The Social Network

The Social Network, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's new film about the genesis of Facebook and the lawsuits that followed is a rather fantastic film, and I can say fairly certainly that it contains some of the greatest written scenes I've seen in a long time.

Sorkin of course is no stranger to brilliant scenes, just check out almost every single episode of The West Wing for proof of this, but his writing here transcends that. Yes, it's quick witted and sly, and yes, not a single person on the face of the earth probably speaks like that, but it's one of the most capitivating scenes I've seen in a long time.

"You're going to be successful, and rich. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."

To set the scene, two students are in a bar. One of them, Mark Zuckerberg is distracted and distant, whilst his girlfriend Erica attempts to salvage the last pieces of their relationship. The conversation that follows, seems to break down into four different topics of conversation; about the relationship, Final's Clubs, China and Mark's general ego. The conversation mixes between these topics, flitting from one to the other and back again whilst keeping a throughline, constantly bringing it back to Mark and his struggle (that makes up most of the film) about trying to stand out in a college (and to an extent, a country) filled with success.

---

I think we should just be friends.
I don't need friends.
I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you.

Sorkin distills the entire films narrative and themes into this one conversation, whilst also fleshing out Zuckerberg's character and it does this without shoving exposition down our throats. It never speaks down to an audience who has never attended Harvard, making you feel slightly alienated, which to me at least feels very purposeful.

It's an excellent scene, one of the finest of the year.

Bad Language does Bad Literature

In honour of the Manchester Literature Festival and Robin Ince's Bad Book Club, Bad Language have decided to indulge in their very own bad literature night. The below video features Dan and Joe reading some raunchy delights from Mills and Boon. Get ready whilst Bad Language topples you to a climax....

Interactive Literature

The future of novels is apparently here. With the rise of Iphones, Ipod touches and Ipads, as well as people looking into moving publishing into the next generation, it seems the words on everyone's lips are 'how do we make reading an interactive experience?'

Ebooks are the industries first attempt at this, with the Kindle and Ipad especially highlighting just how interesting these things can be. Both can show basic functions, say for example a digital book with a touch screen so you can turn pages. Text can be resized and background colours can be changed to make it easier to read. This is fairly standard, and for most would be considered pretty satisfactory.

But then a book like this comes along and shows everyone just how a digital book should be done. With smart physical effects moving scenary and developing aspects of the story in stunning high definition, this is a must have app for the Ipad.

But that's just as far as things are going at the moment. What I'm interested in is the future.

Let's take a look at a some trends in literature, and just how these can be worked into apps, to make interactive literature an essential part of the reading experience.

Teenage fiction, and to be honest, young adult fiction is predominately dominated these days by series of books. Harry Potter, Twilight, True Blood, the Discworld and even to an extent, series such as James Pattersons detective novels. These books all have shared universes, filled with locations and characters. They have rules and mythologies. Harry Potter even has textbooks. What if there was an app for those universes. So whilst you're reading the text you can touch an image or link on the screen and be whisked away to some other information. So, for example you're reading a chapter of Harry Potter where he's in a potions class. How about the image behind the text is of the classroom, or a desk. You can click on a textbook and be taken to a replica potions book, complete with spells, or how about clicking on an image of Snape at the head of the class and be taken to a profile of his character, biographical information etc...and then, with another click on there, get taken to a family tree-esque diagram where you can see how his character fits in with the rest of the cast.

Think about how this could apply to some of your favourite books? Imagine a Discworld series where the footnotes are all links to other information, and a map of the Discworld was readily available. Especially in terms of fantasy and sci-fi - the cornerstones of world building and fanbases that eat up continuity, this could be the future of those franchises.

Augmented reality apps are another option. These can already be found on Iphones and Ipads and look a little like this. An extra layer of reality viewed through the camera, recognising distance and location. There's a definite market for this in terms of literature. I point you to the brilliant Rainy City Stories, who have on their website a map of Manchester, along with short stories and poetry about specific locations. But what if those locations could be viewed through an Iphones camera, and then when you reach them, it triggers an audio version of a poem or story, or even just brings up the story alongside the camera. Applying location specific literature to applications that deal in location specifics can only enhance the literature. There are already books out there that try to deal with this aspect, for instance Lyra's Oxford or Ian Rankin's Edinburgh. I could see the use of an app that shows locations featured in the novels, or even direct you along the path of your favourite novels.

Anyone have any other ideas for making literature more interactive?

Webcomics

Just a quick post to say that these two webcomics are very very good indeed.


Troop 142


Nathan Sorry

What I've Been Reading. Over and Over again.

I like to think I'm better than Lee Child, he who manages to write fourteen books starring Jack Reacher, without making a single painfully obvious Reacher-round joke. However, I geniunely felt a little admiration for him when I was pointed to this article in which Child quite wonderfully admits that anyone could knock up a literary classic, but he's much more doubtful that the reverse could be true. So, the question I guess is this - can genre fiction be literary fiction?

