I’m blogging today about three works that made me think a bit more about how expectations and knowledge can affect the way I experience stories.  Yeah, you’ve been warned.

One of these works has appeared in my blog before: BBC’s Sherlock, which has happily been renewed for another season (miniseries? Whatever, as long as it comes back). Another has appeared through its series-siblings, but not in and of itself: Jeffrey Deaver’s The Vanished Man, an installment of the Lincoln Rhyme series of thriller-mysteries. And, finally, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this last one, at least, not by name: the play Theater of Blood, based on the 1973 movie starring Vincent Price.

Before, when I blogged about expectations*, it was mainly about how sometimes a reader or viewer needs pre-existing knowledge to understand or appreciate a particular story. The example I used was Jesus Christ Superstar: if you don’t know a lot about the founding stories of Christianity, as I do not, the musical is a whole different experience. But the stories I mentioned above made me see that the opposite can be true, too. Sometimes, pre-existing knowledge can spoil a story instead of making it better.

The most obvious and trivial case is when the reader or viewer knows something about the plot by reading spoilers or watching promos. But I’m talking about something different, something that admittedly applies only to a very specific genre of story. Well, maybe “genre” isn’t the right word, since that implies a wide-ranging category like “science fiction” or “mystery”; the kind of stories I’m interested in right now is more precisely defined but less likely to have its own section in the bookstore. These are stories that deliberately reference real-world facts and drop trivia as clues to what happens next.

Some of these stories, like Sherlock, do so because they’re re-imaginings** of older, famous stories. For instance, if you know things about A Study in Scarlet or the original Bruce-Partington plans, you’ll know whodunnit in “A Study in Pink” and “The Great Game” before 21st-century Holmes and Watson do, because the plots of the new stories follow the plots of the old ones.

Other stories  reference older stories without deliberately re-creating them; in Theater of Blood, for example, a crazed has-been actor traps the critics who tanked his career in an abandoned theatre and kills them one by one in ways resembling famous (and infamous) death scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. Finally, there are stories that base important plot points on specialized real-world knowledge.

The Vanished Man is one of these, and it’s the reason why I felt like writing this blog entry. I picked it up expecting another great Lincoln Rhyme procedural — and it was another great Lincoln Rhyme procedural — but for the first time with this series, I knew what would happen next. Not because I suddenly got a million times cleverer and saw all the twists ahead, but because, the same way previous books in the series involved a lot of information about things like human smuggling or aircraft flight, this one involved a lot of information about the history of conjuring. Which is part of my field of study for my PhD thesis.

Deaver is great at building tension by putting the reader into the mind of the antagonist for a page or two between scenes told from the perspective of his dynamic duo. In The Vanished Man, this involved getting into the head of a crazy-talented (and also just crazy) homicidal magician. This magician would occasionally think about what he was going to do next (hint: murderous versions of famous illusions), but instead of saying what exactly he intended, he’d think about it like an expert in the field. For instance, if the crazy magician were about to kill someone by mauling them with tigers, instead of thinking, “I am going to maul someone with tigers”, he might think, “I am going to use an illusion made famous by two German-American Vegas stars… an illusion so dangerous that even one of the experts who performed it had to be rushed to the hospital…” etc.

Now, the illusionists Deaver has his murderer mention are somewhat less well known today than are Siegfried and Roy. Few people recognize the great names of the nineteenth century (with the exception of that of Houdini), unless they study magic or are magicians themselves. Deaver includes suggestive details, like saying the illusionist in question had an ambulance standing by during the performance of his act, or teasingly suggesting that this illusion is so famous that the readers would surely recognize it, if only they had just one more clue…

In a way, being able to identify the referenced illusionist and illusion before I was “supposed” to increased my enjoyment of the book — who doesn’t like to feel one step ahead of where the author wants the reader to be? Even knowing the reference, I didn’t know other important things, like who the victim would be, when the murder would take place, and whether the heroes would get there in time to stop it. But other times, having advance information like this can make a story much less enjoyable. For an example, let me get back to Theater of Blood.

I’m decently familiar with Shakespeare; some plays I know really, really thoroughly from having spent a summer performing them. Others, I know tolerably well, from having read them and liked them, or from having learned them at school. At one of the key points of Theater of Blood, early in the play, the (surviving) characters stumble across a list of the plays their mysterious killer was in. The protagonist takes care to read the whole thing aloud in order, strongly implying that each of the critics will meet his or her fate in a manner similar to that play’s most famous death scene in the order the plays were produced. Well and good.

But for me, this*** made the show an exercise in patience and frustration. There was no suspense as to whether the critics would survive: they were obvious horror-movie jerks, cruel enough to make the audience thrill to see them bumped off. Instead, the tension came from trying to figure out how each character would meet his or her demise and who was next — but I already knew those things. Given each character’s defining trait (one gourmand critic had a pair of toy poodles; another was a drunk; etc.), and given what I knew about the plays that had been mentioned, it was pretty easy to figure out what was coming.

I’m 100% sure I would’ve enjoyed that show more if I’d known absolutely nothing about Shakespeare; although feeling like you’re smarter than the author hoped you’d be is gratifying, it’s only fun when you feel like the author’s still ahead of you. If you feel like you’re somewhere down the road from the author, waiting for him or her to catch up, well, what kind of a race is that?

All storytellers in all media occasionally depend on being able to hide something of interest from their audiences, whether it’s what happens next or just how this particular artist will make this particular character come alive in this particular upcoming scene. No one can escape telegraphing unwanted information to a few of their readers or viewers ahead of time. But if they do, I think it’s wiser to do it like Jeffrey Deaver than like Theater of Blood.

* Sidenote: and, yup, in belated response to me of three weeks ago, I totally did use that title before. Whatevah! I regret nothing!

** I like re-imaginings. Re-imaginings are great. Re-makes are the ones you have to watch out for.

*** Well, among other problems, mostly to do with theme and other kinds of expectations, like expecting a prominent character to have a listing in the programme, which led to me not even realizing a major upcoming revelation was supposed to be a surprise to both audience and characters until it became clear to me during intermission that the rest of my class had no idea what I was talking about when I joked about the “plot twist”.

So, first: THANK YOU to all who joined us for our awesome Stratford adventure, but particularly to our generous drivers, Juliana and Dave, and to my Ottawa Branch co-organizing sister, Debra. Hope you all had as much fun as I did. For those in the Toronto or Ottawa areas who think the sort of thing I’m about to describe sounds like fun, stay tuned for next summer, when I hope to organize something similar on a larger scale, involving bookings of group tickets in January and perhaps even the rental of a school bus.

Our adventure begins on the Saturday morning when the Car o’Joy set out from the TTC station with maturity levels directly related to proximity to the trunk:

(in the front)
DRIVER: Hmmm, that’s an interesting question. What time period other than my own would I be most interested in living in?
SHOTGUN PASSENGER: I know, there are so many factors to consider…
(in the back)
THE BACKSEAT: Oh I just can’t WAIT to be king! LA LA LA LA LA!

Luckily for them, the front-of-car survived this with their sanity intact and luckily for us, also without marooning the backseat by the side of the road. After much singing and a preliminary round of Botticelli*, we arrived at the SGH Residence.

Short review #1: SGH Residence
Clocking in at about $40/night/person for a double dorm room, with public toilets and showers, access to an outdoor pool, a free hospital cafeteria breakfast, and parking included, it wasn’t the cheapest place to stay, but it wasn’t the worst, either. The lack of air conditioning and hard beds made it difficult to get to sleep, although, to be fair, by that point, I had also acquired a painful sore throat and slight fever which may have been the real culprits. The staff were friendly and accommodating — kindly allowing us to change our reservation several times right up to the day before we arrived — but the breakfast, although generous, was pretty much standard hospital food. We had fun watching TV and playing games in the lounge, though. All in all, I wouldn’t be averse to staying there again, but I’ll do some more price-checking in preparation for next year.

From there, we headed out to meet the Second Car at our accidentally designated lunch spot. (“Accidentally”, because I said I was going to pick up my lunch there, and it turned out that we all ended up meeting there to eat because of this.)

Short review #2: York Street Kitchen
According to my Stratford guide, this was voted one of the top 40 places to get your money’s worth of food in Canada. They make gourmet sandwiches of various sorts, and one always has the option of building one’s own. My friends and I “discovered” this place on one of our high school field trips to Stratford, had a devil of a time figuring out where exactly it was on subsequent trips, and thoroughly enjoyed picking up a sandwich at their window opening onto the park-ish area on the bank of the Avon river. Their bread is fresh, they have tons of local toppings (I always pick their Othello goat cheese sandwich), and it’s fun to order by ticking off little boxes on their checklist form.

