A Shot In the Dark: Thoughts on Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin

It's rare that I read a book, shove it aside and go on to the next one without a thought. I tend to ruminate on them -- chew on events, characters and how the story left an impact. Now I'm also reading for prose and style.
Atwood had me at the first line:

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

What war? What bridge? I definitely want to know what happens next. At the same time, the recitation is so breezy, so casual.  What's fascinating is that throughout this novel, we never go far from this epicenter, and we've been told the entire thing. Even when the story steps back to before Laura and Iris all the way to their grandmother's time, that moment stands in the wings, waiting. The Blind Assassin many times reads like a murder mystery, many times as a Noir script, and sometimes broods with a lush decrepitude that when you reach a point where Iris says, "Things go downhill from here." you might not be able to imagine why. But they do.

What's so impressive from a technical perspective is the story within the story, the pulp science fiction story that gets created while another story -- the rise and collapse of a Canadian aristocratic family through the Great Depression and the wars around it -- is being told. That story feels like a mix of a paean, commentary, and criticism of pulp stories of the time, but so well mixed into the story they don't detract in the least. And, it's a decent story on its own, and I felt just as much regarding the fate of that story as I did the story that encompassed it.

The prose is thoughtful, and takes us on digressions, much like a memory -- always related, but not always coming to a conclusion. Sometimes the reader is left with just the thought, and they have to make their own down, but they are never far from the story itself.

The characterization is incredibly vivid, which I think is why I get that noir feel, and realize, that for all the 'tricks' that author sites and author discussions divulge in order to make your story more interesting, there is no trick to interesting characters. There are distinctive voices and motivations. There is how they rub and clunk against one another. How they fight or not fight. Who they are, how they struggle.

Both stories in The Blind Assassin  are written is past tense (inclusive narrative tense), which I think was desperately needed for this story, which is told from the point of view of the older sister, Iris, who hops from the past, to even further back, to moments closer to the present, and of course her 'present situation' very freely. I imagine Ms. Atwood could have used present (focused narrative) tense, but I think jumping from one perspective in time to another would have been much harder. And the story flows so well in the inclusive tense that its hard to see how it could have gone otherwise.

I'll be thinking about this for a while. The main point is, you should read this book. I'll probably be reading it again. Atwood's prose fills a novel -- the words don't just occupy the pages but expand them. This is work of substance, and one day I hope my prose can evoke the same feeling in a reader.

The Mutinous Crew: Chapter Nine: Extra

I almost skipped the extra part of Chapter Nine. I've been starting a re-read of The Stone that Sings and itching to do some editing. So I'll start with my first thoughts on TSTS, then move on to the exercise.

The Mutinous Crew Exercises: Chapter Nine

There were several parts to this exercise -- an exercise I found very enjoyable, despite all the time it took me to complete it. October is Halloween for me, when I turn back into a designer and engineer, and try to make fun and spooky animatronics for our haunted house -- haunted yard, really. You'd think, based on the spider theme of our haunt, I'd write more spider-themed things, but for some reason, I do not.

The hardest part of this exercise was writing about the other. No matter what I picked, it seemed like a shallow trait to aspire to give to the other, and at the same time, bring that up in a way that seemed perfectly natural. So, I found myself just making them sound as they do in real life -- genuine, but a little off. I hope it doesn't come across too badly.

The Mutinous Crew: Chapter 8 Thought and Exercise

I'll post more of the other exercises later, but normally I've been posting these inside at Scribophile, which limits the audience and the feedback.

I finished Chapter Eight just as I finished Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. I confess that the multiple points of view, gliding from one to the other was challenging, as was the use of names as a formal surname, then switching to a more informal first name. I blame that on my initial laziness and started keeping track of names -- I'm bad with names, so perhaps this is a literary manifestation of my real life. Shocking, I know.

The Mutinous Crew: Becalmed

Over the weeks, the mutinous crew seems to have abandoned ship; I'm determined to press on. Writing is ultimately a solitary craft; I've traveled by ocean liner and by canoe, and am reasonably at home with either.   Many of us do better in our coracles, paddling in shallow waters well in sight of a safe, comforting shore.  I was surprised that so many stopped at chapter one, declaring that a particular musical analogy was inaccurate or they detected a "whiff of pretentiousness" - as if declaring a whiff of anything from words on the page weren't pretentious enough. Others chafed at the idea of gorgeous writing, and purposefully conflated it with purple prose, which, if they had read any further, wasn't the point at all. 

The Mutinous Crew: Exercise 7

Exercise 7 from Steering the Craft is the exercise that was as engaging as it was long. It was as if the last part of the exercise lifted a veil and showed the entire scene that had hints with the other methods. So I found myself revisiting the earlier parts based on what I learned.

The actual exercise below the fold

Article Review: Star Trek, Axanar, and the Future of Fan Fiction

Star Trek, Axanar and the Future of Fan Fiction

Dany Roth did a good job producing an article that is about much more than just Star Trek, but used Axanar as one of the more complicated examples of the (non) interaction between fan and licensed works. It gave a good overview of the copyright-able and non-copyright-able aspects of fan fiction. After what seemed like a decent primer on copyright law, goes into actual lawsuits.

The article also goes into where the courts do not agree amongst themselves with the interpretation of 'fair use' and how that really makes things confusing, and since that can determine the fate of your fan work, it is a crucial area. 

The example court cases are very interesting and well worth a read.