking and absolutely beautiful, yet convey a real sense of horror. In Titanic, it is the image of a drowned girl or woman, splayed out underwater, her dress moving gently about her. In Avatar, it is the image of a pa'li (or direhorse if you prefer the English) on fire and galloping through the burning forest. Neytiri is observing this, but she's not in the frame. This is a nightmare image, yet slow-mo turns it into one of strange and compelling beauty. Beautiful and terrible at once.

(ii) in both movies, one of the main characters (two in Avatar) is (are) bound and trapped as the disaster unfolds all around. In both cases, neither really deserves to be there. Jack is handcuffed below decks for stealing a necklace, when in fact he has been framed. Jake is tied up -- for what exactly? I think it has more to do with Eytucan's being angry that Jake has distressed his daughter, and a general anger at the skypeople than anything Jake has done personally. Unless it is just a case of wanting to shoot the messenger? Or because he has withheld information that he wouldn't have been allowed to deliver and wouldn't have been believed? He has, in fact, betrayed them through his reports, but they don't know that. (And for him it wasn't a deliberate betrayal. I imagine he had forgotten, if he were ever aware, that Quaritch was looking at these as well has his official reports, which had become a lot more guarded.) In both movies, someone has to rescue the main character rather than their being able to get themselves out of trouble.

(iii) something big falls! Yeah, this is kind of obvious, I know, but it still leapt out at me -- hometree almost trembling in the air, as did Titanic, then canting sideways and going down -- both achieving the same kind of "splash". Maybe it's just the cinematography -- not sure -- maybe it's just that it is the same type of event!

Post script: For the record I'm an Alien (Ridley Scott) rather than Aliens (James Cameron) girl -- much prefer the suspense than the action-shoot-'em-up kinda thing in those two, and yet here I am absolutely loving Avatar . . .

Merry Christmas

After enjoying the Victorian State Singers as part of yesterday's "Carols by Candlelight" on Channel 9, we've been listening to their "Nine Lesson Carol Service" while unwrapping presents: a new King Arthur novel (never can get enough of those), and the soundtrack to Avatar -- some fantastic writing music. Lucky Cat Sparks isn't here -- I know I drove her mad with the Return of the King soundtrack while at Clarion, and I'll be the same with this one: playing it on loop while I write. Beautiful!

Anyway, here's the link in case anyone else wants to listen to some beautiful Christmas music. (VSS is a youth choir in Melbourne, led by Doug Heywood. They're centred in Williamstown (in Melbourne) and looking for new members, so if you're 30 or under, love singing and live in or around Melbourne, here's their website!)

Avatar -- 3D

Mild spoiler alert . . .

Tonight, my kids and I went to see Avatar in 3D. As I walked out of the film, I heard a man lean across to his wife and say, "This is the best film I have ever seen." Princess Sleepyhead said to me, "That's a keeper", meaning it's one we have to buy the DVD for, and I said, "No, that's not a keeper, that's a let's-go-and-see-this-again film, as in right now." The film reminded me of the passion I used to feel for Star Wars (known these days as Star Wars: Episode 4: A New Hope or just A New Hope to some of the younger generation). I saw Star Wars more than thirty times in the cinemas, could hum the entire soundtrack in order and recite the whole movie. My friends thought I was a freak; my parents thought I was a freak. Well, not really, but it's in their interests not to believe that seeing as I had to inherit such freakiness from somebody. To me it was a passion -- and it's the same thing I get from my writing, or perhaps take to it.

I came out of Avatar tonight at 8.40, and the next session was at 9.00. I said to the kids, "Do you wanna see it again? We could go to the 9 o'clock session", and Princess Sleepyhead nodded yes, and grabbed my arm and said, "Really?", whereas Sir Talkalot tilted his head to the side and said, "Are you joking, because I can't tell whether you're joking or not?" I assured him I wasn't, and only then did he give me an enthusiastic endorsement.

Now, unfortunately for all of us, I didn't have a mobile to contact my husband and tell him what we were doing, so we went out in search of a public phone box. There were some inside the shopping centre we were at, but it was already shut. We found one nearby, but someone was in it. Can you believe it? We headed to the nearest large train station, and I was so busy spotting the two there that I didn't notice the traffic island in the middle of the car park and straddled it neatly with all four wheels, crunching the undercarriage of the car, much to my own horror and that of the bystanders. Whoops! No damage done to anything luckily, but by then I was too shaken up to do anything but drive home. The repeat will have to wait now until Tuesday as we have something on tomorrow, and I have a solstice party tomorrow night.

