The Hero's Two Journeys ***

*** The Hero's Two Journeys, Michael Hauge & Christopher Vogler, 2009

Being a big fan of Vogler from reading The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters last year, and a new fan of Hague after scrapping the 6th draft of Endless Vacation to start over from blank paper based on our conversation on the ride from the airport and taking frantic notes in his excellent seminar the next day, it was a no brainer to get this DVD set. There are two "journey" DVDs, inner and outer, a DVD analyzing the structure of Erin Brockovich, and an audio CD of Writing Screenplays That Sell, all worth the price of admission.

I do think that Vogler's ideas came across better in the book than on the DVD. I haven't read a Hauge book, so I can't say the same there, but his six stage story structure is a must-learn for the sake of encapsulating all the things you've already learned from other sources into a framework that shows how it all fits together.

For aspiring screenwriters, I'd put it at four stars.

Story ****

**** Story, Robert McKee, 1996

I've read a lot of books on writing, but this one might be the best I've read. Definitely in the top three. It passed the Elliptical Test with flying colors. I actually looked forward to working out because I knew I would get to read it.

The funny thing is, it's the iconic work for screenwriters to read and I'm just now getting around to it. But the timing is good. I'm between revisions on my latest project, and now I have a lot to think about as I do the next edit.

If you're writing any kind of fiction -- screenplay, novel, short story -- you should read this book immediately. Like right now. Now!

Quotes From Stuff I Like - Theroux

Hotel Honolulu, Paul Theroux

This guy is a great writer. You might have seen the Harrison Ford movie made from his book, Mosquito Coast. The movie was good. The book was better.

p. 4. A large square building with porches like pulled-out bureau drawers.

p. 6. “It’s not rocket surgery.”

p. 11. A boss’s comedy is always an employee’s hardship.

p. 25. On the beach everyone is a body.

p. 48. Games are the pastimes of men who cannot bear to be alone, who do not read.

p. 55. Fiction can be an epistle to the living, but more often the things we write, believing they matter, are letters to the dead.

p. 87. Guilt shows clearest on the faces of older people, whose skin is so full of detail.

p. 133. She was in the secrets keeping business, and I was a collector of secrets.

p. 166. She climbed on him and hugged him with all her bones, clinging like a little gecko on a big crumbling tree trunk.

p. 382. You’re a writer. Among other things, that’s a pathological condition.

Blinding Light ***

*** Blinding Light, Paul Theroux, 2005

I'm a fan of Theroux, not as fond of his writing as I am of say, Richard Russo, Robertson Davies, or Rick Riordan, but a fan. Theroux is a good writer.

I first encountered his work by watching Mosquito Coast with Harrison Ford. Very depressing movie. Then I read the book. Great writing, not as depressing. Go figure. Several years later I read Hotel Honolulu. (Theroux has a home on the north shore.) It was good. I have some quotes from it coming up soon.

Blinding Light also showcases Theroux's great writing, but with two qualifiers. There were times when the story sang, but other times when I found myself thinking, "Come one, get on with it. You've expounded on this aspect of Steadman's character a dozen times, already." I don't know if my screenplay work has made me less patient, or if the book really did drag in spots. And the blindness theme seemed a bit overdone in spots as well.

The other issue is the sheer quantity of explicit, and I do mean very explicit, sex scenes. They were relevant to the plot, but as I've said before, I'm not into sex as a spectator sport, more of as a participant. I almost downgraded it to two stars because it seemed so excessive. To my tastes.

In short, a well written book with an interesting premise, great characters and a surprising cameo appearance of W. J. B. Clinton as "the president." And, if you like your sex on paper, this is the book for you.

Steve Earle

From the Songs you won't hear on the radio files:

Steve Earle is from the nasal-mumblers school of vocalists and the hold-the-phone-damnation-thats-one-helluva-good-song school of songwriting. If you haven't listened to him before, do youself and troll through YouTube and sample some stuff. Here's my favorite.

Goodbye

Here's Emmy Lou and Spyboy with a great cover.

