The Double Bind

SPOILER WARNING: I have just finished reading The Double Bind by Chris Bohjailian. I did not anticipate the ending. In fact, I felt betrayed by the ending. It really focuses me on the question: Can the point of view character's report of the action and interpretation of events be trusted?

To some extent, I play with this in my own writing, but I'm writing SF and from an alien's perspective. Its self-reporting and evaluation of human thought and action is suspect and the alien narrator even admits it may not truly understand what is going on. However, totally fictitious characters, conversations and events are chronicled and then explained away by retroactively defining the POV character as mentally ill. Although this happens in real life, I don't care for this treatment of the reader nor as a narrative device.

Another question the novel raises is victimization and how we treat other people. Characters who are important to the POV character and who care about her treat her as a child. She resists this categorization. Later, we learn that she is having a psychotic episode. Does this make her friends' and family's responses acceptable or could they have handled things differently--more like the adult she is?

On the whole, I can recommend the read because it prompts these questions.

Radio Scripting

The "film" was out of control. I am still thinking like a novelist. There was too much dialog and too much description. I investigated a radio style scripting method which seems a better fit. If anything, this story will show up as a podcast either as a drama or as a novel. In working through the formatting, which is tiresome, I discovered my long, boring and lots of back story opening scene is pretty useless. I deleted it just now. I spent a lot of time with it, but it had to go. I'm thinking I need to write the story to fit into 2 1-hour (without commercials) sections. That's a bit more writing than the challenge but makes a certain amount of sense. Whether the story fits this way or not I can't tell at this point. What I hope this exercise is leading to in the final analysis is sorting out the plot of the novel which is vague at best. The beginning is fairly clear. The reason for Gwen Chen's murder is somewhat clear, but the scam is not clear at all in my mind. There just is one. So I'm hoping that gets sorted out and Star's conflict about friendship gets sorted out, too. I think that is the best I can hope for at this point.

Script Frenzy: First Impressions

I looked at it last year, but I didn't participate in Script Frenzy This year I decided to take my nanowrimo novel and turn it into a film script. Films are less detailed than a novel in some ways. People who have read books and then see the movie are often disappointed. Whole subplots are deleted. Characters are merged. I wanted to get going on the script to sort out some of my plot failures and to strengthen the antagonists. Curiously, I'm finding the process actually is strengthening my descriptions of the environment. What does this character look like? What exactly is this character doing while it is speaking? How can I show rather than tell? I'm still having some difficulties with my Word template for script format. I think an hour or so at the keyboard should sort this out and then I'll have a pretty good idea where I'm at. I'm taking the high school worksheet available through the site to write a formulaic script but I think it will keep the pace fairly consistent. If I don't like the results, I can change it later. I'm not expecting to come out with a block buster. I'm really thinking of changing it back into a novella when I'm finished. Many changes involve tense. Novels tend to be written in past tense while scripts are present tense. I find reading fiction in the present tense fairly disconcerting.