Plot Holes

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

We watched Interstellar last night. Long movie – almost three hours. And there was a huge plot hole in the middle.

In the movie, the heroes travel through a worm hole to save the earth. They are headed to two stations where previous heroes went to see if places were habitable. One station has quit transmitting and the other has been transmitting regularly that the place is livable. So our heroes go there, having adventures along the way and losing one crew member. All good so far.

When the heroes arrive, they are met by the lone survivor of the earlier trip. This station is a world so frozen that even the clouds are ice. But the survivor tells them how the place is livable in a lower level so they start unloading all their stuff. However, he turns out to be the Villain who attacks the leader then steals their ship in order to get home because he’s lied and the station isn’t habitable after all.

So the Villain is desperate to get home. Understandable. But here’s the giant plot hole. All he would have had to do is tell them the place wasn’t habitable when they arrived. They would have loaded him up and moved on to the next station, or tried to go home. There’s a twist with going home, but that’s not relevant here and I don’t want to list too many spoilers. There was absolutely no reason for all the storyline maneuvering, the attacks, stealing the ship and all that drama. I mean, the heroes wouldn’t even have had the excuse that they couldn’t save the Villain because they would be over a weight limit on their ship since they lost a crew member earlier. And the Villain is an experienced pilot which they could have used.

In other words, no believable reason for the Villain to be a villain.

I lost interest at about that point.

It’s the same with books. A reader might let one, or maybe two, coincidences slip by. Maybe they’ll allow one instance where the point of view character does something that has no ties to the plot threads. But more than that and the reader will move on and probably never pick up something by that author again.

It reminds me of a book I read a long time ago about a knight on horseback who turns to his trusty companion and says ‘No shit, Sherlock’. Seriously. And that was only one of many such dialog issues. Oddly the author is well known and has a lot of books out with this same knight. He’s one busy dude, slinging contemporary slang as easily as his sword.

Anyway, if the action sequence raises questions because the route taken makes no sense, the author better insert a compelling reason that ties character and plot together. Otherwise the audience is going to move on.

Writing Sounds

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

Remember that hilarious video of two men talking, but the only word they say is ‘Dude’? The different inflections tell the listener what they are talking about.

But how does that translate to writing?

If that conversation were to be written, punctuation would help.

“Dude!”

“Dude?”

Then there are dialog tags. “Dude,” he said, on a long exhalation of beer-infused breath.

The idea intrigues me. I’m positive I miss opportunities by not thinking about the sound of a story. I don’t mean reading your work out loud, which is of course important. I mean, how do you convey sound without being bland (‘the car door slammed’) or corny (POW!!! Batman’s fist hit Robin’s jaw)?

If you do an internet search on writing sounds, you get some interesting hits. I found a few sites that actually had sounds attached to writing, where someone had done studies and assigned sounds to things like a pencil on paper.

I got distracted by that one.

Then there’s Onomatopoeia. At its most basic that means using sound to show the noise, as in hiss, meow, or POW!!! There’s a more subtle version of this where the word alludes to sound. Like Eeyore’s name in Winnie the Pooh. His name is a quiet nod to the sound a donkey makes. Think about that honking, braying sound. Can’t you hear ‘Eeeeeyooorrreee’ in there?

I got distracted reading up on Onomatopoeia, too.

With all the internet searching though, I didn’t really find what I was looking for. How do you imply sound through words, without telling the reader what something sounds like?

Well, body language works. Someone speaks and the other person cringes and covers their ears.

Description, of course, implies sound. If I said ‘fingernails on a blackboard’ you’d hear that sound. I think, though, that using that tool can cause writing to slide into clichés. And one can’t forget that too much description gets boring. Plus, description means you’re writing what you see, rather than what you hear, if that makes sense.

I’ve tried closing my eyes to eliminate the sense of sight and forcing myself to focus on just sounds. As I listened, I tried to figure out how I would translate sound into words.

I got queasy.

So I don’t know. Guess I’ll just keep using a mix of all of the above, hoping that somehow the reader, using imagination, can hear the wind in the trees or the scary sounds outside the door late at night.

Birds and Other Apocalypse Tales

/ Lisa / 3 Comments

Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds? I believe I was about nine when I saw it. Afterwards I decided I could keep my siblings alive in our half-bathroom. There were no windows, I could stuff towels under the door, we’d have water to drink, and most important of all, a toilet. Of course the five of us would have had to stand in the cramped space the whole time. I believe I pictured myself, as the one who saved their lives, getting to sit on the throne.

Birds from Wikicommons

Birds from Wikicommons

Then there was the nuclear bomb. Or the atomic bomb. I don’t remember which. Either way, I was going to make the siblings crawl under the house because for some reason I thought we’d be safe there. An alternate plan was to get to my friend’s house. They had a real bomb shelter, stocked with canned goods. No can opener though, as they discovered years later when dismantling the shelter.

Next came volcanoes. Anyone remember being shown, in school, a film about a Mexican farmer who had a volcano appear in his back yard? I believe I was around twelve for that one. I don’t remember my plan to save the siblings from volcanoes other than an attempt to get my dad to teach me to drive.

From Wikicommons images

From Wikicommons images

Then came the Chernobyl disaster and I was right back to planning for radiation. But by then I was living off grid with my parents – generating our own power, in the woods (hunting possibilities), near a river (water supply) and with an outhouse (remember the importance of the toilet and the birds?). We were set.

wikicommons images

wikicommons images

Each generation has an apocalypse fear. I read a study that said the shape an apocalypse takes for each age is a reflection on the stresses and fears for that generation. Zombies? That we were becoming drones.

So what is it these days that I’m preparing for? Natural disasters. I just read a very sobering article on the upcoming big earthquake for the Pacific Northwest.

But hey, I have a plan. Bug-out bags, stocked pantry, kerosene lanterns and candles, water filters, hunting rifle, and lots of vodka.

I’m still slightly worried about that volcano though. And the giant mutant spider from a Midnight Theater episode. And tornadoes. Man, don’t get me started on tornadoes.

Are you prepared? There’s a fine line between paranoia and preparedness, between nightmares and reality. It never hurts to at least have a blanket, candles, and some water in your car though.

Oops. I took the candles out. They melted.

(Ha, looking at the tags for this post you’d think I was a bit paranoid…)