WritersBlock 2009-09-10 13:12:07

I know. I love how we have a precursor to the events in the film because of the film, and as such, we're expecting a certain ending that at some point clicks back into real, historical events. Full credit to Tarantino for leading us astray there and going against our better judgement for something wholly more satisfying. And on the whole, the jew-revenge plot against the nazis is so deliciously nasty, I found it impossible to resist their execution of justice upon the nazis, especially in the attitude that the nazis, at the point of begging for mercy, weren't forgiven in renouncing their ways and actions, as the act of being a nazi, by and large, is unforgivable.

WritersBlock 2009-09-10 20:11:02

You take an idea and you build upon it, and youextend it into a believable plot with believable characters in a likewise believable setting. And when I say 'believable', I mean that it's believable within the world in which your story is set. If you're writing realist fiction based within a possible actual world (as in a world that mirrors the one we live in) then the rules of your fictional world are anchored to the same rules that the readers have come to know as true from experience. Things like gravity and geography and the middle class, economy, politics, religion, etc. it should work in your possible actual world the same way that it works within our actual world. But if you take a genre like science-fiction or fantasy, for example, the term 'believable' has a new set of rules to abide by. Now, as you're writing to fit within a certain genre, there are certain rules that you need to follow to identify your piece as sci-fi or fantasy or whatever, but once you've established that, then the rules of your possible non-actual world (as in a world that may share similarities to our own world, but contains rules that are significantly different) are largely up to you. It's not a matter of bending the rules of what we know from the actual world, but constructing an entirely new world in which in that world, those rules are universal truth. Mythical creatures are known to exist in this other world, space travel works a certain way in this other world, the geography, the heirarchy, the politics all work in a way that is truth in the possible actual world. Even though the reader identifies that it's not possible in the actual world, within the world of the story, it is truth to the characters that the setting and plot progresses in a very real way, and therefore it becomes believable to the reader. If you can pull a reader into a believable story, you've written good fiction.

Also, I highly recommend the movie. Film-making at its finest.

WritersBlock 2009-09-12 18:30:23

Well, as you can see, at the moment I'm really enjoying writing and studying the theory behind writing.

One point I did forget to mention is that it helps to read a lot. I don't read enough, so I'm trying to pick back up on that. I just finished reading J.R.R Tolkien's 'The Hobbit', and I've got quite a few other books that I've started but have yet to finish.
These include:
Terry Pratchett's 'Carpe Jugulum'
Stephen King's 'It'
David Zindell's 'The Wild'
Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith's 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies'
and most recently I'm actively reading Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'.

I've also got a handful of short story collections that I can hop into now and again, including:
H.P Lovecraft's 'Necronomicon'
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'
and Edgar Allen Poe's Complete Works.

And I have noticed, the more I read, the better I've become at using language to tell my stories, how to pace them and structure them, and in general how fiction should be shaped and written. Still got a long way to go though.

WritersBlock 2009-09-14 08:53:03

I've heard people complaining about all the subtitles, but I think it's part of the charm of the plot.