The 3D aspect was interesting, especially the breathtaking views of the planet and spaceships. OMG, was I in heaven, or what? But there were some scenes where the effect was ruined by the painted backdrop. These were only occasional though, but it did effect suspension of disbelief. Sometimes this is noticeable in 2D films, but the effect was more marked in 3D, but aside from that -- I *love* this movie. (My one other critique was I wanted a little more on Trudy's motivation to make her role completely believable for me, just a little more . . . And also Avatar # 3, whose name I don't remember, seemed to disappear for a lot of the film. I thought he hadn't made it to the Na'vi camp, but he was there at the end.)

So, what exactly do I love about it? The story, the world, the characters -- all of it. Also the soundtrack, the special effects. In many ways the Na'vi (alien race) remind me of my own Myrads, except my Myrads are neither as tall nor as elegant. (And there are no romances between my aliens and humans, nor are they capable of having sex -- they're too anatomically different. This isn't a criticism of the film -- after all the Na'vi are interacting with avatars that are anatomically the same as they are, not humans. Whether or not such unions could produce a viable offspring isn't addressed in the movie, so there's no stumbling block there in the science for me. Not that this is a big part of the movie anyway -- it's not.)

I completely bought into this film and was swept up by it and its splendor. James Cameron's wait for the technology to catch up with his vision so that he could do this film was worth it. I believed in the Na'vi in a way I could never believe in the Ewoks. To me the believability is all in the eyes of the character, and whether they can use their eyes to express emotion. The Na'vi could. Chewbacca could. The Ewoks had buttons for eyes. Go figure.

I have the website open as I'm writing this, listening to the soundtrack. I can tell already that I'll be buying it in the next day or so: it's good writing music -- my last four writing albums were the three Lord of the Rings soundtracks and Gladiator (oh, and also "More music from Gladiator"). This is similar and different, just what I'm looking for. Already some of the leitmotifs are embedding themselves in my brain.

Okay, so see the movie already. This one has shot up into my top ten favourite movies of all time, and that's saying something considering I've only seen it once!

EndoWriMo

Day....Written....Wordcount

1..........0..................0

2..........0..................0

3..........4209...........4209

4..........227..............4436

5..........1802............6238

6..........0..................6238

7..........0..................6238

8..........3439...........9677

9..........0..................9677

10........0..................9677

11.........0..................9677

12.........0.................9677

13.........0.................9677

14.........0.................9677

15......... 3193...........12870

16.........0.................12870

17.........3061...........15931

18.........0.................15931

19.........0.................15931

20.........4133...........20064

21.........1944...........22008

22.........0.................22008

23.........6422...........28430

24.........0.................28430

25......... 2626...........31056

26.........0.................31056

27.........8239...........39295

28.........0.................39295

29.........8015...........47310

30.........7439...........54749

So, here's the summary of my NaNoWriMo stats, taken from my official NaNo stats on the site -- three big days at the end. This table isn't quite accurate (although two of the last three days are), because I was NaNoing on a computer that doesn't have internet access, which saves me being interrupted by the ping of emails landing in my inbox, a great distraction, particularly if the writing's not going so well. So, for example, the first three days I wrote every day. Most days I did something, though sometimes it was only a couple of hundred words. The stats are also out because sometimes I updated after midnight. I mean, really, when does a session end at midnight? I did have a couple of days where I wrote till I was so tired I didn't make sense anymore -- one time I realised my sentences were no longer coherent, and another they were individual coherent sentences but had no bearing on the sentences before or after them, so I had a sequence of sentences with not only no logical progression of thought but no one thought in common! At this point I left them and they were included in the day's count, but then deleted the following morning, so there were words I had to make up. (And, yes, the NaNo rules are you don't edit or delete, but I always do. I know I'm not alone in that. Horses for courses.)

So, the crazy month is over, and I'm left feeling excited and very much "in the zone". That's what I love about NaNoWriMo, sometimes I hate it, and it's hard, and I ask myself why am I doing this crazy thing to myself, but when I get to the end, I have something substantial to work on, and it's amazing to have done it and been part of it. But some days . . . some days, to use a cliche, it really is like getting blood out of stone. Some days the blank screen is god and it dictates there shall be no inspiration, but countering that is the NaNo dictation: thou shalt write regardless of whether thou feels inspired or no. And so I put my head down, bum down, and plough on, plough the most rugged of fields, hating every moment, every word that comes out mired in crap, hate it, hate it, hate it. Less often are the gifts: days when inspiration is there for the taking and the story flows. I could have wished for more of these, but it's good for all of us to know we don't have to wait for them. I always remember hearing John Marsden talk about the days when the writing was agony and the days when it was gold (not his words, but I can't remember exactly how he put it), and I asked if he could tell the difference in quality between the two, and he thought about it for a little while and then said that no there was no difference in quality. That was a particularly enlightening and liberating moment for me.

