Think about yarn for a moment. If you look at it under the microscope, you’ll see that it’s a series of fibrous strands that have been woven together so tightly they seem to fuse into a single cord. Little ends of the strands edge free from the cord and catch the light that shines on the weave. Story yarns are the same: a woven rope of characters, narrative and plot points pull the entire tale together while, here and there, a strand can catch the light. Some story yarns are so strong that other writers can spread out their elements, and then reweave them into another pattern that shows what you didn’t see before. Gregory Maguire did this with Wicked and Joan Aiken rewove Jane Austen’s Emma into her own Jane Fairfax. I love this technique but the one I love even more is when a writer pulls one of the glinting ends at the edge of a story and teases a whole new tale from that thread. T. K. Thorne did this in 2011 when she pulled the bright thread of a character from the book of Genesis and created a tale named Noah’s Wife. At last, the Lady…
Like a lot of folks, I’m nuts about movies. For decades I’ve spent lots of leisure time sitting in the dark, staring at a screen and believing that no matter how big a problem is, it can be introduced, muddled over and solved within two hours, two and a half, if a war is involved. And while I often hate what a film adaption does to a book’s story, (don’t get me started on The Prince of Tides) some adaptations work well and some stories are downright cinematic and need to be retold. Last month I was looking for a book on World War II that my husband hasn’t yet read (not an easy task!) when I ran across The Forgotten 500. Not only did it make a great gift; it would make a brilliant movie and the film industry wouldn’t have to stretch the truth. This story writes itself. It’s 1944 and the USAFF is flying combat missions with other allied crews from Italy into Germany every day. Part of their flight path took them over what was then Yugoslavia and the planes were often hit by German troups. The crew of a crashing plane could bail out but…
I grew up during TV’s golden age of westerns and I hated every minute of them. Those were the days of three networks (four if the cloud ceiling was low enough to bring in PBS) and twenty eight hours of prime time programming every week. On the year I was born there were thirty westerns on television. If you do the math and remember most westerns were an hour long, (except The Virginian, which was 90 minutes) you’ll realize that almost half of the shows aired during family viewing time had rifles, spurs and bonnets in every episode. The Duke was still alive and the go-to movie actor for many dads and Lois L’Amour sold enough paperbacks to deforest a small continent. We were flooded with westerns, inundated with the damn things and it’s probably why my friends became comic book and sci-fi fans. We couldn’t take one more stone-faced guy blowing the black-hats away and then saying, “Shucks, twarn’t nothing, ma’am.” It would take an incredible yarn to make us trade our phasers for a horse and a great story is what we got. Everyone loves Lonesome Dove, and it is a western, but a western that breaks the…
Google remembered the liberation of Auschwitz today. For those who grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century, Auschwitz is the edge of a remembered nightmare, a disaster our parents and grandparents witnessed and passed in their memories to us. My mother saw the newsreels of the liberation as a child and the images haunted her forever but some of my friends were even closer to the tragedy. One college friend’s great-aunt was a survivor of the camps and when I met the lady, I marveled that this happy cookie-jar of a woman had faced such evil and still lived so joyfully, dancing with a tattooed number on her arm. Another friend was the child of camp survivors who married after the liberation and their tenacity and PTSD were visible in her character. Auschwitz left a lifetime of suffering and long memories in its wake and those of us not directly affected have been trying to grasp the motives and magnitude of the Holocaust ever since. This is the role more and more of the world has moved into over the last seventy years and it’s a role William Styron talked about in his novel, Sophie’s Choice. Styron…
Most people think you can’t learn much from popular fiction. I disagree. For one thing, so many of the “classics” people revere were popular tales in their day and for stories to sell, they must have an emotional appeal. Either story is sensational, in the titillation sense, or it resounds with the reader. Since the thriller novels of Dick Francis weren’t exceptionally sexy or gory, there was something besides the entertainment of the stories that kept readers coming back. One of the continuing themes in his stories was coming to terms with loss and because he wrote about this well, readers kept returning. It was a subject Dick Francis could speak on with authority. Francis had success as a jockey, although he lost his fair share of races, including the failure of Devon Loch in the home stretch of the Grand National. To win so many races and ride for the royal family and then lose that race for those owners because your horse falls in the home stretch must be devastating. Not long afterwards, Francis retired from racing, still a young man but unable to pursue the career he loved because of one too many injuries. These experiences became…