Book Recommendation (Page 3 of 3)

For me, it turned out better than you intended. Almost any controversial subject, or subject that can be made controversial, brings out the best in the good critical thinkers and the worst in the poor critical thinkers.

It is the way humans have separated the wheat from the chaff ever since they started to communicate. You've advanced civilization even further than you expected to.

Memphis Trace

In my Amazon review, I opine that the MFA should not be listed among Bird's qualifications because he states, in the firmest terms, that he had to unlearn the biggest lessons the MFA program taught him, and that the whole MFA program was a scam.  'scam' is his word.

What was that lesson?  Write from your heart, gut, or whatever organ you find rewarding.  Bird's lesson from the real world?  You have to write for your audience, in whatever medium.  Implied is that the greatest reward is winning the audience to your story.

We all judge books by their covers, in various ways.  I assert that the suspicions that you have formed, based on the cover, do not represent the book's content.  Only you can test that assertion to your own satisfaction.

What?  And give away the ending? 

The greatest preachers claimed to have been rescued from sin, though that certainly does not stop the collection plate being passed around.

No, my suspicions are based on having read several how-to books regarding writing for commercial publication, and all of them were scams. How I might say they were scams is based on treatment of writing as if there were little difference between non-fiction, genre-fiction, non-genre-fiction, and TV/movie fiction except for a matter of marketing. Moreover, red flags go off when the "reviews" are all 5 starred.  And  "winning an audience to your story" is a feel-good platitude  that says nothing because no one will write for no audience even if there be a catharsis or the like effect in that writing.

If we are to ignore his screenwriting qualifications, what qualifications, tangible or otherwise, does he have? Does he, for example, point to a classic novel and analyze how it might written/marketed today? Something along those lines where he does distinguish a type of fiction that is not obviously commercial but may be made so, or is his advice to never write anything of the type that does not fit a commercial-fiction formula?

Bird uses many examples from both books and movies, some of what works well, some of what flops.  His resume is drawn from his successful work.

And since his emphasis is on Story, it seems reasonable to conclude that he is addressing principally the fiction writer.

Amazon lets you preview parts of the book.  Why not do that?

Believe me, I did not post a reply to your OP without checking it out, and in spite of his protestations to the contrary he has screenwriter fingerprints all over it.  It is even in the advice that every author should care about his audience and particularly the advice #4 on audiences don't care about stories; they care about characters, and I believe that is false for most genre of novels but is partially true for movies because the medium is first,visuals and second, plot; it is the actor's job to look good and be good. A novelist has to expend a thousand words to imitate the 30 second screen shot.  And, of course,  his only examples are and can be only from from movies. His extended movie biz anecdote on John Carter is irrelevant to a novel writer. I don't even agree that the movie flopped because of some unlikable John Carter who I thought was a very likable hero; it is the story that meandered and fizzled from action scene to action scene there were a bit silly. The history of Mars part, yes, movie goers don't not like that, but a genuine reader would -- until recently when authors are writing novels as if they were movies not realizing that is the whole point of a novel versus a movie is engaged versus passive entertainment.

No, I am weeding out people like you. Engage yourself in Catch-22 of whether you are sane or not, but you have no keen mind, sane or not.

I hope the novwllisf doesn't use 1000 in lieu of the 30 swcond screen shot.  A 140 minute movie would correspond to.1120 pages!

The media are different, but the customer's relationship to the story is mostly the same.  And you may have missed the examples Bird gives of books turned int bad movies, and why.

Bird does use books for examples, too, just not as often.  And grsphic media as well ... Tintin and V for Vendetta get consideration.

Can't a novelist put the visual of Danny DeVito in the role of the action hero instead of Tom Cruise: short, dark-haired, round-shouldered, italianate, and if the relation to the story is the same, why can't DeVito play Jack Reacher in a movie just the same as Cruise because Lee Child's Reacher looked as much as Devito as Cruise (not at all)?  The novel has narration, and that is its strength, and the movie has the visuals, but narration has power to do much more than visual description. I think the novel will die out, maybe it has already, because of a false equivalency drawn between them. It'd be like trying to make music be like speaking rhyme delivered over a beat going on in the background.

From what I can tell, the non-traditional publishing path is encouraging pulp-fiction quality as if on steroids.  Indeed there has been a genuine market for low-brow story-telling (and I don't have a problem with that) -- that had little to do with "characterization" beyond stereotypes, and forget about thematic content. Movies also have taken up pulp fiction market. "Cheap fiction may again thrive" is what I mean by the death of the novel even if there continues to be stories presented in the written word. The ideal would be as one might have seen it in the mid-2oth century with a reasonable mix of high- and low-brow and  the rise of genre fiction but always balanced with what was labelled literary fiction in the '60's but has died out in some rush to homogenize literary culture into certain acceptable political-social values marking a move backwards since the mid 20th century.

I don't know Howey so I can't say.  Most of my reading has been light.  But Sarah Hoyt, one of the Sad Puppies principals, has a series starting with A Few Good Men which is supposed to be quite serious in theme and thesis.  From what I hear, you might approve.

Nor do I know how far along Howey is.  Remember that Heinlein changed as he went, from Podkyne of Mars to Farnam's Freehold and And I Shall Fear No Evil to Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love, to the self-parody of The Cat Who Walked Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (which closed off his worlds and characters so others couldn't hack-write on them).