The whole NaNo thing -- the loving and the hating it is my relationship to writing really. Sometimes I love the first draft, but mostly I don't. Mostly it's hard work. For me, the pleasure is in the rewrites, the editing passes. The reimagining. The redescribing. The fleshing out and the cutting back. NaNo gives me something to wreak my pleasure on! To take my pleasure from. It's hard but exhilarating and hard and fun and hard and hateful -- look at all those zeroes -- and hard, most of all, but it does say something about the power of deadlines. At least my stats do. There were times when I thought I wasn't going to make it, but I remember last time I did it, two years ago, when I really had to pull some big numbers and thought that I could do it again if I had to. And I did have to. More often. But I did it, and never mind that my husband had to cook dinner every night and no cleaning got done. Writing got done, and that's the main thing.

The unlikeable character

It's always hard having an unlikeable character as your protagonist. After all, you want your readers to keep reading, right? So if your character is unlikeable, you've got a harder task to keep your readers interested -- if they don't like the character, why should they care what happens to him or her? And if they don't care, what's going to compel them to read on?

There is more than one way to get around this. You can write brilliantly so that there's other things going on with the musicality of your prose, its sheer poetry, to keep readers interested (which won't work on all readers). You can make sure your character is at least well rounded (as all protagonists should be) and that there are enough good characteristics to keep readers on-side. You can start with the good and gradually reveal the bad. Or you can trick your reader and suddenly reveal some abhorrent characteristic that totally puts the reader off.

Okay, I don't really recommend the last, but I've just had that experience as a reader, so clearly not all writers agree with me. Two thirds of the way into a book I've been reading, and the main character has done something that has left me so cold I'm not sure I want to continue. I liked this character. I empathised with him completely, but any empathy vanished with that one cruel act. It's something that was foreshadowed, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was led to a point where it seemed unavoidable and I was spared, so I relaxed and, then, when I wasn't expecting it: bang.

It's unusual for me to have such a strong reaction. But then this particular action was always going to be difficult for me to get over. Leaving it so late -- well, I feel manipulated. Two-thirds of the way in, I don't really want to abandon a story I was enjoying, but now I don't want to stay with this character at all. I suppose I will finish it -- my son asked me to read it because he wants to discuss it with me (and, no, it's not one of his school texts). He says it's one of his favourite books, and I mull over what's just happened and think, how can it be? But we're all different readers -- we all want something different, something we writers have to bear in mind.

Currently reading

It used to be that I would only ever read one book at a time. I'd start one, and if it were any good, might have it finished in a day or two. And if it were not good, I'd pick it up and put it down, but would stay with it until I'd made a conscious decision (rarely) not to stay with it. This might mean that I would be stuck on one book for several weeks, perhaps longer. There are few books that I have abandoned, and it's usually because of a sludgy writing style -- think too many adjectives, too many adverbs -- rather than a lack of things happening. Sometimes it might be because I don't empathise with the characters, but most often it's to do with style and my own desire to take a blue pen and start paring these books back.

These days, however, I seem to have multiple books on the go. I might pick one up that someone has left somewhere and read a few pages. Next time I'm looking for something to read, it may be that book again or something I can more easily lay my hands on. We're constantly hearing talk of how our attention spans these days are shorter, that the TV age and computer age have made us almost illiterate for longer works. I don't really subscribe to this theory -- well, not in total, anyway -- I can easily believe we have shorter attention spans, but I still enjoy long books. Length is a bonus -- I get to stay with characters I love all that much longer. And yet here my own reading pattern has changed.

I'm currently reading a YA book, a biography, a genre novel, two literary novels and one classic. And I'm having no problems at all jumping from one to another. Interestingly enough, though, I still can only work on one writing project (happily) at a time. I've included "happily" as an aside because I am capable of doing more than one, but I love best just immersing myself in my work in progress, sinking through its layers. I wonder if that too will change with time.

Chris Baty and NaNoWriMo

Last week we had Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, come in and speak to our students. As someone who entered (and won!) NaNoWriMo the year before last, I was keen to hear his insights.

NaNo was hard for me. I started well by going on a writing retreat to Phillip Island with my good friend Ellen for several days. Although Ellen wasn't doing NaNo, we both wrote furiously, and it was wonderful having time away from family and its constraints and interruptions, and emails. It made me realise just how distracting emails can be -- you're writing away and that ping sounds to tell you something has landed in your inbox, and you have to go see what it is in case it's something important. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Anyway, after a brilliant start, things dribbled off. I returned home to a series of crises (which seems to be an ongoing feature of my family life, but then I have teenagers...) and the writing dried up. But I was determined not to fail, and so, slowly, I picked up the writing again, but it was a bit sporadic. By the end of week two I was way behind schedule, but things weren't looking impossible. By the end of week three I was chasing about 20,000 words, till finally I had several days where I had to pump out in excess of 5,000 words. And I did it. It was daunting and scary and hard and fun, and it felt good to finally scramble those words and send them in for verification. And to see the confirmatory message that I'd won.