Holy cow, looks like Steve has a Townes tribute album! Time to update my BoxedUp.com wish list.

Writing the Modern Mysery **

** Writing the Modern Mystery, Barbara Norville, 1992

Got this on some bargain rack or garage sale and slated it for the upstairs bathroom standby. Diverting, but much has happened in the genre in the almost two decades since it was written.

Sex in books

I prefer to experience sex, not read about it. Or watch it in a movie.

In my humble, but accurate, opinion, sex is not a spectator sport. Like breathing, eating and eliminating waste, it is something you do. And I don't find much pleasure in watching people do those things, either.

YMMV.

Weird Texas **

** Weird Texas, Wesley Treat, Heather Shades, Rob Riggs, and Mark Moran, 2005

Our realtor gave this this to us for a house-warming gift when we moved in Oct, 2008. It's a good coffeetable book, but we don't have a coffetable, so it became the bathroom book. (You know, the book with short snippets you can skim on your visits to the throne.) As a result, it took a while to get through it.

I was put off at first because the first third of the book focuses on paranormal phoenoms, with sections labeled Local Legends, Ancient Mysteries, Fabled People and Places, Unexplained Phenomena, and Bizarre Beasts. I have little patience with what I consider vain speculations about "facts" of questionable provenance.

Finally, after months of celebrating the final stage of the gastro-intestinal process, I arrived at the sections called Local Heroes and Villains, Personalized Properties, Roadside Oddities, and Roads Less Traveled. This was the kind of stuff I was interested in and it worked well.

Unfortunately, it was followed by Haunted Places and Ghostly Tales, and Cemetery Safari, bookending the content of substance with content of little interest to me. YMMV.

The Better Angels **

** The Better Angels, Charles McCarry, 1979

Had to try another McCarry to see how he writes when he's not doing a dossier style. And the answer is, much better, but still pretty dry. However, he's got a real knack for the nice turn of phrase which pops up occasionally and makes me glad I read the book. Here are a few examples:

• "Rationality is the enemy of consciousness."
• She had mastered a vocabulary, but she had no ideas, only passions.
• The table had been laid in the garden: white damask and blue china and silver as thin as an old voice.
• "Where I come from, they've always liked a dead man a whole lot better than a coward."

There were some intriguing things about the book. It was written in the 1970s but set in the 1990s. McCarry's 90s included an atheistic, rational Republican party set on annexing Canada and building gulags in Alaska for dissenters, a religious Democratic party that imposed gas rationing and mandatory lights out for the entire country at 10pm, a Democratic president that had nicknames for everyone, much like Dubyah did, a private computer network that spanned the globe via telephone lines, and female fundamentalist Muslim suicide bombers with explosives implanted in their bodies blowing themselves up at US national monuments. (And at the Alamo!)

On the other hand, there was too much sex in it for my tastes. The book was also laden, almost turgid, with backstory larded in as early as page two. Not the pacing one expects from a political thriller in this millenium.

But, overall, a decent, if not must, read.

Quotes From Stuff I Like - Gardner

I found some quotes from stuff I like jotted down in a notebook the other day and thought I'd share some of them with you. Here's the first batch, a small, numbered, single-barrel batch.

On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner

p. 42. Teaching creative writing, one constantly hears students say of their work, “I am trying to show . . .” The error of this is obvious once it’s pointed out. Does the twenty- or twenty-five-year-old writer really have brilliant insights that the intelligent reading public (doctors, lawyers, professors, skilled machinists, business men) has never before heard or thought of? If the young novelist’s answer is an emphatic yes, he would do the world a favor by entering the ministry or the Communist party. If I belabor the point, I do so only because the effect of English literature courses is so often, for a certain kind of student, insidious.

p. 43. One of the great temptations of young writers is to believe that all the people in the subdivision in which he grew up were fools and hypocrites in need of blasting or instruction. As he matures, the writer will come to realize, with luck, that the people he scorned had important virtues, that they had better heads and hearts, than he knew. The desire to show people proper beliefs and attitudes is inimical to the noblest impulses of fiction.