Story on the Brain

Here's one thing that makes characters incredibly compelling to me: tension between who they really are and who they present to the world. That's the most relatable thing, isn't it? Because none of us are who we think we are in our heads. There's no perfect transfer of who we are on the inside to the outside world, even if we always wanted to do that, which I don't think anyone does. You'd have to be one hundred percent at peace with yourself to do that. And who doesn't have some traits they'd rather be without? I was trying to figure out what made the characters of Community so brilliant and that's what I figured out. They're all in a constant state of tension between who they are and who they present to the world. There's actually a wonderful third part to that tension, in that they're all trying to become something new. That's what moves it beyond great to fantastic. We love watching people try to transform themselves or reach ...

I loved Attack the Block. I saw it on DVD a couple days ago and I've been thinking about it ever since. It hit on several of my favorite things all at once: science fiction movie tropes, class, found family, and so on. My favorite thing right off was how realistic it was. What would a bunch of tough city kids do if an alien landed in their neighborhood and gouged three deep marks in the face of their leader? They'd go after it and beat it to death, obviously. I loved that so much. They didn't do any of the usual sci-fi things, like call the authorities, panic, run away, try to capture it, whatever. This struck me all throughout. These kids did exactly what real kids would do, not what kids in movies would do. They protected their own, unless they couldn't. They weren't heroic. They ran away a lot. They did stupid things. They went to their own perceived authority figures instead of the official ones, in this case the local grower/dealer. And the scientific bas...

This was a tough book to love because of the ultra-passive heroine, but I did love it. It's something I watch out for in my own writing, and let me tell you, my first finished novel was all passive heroine all the time. But I'm currently writing something else that's all about a passive heroine waking up to that fact and snapping out of it in the first paragraph of page one--and how terribly hard that is for her and for everyone else around her to accept. It's like getting out of a nice warm bed into cold water, every single time she has to do something instead of allowing things to happen to her. And everyone around her shoves her right back into that old mode every time she moves a muscle. So let's just say I'm very interested in the literary tradition of the passive heroine (you can trace it back to early saints' lives, at least) and that makes this book fascinating to me. I have some dumb complaints I'll just get off my chest right away. Most of ...

That (of course) is what Grey's Anatomy writers put in as a placeholder when they know they need to go look up some medical stuff to put into an ongoing dramatic situation. Isn't that cool? I love that. "We have to go now!" "We can't, not with the medical medical medical!" "Then medical medical medical and let's get the hell out of here!" Yay! Today I went to a new doctor and had to give the whole saga of the absurdly dysfunctional situation with the old doctor. And it made me think about story. I don't honestly know how doctors think, but I get the impression it's part puzzle solving, part confusion/red herring/BS sifting, and part flow chart in which there are major junctions with big arrows leading to: Are you dying of this right now? YES/NO Should I refer this to a specialist (and therefore make it someone else's problem? YES/NO And so on. But coming out of a dysfunctional doctor relationship, my story was ful...

This episode played out a potential present day if Ellis Grey had never gotten Alzheimer's and died. It's set up as Meredith's actual dream that she dreams. Like we see her thinking, "What if?" and falling asleep. So presumably no logic applies. Except it's set up as x = normal only with Ellis Grey, so what's the point of that? Many sources of irritation right there. The show sets up a happy, perky Meredith who wears pink and gets along with (and LIVES with) her mom and her dad, who is Chief Webber in this scenario. She's meek and earnest and very much in her mom's shadow. See, I think that could have made an amazing episode right there, to see how that Meredith would deal with a given situation, say with Lexie reappearing as a junkie. But the show immediately breaks that premise. Ellis is alive and well and bossing everyone around, so...Derek and Addison never broke up? Why? Callie chose a completely different specialty? Why? Callie and Owen s...