Chris Baty talked about tackling NaNo as a series of different weeks. He called weeks one and four the champagne weeks: week one, you're on fire and the words are pouring out, weeks two and three are the slogs, and by week four you're near the end and can see the finish line. Hmm. I'm not sure that quite describes my experience of week four, but I concede it's probably like this for most people who have paced themselves better than I did. I'm sure I couldn't see the finish line because of the burning of all that sweat from my forehead, dripping in my eyes. Never mind.

The great thing about guest speakers such as Chris is that they're usually so inspiring. Chris was no exception: filled with enthusiasm for a concept that's pretty exciting when you think about it. All around the world, all these novelists set aside a month where writing becomes their number one priority. And it did -- with 1660 words per day, every day (or 5000+ towards the end), there's not a lot of time left for frivolous socialising. NaNo is growing -- and I could see the infectiousness of that enthusiasm in our students. Few had heard of NaNo before, but most were keen to try it afterwards and were lamenting the fact that November was so far away.

Chris originally started NaNo with a group of friends, who would take their laptops to cafes and write together. I must say that, having been on several writing retreats where we've all sat around writing, I know that writing socially like this works really well for me. There's something about being there with others that keeps my bum glued to that seat. I can't sit and distract myself with a few games of Spider Solitaire because I'm stuck. I can't get up and wander around the house, pick up a book and start reading. I can't take my dogs for a walk or ring a friend or anything. There's me and the public conscience: I have to write. We all have to write.

The NaNo site was great too. I loved the word tracker and the fact that I could watch how my friends were progressing. There were great bulletin boards where I could go to discuss problems (plot problems, ideas, characterisation) if I had any -- but for me these proved to be a really interesting source of distraction, so I tended not to spend too much time there.

Last year I didn't attempt NaNo. I was still teaching in November (whereas the year before I had finished), and had too much marking to do. This year I'll be finished again (apart from late assignments), so will probably give it another go. The trick will be to get a more regular work pattern than last time. I must confess I haven't gone back and read what I've written, but will have to do that at some point. And after hearing Chris talk, I have to say that like my students I can't wait!

Vale JG Ballard

Earlier this month (19 April, to be exact), something happened that escaped my notice -- JG Ballard died. I don't know how I missed this news -- probably busy with my head in a book -- but it's something I should've taken notice of. It was only this morning, reading Time magazine over breakfast, that I saw a tribute to Ballard by Bruce Sterling. Sterling writes: "...the orderliness of his personal life allowed him to create a surreal, visionary fiction that was often frankly pathological".

If you've read Crash, it's easy to agree with this. Ballard is, no doubt, best known for this and for Empire of the Sun. Although I own the latter, I must confess to not having read it yet. Or have I? The more I think about it, the more I think I have. In any case, I did enjoy the movie. On the other hand, I've definitely read Crash, a disturbing book, but haven't seen the film. But it was neither of these that spoke most loudly to me. It was one of his short stories: "Billennium". 

"Billennium" is set in an overpopulated future, where humankind has solved the problem of feeding its burgeoning population, so that the main problem now facing humanity is the lack of space. It is the story of a man who lives in a cupboard under a staircase (hmm, sound familiar? Ballard visited it first!), but who discovers a secret room, a large room, which he can have all to himself. Or can he? He gives up his cupboard and moves in, and the story goes somewhere unexpected but completely inevitable. It's one of those stories that left me thinking, and thinking. And a few days later, still thinking.

Ballard wasn't a discovery of my early science fiction years, but of my middle ones. In my early years I read mainly Asimov and Clarke and Hoyle. 

I loved Fred Hoyle's The black cloud as a teenager. Years later, I read it again and it felt dated -- not so much in the science but the way all the characters were always smoking, which annoyed the hell out of me. (I had this gripe about Nevil Shute's On the beach, too -- another book I otherwise loved.) I read some of Hoyle's other books, mostly co-written with his son Geoffrey, but these didn't grab me quite the same way -- though I do remember a wonderful scene where someone skated down through Jupiter's atmosphere... Going a bit hazy there.

