The way I write: 1) Imagine a world. Give it aspects and conditions. Establish the ground rules on which that world operates, the aspects of it I wish to illustrate and the things that make it interesting. 2) Imagine the characters that would be the most interesting to explore that world. Find the perspective into that world that entertains the most. Give those characters the opportunity to run and take the narrative where it goes. 3) I know I have created a viable world and viable characters when, in the midst of writing, they surprise me. This is nothing more than my subconscious "role-playing" with my story but it gives me insights into my story that I would not have otherwise. In other words, I write stories as if I were creating a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and I, the dungeonmaster, control the Non-Player Characters that you, the player, view through the access character I have created for you. The universe is whole and good and successful when the NPCs revolt or when the access character shows me insights that I did not consciously create. When you do it this way, you at least create a semi-complete world to explore. I like to use the film Alien as an example - there's all sorts of throw-away dialog about rates and wages while everyone wakes up and drinks their coffee. It's nothing but "banter" but it also reflects '70s era British labor disputes and subtly sets up a class society whose underpinnings give breadth to the characterization of the film. The cargo hold is also full of all sorts of mysterious things that we never see fully, that we can only guess the purpose of, and that exist only to make the pursuit of the Alien more genuine... but there's a real sense that somebody spent an awful lot of time figuring out what would be in the hold of the Nostromo so that when the audience explores it, they get the sense that the Nostromo is a real ship. The way Chris Nolan writes: 1) Imagine a story. Line it up like dominos. 2) push over the dominos. Don't look left, don't look right, don't pause the dominos, don't imagine anything outside of the narrow view ahead of you. Take The Prestige. This is ostensibly a story about two feuding magicians. They each have some trick that wows the audience and neither knows how the other does it. This feud ends up costing them both dearly. Okay, fine. But the trick one of them employs is "I have a twin." The trick the other employs is "I have created a matter replicator." Fer real. And the twins basically decide "one of us will die just to fuck with you" while Mr. Matter Replicator's whole thing is "I have been creating copies of myself and drowning them every night and hiding the bodies in the basement just to fuck with you" and the audience, rather than going "WTF" goes nolan is a jeeeeeeeeeeeeenius and I say "fuck this guy."
Cheap trick. I read somewhere that good stories don't have surprises like that, no sudden unveiling of facts at the end to suddenly change the plot - dependent on narrator and point-of-view of course - nothing that should have been previously known 100 pages ago that the author just hid up his sleeve to hit you with at the last moment. You can't always apply that rule, of course, but it's worth thinking about. When I wrote loose crazy fantasy fiction-prose I'd just start with characters and see what they did. Several "novels" worth of that hidden away in old desks on lined paper in longhand. Now and then I experiment with prose outside of the blog but it's much more semi-autobiographical. I think, by the way, sometime I should try my hand at scripts. I watched the House of Yes again last night and I want to read the play it's based on, I think it's a very tight script. But the trick one of them employs is "I have a twin"
This is what pissed me off about Sherlock Holmes. I can't believe any of the Holmes stories are considered the standard of mystery literature. "Oh, by the way, Sherlock knew all along cause that one time he saw the thing and did the move to trap the guy. He's so smart heh." Come on.
What bothered me about Sherlock Holmes is the fact that Holmes' skill is essentially "looking very hard" and/or "noticing the details and putting them together." In addition, a lot of the stories rely on there being little tells for Holmes to pick up on - when in real life that isn't always the case - although I suppose the point was the tells were so small "ordinary" people wouldn't notice them. Idk.
Cut Conan Doyle a little slack, though - it was over a hundred years ago, there was no Internet, he had an opium habit to feed and he even tried to kill Sherlock Holmes off in a satisfying way and the fans dragged it back. You'd probably invent a snake every now and then, too.
It's called a deus ex machina and is to be avoided at all costs. The counterprinciple is Chekhov's gun.
Trey Parker uses it to varying degree when he digs himself into a giant hole in some South Park episodes. In the case of a 22 minute comedy, it can work in a beautifully ridiculous way, although even in those cases I think it's only used because the show is a made in a week and sometimes they just run out of time.
You can get away with a lot more in parody because absurdity is a fundamental part of satire. It's when you're taking yourself seriously - "if the eagles could swoop in and save Frodo and Samwise at the end, why didn't they just ride fuckin' eagles from the Shire in the first place?"
Also fuck Nolan and his genius idea to release low-level thought movies in the Summer season, when there are zero-thought movies, and being hailed as the messiah of shitty sci-fi-ish films. And screw the Dark Knight Rises, holy crap. Edit: b_b, just saw your comment, we are very close in thought when it comes to films, apparently."Its a device Morty, that when you put it in your ear, you can enter people's dreams Morty. Its just like that movie that you keep crowing about."
"You're talking about Inception?"
"That's Right Morty! This is gonna be a lot like that. Except you know. Its gonna make sense."
"Inception made sense!"
"You don't have to try to impress me Morty."
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“[This dream is] like Inception, Morty, so if it’s confusing and stupid then so is everyone’s favorite movie”
Dear lord. I had to see that movie twice in theaters because my girlfriend at the time loved it. And then again after that when people got it on DVD. I didn't enjoy that movie at all, there were a ton of plotholes and the entire storyline was meh at best. However, I will admit to really enjoying The Dark Knight, but that's about it as far as Nolan goes. I think that's more because Heath Ledger absolutely nailed it.And screw the Dark Knight Rises, holy crap.