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xiphiasSo, Lis and I just got back from seeing the movie Stranger than Fiction and have been arguing about it since, which is generally a good sign for a movie -- we like movies which we have things to talk about after.
Obviously, this post will probably be spoilery, so I'll cut-tag it. But, for you writers who either have seen the movie, or have no intention of seeing the movie, I'm just wondering how YOU feel about some of this stuff:
So, the movie is about a guy, Harold Crick, who has a normal, if particularly dull, life, but starts hearing someone narrating the things he's doing, which is disturbing enough, but it doesn't get bad until the narrator says something like, "Little did he know that that seemingly normal Wednesday afternoon would start a sequence of events that would lead to his imminent death." Which worries him enough to figure out who this narrator is, and stuff happens, and he eventually manages to FIND the author who is attempting to figure out how she's going to kill off this character at the end of her book.
Who has to deal with the fact that, woah, this person she's going to kill of is actually a REAL PERSON.
She shows him her notes for how he's going to die, and he gives them to a literature professor who has been helping him, and eventually, he goes to the author and says, basically, this is a good, fitting and poetic death -- go ahead and write it.
Okay.
So, the bit which I couldn't get my head around was, well, SURE she's killing off a real person -- it was always my impression that authors are ALWAYS killing off real people. I mean, if the characters aren't real, why are you bothering killing them off?
So, I guess that's my question to the authors on my flist -- if one of your characters knocked on the door of your apartment, and asked not to be killed off, would it make any real difference to you? If you were writing modern realistic fiction, and it turned out that the person you were writing about wasn't at all fictional, would that make a difference?
Obviously, this post will probably be spoilery, so I'll cut-tag it. But, for you writers who either have seen the movie, or have no intention of seeing the movie, I'm just wondering how YOU feel about some of this stuff:
So, the movie is about a guy, Harold Crick, who has a normal, if particularly dull, life, but starts hearing someone narrating the things he's doing, which is disturbing enough, but it doesn't get bad until the narrator says something like, "Little did he know that that seemingly normal Wednesday afternoon would start a sequence of events that would lead to his imminent death." Which worries him enough to figure out who this narrator is, and stuff happens, and he eventually manages to FIND the author who is attempting to figure out how she's going to kill off this character at the end of her book.
Who has to deal with the fact that, woah, this person she's going to kill of is actually a REAL PERSON.
She shows him her notes for how he's going to die, and he gives them to a literature professor who has been helping him, and eventually, he goes to the author and says, basically, this is a good, fitting and poetic death -- go ahead and write it.
Okay.
So, the bit which I couldn't get my head around was, well, SURE she's killing off a real person -- it was always my impression that authors are ALWAYS killing off real people. I mean, if the characters aren't real, why are you bothering killing them off?
So, I guess that's my question to the authors on my flist -- if one of your characters knocked on the door of your apartment, and asked not to be killed off, would it make any real difference to you? If you were writing modern realistic fiction, and it turned out that the person you were writing about wasn't at all fictional, would that make a difference?