In my early days, I was a purist who preferred Clarke to Asimov -- mainly because of Clarke's ideas. Rendezvous with Rama was one of my favourites, but I also particularly enjoyed Childhood's end. And then of course there was the esoteric film 2001, which intrigued me (and I enjoyed "The sentinel, which it was partly based on, and loved the idea of Michael Collins considering telling Houston he'd seen a big black rectangle on the farside of the moon -- if only he had!). You know, though -- I think I preferred the less intriguing, more traditional  2010, at least at the movies. I can't remember which book I preferred. I do remember going on to read 2061 and perhaps even 3001. Did I finish it? I can't remember. I do remember that I found the lack of characterisation difficult to deal with, and these last two signalled the end of my reading Clarke.

Asimov grew on me first with a robot -- R. Daneel Olivaw -- in The caves of steel and The naked sun, but then even more in the Foundation series. Until then, I think I had mainly read his short stories, and I never liked any short stories as much as novels -- mainly because I always bought them by accident, and then would do the work and just be getting into them when they would finish. I've since learned to appreciate the form. 

Then I made the discovery that the unsophisticated but fast-paced Lucky Starr books I'd read when I was younger were by Asimov too, writing under the pseudonym of Paul French. 

But the Foundation series -- initially, just three books -- really blew me away. What a concept! How amazing. And then R. Daneel turns up in the Foundation series, tying this series with the robot series. More, more, more. Give me more. Eventually, I think I read the whole Asimov canon, and was amazed at how he'd set all his novels in the same universe -- in his universe. It was so cool. Later, after he died, I tried to read some of the follow-ons to the Foundation series, written by other authors. Greg Benford's was just too dry to engage me. I almost wept with disappointment.

Strangely, both Clarke and Asimov had their own three rules, though Clarke's were more about writing (apart from no. three), and Asimov couldn't count because he cheated and snuck in a Zeroth Law, which seemed totally right and necessary when reading the later Foundation novels. I imagine most people would be more familiar with Asimov's laws of robotics, and I confess I'm more aware of Clarke's third law -- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -- than his other two.

The purists may prefer Clarke to Asimov, and indeed I've heard many of them snigger about Asimov, but to me Asimov's writing had a warmth, a human interest that I just couldn't find to the same degree in Clarke's books. It was this factor that I found in abundance in fantasy, which was why I responded so well -- and indeed shifted my allegiances -- to this genre.

Bradbury, as I think I've posted about before, was my first induction, and I will be forever grateful to him for the two seminal stories that changed my life: "A sound of thunder" and "The scythe". But the discovery that they were by the same author was for the future -- at that time I read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and liked it, but didn't feel the need to dip any further.

Then I entered my middle years -- which involved Ballard and Larry Niven through his wonderful story "Neutron star". I have these two in a book of ten SF stories everyone should read, but these were the two that resonated. (And I loved Asimov's footnote about how he said to Niven that he could have written "Neutron star" because he'd written a paper on the idea behind the story. And Niven had replied that he knew -- he'd read the paper and it gave him the idea for the story! Asimov said he was kicking himself.)

My later years gave me back the terrific Bradbury (with an 800+ page book of his short stories! Just heaven.). And with his more writerly Zen in the art of writing. A great book every writer should read. But in the meantime, I'd found fantasy.

So that leaves me with Ballard, who has just died. Such was his influence that a word was coined after him: Ballardian. It probably doesn't need explaining. Orwell is the only other author I can think of offhand (I am pretty tired) with his own adjective! Perhaps you'd like to remind me of the ones I missed.

Movie and live show reviews

Well, I've been a bit remiss here and haven't posted for a while -- partly because my wrists are sore, and I'm trying to give them a break from so much typing, and partly because it's been school holidays, and I've been busy editing a book for a small press publisher, leaving my kids to take over this computer.

I have seen a number of movies in the last couple of weeks and one live show, so I thought it might be good to review them here, as much to sort out my own thoughts as a writer, which is how I always look at things now. It's been a spec fic bonanza for me, as three of the five films have been spec fic, and so, I guess, has the live show. Perhaps I'll start with that.

Wicked is the prequel to The wizard of Oz, and tells the story of how the Wicked Witch of the East and Glinda the Good met, and of course subverts all the well-established conventions of just who the good gal is. I loved this show: it's big, bright and boisterous, though I could've done without Glinda's whiny stage voice (part of her character, not the actress playing her -- I did love her one truly operatic moment, however). 

But I have to say I thought there was a little too much subversion -- it's rather like reading The mists of Avalon and comparing it to every other book on the Arthurian legend. Or seeing how Sara Douglass reworked her characters in her second trilogy of the Axis series. In the case of Wicked, I was happy to have things changed around -- and, after all, that adds to the story's freshness -- but I'd like more shading, more darkness in Elphaba's character. After all, she made a truly terrifying antagonist in The wizard of Oz, and I came away from Wicked finding it difficult to reconcile the two. Glinda's character was easier. 