Liz thoughtfully brought a picnic blanket, which made our lunch by the river even more fun, and we serendipitously managed to be there at the same time that Swamperella, a Cajun music band, was playing on the river barge for Stratford’s free Summer Music Festival. Because it had been YK’s birthday earlier that week, Juliana and I had made robot cupcakes, which Juliana cleverly insulated and smuggled in via a Scene It Box and a carry-on sized suitcase in her trunk. They were so well disguised that even when Dave put the (signficantly heavier) box of cupcakes in YK’s hands, he didn’t suspect until Juliana pulled off the lid and we all sang “Happy Birthday”.

Although at this point there was some talk of renting a canoe or paddle-boat, in the end we settled for wandering around Stratford. The Family and Company toy store doesn’t get its own short review, but go there anyway if you ever make it to Stratford: they have a wide selection, including things from ThinkGeek’s catalogue that I’ve never seen offline. Unlike most toy stores, they have staff wandering around who are generally happy to demonstrate and to let you try out most of their strangest toys, and occasionally, they’ll pump crazy songs through the store speakers and give candy to anyone they catch dancing. Less exciting but still fun stores we visited included one that sold loose-leaf tea; another that sold occult and Wiccan magic supplies; a mix-your-own frozen yogurt place that didn’t really clean its machine, as we discovered when each of us had bits of the others’ flavours in our own cones; and an environmentally friendly store that sold various organic and recycled products.

The Ottawa car finally arrived in time for dinner, which we generally had at two places. (Yes, I had it at both. No need to judge!)

Short review #3: The County Food Co.
Eating here involved approximately a minute and a half of singing “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd. I can’t comment on anything but their hot meat pies, which were delicious and came in four varieties, none of which was “murdered victims of a crazy barber”. The prices were reasonably cheap, and most of the ingredients in their wide selection of cold salads, sandwiches, and hot dishes appear to come from local farm suppliers. We had a little trouble finding a table big enough for all twelve of us, but we staked out a couple of the picnic benches outside and hunkered down.

Short review #4: Boomer’s Gourmet Fries
I wasn’t exactly hungry when I ordered from here, but when I was looking for a place for us to meet up with the Ottawa car, I kept running into reviews praising this place’s poutine, particularly their unique goat-cheese variety. So even though the bison meat pie from The County Food Co. pretty much filled me up, I just had to go try it. Goat cheese, perfect fries, pesto, and a very light beef gravy — delicious. They do burgers, too, but I didn’t get a chance to try those. Also, no real seating: I brought my order back to the bench beside the restaurant where the others were eating. On the plus side, they did let me take approximately a handful each of towellettes and plastic forks…

After dinner, it was time to split up: a few of us were seeing King of Thieves at the Studio theatre, and the rest of us neatly divided ourselves between Evita and The Tempest at the Avon and Festival, respectively. Three of us decided to walk off our various culinary indulgences and take the path by the river to the Festival. This involved some photographing of swans and climbing a nearly horizontal tree while singing the Pride Rock theme, but eventually we did get there and meet the other two who were seeing the same play.

Short review #5: The Tempest
I admit that part of the reason I was disappointed with this play is the fact that I already have complicated pre-conceptions about it. In high school, my friend Tory and I co-directed a production for our wonderful 100%-student-run Shakespeare company, and although I’ve seen several professional productions since, I’ve never found an Ariel or Miranda or Neapolitan court I liked better, nor interpretations of the action that supplanted ours in my imagination. The Tempest is a tough script, a knotty problem of a play, and I guess I’m still searching for the show that will solve it in my heart. I had high hopes for Christopher Plummer, since he made even King Lear come alive for me, but Prospero is such a difficult character. The magical effects were intriguing; Dion Johnstone as Caliban was energetic and brilliant, the first version I’ve seen that made me believe Prospero really did beat him for his transgressions; and the music, from Full fathom five… to Flout ‘em and scout ‘em, was gorgeous and moving. But somehow, I didn’t “catch”… you know when you’re trying to start a campfire, and you carefully stuff in your newspaper and kindling, but no matter how many matches you hold under them, even if there’s nothing wrong with the matches or with the paper, they just sort of smoke and snuff out? Like that.

I suppose I should mention at this point that The Tempest made me literally sick, although this certainly had to do with the level of air conditioning in the auditorium and not with any of the play’s content. By intermission, half my throat felt swollen and full of needles. By the time we all met up to say good-bye to the car of Definitely NOT Joy Because Joy Would Totally Have Stayed Overnight, Just Sayin’, all I wanted to do was go to sleep.

Which I did. The next morning, we had our lukewarm hospital breakfasts (mmm… hard, cold home fries. Like eating dice made out of potatoes), and then sat around watching TV and playing Celebrities, for which Juliana had thoughtfully brought pre-cut paper slips**.

After this, we did some more downtown shopping, having particular interest in Rheo Thompson Candies Ltd. and the science toy store Quark Soup. We decided on Fellini’s for lunch, which means…

Short review #6: Fellini’s
At $10-15 per meal, this was definitely the most expensive restaurant at which we ate. The food was nice — I shared a chicken pizza and had blue-cheese-and-turnip soup. More importantly, the tables were covered in brown paper, and we got actual crayons of various colours, even brown, black, and peach — not those faint-hearted stiff ones that arrive at family-friendly chain restaurants and barely even make a mark no matter how hard you press. Also, we were never waiting long for a water refill or a fresh bread basket. Most importantly, when the staff learned it was Peter’s birthday, they brought him a dessert with a candle in it. So although my wallet and I prefer the simpler, cheaper food of picnic time, this was a great choice for our only sit-down, full-service meal in Stratford.

Since matinees are start at 2pm, right after lunch, hard on the heels of Fellini’s comes the seventh and final short review.

Short review #7: Peter Pan
I was really looking forward to Peter Pan, the original J. M. Barrie play (not the musical), and it had some aspects I really liked: the crocodile was the scariest beast I’ve ever seen onstage; the Never-T-rex was an excellent and appropriate substitute for the ostrich and kangaroo; by turning the “Indians” into “Amazons”, the production team found the neatest solution I’ve seen so far to different mores of different eras; and speaking entirely from my experiences trying to replicate the same last fall, the fake “gaslight” of the nursery was amazing.

There was nothing in the show I thought was bad — I enjoyed seeing the audience interaction, the use of adult actors for all roles, and the experiment where J. M. Barrie was as much a character in the play as Peter and the Darlings. I was also intrigued to see onstage for the first time the ending that dwells on the family life and love Peter loses by refusing to grow up, as opposed to every other production I’ve seen that ended on a note of nostalgia for childhood. So I don’t really have a specific reason I can say this show didn’t move me the way I expected it to, but there it is: something was just missing for me, maybe because of the sense of fragmentedness and conscious artistry that overwhelmed the whimsy.

However, all of us agreed that our favourite part of the play was watching the audience, which was happily packed with small children. The boy in front of me was clearly a kindred spirit in that he was a Hook fan, cheering, “Go Hook! Go Hook!” as Peter and Hook duelled in the play’s climactic scene; my sister had a similar seatmate who shouted, “Go Peter! Go Peter!” And everyone’s favourite moment of the play came during the tense scene at the end in which Peter secretly closes the nursery shutters so that the children will think Mrs. Darling has forgotten about them. As Peter struggled with his inner demons, a shrill, preschool voice shrieked, “Open the window!!!”

So Peter did.

Unfortunately, here’s where our journey ended, since right after the curtain call we all piled back into our cars and headed Toronto- and Ottawa-bound. Thanks again to all who made this possible, and looking forward to seeing many more (of you?) same time next year! (Everyone’s up for Titus Andronicus, right? (But probably not for more meat pies on the same day, huh…))

Appendices (game rules):

* Botticelli is a more exciting verison of Twenty Questions to which Juliana introduced me a couple years ago. In the interest of more people playing it on long car rides, here are the rules:
1. Choose someone to be IT. IT secretly picks a famous person, who can be real or fictional, living or dead, etc. This secret person will hereafter be referred to as the Target.
2. IT tells the rest of the players the letter with which the Target’s name begins, specifying if applicable whether it’s the beginning of the Target’s first name or surname.

(For instance, if IT chose Elvis Presley, he or she might say, “The letter is E. First name” or “The letter is P. Last name.” Generally, IT should choose the Target’s last name unless the Target is commonly referred to by his or her first name. For instance, it would be unfair to give “The letter is W. Last name.” for Prince Charles, because most people refer to him by his given name.)

3.  The other players have the goal of guessing IT’s target. They do so by taking turns posing trivia questions IT. The answer to each question must begin with the first letter of the Target’s name, the letter IT just revealed.

