Tag Archive for ‘Bonnie Friedman’
“You Have to Make It Excruciating Somehow”: More on James Cameron
Last week I posted James Cameron’s answer to the question “What’s the most important thing you know about storytelling?” Discussing Cameron’s ideas with the writer Bonnie Friedman – with whom I have an ongoing, percolating conversation about craft and creativity (as regular readers of this blog well know) –, I mentioned that I particularly liked his idea that “you have to take [your characters] on a journey – and then you have to make it excruciating somehow.” Excruciating – such an [...]
Writing Past the Blind Spot
Last week Bonnie Friedman found out something big … As soon as I finished writing my guest post for this blog last week about how “people don’t do such things,” I put the computer in “sleep” mode, stood up, and the answer to the question I was secretly asking washed through me. Why couldn’t I really believe that people in the world do mean and otherwise outrageous things (things that, if I could believe in them, I could let my characters [...]
"People Don't Do Such Things!"
The writer Bonnie Friedman considers what it means to create ‘realistic’ fictional characters: “People don’t do such things!” is the last line of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler — words cried out by the scandalized judge after Hedda has shot herself off-stage. His words echo in our ears as the curtain rings down and as the actors gradually emerge to take their bows, and as we shuffle out onto the street and back into our lives. People don’t do such things! Well, [...]
The Novel Terminable and Interminable
Bonnie Friedman writes about the lure of (and cure for) the endless novel: I just finished my first novel. This isn’t the first novel I tried to write. Before publishing a book of essays and then a memoir, I’d been a devoted fiction writer. I’d written hundreds of pages of two vast novels, one when I was in my twenties and one in my thirties. But this last one is the first novel I’ve finished. Those other novels were a [...]