But, for all of that, it's a satisfying story and entertaining. We bought the soundtrack afterwards, and my daughter seems to have it on a permanent loop! My favourite song is "For good", though I wonder if I'm biased because my daughter and one of her Victorian State Singer friends were singing this together for a performance that never eventuated. It's a beautiful song, heartfelt and moving. But my daughter seems to have settled on the more uplifting "Defying gravity". Well worth a listen, and worth seeing. (The soundtrack and the show, that is.)

The reader is a story of seduction and its consequences -- a young boy is seduced by an older woman who later abandons him, and then, at a Nazi war criminal trial, he learns more about her than he ever wished to know. 

I wish I had taken my kids to this film. After the movie, we could have sat down and had an in-depth discussion about morality and ethics, the type of discussion I love to have with them. On the other hand, the first half of the film is so steamy that I'm sure I would've been squirming in my seat had they been there: my son would have been leaning forward in his seat to make sure he never missed a second, and my daughter making gagging motions behind her hand. 

This is a deep and complex film: slow moving but compelling. Kate Winslet is a stupendous actress and at the top of her form here; she is mesmerising on screen, beautiful and ugly at the same time: a terrific performance. The reader is a movie I'm still thinking about -- on many levels -- and will be awhile yet. It's one I'll have to buy and watch with my kids later -- when they're older, perhaps, so I can have that discussion I so want to have. This is must-see cinema.

Race to Witch Mountain is an action film on steroids. It's go-go-go with barely a breather anywhere. The action starts right at the beginning and never lets up, which makes for breathless viewing. That's great if you like this kind of movie (and I do), but not so much if you want something deeper. This wasn't a film that left me thinking. Plot -- two aliens, being chased by the government, co-opt the help of a taxi driver in their endeavours to return to their crashed spaceship and escape. It's a fun film for kids and those who love an action movie. (And funnily enough, there was a reference to The wizard of Oz in this one.)

Inkheart is the story of a man who can read characters out of books (can I borrow him?), and the consequences. I must say that having seen the trailers for this film, I thought part of the story involved our real-life characters entering into the world of the book -- that there was some kind of portal that they crossed, but that wasn't the case at all. Rather, the characters who had come out of the book brought their own little world to life in the real world. While this made more logical sense, given the film's premise, I was disappointed as I wanted to see the real-life characters enter the world of the book, giving this world a larger canvas. Perhaps that's just my own thwarted desires as a writer coming to the fore. And I did spend part of the film wondering what would happen if I were able to meet my characters, but I've already explored such things in a short story I started once about where book characters go after a reader finishes reading them. 

Aside from my expectations, which is not the fault of the writers but whoever made the trailers (and this isn't nearly as bad as it is for the comedy film you go to see and realise you've seen every funny gag already in the trailer!), I found this film both fun and interesting. It was meatier than Race to Witch Mountain, but had enough action to satisfy those who like a fast pace. (And it too contained a Wizard of Oz reference -- they seem to be following me.) Well worth a watch.

Knowing is the story of a mathematician who "inherits" a piece of paper that has been buried in a time capsule for fifty years and that predicts accurately every disaster that has happened in the last fifty years, and a few more that are about to happen. The paper is written in code, so we track his unravelling of this code, his disbelief, his trying to convince others. This was a solid spec fic premise, so the writers had me from the beginning.

My son had auditioned unsuccessfully for a part in this film -- he was a bit too old anyway, and always has looked older than he is, which is not a benefit for a child actor -- so we felt we had a personal connection to the film. This was intensified when I was speaking to a friend who is friends with a girl who did get in (and she was very good!). And I have to love an apocalyptic image of the end of the world happening around the State Library of Victoria. Very reminiscent of On the beach. (I'm sure Ava Gardner would have found that appropriate! Or perhaps not. And isn't that disappointing to learn!) Anyway, I've digressed...

I loved this film. I always like Nicolas Cage, and it was funny seeing some American city with the West Gate Bridge in the background (another touchstone for me), and there was a great mixture of intrigue and darkness and action and fear. It ends with Biblical symbolism, which may colour the response of some viewers, but didn't bother me. This will be another I have to buy.

Duplicity is the story of two ex-spies (CIA and MI6) who get together to organise their own corporate sting. I have to say it's a very brave screenwriter who puts together a movie where nobody has any idea what's happening for the first third of the movie. And I mean no idea. I went in prepared to love this movie, but by the time I realised it was a puzzle I had to put together, I'd already lost interest. My son said this was the first film he'd ever considered walking out of. It wasn't quite that bad for me, but I felt all of its length (unusual for me), and, while it did end well, this wasn't enough of a save for me to ever (and I mean ever) want to watch this one again. 