(For instance, if the letter of the Target’s name was “T”, one might ask IT, “What element has the symbol W?” (Ans. Tungsten), “Who is falsely accused of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird?” (Ans. Tom Robinson), or “Who was a Canadian father of Confederation?” (Ans. Charles Tupper).)

4. If the answer to the trivia question is the Target, then the players have guessed who it is and so win the game.

5. Otherwise, if IT can answer the trivia question with a reasonable response that begins with the correct letter (for instance, the player who asked, “Who was a Canadian father of Confederation?” might be thinking of Charles Tupper, but IT could safely answer “Thomas D’Arcy McGee”), the other players must think of another trivia question to pose.

6. If IT cannot answer the trivia question, AND none of the other players (i.e. the ones who didn’t ask IT the question) can answer the trivia question, the other players must think of another trivia question to pose.

7. If IT cannot answer the trivia question, AND at least one of the other players can, the other players may ask IT one yes-or-no question about the Target.

** Well, I gave you the rules to Botticelli, didn’t I? Enjoy Celebrities too:

1. Everyone gets 10 slips of paper. On each of their papers, players write the name of someone everyone in the group could reasonably be expected to know, viz. a celebrity, a historical figure, a fictional character, or a mutual acquaintance. Famous group names are allowed, too: for instance, you can write the name of a band.

2. Everyone passes their ten names to the person on their left. Everyone discards exactly two of the names they currently hold. Generally, one chooses to discard the most difficult or most obscure names one has. The surviving sets of 8 slips are put into a hat, box, etc. where they are mixed around.

3. Everyone splits into teams of 2 or 3, depending on whether there’s an even or odd number of players.

4. For each round, teams select a player who will try to get the rest of the team to say the names on the slips he or she draws out of the hat one by one. Each team gets a certain amount of time (recommended: between 1:30-2 minutes) per round, and when one team completes its time, the next team gets its turn. The methods by which the player is allowed to communicate differ in each round, as do the point values of successful guesses. Any slip a player has drawn (whether guessed or not) is kept by his or her team unless one of the next teams runs out of slips in the hat. If this happens, first, all the un-guessed kept slips go back in the hat. If these run out, all the guessed slips go back in, too. When all teams are finished the round, all the slips go back in the hat.

5. ROUND ONE: the player may say or do anything short of actually saying the words on the slip (or any variations thereof — for instance, if the slip says “Bill”, the player can’t say “William” or “Billy”), spelling out the name in letters (the player may, however, go with, “has the same first initial as the word ‘bread’… second letter is the letter that starts ‘indigo’… etc.), or using a “rhymes with” clue (e.g. “Okay, it rhymes with… Pill Blinton”). Players may NOT pass on any slips this round — each drawn slip must be guessed before the team can move on and draw another. Correctly guessed slips are worth 1 point each.

6. INTERMISSION: One player from any team goes through all the slips, guessed and unguessed, and reads them aloud once. All the slips go back in the hat.

7. ROUND TWO: The player may say only one word. Gestures and melodies are still allowed. However, the team has only one guess. Incorrectly guessed slips must be discarded. Players may pass on slips in this round. Correctly guessed slips are worth 2 points each.

8. ROUND THREE: The player may use only gestures and melodies. The team still has only one guess, and the player may still pass. Correctly guessed slips are worth 3 points each.

9. The team with the most cumulative points after round three wins.

(Also, for those of you picking this up on Facebook, I’d just like to maintain that I really do update this every Sunday. Facebook is just weird and sporadic about the timing of importing entries from my RSS feed…)

So I just got back from a trip to the Stratford Festival (fun courtesy of my AWESOME friends and sister), where I noticed something sobering: the more I was looking forward to a play, the less I actually enjoyed it. More on the actual trip next week, but my point is, I wonder if I’ve been remiss in not identifying my expectations when I ramble on about movies, TV shows, plays, and/or books that catch my interest.

In other words… Great Expectations, Robots (Moderately) Short Reviews In Disguise!

Work: Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)
Expectation: Awesomest film ever! My Facebook page was awash in stellar reviews, plans to see it a second time, and minds purporting to be blown.
Reality: … yawn?

I like movies that keep you guessing, and I like media that meddle with layers of time, space, and reality. 12 Monkeys (or La Jetée)? Donnie Darko? Paprika? (Braid? Portal?) Sign me up. But it seemed to me like Inception did none of it very well.

I know exposition is one of those things where people’s mileage may vary drastically. For me, this movie seemed to indulge in hand-holding. The first five minutes or so make utterly no sense, and the intention seems to be to intrigue the viewer to find out what’s going on — well and good. However, the next hour or so is dedicated to slowly and carefully spelling out how this conceit works, not only having a character tell us, but demonstrating each fact as it is said at least once, if not several times one after the other. Look, either let me figure details out for myself, or don’t depend on the mystery to hook me.

Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are great but underused. Ken Watanabe and Tom Hardy likewise. Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be doing the best he can with a character who’s predictable (my sister and I guessed the various climactic “revelations” about a quarter into the film) and just not that interesting, which, in a movie about literally delving deeper and deeper into his subconscious, is weak sauce. Is Leo (aka Cobb) telling the truth? Does he know the truth? Is this reality? Is it fake? Do I care? No. And this could have been so easily fixed for me — make me like the lady who’s so important to him as a character in her own right by showing her to me before all the craziness.

Work: Verdigris Deep (Frances Hardinge, 2007)
Expectation: an LJ user posted on a Diana Wynne Jones fansite asking for books like DWJ’s to tide her over after finishing the main corpus. This was one of the few recurrent responses that I hadn’t read.
Reality: Picking this book up while thinking “Diana Wynne Jones” was a mistake. Because of that, it took me a long time to get into what was otherwise a fantastic read.

I see where the LJ recommendations came from: Hardinge’s style is similar to DWJ’s in that her fantasy plots are complex; her characters are well rounded; there are tons of those “oh, I see a new side to this person!” moments I love; and she fills her prose with exciting and vivid metaphors that bring the world to life. And by the time I reached about halfway through the book, these features had gripped me.

Now, most of the time, when I say that I had a problem with a book or movie, I don’t really believe it. I mean, I believe intellectually that other people can have different opinions and that those opinions are just as valid as my own, but at the same time, I can’t fathom emotionally how anyone could perceive, say, Harry Potter or House differently from the way I do.  This time, however, I give a full-fledged mea culpa. I went into this book awaiting some sort of intriguing mystery-hook — something I didn’t even realize I expected from Diana Wynne Jones until now. Who wants Quentin’s words and why? (Archer’s Goon) Who are “They” and why do they care about Jamie? (The Homeward Bounders) Why is evil pervading the moor? (The Power of Three).

Verdigris Deep has tension and intrigue, but this sense of mystery I thought I’d get is lacking. It’s reasonably obvious what’s going on at the base of everything from the beginning: three kids steal coins from a wishing well, and run into trouble with its magical inhabitant as a consequence. There’s no shadowy figure behind the strange goings-on with impenetrable motives — the questions are of clarification, not “Who?” (the being!) and “Why?” (because they stole the coins!) but “Who, exactly?” (what rules does this being work by?) and “Why, specifically?” (why are the coins and granting wishes so important to it in the particular way they are?).

All told, this is an excellent book, and I’m sorry I didn’t pick it up with a completely blank slate.

Work: Sherlock
Expectation: I sought out this new BBC series because I read an article about it in The Ottawa Citizen. Thinking back, the article wasn’t memorable — it had nice things to say, but all in all its focus was on how funny it was that a modern Holmes and Watson have to spend a lot of time making jokes about how they’re not gay.
Reality: Sweeeeeeeeet!

There really are a lot of jokes about how Holmes and Watson are/aren’t gay in this miniseries that sets Sherlock and his BFF in 21st-century London, where the Master is as comfortable with text messaging and computer passwords as with traces of soil and dogs that don’t bark in the night. And I can see why the reviewer rather neglected to talk about the plot — in the pilot, there are in-jokes for those familiar with the original A Study in Scarlet (the adaptation is remarkably faithful, considering the story is one of the least exciting Holmes cases), but the plot is ultimately lacklustre and boils down to a disappointing revelation that leaves anyone who’s seen The Princess Bride feeling smarter than Holmes. (“You idiot! It could be both!”)

