Archive for July, 2010
I like to run my characters — the protagonists especially — through hell and back. I shove their squealing asses into whatever meat grinder, trash compactor or whirring fan-blade I can find. I punch them. Kick them. Knock out their teeth. Cut off their toes. They get loved, and then left. They suffer betrayal. They undergo unpleasant transformations. They’re forced down dark paths.
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Still. Here in the dark forest, uncertainty nags. Little goblins with sharp teeth and ugly shoes. Biting. Stomping. Dancing. Mocking. I know I’m going to need more work (and, as always, if you have work or know of it, boy howdy I’d appreciate you giving me a head’s up because damn if I won’t soon have a hot fresh mortgage to pay for — though, blessedly, the same mortgage we have now). I know that the daily work I’m doing vacillates between “This is pretty good” and “This is as appealing as a chancre-encrusted pig rectum,” but I know deep down that even the worst word count can be spit-polished later on down the road.
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Man, Inception. I can’t stop noodling it. Now, to be clear, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. Like, for real. Really real. Like, we’re gonna spoil the whole goddamn ending of the movie. I’m not kidding. 3… 2… 1… You had your chance.
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We know already that the meat-and-potatoes of fiction is conflict: life without conflict would be gooey and grand, while fiction without conflict would be redundant and dull. Conflict is the food that feeds the reader, and, if you permit me to get a little disgusting here (what else is new?), what the reader then, erm, regurgitates is tension. Tension is born out of conflict. But where does conflict come from?
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Last night, went to see Inception. To me, the movie theater has always been a temple. But they have brought prostitutes to the temple. Barn animals, too. Even clowns. Perhaps even barn clown prostitutes. The temple is sullied. Someone pooped on the altar, called it “a sacrifice.”
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