After my summer of "Spooks", I was really disappointed not to be gripped by this. Once the pieces start to come together, it does become more interesting, but as I said it was way too late for me. The first fifteen minutes are meant to establish what type of movie it is, what it's going to be about, the characters, the tone and atmosphere. And I was just sitting there wondering where all this was leading and whether I'd missed something crucial. I hadn't come in late, had I? The first hint that something more was going on was a repeated scene -- the dialogue repeated but in a different location, which piqued my interest, but I still had no idea what the hell was going on. Some time after that, I did have an inkling, and had put the whole story together by the end, but it annoyed me to be in the dark for so long. Be warned. See this one at your own risk!

Not settling for the first thing

The other day I was watching a film with my children, one none of us had seen before, and I said, "Oh, I know what's going to happen next. He's going to . . . and then . . ." And sure enough, he did.

My kids looked at me and asked how I knew that. And I said I just knew. "Actually, no, it's more than that," I said. "It's because that's how I would've written it."

I never used to be able to do that. Or only very occasionally. But the longer I've been writing, the more I have my prediction-meter turned on. At some point in the TV show, or movie or whatever, I'll just know.

Of course, I'm not always right, and the best films and shows are the ones that don't end up where I've predicted, that subvert my expectations and surprise me. I'm not talking the old-fashioned twist ending here, but an ending that grows out of the characters and the story.

The best writers don't settle for the predictable. They toss away the first idea that comes into their heads and explore other options. The best way to do this is with the "what if?" question. What if this happens? Plot out the likely chain of events. What if that happened? What about something else? Each time you ask that question, you'll move into more original territory. We shouldn't settle for the first idea, but nor should we for the second or third either. 

The further we push, the deeper we explore, the fresher and better our writing will be. If we're scriptwriters, we won't have audience members like me who've worked out the plot halfway through the movie. If we're novelists, we may still have people who flick to the end of the book (there's no getting away from them), but they'll see it doesn't end where they thought and so will still need to read on to see how we got there. But the best part of all is that we'll have something we know is ours and is good, something we can be proud of.

Responding to criticism

The dynamics in class workshopping or in a writer's group's workshopping is always interesting to note. My number one rule of workshopping is that you (the writer) should only ever put up your best work. If you know it's not working, but it's as good as you can get it, then fine. But if you know there's a problem, and you know how to fix it, then you should fix it before you give it to anyone else to critique. 

If you know your punctuation has been sloppy, but your friends are ace at fixing it so you think you don't have to bother, then that's just disrespectful. Everyone's time is important. Aren't you busy? Do you have loads of time to write? Or do you squeeze your writing in around a hundred other things the way most of us do?

So, you might think you haven't got time to check the spelling of that difficult word -- and, hey, you know there is a verb "curb", and you've seen the noun "curb" in the latest book you just had sent out from the States, so it must be right, right? Not if you're living in Australia (or Britain for that matter). In Australian usage, the noun is "kerb". You mightn't have time, but if you don't do it, you're taking up your workshopping buddies' time. Some of them are going to have to look the word up. It might take you an hour to fix the punctuation, but if you have ten friends and they're all spending an hour on it, it's not very fair, is it? Trust me: their time is just as important to them as yours is to you. And, if they're not busy looking at all the stuff you know how to fix, they might just have the time to see something more in your story that they otherwise might have missed -- the forest for the trees, and all that sort of stuff!

But what about when you're in the workshop. In the typical Clarion workshop (and many other serious workshops), the person being workshopped is not allowed to speak until everyone has said their piece. There's a good reason for this. There's nothing worse than someone who argues with every point that you make. (Yes, you've swapped hats now.) If people don't want criticism, they shouldn't put up their stories for workshopping. They shouldn't feel compelled to defend every word their written. After all, it's been put up because they want feedback on how to improve it, right? Not because they want their egos stroked. Well, that's the theory. The trouble is that some people do put up their stories so they can be told how brilliant they are.

I remember spending a lot of time workshopping a story that I thought needed a lot of work, and then the author very smugly telling me and the rest of the group that the story was already published. What a waste of my time. Not just disrespectful but rude as well. Did that mean we all didn't know what we were talking about? Not at all. I'm sure we've all read published stories we thought could have been better. Perhaps the writer (who was new to our group) had no trust in our abilities as workshoppers, but from that point forward we had no trust in her as a serious writer who was making good use of our freely given time.

A good workshopper will give specific, rather than vague comments. So, not: "This sucked big time, and I hated it..." but something more along the lines of: "I thought your setting and characterisation were great, but your POV was all over the place, and all that head-hopping made me dizzy..." 