I find it quite admirable that he's saying these things, about not just story but character, example quote, "People don't want a character to change. With a series like Reacher, people want to know what they're getting - oh good, another Reacher."

I don't necessarily think this is true. I mean, I'm a massive comic book fan, and not just graphic novels or Indie books, I'm talking about real superhero comics. One of my favourite characters out there is Spiderman.

Now, I'm not about to start claming that Spiderman is any sort of literary classic. Of course, he's a classic character, a brilliant creation, but the work on him is never going to considered in a pantheon that considers Lolita and War & Peace. That's not the argument. What Spiderman does give us, is a perfect example of what editors think about the changeability of characters.

Let's set the scene.

In the beginning, a mild mannered teenager became a superhero thanks to the bite of a radioactive spider. Everyone knows this part. He learned the hard way that with great power comes great responsibility, after the death of his Uncle Ben. He learned even harder, that when you let people into your life (as a superhero) you risk their lives, after his first love, Gwen Stacy died. These events, from way back in the 60's have been affecting the character ever since.

Cut to the start of this decade. Peter Parker, now no longer a photographer, is married to Mary Jane Watson, is a college lecturer and...guess what...has grown and changed as a character. He's moved on from these hangups from the 60's. Yes they still haunt him, but it feels realistic that he's moving past it.

Cut to 2007 and Spiderman reveals his identity to the world. Everyone knows he's Peter Parker now. This is a massive change for the character, showing a logical step in the stories being told. This is Parker moving completely on from his worries and accepting that he has a strong family who can look after themselves.

This is all preamble to a few years ago. In a major storyline, Peter and Mary Jane essentially annull their marriage via a deal with the devil and as a (completely inexplicable) result, the world around them changes. Spiderman's secret identity is under wraps again, Peter Parker is single, broke and a photographer (once more). This giant reset button undid everything that had been worked on with the character, and something that comics seem to rarely do these days is build character and develop them in stories like this.

So when Lee Child says people aren't looking for character development, that they want the same thing. I think it can be misleading. I think people would like to see development, they want to see characters go somewhere, and not just be ciphers for plot and exposition. I for one, get much more enjoyment, even in genre fiction, when characters develop and learn.

Sitcom characters never learn as a rule, because once they start learning, once they start developing, the only option is drama, just look at Friends. Thrillers, horror and science fiction shouldn't be afraid to take their characters somewhere emotionally, not least because its interesting for the reader, but mostly because it makes everything that little bit more dramatic.

What I've Been Reading

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

The Rehearsal has made me incredibly jealous. Not only has Eleanor Catton crafted one of the finest debut novels I've read in a long time, constantly evolving her story and taking it to places I'd never expect. Not only does it completely rewrite the rulebook as far as dramatic writing and art-house literature (as close a term as I can think of to describe the book). Not only is it laugh out loud funny. But she's also managed to do all this before she turned twenty-five.

The story takes place in an unnamed community, in a small town. The country isn't specified, although Catton herself has lived in both Canada and New Zealand (and it has a particularly British feel to it at times). A sex scandal rocks a local girls school, and when the rumour mill begins grinding, a prestigious drama college decides to dramatise the incident for their end of year production.

Catton presents the story through the eyes of Stanley, a first year student at the drama school; Isolde, the sister of the girl involved in the sex scandal; Julia, a misfit at the girls school; and an unnamed saxophone teacher.

The characters perform very specific parts in the story. This may sound obvious, but the way Catton writes each of them makes it seem that their role in the story, and the cogs they turn, are almost more important than the characters. As though the roles are being embodied by actors, who are only acting the story out in front of us (and at one point, the actors 'playing' some of the girls are switched around, and the characters suddenly seem uncomfortable and slightly unbelievable). Catton frequently breaks the fourth wall, and uses stage theatrics in her writing. The drama school has a conceit whereby whenever one door is closed, another is opened - literally. In another writers hand, it wouldn't work, mostly because they would be too scared to continue using it, but Catton keeps on with it and as such you get sucked in.

The Rehearsal is absolutely amazing, and well worth picking up.

Nathan Sorry

Nathan Sorry is an incredibly creative look at 9/11. It's an online web comic from Rich Barrett and can be found here. So far it's up to the fifty-first page with a page seemingly added every two weeks.

Nathan, the title character is a finance worker who misses his plane to New York on September 10th and consequently is not in his office when it gets obliterated the next morning. Instead of rushing back to pick up the pieces, he takes the opportunity to leave everything behind him and start anew. Luckily one of his work colleagues was defrauding the company they worked in for $2 million, and this money just happens to be lying in an account under a fake name...

The story has just started properly and although Barrett is updating slowly, it's worth getting up to date with it.

Heather Graham...Writer

As a fairly literate flat, myself and my girlfriend have accumulated a small library of books akin to an accusing parlour in an episode of Poirot. From festivals, second hand bookstalls, the thrusting hands of writers and a lot of charity shops we've amassed an odd collection of tattered old copies of Martin Amis novels, to non-fiction books about the inventor of Cornflakes.