But this is one of the most intriguing adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories I’ve seen. In a way, it’s the bravest: at least in the first episode, Sherlock really is an honest-to-goodness high-functioning sociopath, as he himself claims. The conceit with a lot of Holmeses and nods-to-Holmes (a conceit I love, don’t get me wrong) is that they secretly feel everything very deeply — the Holmes of the late Jeremy Brett, the recent take by Robert Downey Jr., and (of course I’m going to mention) Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House all follow this pattern. In contrast, it’s easy to believe that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock really does lack a heart. Even Dexter Morgan of Dexter, a character who is supposed to have literally no feelings outside of self-interest*, is shown forming more emotional attachments than this Sherlock seems to.

Now, I’ve been a little disingenuous about my expectations, because really the important ones I had for this miniseries are encompassed by the words “Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century”. The joy I had watching this show came from the fact that I already know and love Sherlock Holmes of the 19th century. I knew the core of what to expect but not how it was going to appear, and I got to think things like, “Oooh… is that Moriarty? Mycroft? Lestrade? Mrs. Hudson?” and, “Rache! Ha ha ha!” Better than that, it shed new light for me on the original Sherlock Holmes stories — because, as I’ve mentioned before, it can be difficult for contemporary people to see what Holmes’s actions mean in the context of the Victorian era. In some ways, we think of the nineteenth century like it’s as much a crazy fantasyland as Narnia or Middle Earth, and so when Holmes dresses weird or says something outrageous, we think nothing more of it than we do of Dumbledore twinkling his eyes at Minister Fudge at Hogwarts. But the implications of Holmes’s actions are unmistakeable when he’s borrowing a cell phone or crossing a police line today, here, now.

* At least, in the books, this is the case, and very well accomplished.

I did OK on the spoiler front this past season of House — the one or two I read were entirely by accident, and they mostly turned out to be false. I did manage to spoil plenty of episodes for myself by deciding that next week’s preview looked like it could be an awesome episode about X only to find it was really a boring episode about Y, but that’s neither here nor there. I did slightly worse on the fanfiction front — didn’t read any stories, but occasionally scrolled through the summaries to find out what people thought of recent developments.

(Fanfiction is better than essays for that, IMHO. What people really think floats to the surface of the plot and characterization. For example, it’s pretty easy to tell when many fanfiction authors a) hate a certain character; b) see themselves in a certain character; or c) believe two characters should hook up.)

And up until the finale, I was doing pretty good at divorcing myself from fandom. I hadn’t checked out message boards, internet forums, or comments on various places that review the story.

*sigh* Yes, that was in past tense. Which leaves me wondering: is it more fun to be part of an online fandom or not?

I mean, my first fandoms were solitary occupations. The Internet simply wasn’t ubiquitous when I was a C. S. Lewis fangirl; even if I’d known there was such thing as fanfiction and that I wanted to read or write it, I wouldn’t have been able to click over to fanfiction.net and devour various stories about Susan dealing with the aftermath of her family’s death or Edmund and Peter making out*. Instead, I just read the books and watched the BBC movies over and over and over again; imagined all the really cool plotlines that could happen with the Pevensies and co. after the end of the seventh book; and occasionally began stories about me and my cousins on our way to Narnia**.

Likewise, although the Star Trek fandom was one of the first to make its way online, ten-year-old me had no idea how to go onto listservs and newsgroups, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to define the word “fanzine”, let alone know where to find one***.

But when I became an X Files fan in eighth grade, my family had just got a dial-up connection. I still wasn’t comfortable talking on message boards to strangers, but, well, one thing led to another, and by the end of the series, my friends and I ran a humour website where we wrote comedy lists, archived parody fanfic (our own and other authors’), ran a letters column, collected spoilers, and put up episode “reviews”.

It was nice to have people who shared my obsession — although the ones who were most fun were my real-life friends, not my online ones. And I didn’t encounter much that frustrated me, except the show’s sometimes goshawful writing. Sure, there were opposing camps of “MSR shippers” and “noromos” and people who wanted Krycek and Mulder or Scully and Doggett to hook up and have an orgy, but we were having so much fun poking fun at everything that I barely noticed if someone praised an episode I thought was terrible or belittled a plot twist I thought was great.

To be fair, looking back, I don’t think the characters on The X Files inspired the same sort of divisiveness as do the characters from a lot of my current favourites. It was pretty obvious who was going to finish the series OK, who was going to be the bad guys and lose, and who was going to end up as a couple. (Protip: if you kill someone in the teaser, you bleed green acid, and/or your nickname has “Cancer” somewhere in it, you are probably the villain.)

But fandoms like Harry Potter and House inspire hella Internet arguments, maybe because the characters and plots symbolize such extreme worldviews and exist in such ambiguous moral universes. For instance, it’s easy to make the case that Gryffindors are good and Slytherins are evil; that Slytherins are better than they’re painted and Gryffindors have a lot to apologize for; or that Slytherins and Gryffindors are all buttwads who don’t pay attention to the rest of the human beings they claim to be fighting about. Depending on how you feel about responsibility and freedoms, there’s evidence to argue that Wilson and Cuddy are jerks who don’t deserve a friend like House… or that House is a jerk who doesn’t deserve friends like Wilson and Cuddy. Or both. Or neither.

Maybe it’s just that I’m older now and better able to find my way around online. (Read: I no longer have scheduled time commitments, like classes or a 9-5 job, and therefore can spend lots of time online when I should really be doing my work.) Or maybe it’s that everyone’s got  a whole lot more used to the idea of the Internet and fandom became mainstream. But I feel like my current fandoms have eclipsed the original series which brought them to life. Unfortunately for y’all, I spend a lot more time pondering House and Harry Potter than I ever do actually watching or reading the stories.

Not that that’s a bad thing — in theory, it should make stories more enjoyable, right? Well, at least for people like me who take pleasure in dissecting them and trying to figure out what makes them tick, or for fans who like to interact with other people. And yet, every time I delve into a message board or spoiler site, I come away feeling like I’ve just eaten too many Timbits: bloated, overstimulated, sick.

I think, in the end, the reason I find fandoms, online or otherwise, more off-putting than they’re worth is that they make it easy to take a mis-step off the edge of “we all agree to pretend these are actual individuals living in a self-consistent universe whose activities we’re privileged to watch/read about” into “this is all made up, pfui” . Sure, it’s fun to read that one piece of fanfic that skilfully illuminates one of the character’s psyches, or to observe debaters on the message boards mulling over what’s going to happen next, just like it’s fun to eat one Twinkie or sip a single mojito****. But too much of these sorts of fun can make you sick, especially when you either don’t know your own limits or can’t stick to them.

So I think I’ll do my best to stay out of fandoms for as long as I can, even though the summer hiatus is long, and it’s so easy to trawl the Internet for spoilers instead of working on treasure hunts or novels or papers. Fanfic and online discussion is a quick and easy fix to wanting to know what happens next, but my satisfaction with canon when it finally comes out always decreases proportionally to the amount I consume beforehand.

* I don’t mean to judge other people’s imaginations, but… wait, what?

** Curiously, we never actually reached Narnia. I got bored too soon.

*** Although now, due to legitimate research topics and lack-of-warnings on non-fiction books of essays, I do know what mature-rated Kirk and Spock slash fanart looks like. Thanks for that, academia.

**** And they’re not “bad for you”. Neither a fanfic nor a dessert nor a drink is inherently harmful just for being what it is, like it’s some malicious knock-off of the “real” food/stories you should be consuming. What’s harmful is deciding what you want, figuring out what you need to do get what you want, and then doing something different. Some people legitimately need more fats and sugars. Others need the kinds of stories on fanfic.net.

This is my — personal, biased, emotional — reaction to an attitude in myself and others that annoys me a lot. This attitude encompasses a lot of things, but it seems to me to be embodied in one use of the phrase “first-world problem”.

In a nutshell, the phrase means a problem that one is fortunate to encounter because it exists only for those born into financial and social privilege. For example, if A is frustrated because he’s out of cereal or B is sad because her car only comes in green but she wants silver, that’s a “first-world problem”. A and B are rich enough that they don’t have to worry about the basic necessities of life. If their problems don’t get solved, they won’t die or suffer drastically. Their worries are the worries of the privileged.

I think that it’s important for people like me, living a comfortable life in a developed, Western country, to realize the extent of our privilege. It’s important for me to recognize how fortunate I am, not only because it helps me to avoid being an arrogant prick, but because it helps me to develop as a person, to cultivate my own mental health by putting problems in perspective, and to set myself on a road aimed at confronting and trying to solve our planet’s injustices.

However.

While it’s great for me to set those goals for myself, and while I do believe that, in the best possible world, others in my position would share those goals, I don’t think it’s right of me to exclaim, “First-world problem!” when a friend is moaning about how his or her favourite restaurant moved across town*.