Good feedback will point you in the direction you need to go to get things working more effectively. Good feedback is constructive, not destructive -- with any negative comments justified and a balanced reporting of what works in the story as well. This is important, not just to help preserve the writer's faith in their story, but because someone else might have knocked the very thing that you loved, and the workshopper needs to know that you did love this aspect -- that it did work for some readers.

I'm currently going through reader comments on my novel, and trying to address a saggy middle. As I'm reading through the chapters, I keep seeing opportunities to expand, expand, expand. (Add more characterisation here, put a few more thoughts in there...) I'm working through, looking at scene purpose, commenting on how well I think the scene is working and how I can address any problems. I thought by now I'd be distant enough to be able to see these problems manifesting themselves, but I'm struggling. What should I do? Consider that I'm right and my reader is wrong? This could be the case -- it is always something you need to think about -- but sadly and happily for me, I don't think this is true. Why sadly and why happily? Sadly, because I know dealing with the problem is going to entail more work, and I'm going to have to keep wrestling with it, but happily because I also know the book will be stronger when I emerge out from under it. And really that's exactly why I asked my reader to read it.

The scope of your novel and POV

The other day, my friend Ellen blogged about POV in the first chapter of her novel, and her horror when someone suggested she was writing in [third-person] omniscient when she thought she was writing in "intense third person" (or what I would call third-person intimate, or subjective or limited). And I've added the bit in the square brackets because there actually is also a first-person omniscient, but it's extremely rare as you would imagine.

I've read Ellen's opening chapters, and there's no way I would call them omniscient. For a start she has one person per scene, and she doesn't slip into anyone else's viewpoint, and writes firmly from inside her characters' heads.

K's justification of why Ellen's novel started in omniscient was to do with the characters thinking about their past in order to deliver backstory. K said that we don't often sit around thinking about our pasts in a coherent fashion, and she does have a point. But does that make the POV omniscient? I don't think so.

In an omniscient viewpoint, anything goes. The writer can move from head to head at will -- of course this should always be done for a reason, or the reader can end up dizzied or confused. But the reader *does* move heads throughout a scene. The author can jump in and give an insight that none of the characters know, for example: What none of the characters knew was that everything was about to change... 

Or the writer can jump forward into the future and point out something that would happen at a later date. The author can address the reader: Dear reader... This is called "authorial intrusion" and is a perfectly legitimate (if dated) device in an omniscient viewpoint, and one that I cannot stand! When I'm reading, I become the main character; I am in the story; I am experiencing it: all those terrible things happening to the main character -- well, they're happening to me. Authorial intrusion reminds me that I am not the main character, and in fact that I am the reader, and I'd better damn well stay on that side of the page! It completely interferes with my enjoyment of the story.

The other thing to say about all of this is that the way we represent thoughts on the page is not really how thoughts are in our head. I know sometimes mine are an almost incoherent jumble, as my thought-trains switch tracks, derail, get overtaken and stall. Thoughts on the page are a representation of what the character is thinking, and while K's representation may be closer to the truth, it's still a representation of how we think thoughts are -- just in the same way that dialogue is not the same as how we really speak -- it's more like how we think we speak.

Ellen saw what she'd done as a judgement error rather than POV error. I agree that it isn't a POV error. A POV error is when you slip into someone else's head when you shouldn't. Or when you move outside the perspective that you're writing in -- so if you are writing in an intimate viewpoint, where you are inside your character's head (as in third-person intimate, or first person), you can't say that your point-of-view character had a beatific smile on his face, because he can't see his own face. You could of course say that if he were looking in the mirror, but that's cheating. You can say he smiled. Or that he felt beatific -- even better, you can show it.

Ellen is writing a story with a big scope. She has parallel plots, so is tracking the journey of two main characters. If she were to use the type of very close POV that K favours, where thoughts are detailed and go on for paras, instead of a 120 k novel, she might end up with an extremely intimate account that spreads over 250 k and that is imminently unpublishable just because of its length. (Yes, publishers do occasionally publish books of this length, but rarely rarely rarely first time authors just because it's prohibitively expensive and the risk on a new author isn't worth it.)

The scope of our novels do, to a certain extent, dictate just how close our POV can be, as does whether a story is plot or character driven. If you're writing a literary short story where not much happens, you can afford to have pages and pages of thoughts -- in fact, stream of consciousness stories are exactly this. I can't say I particularly enjoy these, but it's horses for courses. Some people love them.

In the end, the labels we give things like POV don't really matter, but they are a way for us to check that what we does works, a way for us to understand why doing this particular thing (showing the beatific smile) doesn't work, and why we should change it.