One of my readers read my
post yesterday about the movie 2012 and said she understood the use of the four
elements but found the story itself very poorly told. I agree: the ludicrous speech
by the young scientist toward the end (I won’t give it away), the fact that no
matter how bad things are there’s always time for an exchange of clichéd
dialogue, and the sheer number of times someone says, “I think you’d better
come see this,” plus the fact that at least 20 or 30 minutes could and should
have been cut all attest to this. She wondered why some movies get to be so bad
yet succeed at the box office.
Special effects.
The movie 2012 is a thrill
ride.
For the vast majority of the
mass audience just the basic structure is enough as long as the visuals are
impressive. They’re coming out talking about how realistically Los Angeles crashed
into the ocean, not about the nuances of how people respond to the apocalypse.
Are readers more discerning?
Not always much more. Let’s face it, Dan Brown doesn’t get a lot of points for
literary style, nor does Mary Higgins Clark, for instance, but they excel at
the art of the story twist and the cliff-hanger.
Here’s the key point: story twists and cliff-hangers
are the text version of the special effects in a film.
Great writers use them, too.
Look at the works of classic authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, Joseph Conrad,
Robert Louis Stevenson—all of them use these methods to keep us enthralled.
In blockbuster novels the
twists and reveals tend to be big: there’s a major conspiracy, or a threat to
the entire population, or the protagonist’s best friend is working for the
other side and tries to kill him.
The twists and reveals can
be much more subtle but still have impact. For instance, the cliffhanger may be
whether or not the protagonist is pregnant. The best friend’s betrayal may be
that she doesn’t tell the female protagonist that her husband is having an
affair.
If you’re working on a
fiction project, it’s worth giving some thought to your special effects!
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