Why not? Well, a bit because it’s ineffective. Am I actually making my friend think of how ashamed he is for making a big deal about a frivolous luxury? No, I’m making him think of what a tool I am for needing to point out his moral failure in order to show I’m a better person. Not necessarily better than him, but better in general for being the sort of person who, instead of getting annoyed when her friend complains about something she doesn’t think is very important, places his action in the greater moral landscape and always judges it compared the suffering of the less fortunate. And let’s face it: I’m not actually helping any person who doesn’t share my privilege here. No one who’s starving or hurt or homeless is going to suddenly have a better life because I convince my friend that he’s making a silly complaint. This is entirely between me and him.

Also a bit because it’s insulting. I’m assuming my friend has never thought about these things, that just because he didn’t say, “It so sucks that St. Hubert moved out of the West End… although of course I am glad that I have enough to eat and a roof over my head and a safe place to work, which I know many people don’t”, he’s totally unaware of the social injustices in the world. I’m also putting my moral quest above his feelings — because, hey, even if the problem isn’t a big one in the grand scheme of things, it still clearly matters to him. In the moment I use him to advance my ethical viewpoint, I treat him as a means to an end, even if that end is social justice.

And, finally, also a bit because it undoes the very good I’m trying to do with the statement. If my ultimate goal is to get my friend and me thinking about our position as First-World citizens who enjoy comfortable and often downright luxurious standards of living, bringing the fact to his attention with a quick token phrase is shooting myself in the foot. When I do that, I’m not ready to listen to him or giving him an opportunity to open a discussion. I’m closing down the conversation, imposing my view without starting a dialogue. And the dialogue is where the real thinking comes in.

Let me put it another way. We do a whole lot of things to try to make the world a better place, and not all of them are effective. We force ourselves to eat every last morsel on our plates, despite not being hungry for them, in the belief that this is somehow less wasteful than throwing them out, when it’s arguable that the food is already wasted the moment we buy, choose, or are given a portion size that is more than we actually want or need**. We “raise awareness” about complex, nuanced issues (like breast cancer, the genocide in Darfur, and poverty) in simplistic ways that require little effort, like wearing a certain colour shirt to work or changing our Facebook status. We embrace small changes, like recycling or turning off the tap when brushing our teeth, instead of making the large-scale changes in lifestyle needed to support environmental sustainability.

And, hey, that’s understandable. If it were as easy to make the world a better place as it is to talk about wanting to make the world a better place, we wouldn’t have all these injustices and problems to worry about. My point is not that when we do these things that may not be 100% effective or that may be inconvenient for others, we’re bad, bad people and should stop being hypocrites because it’s all useless anyway. My point is that, if doing something like this is important and meaningful to you, that’s good. Just like I wouldn’t tell someone with faith to stop praying because *I* don’t believe in G-d , I wouldn’t tell someone who finds meaning in having a pink ribbon for breast cancer to stop wearing it.

However, just as I would not appreciate the same devout friend insisting that I, too, must pray in order to be as good a person as they are, I don’t appreciate a Pink Ribbon supporter telling me or acting like they and their fellow ribbon-wearers have the one and only good way to acknowledge or aid the cause of fighting breast cancer. There are lots of ways to wrestle with a problem and lots of ways to help, and any of them can contribute to personal growth as long as it has meaning for the person doing it. If my way of keeping myself on track is to remind myself that my various difficulties are first-world problems, that’s great. But I can’t assume that what has meaning for me has meaning for others, nor can I demand that they share my interpretation of the action.

What I can do is discuss my position on the issue in question. I can debate the effectiveness of particular approaches, talk about the goals I think one should have and why one should have them; I can say, “Hey, I’m sorry your favourite restaurant closed. I know you liked it a lot. But you know what I’ve been thinking about lately?”

Learning how privileged one is to be wealthy, or a first-world citizen, or white, or male, or heterosexual, or middle-class, or physically able, etc. and accepting moral responsibility for that privilege is ethically and psychologically important. But it starts as an individual journey. Nobody can force any of us to confront our privilege if we choose not to do so — that is, after all, one of the essences of privilege. And it’s especially problematic to try to force someone to confront a privilege that’s shared — who am I to call myself a voice for others when you and I are in the same boat?

*Unless, obviously, that particular friend and I have had a discussion about this beforehand, and we’ve agreed that we prefer to work that way. All things are open to negotiation.

** As you can imagine, I encounter a lot of people who disagree with this position, and I’d be happy to discuss it in the comments. (Unless you are my sister, because we talked about it enough.)

I love surprise endings. I enjoy reading them — nothing makes me feel more satisfied with the ending of a book or movie than a well executed twist — and because I enjoy reading them, I also enjoy writing them.

Thing is, twist endings are difficult to pull off. And they’re also difficult to write about, because you can’t discuss any examples without potentially ruining awesome stories for anyone who reads your essay. (Or maybe not — more on this later.) Even identifying the stories you’re going to talk about might ruin them whether or not you give anything away. Sometimes, knowing that the story you’re watching or reading has a twist ending is enough to help you guess that twist ending, sort of like the way that knowing how the author of a murder mystery is trying to provide you with enough clues to guess the identity of the murderer but enough diversions to make the real villain invisible to you until the end can help you figure out which of the characters dunnit, even when you don’t know how or why they did.

So, here is the spoiler warning for the spoiler warning: although the stories I’m about to talk about are fairly well known for their twist endings, I’m about to list them after the cut, in the next paragraph.

And here’s the real spoiler warning: I will reveal the ending of the movie Fight Club. I will make reference to the endings of the movies The Sixth Sense and the original Star Wars trilogy, and I will avoid referring to books, since, due to widespread viewership and not-as-widespread readership, I suspect it’s easier to spoil them than films. There will also be references to the finale of House season 6 and to that of Dexter season 4,  and to season 1 of Dexter in its entirety, although I will not explain what actually took place in any of those shows.

HERE

THERE

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SPOILERS

Right. So what makes an effective twist ending? Well, first and perhaps most obviously, the ending has to be a surprise. But it has to surprise us in the right way. It’s not a twist ending when Sherlock Holmes reveals the killer in the final few pages, even if the killer was someone we weren’t suspecting, because that’s the way we expect a murder mystery to end. The simple fact of not knowing the ending isn’t enough to make it a twist — otherwise most stories would qualify. Instead, a twist ending has to take the audience’s expectations and take them in a completely new direction.

For instance, it’s a twist in Fight Club when Edward Norton and Brad Pitt (the Narrator/”Jack” and Tyler Durden) turn out to have been different personalities of the same individual not just because it’s unexpected, but because the story could–and seemed like it would–legitimately end with Tyler and “Jack” just being regular guys who have to confront one another, and it still would have been exciting and satisfying. Similarly, The Sixth Sense could have ending with Bruce Willis resolving his character arc by helping Haley Joel Osment deal with his gift and working out his own feelings toward his distant wife; Darth Vader could have turned out to have killed Luke’s father; and season 4 Dexter could have murdered Trinity and gone off to start the difficult struggle of being a family man and a serial killer at the same time. All these stories were set up so these endings would have felt good, if predictable in spirit (though maybe not in detail).

But instead, the actual endings of these stories not only changed what kind of stories they were but retroactively changed what came before them — you can’t view the Star Wars trilogy or the Trinity-murder scene in the same light once you know what their respective endings reveal. To count as a twist and not just a surprise, an ending must force us to go back to the scenes we’ve already watched or read and view them in a new light. Words that seemed to mean one thing turn out to mean another; actions that seemed to be for one purpose actually worked out another way; a context that seemed obvious turned out to be wrong.

So it’s going to seem strange when I say that the second part of making an effective twist ending is making it follow naturally from what happens in the story. This is actually the only reason that I wanted to mention the House season 6 finale, “Help Me”, because I think it committed a darn tempting mistake to which I often succumb in my own writing.

The “twist” ending of “Help Me” involves a character having a 180-degree change of heart in the last two minutes of the episode; whereas before, this character was coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, now the character’s decided he or she can’t stand them. Before they thought Archie should get with Betty, now they’re cheering for Veronica. Before boxers, now briefs. You get the idea.

Anyway, because the writers and director and producers (rightly) felt that this was one of the most important developments of the episode, they decided to do their best to keep it a surprise for the viewers, going so far as to issue script pages only to the performers in the scene, cutting the last two minutes from previews for the press, and doing something that turned out to shoot them in the foot: they wrote the rest of the episode (and, indeed, the rest of the season) with the character in question loudly and convincingly proclaiming their absolute undying love for Cocoa Puffs, every two seconds, in both word and deed.

