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The Problem With The ‘One Big Lie Per Story’ Advice
There’s a rule of writing fantasy which all professional writers are familiar with. (No, I’m not talking about the dangling preposition.) Fantasy writers are allowed one big lie per story. As Michael Hauge writes at his Story Mastery website: The quality that gives every movie its emotional appeal: It isn’t the fantasy element of a…
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Little Miss Sunshine Film Study
Little Miss Sunshine is a good example of a ‘comic journey’ story structure. For fans of another well-known drama set in Albuquerque, fans of Breaking Bad may be interested to know that both Bryan Cranston and Dean Norris have small roles in Little Miss Sunshine. There’s a ticking clock in this film because the pageant…
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The Female Maturity Formula Of Modern Storytelling
When it comes to modern storytelling in Hollywood animated films for children, Pixar is at the top of the field. In fact, The Good Dinosaur, released late 2015, might have been their very first lemon, depending on what you’re looking for in a film for children.
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Gravity (2013) Film Study
Gravity is a science fiction film from 2013, with a strong mythological, Christian influence.
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Rare Interview With Author Janet Frame
This is a radio interview, transcribed and published in Landfall 178 (Volume forty-five, June 1991) between Janet Frame and Elizabeth Alley.
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Film Study: Contact (1997)
I recently found a copy of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact at the second-hand store. I already knew that Carl Sagan was a brilliant thinker and that he wrote this book of fiction as a way of playing with some ideas he had about what might happen if humans were to make contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligent life…
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Planes Trains and Automobiles
Planes, Trains & Automobiles is a thanksgiving comedy from 1987. The film has been given an R rating — not, as I expected, because of the pillow scene, but because of the cussy airport scene. [Hughes] is not often cited for greatness, although some of his titles, like “The Breakfast Club,” “Weird Science,” “Ferris Bueller’s…
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Waitress Film Study (2007)
Waitress is a 2007 film with a tragic real life story behind the movie. It is also a good storytelling case study, as it changes mood part way through. Though I don’t like Waitress nearly as much as I like Juno, it’s worth a brief compare and contrast as a way of understanding the way…
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The Others Film Study
Written by Alejandro Amenábar, The Others is an old-fashioned melodramatic ghost story but done very well. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s one of those films that can be ruined in one fell swoop (like Sixth Sense), so leave the building now!
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Black Books Pilot (2000) TV Study
The pilot episode of Black Books is called “Cooking The Books”. One thing Cooking The Books does really well is introducing the audience very quickly to the three main characters (all of them transcending stock characters, though based on stock), and weaving them together for gags at the climax. When broken down, we can see that each…
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Everyday Words With Different Academic Meanings
ASEXUAL The queer community uses ‘asexual’ in a very specific way to refer to orientation (low-to-no- sexual attraction). Some people are homosexual, some people are bisexual, heterosexual, pansexual and… asexual. In non-queer spaces, the word ‘asexual’ is used in various different ways independent from the central contemporary meaning of orientation. Even within academic literature, there…
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Dreaming In Storytelling
You may not remember dreaming after you sleep, but you’ll encounter many dream sequences in books. Isn’t it cheesy to rely on dreams? Don’t rational readers know that dreams cannot predict the future — that dreams are the scrabbled outworkings of a brain tidying itself up? Dreams, daydreams, visions, prophecies, processes of memory… all of…
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Storytelling Tips From Juno (2007)
I’m no great fan of many traditional rom-coms, but I do love this off-beat romantic comedy drama blend precisely because it takes the regular, conservative storyline of: mother almost loses her baby and then reunites (to live happily ever after), and the usual movie tropes (geek = Bleeker, but he’s also an athlete, stepmother is not…
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Side-shadowing In The Wrysons by John Cheever
“The Wrysons” is interesting as a study of writing technique because it is a story with the theme of ‘lack’ running throughout, and Cheever masterfully chose to employ some narrative techniques which are themselves about describing not what did happen but what didn’t, and what might have. Apart from The Bella Lingua, which is set…
