Writing in Public, Too: NaNoWriMo Day 12

Writing time came in the morning today. Got in a couple of good bursts of writing between some housework. Then off to an appointment in the early afternoon. Didn\’t get back home until mid afternoon. Soon after, it was off to see a movie – Interstellar, which I\’d heard such good things about. I\’d purchased tickets to see it in IMAX, because I\’d heard it was just awesome. More on that in a bit.
Left buckets early with SO, and they were not even close to ready to take people into the theater when we got there. So we stopped and grabbed a quick bite to eat, chatting. When it looked like about time, we wandered down to the theater and watched the movie. Well, I watched it. SO decided about halfway in that she\’d had enough, and retreated to the hallway to read and answer emails. I almost joined her, but stuck it out, hoping beyond hope that the movie would GET GOOD AT SOME POINT.

Not really.

The fundamental flaw with Interstellar is the same thing that\’s wrong with most artsy attempts to be \”literary\”. They sacrifice plot on the altar of cool effects (or pretty language, in the case of writing). Without dropping into spoilers:

– Nothing the characters do in the entire film actually matters, because the entire problem is resolved by deus ex machina in the end.

– An entire section, about a half hour of the film, was completely unnecessary, and could have been cut entirely without harming the movie at all. Mostly it was there to show off cool water special effects. (And demonstrate relativity, which could have been written in elsewhere.)

It\’s like the writer looked at the rules of writing good fiction, picked two of the worst offenses possible, and worked really hard to find a way to cram them both into the same movie. Those are:

– One of the characters should solve the problem. It should never be somehow magically solved by outside forces.

– \”Kill your darlings\”. If there is a section of your story that you just love, but adds nothing to the overall plot, cut it.

Interstellar broke both rules, and as a result is a very forgettable, very weak story. It has all sorts of cool special effects, however, and seems to be doing OK in the box office. Sigh. As much as a laud the attempt to step away from Star Wars style science fiction and bring out something more like 2001, you have to actually have a good script to accomplish that.

Little sad. It was a good story idea, and they could have done so much with it if they\’d wanted to. Maybe I\’ll write a different take on the same thing someday. 😉

Anyway, to bed shortly after coming home, so no additional writing done.

Fiction words for the day: 1000      Fiction words for November: 14,500

Fiction Target for Day 12: 19,992 (behind 5,492 words)

Blog Words today:: 483      Blog Words for November: 5389