So, essentially, the character showed up in the last two minutes and said, “Hey, remember when I really liked Cocoa Puffs? Well, SURPRISE!!! A TWIST!!! All that time, I was actually having a harrowing personal crisis in which I was trying to like Cocoa Puffs but really couldn’t help hating them. But that all happened off-screen. I hope you believe what I’m saying now and not what I said and did before.”

And the cast of the show really did their best to make that reversal ring true, but it still felt contrived. The writers had done such a good job of hiding any signs of their “surprise” ending that they seemed to have laid no groundwork at all. It was a surprise, all right, but a surprise in the world of the narration and not in the world of the story. I, for one, wasn’t like, “Aha! This character has been hiding this secret for THE WHOLE SEASON! I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming!” — instead, I thought, “So the writers have been trying to hide that they planned this all along. Great. Are we done yet?”

(To be fair, this might also be the result of trying to make a surprise ending out of something that ordinarily wouldn’t be a surprise: before this season, this character obviously didn’t like Cocoa Puffs, and the whole Cocoa-Puffs storyline felt inserted solely for the purpose of creating tension where there was none before. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Putting all one’s eggs into the basket of “I’ll surprise my audience so good they durn won’t know what hit ‘em” is missing the point of twist endings. Good twist endings don’t work because they surprise the audience. They work because they are first and foremost good, satisfying endings. Yeah, OK, you might not get the same thrill from watching out of Fight Club if you already  know Tyler and Jack are the same person. But it’s still an intriguing and well crafted story. I knew the ending of The Sixth Sense before I popped it in the VCR, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

To look at it another way, a counter-example: sometimes it’s wiser for writers to trade the payoff of a big twist at the end for a little twist in the middle that heightens the tension, and the first season of Dexter shows this perfectly. The season is about the Ice-Truck Killer, whose identity is a mystery for at least half the episodes. But instead of saving it for the final reveal, the audience learns which character it is pretty early on, even though the other characters don’t. Sure, the writers could’ve horded it for the finale, but it just worked better this way. There was still the thrill of the twist, but Dexter got to up to stakes by having the viewers know something the characters didn’t, letting them watch Deb and Dex and the rest of the cast stumble unwittingly into danger.

Not to mention that this was the wise choice because it would have become obvious which character was the bad guy pretty quickly. Guest star? Check. The same guy who it is in the already published and widely available books? Sort of, but check.  By shifting the moment of the twist, the writers played down the “Who is the Ice Truck Killer?” killer story question in favour of “Will our heroes catch him/her? What’s going to happen if they do?” — a much more interesting problem, with many possible resolutions.

So, yeah, t’s better to have a non-twist ending that wraps up the story in a good way than a twist ending that feels cheap. Nobody likes the moments in a horror movie when the spooky music and scary camera angles build up to a crescendo only for the filmmakers to cheat by having a cat jumping out of the garbage can. Ending a story with an ending whose only virtue is its unpredictability is like ending with one of those moments. But, contrariwise, having a twist ending so predictable that it doesn’t change the reader or viewer’s perception of the story isn’t a twist at all. In the end, like pretty much everything worth doing ever, writing twist endings is a balancing act, and (at least I hope) practice makes perfect.

Our superior alien race finds your puny starships laughable. The extent to which you hu-mans rely on “dilithium crystals” is outrageous. Why, what will you do when the supply runs out in approximately 345.3 Earth years, or, as we like to say on Arcturus, 93 h’waxlobs?

I suppose you’ll do as you did now, and send your eight mightiest teams out to search the galaxy for hidden caches of the compound you need so dearly. Odd, its strange resemblance to the hu-man children’s toy known as “play dough”!

At first, your Earth teams appeared a motley crew. The members of Team 1, for example, did not all appear to be biological entities:

The apparel of the Red Squad, on the other hand, seemed strangely familiar:

And Team 3 looked downright… dark:

So dark, in fact, that hardly anyone dared take pictures of them to their faces:

Other teams wisely chose to blend in with the population:

I admit that we did not expect your Earth endeavours to be so successful. Of the trail of clues you were to follow, each leading both to the next clue and to ever-larger caches of dilithium crystals, we hardly expected you to get past the first. And yet, you demonstrated that you could overcome your hu-man limitations and learn to:

… master Klingon, chart courses through the stars

… find locations throughout the known galaxy based on visual records only

… decipher encrypted messages

… and extract the crystals from a variety of locations.

Although all the teams provided outstanding examples of what you Earth creatures call “determination” and “intelligence”, in the end, and there were many ways to achieve — teams who reached the caches second, teams who finished the entire hunt after the last cache had been found, teams who collected almost as many crystals — only one team could collect the most crystals.

Team 4…  got to each cache right on the heels of the teams that found them first
Teams 2, 5, and 6… achieved the end of the hunt
Team 1… second team to achieve the end of the hunt
Team 7… attained 15 crystals (3rd place) and achieved the end of the hunt

The Red Squad… attained 50 crystals (2nd place), thanks in part to a donation of 2 from generous Team 6

…and the team so successful in their mission that it is easy to forget they’re even hu-man, The Galactic Gagas, with 80 crystals and almost as many psychadelic hairstyles. I believe it is the Earth custom to say, “Congratulations!”

I will never understand why you hu-mans insist on the tedious process of “voting” when a simple kick in the sna’fik is sufficient to assert one’s dominance over the rival males of one’s tribe. However, using your primitive rituals, you named Dave and his team, the Red Squad, the winners of most elaborate costumes:

(Hey, that’s not a phaser!)

And Juliana and her teammates the winners of most creative costumes:

Is Yervant happy with his team’s prize?

Affirmative

But don’t worry, the petty land wars and international hostility that plagued your planet during the first few millenia of your species’ civilization are a thing of the past.

On behalf of the United Galactic Board, many thanks to all the heroic space adventurers who participated, the various anonymous extra-terrestrial entities who aided them on their journey, and especially to Smoke’s Poutinerie, who graciously not only housed dilithium crystals for safekeeping but provided some prizes and allowed stinky hu-mans onto their premises despite the fact that this would clearly put customers off their appetites.

Godspeed, creatures of the Earth! May you earn your rightful place in the galaxy in record time! And, remember, next year: BRAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNS…

MANY THANKS to JULIANA B., DAVE H., HEATHER C., SHEILA G., and SARAH L. G. for sharing their amazing photos and videos!

Wet Magic (E. Nesbit, 1913) — Aside from having a giggle-worthy title that will lead to NSFW Google hits [that link is just to the public-domain text; don't look so shocked], this book is nifty. I love how E. Nesbit manages to capture the inter-child politics in a large family — the way siblings of different ages interact and get into trouble. Her characters always remind me of me and my sister and our cousins and family friends — the little arguments, the ideas for games based off of favourite stories, the conflicts that arise between older and younger sibs, the projects that seem perfectly reasonably to kids and utterly silly and impractical to the adults in charge.

Brothers and sisters Mavis, Francis, Bernard, and Kathleen aren’t quite as jump-off-the-page lively as the Bastables, but they do splendidly in this whimsical story about rescuing a mermaid. Well, at least until halfway through, when the story takes a sudden “dive” (uh, literally) into a whimsical underwater kingdom full of poor puns and unfortunate words-that-are-no-longer-used-the-same-in-2010:

“Do you have cats here then?” asked Kathleen, whose attention had wandered, and had only caught a word that sounded like Pussies.

“Only Octopussies,” said the Princess, “but then they’re eight times as pussy as your dryland cats.”

This part of the story, in which the children accidentally start and then end an undersea war, gets a little twee and tedious. Nesbit’s really at her best when mixing magic and the everyday, not creating secondary worlds, but her best is amazing enough that not-quite-her-best is still great fun. Anyhow, as Levar Burton was wont to say, you don’t have to take my word for it.

Ghost Story (Peter Straub, 1979) — Why do horror stories take so long? I am — or at least, I thought I was — a fan of atmospheric horror, stuff like this and the works of authors like Shirley Jackson, but when I consider how much I’ve actually enjoyed reading the actual books I just referenced, I’m forced to admit that I’ve been lying to myself. Or maybe I need a creepier atmosphere?

I liked Ghost Story, a narrative about four old men who may have something evil stalking them, but mainly for the second half of the book, in which secrets spill out, questions are answered, and our heroes finally go on the trail of the creature (or is that “creatures”?). Gotta admit, I prefer individual ghosts or monsters to the “Beings of Pure Evil Incarnate That Are Defined Solely By Being Evil and That Inspire All Horror and Myth Everywhere In All Cultures” genre of horror (see also: Stephen King’s It), so that may be why I found the first part of the book disappointing. I was willing to put up with the slow build-up as long as I believed there’d be a unique and cool payoff at the end, but then it seemed like it was stuff I’d seen before. Not that I hold this against Straub — Ghost Story is a classic, so I’m reacting to works that rip him off rather than the reverse. It’s not his fault I was born after this book was published.