So inevitably there comes a time that some of these books should be delved into and essentially torn apart for the sake of...well...learning something about writing and how it works.

Our choice for the first installment: UNHALLOWED GROUND BY HEATHER GRAHAM.

Not the Heather Graham by the way, who as you all know is this person but instead, is this person. This is important.

The book was given to us at the book launch for Mrs Graham's (much much worse) fairy-tale graphic novel, during which she dressed in wild west attire and performed an excruciatingly bad set of music in the middle of a bar on Brighton Pier (without learning any lyrics of the songs she was singing, and resorting to reading them off the back of an amp.) Unhallowed Ground was left on the table we were sat at, and seizing the opportunity, we grabbed it. Once we started reading, we discovered that this book is truly a holy treasure of bad writing, resulting in one of the most beautifully unintentional comedies I've read in a long time.

This is Heather Graham's thirty-somethingth novel and on Amazon it gives you a list of Mills and Boon forums as related topics. Lovely.

The tale concerns Sarah McKinley, a woman rennovating a house when she discovers some corpses in the walls. So who would show up but CALEB ANDERSON, private investigator and all around hunk. How do we know this? Well, Graham writes with such poise and beauty that even the subtlest movement of his upper hair gives your imagination a little orgasm. Take this typical paragraph from the opening of chapter eight.

"Frankly he was just gorgeous, the kind of man any woman would want to have sex with...."

And yes, the four ellipses are the authors own. Presumably they show the lead female drifting into lustful adolescent fantasies. After all, not more than a few lines further down the page,

"Then again, why would any man - especially an exceptionally handsome and charasmastic one - want to spend any more time with a woman who had not only been convinced that he dressed up in a costume to play a practical joke on her, but had also come crashing into his room at the crack of dawn to accuse him?"

Of course, the man "any woman would want to have sex with," is the kind of mysterious Angel-lite private dick/hero figure who'd slot perfectly into Dan Brown's universe. The opening of the book finds him on the trail of a missing girl, who possibly went missing over the side of a boat. Tough mission by a long way. But Caleb Anderson has his thinking cap on,

"Unless, of course, she'd been kidnapped by a boater and dumped somewhere beyond the bay and out in the Atlantic. If that was the case, their chances of finding her were almost nonexistent. The ocean was huge."

The ocean was huge. It's a tough theory to disprove, and that's the main problem with the writing in this book. It's so full of non-statements that the book itself becomes a giant kind of non-statement of a mystery story. In fact, each chapter is an endless sequence of nothing happening, followed by a trite cliffhanger as a last sentence,

"She had not come to make a sacrifice. She had come to be the sacrifice."
"But she didn't believe in ghosts. Did she?"
"Caleb walked down to the water. And found the corpse."
"My husband's death was no accident, he was murdered."

I guess some people must like that style of writing, this odd little universe that exists somewhere between Mills and Boon, Dan Brown and Eastenders. A kind of American soap that would be watched by characters in Twin Peaks if it weren't so completely dull. And certainly, Heather Graham, not this one, has made money from this (remember, this is book thirty-something), but what scares me is that people actually want this from books. An absent minded professor is actually described as being like an absent minded professor. And the entire book ends with three pages of explaination as to what was going on, (apologies for spoilers),

"As they put the pieces together, Caroline's MO began to emerge,"

To me, this all screams bad writing, violating most (if not all) of my ten rules for writing, and worst of all - it violates that worst of all writing traits. Bad sex. This book has one of the greatest bad sex scenes I've ever had the pleasure of reading. It genuinely begins with the two characters watching 'From Here to Eternity' and continues thusly.

"A sound escaped his lips, a groan, and he plucked the beer bottle out of her hand, set it on the side table alongside his own and pulled her into his arms."

And my current favourite use of alliteration outside of Dr Seuss,

"The stroke of her fingers against his flesh felt like flickers of fire."

It continues, with sentences like:

"At last he kissed her and found her lips everything he'd imagined they'd be."
"The naked flesh of her breasts, firm against his chest, sent an infusion of fire streaking through him like lightning, straight to his loins."
"She pulled him down to he, and then they were kissing in a frenzy, hot kisses, liquid and steaming and damp, and erotic beyond measure,"

Graham has a style more akin to telling, not showing. It's the stereotypical writing style for a plot heavy mystery story, but the fact is, this story doesn't even have that going for it. The mystery doesn't really go anywhere, but rather gets boiled down to exposition in the last couple of pages, literally everything is explained in a "whilst you were looking away just then, here's what they all discovered about the killer," kind of a way.

I don't want this to read like I despise the book, I think these books are needed. They're a necessary evil for me because as much as I don't think they're any good - they can teach us a lot about writing. Take a look at some of those sentences and don't pretend you've never written anything as bad as some of them. So we learn, we look at what doesn't work and we decide why it doesn't work.

In the end, Unhallowed Ground goes back in the bookshelf for the moment, and I'm sure we'll pick a new one out in a few days (Postmodernism for Beginners definitely looks like a good title)...