(I do, however, hold it against him that all the women in this book are seen through male eyes as objects of sexual desire, victims of sexual desire, and/or incarnations of sexual evil, even though the one time the most major female character encounters an agent of evil, she totally whups its butt in, like, five seconds, while it takes the men friggin’ chapters to even figure out what they’re dealing with.)

Incidentally, this book also has some mis-steps with “phrases that mean different things in 2010″. I know when the Chowder Society says, “That’s what she said”, they mean, “No, that’s really what the woman we’re talking about said,” but… it’s funnier my way.

The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco, 1980) — With apologies to all the medievalists and semioticians I know, I found it really difficult to get into this one. All the back-cover stuff makes it sound like the awesomest smart-person novel ever, but I couldn’t get over how dry it was, even though the plot deals with ostensibly intriguing things like murders and disappearances and illicit monastery affairs. Sure, I’d love it if academic papers could be as exciting as this book, but being more exciting than an academic paper doesn’t translate into being an exciting novel.

The plot runs as follows: William of Baskerville is the medieval Sherlock Holmes, although of course it is anachronistic to think so and probably ruins the meticulous atmosphere the author has expertly set about to construct. Whatever. He and his apprentice/Watson/narrator arrive at a monastery where an important political meeting is to take place in a few days only to find the simple case of suicide they’ve been called in to investigate has turned into a complex case of monk-murdering-mania. Also, everything is symbols.

Okay, maybe part of the reason I found this book tedious is because I don’t much care for semiotics (oversimplifying-ly: I find it either makes sweepingly unfounded claims or is so patently true as to be trivial), but I still wish the plot had moved faster. I appreciated the historical accuracy; I guess (unfortunately for a historian), I needed a little more to keep me hooked. Also, I realize this is a book about monks — you know, all-male — but for crying out loud, that’s all the more reason not to have a gratuitous female character who’s there in order to sleep willingly with a sympathetic male character instead of being forced to sleep with a mean male character, just to underscore what a harsh world it is. If I wanted to watch Moulin Rouge, I’d rent Moulin Rouge!

Enchanted Glass (Diana Wynne Jones, 2010) — YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!

(… although, also, re: the very end, ewwwwwwwwwwwwww!!! Not being the adult FTL!*)

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) — This movie drove me nuts until I finally went on IMDB and learned I recognized the Baron from when he played the Well-Manicured Man on The X Files. Mystery solved!

*ahem* Anyhow, this is a Terry Gilliam flick that blends fiction and reality, to tell the story of the legendary Baron Munchausen, his magical servants, and a little girl named Sally on the quest to save Sally’s hometown from the invading Turkish army. It’s lots of fun, with plenty of famous cameos (Robin Williams as the King of the Moon was actually somewhat… inspired), and it skillfully walks the line between making us care about these characters and allowing us not to take their actions seriously. For instance, the Baron is human enough that we want things to end okay for him. He’s also a total dick, but we aren’t expected to approve or condemn him, so it’s all right to watch him do all sorts of unfeeling things.

I liked the whimsy of the movie and of course the meta-story-within-a-story-within-a-story. I wasn’t too impressed by the SCIENCE = TEH EBIL (because of course, wanting to think empirically or logically is just a slippery slope to allowing people to die in an arranged war because it’s more efficient that way), and for some reason, all Terry Gilliam’s movies move a little more slowly than I’d like, leaving me with a constant feeling of impatience. Still, I enjoyed it enough that I remember everything that went on, which is more than I can say for a lot of films. And I loved the hearkening back to myth, even if I wasn’t impressed with the comparison between it and “modern thinking”.

Also, while I was watching it, I accidentally ate some bugs. Never eat trail mix in the dark. I don’t wanna talk about it.

* Don’t worry, you won’t understand what I’m spoiling until you’ve read it.

Remember when I pretended I wasn’t going to blog about how difficult it is to write the “Aha!” moment in a mystery in which the protagonist figures everything out? I lied!

And remember when I didn’t want to mention Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes? Actually, I still kind of don’t, because they’re cop-outs. Using a detective-at-a-distance like Holmes, Poirot, or Nero Wolfe allows the author to get away with not showing how our figurer-outer came to his or her conclusion. Instead, all you have to do is let your genius stare into the middle distance making the Epiphany Face, have him or her exclaim, “I have it!” (optional), and then pen in some dialogue in which everything gets explained bit by bit to Sidekick McEveryman  and, hence, to the reader.

Those are relatively easy to write, from my admittedly minimal personal experience.* The hard part — maintaining psychological realism without giving the game away — is already taken care of. The right diagnosis can hit House like a strike of lightning, and that’s okay, because it’s one of his defining traits. But with a less plot-device-driven character, it’s challenging to strike the balance between capturing the suddenness of inspiration and keeping the character understandable, especially when he or she is a viewpoint character, and you’re an author like me who finds herself writing in first-person a lot of the time. We need not only to believe that this character could figure this out at this moment, but we also need to follow her train of thought and to believe that she wouldn’t have figured this out before and to believe the way the discovery makes her feel.

I guess another tension that’s difficult to manage is how the writer is hoping both to surprise the reader — he or she shouldn’t see this revelation coming until the actual moment it hits the page — and to draw the reader to the correct conclusion along with the character. Ideally, the reader’s thought process should follow the character’s as they go through the journey together.

There are always going to be the readers who guess who the murderer is on page three, and there are always going to be readers whose excursions to the cinema go like this: “I don’t get it.” “Sssh!” “But why did he say that?” “Because he just figured out who the killer is. Sssh!”  But, as with most things in writing, I still think a good writer can hit most of the readers, most of the time, with something well crafted.

In fact, a really good writer can use the need for psychological realism to his or her advantage. A vivid character can mask the answer to the plot through his or her feelings. If you can convince the reader to trust and love Aunt Secretly Murderous as much as Protagonist Nephew does, you’re well on your way to keeping her guilt under wraps until the climactic discovery. A lot of the mysteries I love best work this way: the guilty party is someone the reader and the main character both care about, so even if you begin to suspect him or her, you want to believe you’re wrong.** This has the double benefit of making the final revelation a real punch to the kidneys — an ending the reader won’t be able to put down.

A different strategy, one of which I’m more wary, is to have the moment of revelation be inspired by a new discovery. For instance, in one Sherlock-Holmes-vs-Jack-the-Ripper story I’ve read, Watson discovers the Ripper’s identity by seeing him cutting up one of his victims. So, not much putting-together-of-clues going on — in fact, it’s more like the omg-magic-is-real moment I discussed last week, because the main challenge for the writer is negotiating Watson’s journey from skepticism (“No, not him!”) to belief.

Moments like this, in my experience as a reader, have to be used with care. I’d feel cheated if Poirot solved a murder by walking in on the perp knifing someone else.*** It works in the Sherlock Holmes pastiche  I mentioned only because the big question isn’t “Who is Jack the Ripper?” but “Can we stop Jack the Ripper?”. Some stories have the protagonist(s) figure out everything except the correct identity of the bad guy, which is then revealed this way (“We set a trap for X, but it turns out the killer was really Y!”), but, again, those tend to focus more on the action and less on the whodunnit. (And it is a great trope for action, because then the writer can pull the rug out from under the heroes’ feet right before the big showdown, raising the tension: “We came prepared to confront our little-old-lady principal, not our six-foot gym teacher who’s armed with a javelin!”)

Personally, although I’ve used (or tried to use) each of these strategies in different stories, I find each revelation scene is different, because each viewpoint character is different. But one thing that helps me in any scenario is making sure the protagonist isn’t alone. It’s so much easier to have two characters spur each other on than to figure out how a single character might draw conclusions all by him- or herself. And the most difficult part of writing emotion into “Aha!” moments is when you have to have a single character realize something, explain it to the reader, and react to it without any outside stimulus. It’s so much easier when you can give some of those jobs to a second character whose emotions you don’t have to show directly.

My favourite way to draw characters on to a conclusion is to grow the answer out of an argument. That way, I can try for some snappy dialogue, amusing in itself (I hope) and fast-paced to keep the reader turning the pages. And because I can have one character provide a counterpoint to everything the other character says, the discovery doesn’t seem too unbalanced. It’s like the way an essay where you bring up and work through a couple counterarguments to your thesis is more convincing than an essay where you act like those arguments don’t exist.

Another trick that seems to work for me (again, in my admittedly limited experience): I try to make sure that the answer the characters are looking for is something that inspires them to immediate action — the murderer’s about to kill somebody else, so now that we know who she is, we have to stop her; or, we’ve accused the CEO of polluting the river, but now he’s trying to escape; or, we’ve deduced the treasure’s hidden in the old lighthouse, but we have to get it before the bad guys!

I guess this is sort of a cheat, too, because although it does move the story onward and keep the reader hooked, it’s still there so I can avoid having to stop and dedicate chapters to how the characters feel about whatever they’ve just uncovered. So your grandmother’s an axe murderer — too bad, so sad. Luckily for me, I’m going to send you off to stop her from killing the President, so the reader and I don’t have to deal with twenty pages of how much you loved her apple pie and how couldn’t you have seen this coming and whether you’ll ever be able to trust anyone again.

In the end, there’s no single tried-and-true formula for the climax of a mystery. But because it is the climax, it has to be carefully constructed. One false step near the end is enough to invalidate the entire story for a choosy reader, and every detail has to be in place.

In other words: back to revision for me! Later.

* All right, there’s a bit more to it than that: you still have to devise some way your detective could’ve reasonably deduced the answer from a minor clue, and you still have to figure out how to have someone re-emphasize that clue in conversation in a way that doesn’t telegraph WILL AWKWARDLY INTRODUCE TOPIC TO INSPIRE YR EPIPHANY STOP But it still has to make only logical sense, not emotional sense, and the latter is the more difficult of the two.

** Hmmm… another difficulty of focussing on this moment rather than the one I looked at last week is that any example I could give will spoil great stories for anyone who hasn’t yet read them. “Vague as possible” it is!

*** However, genius-detective-style  mysteries often end with a revelation like this for the reader and the sidekick — the detective has an epiphany and yells something like, “Hurry, Watson, it may not be too late!”, and the two of them bust in on Clever O’Villainous about to commit the last foul deed entailed in his or her plan. This is perfectly OK, because there’s still thinking going on that the reader feels he or she could have done, too, given the necessary intelligence. In fact, it’s sort of having your cake and eating it, too — enough deduction not to feel like a cheat, enough action to be exciting.

One of the things I find most challenging about writing in the genres I love is handling the moments when everything changes: the part of the mystery when the protagonist puts all the clues together and figures out what’s going on (I knew it all along; how do I make it seem like she didn’t?), or the point in a fantasy when our heroes stumble across magic for the first time (of course there are zombies/fairies/vampires/ghosts! That’s the whole point of the story, isn’t it?).

In what follows, I’m going to focus on the fantasy problem not only because it’s what’s on my mind now, but also because I’m pretty sure that if I talk about ways to deal with “eureka!” moments, I’ll end up mentioning Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House again, and then at least one of you will stab me through the Internet.

(Also, in some ways, the mystery and fantasy flashpoints are the opposites of one another: with “Aha! The murderer is…”, you want everything that’s been confusing to the reader and the protagonist to come together for them both, and you kind of want the protagonist to figure it out before the reader. With “Oooh! Werewolves really do exist!”, it’s okay for the reader to understand before the protagonist does (sometimes it’s even better that way), and you want to avoid confusion as much as possible. Maybe I’ll talk about mysteries some other time, since I actually use many more “Aha!”s than “Oooh!”s in my own writing…)

When I think honestly about how I’d react if I saw a see-through figure on the castle turrets or happened to find $20 after wishing for more money, I doubt my first reaction would be, “Hey! Magic exists!” It’d probably be more like, “Hey! I need more sleep!” or “Hey! I understand probability!” In fact, if I were Agent Scully, even after 9 seasons and 2 movies, I likely still wouldn’t believe in aliens because the other possible explanations (I’ve gone crazy, I’m ill, etc.) make more sense.

But my characters can’t react that way. Sure, maybe the first time my protagonist sees a cloaked figure seem to transform into a bat, she can be all like, “Whoa, time to stop drinking so much caffeine!” But after that, the reader starts to get annoyed with her if she doesn’t believe. After all, we picked up this book from the fantasy section — we know that vampires have a high probability of existing in this world, even if she doesn’t*.

On the other hand, if that same character goes, “Whoa! Vampires are real!” right away, it either tells us something about this protagonist (she’s credulous and/or kind of wants to believe in vampires already) or this world (namely, that it’s a very different from our own). If the writer wants the world to be realistic-except-for-fantastic-plot-device, there has to be some reasonable amount of doubt.

But how much doubt is too much doubt? How gently must the writer ease the reader into whatever conceit drives the plot? It’s easy to sacrifice the pacing for the sake of developing the right atmosphere for credulity**, but it’s just as easy to drop in the supernatural front-and-centre at the expense of the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. Sure, if I spend 10 pages detailling every creak of the floorboard in the creepy old mansion, how a crash of lightning makes the protagonist jump, and the moment he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and thinks his reflection’s an intruder, it’ll make it more sense that he instantly believes in the disembodied hand he sees skittering across the floor. But that’s… 10 pages before the plot actually starts. Then again, if I spend one page talking about the mansion and suddenly drop a ghost-bomb, I risk you throwing away the book or short story in surprise and annoyance.

(Curiously, the exception seems to be first lines. If you open a story with “The disembodied hand skittered across the bathroom floor”, the reader is suddenly committed to this world containing disembodied hands (because they’re already there, right?), and will have no problem with the next sentence being something like, “‘Holy #$%^!” Juan screamed. ‘A disembodied hand!’”)

The problem is so tough, I admit, that the solution I seem to favour avoids it completely: start in the middle of things with the magic as established fact, and go from there. Karen, the protagonist of the YA fantasy I’m working on, lives in a world where elementals have co-existed with humans for centuries, and so doesn’t need their existence proven for her; similarly, Meyer, the narrator of some short stories on my plate, grew up in a world in which creatures called daimons were discovered in the late 1800s. Even my project in which the protagonist meets a couple ghosts on the first page sort of cheats by having him narrate the incident as an event from his past — he met the ghosts when he was little, but by setting it up as having happened in the past and before he could reasonably be expected to have trouble believing in magic, I get to avoid any Lieutenant-Commander-Data-ing: “That is impossible, Geordi. Ghosts do not exist.”

But the price I pay for all this is having to set my narrative in a secondary world. If I wanted a story about someone living in the “real” world who encounters a fantastical plot device — and genres where this is normal range from children’s fantasies like Harry Potter and Narnia*** to horror like the work of Stephen King and Dean Koontz**** — I’d need a different strategy.

One of the points of attack I admire as a reader but have never quite been sufficiently competent or inspired to manage myself is the one I associate with Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones: adopt a subtly comic tone and underline people’s amusing tendencies to approach strange things with everyday attitudes. This tactic actually plays off the fact that the reader sees the truth of the magic and the character is hamstrung by his or her mundane attitude; by emphasizing the contrast between the two, the author can humourously comment on how habits of thinking lead us to behave in silly ways.  Really good authors, like the two I mentioned above, can do this is a way that’s funny and yet allows us to identify with the character in question, because secretly we know we’d act the same.

In the end, I guess the moment of omgmagicsreal is one of the things readers of fantasy are willing to overlook, since it’s necessary to the story, and since the reader usually already knows that magic exists in the fictional world. I can’t recall ever abandoning a book or movie because the characters believed in magic too quickly*****, although I can remember plenty of bits I wished we could just get over with. Poorly handled, these moments become the pages readers flip through impatiently, or the scenes that inspires that slight AWK-ward… feeling in the pit of one’s stomach. But those two reactions are only a step away from throw-the-book-across-the-room, so it behooves writers to handle it as well as they can.

* One of the (admittedly many) reasons I didn’t enjoy Twilight was that I opened the book knowing Edward was a vampire, and it seemed to take Bella forever to catch on. C’mon: has perfect features, stays aloof, never eats, is super-strong, never goes out in sunshine, has pale white skin. Buffy would’ve hit that in in five seconds. With a stake, I mean.

** I find horror fiction does this a lot.

*** Where they benefit somewhat from being able to contain omniscient narration.

**** Horror, it seems, has a particularly difficult problem in this respect, because part of the genre is you don’t want to reveal what’s going on until the end, so it can be scarier. On the other hand, all your protagonist and reader have to understand to make the plot work  is that something dangerous is out there. I recently picked up more horror than I’m used to reading, and I was floored by how they universally seemed to me to start so slowly (see above at **). Sometimes it seemed like the whole story was nothing but 20, 50, 400 pages dedicated to revealing a single dubiously spooky idea as gradually as possible: “Guys, guys, I’ve got another one! Okay, so, like, the scariest thing in the world would be…”

***** Hello, X Files fan over here!