Yes, Sure, Progress

Yesterday, went through and edited the first ten pages, decided to hate it for its inaction and lack of dialogue. Despaired.

This morning, went back through and edited again, decided to love it because it sets up everything tersely, complexly, and subtly. From now on, everything that happens for several hundred pages flows from this.

Wonder, very briefly, what normal people do on perfectly ordinary days like these. I have no idea.

 Now stop whining and get to work.

Say What? Who?

The writing group might want to draw and quarter me over this, but I like it: changing all the proper names to near-proper Greek, and subjecting them to Greek syntax. So Ajax is Aias, but when addressed by name is Aia. Troy is Troia, a person who lives there is a Traoianos but is addressed as Troiano, the people who live there are Troianoi. Agamemnon is Agamenonos, but is address as Agamemno. Hah!

I hesitated to mess with possessives, as that required restructuring the sentences in which they appeared, making my casual, contemporary language suddenly stilted: Instead of "Agamenonos' wife says..." it had to be "The wife of Agamemnonos says..." or some other structure. Anyway, I gave it a try.

What this did is something I did not predict. Until now, I've been bugged by how ordinary the narrative voice of this story is. This extremely simple Greeking has, just by itself, contributed a touch more flavor (ala Peryton) of strangeness without having to do it so deliberately that it sounds like TV quality pseudo-archaic.

And then, of course, there is this.... 

Less, More, and The Bodyguard

Finally acquired grown-up home wifi, and an up-to-date DVD player that is preprogrammed for many of the on-line video services. Hunting happily through menus, I found a kinda-ashamed-to-admit-it but WTF old favorite, all the previous seasons of Project Runway.

And I found two movies: one old favorite, one a delightful new surprise.

Why have I always liked "The Bodyguard?" I discovered one of several answers to that question at last.

At the most recent meeting of my small writing group, one member lamented that his character, a hard-boiled detective, needs something in the way of a life beyond solving the current mysterious crime spree.

We mulled over the usual kinds of trite complications of the "he raises and shows tropical fish" variety. But those just feel like mandatory stick-ons, and he and I left the meeting still feeling unsatisfied.

Now, with two attentive run-throughs of 'Bodyguard,' I feel closer to an answer. Frank Farmer simply is who and what he is. His own father describes him, very briefly, as always have been driven toward what scares him most, but we are spared any horrid wake-screaming-in-the-night scenes. He was in the Secret Service, was off duty when Reagan was shot. This troubles him, and we don't have to drag ourselves through a thick layer of self-dislike to feel it, understand it, know that it is wrong, but also accept it. The film touches Farmer's spirit very lightly and quickly several times, then lets him go. No childhood trauma, no pitying psychological morass. By the end, we know and like him, we would trust him with our lives, we understand that he will always do what he does and be how he is, and, like Rachael Marron, we are content to let him go.

Any writer of fiction could do infinitely worse than to create and manage such a character. I will recommend this film to my detective-writing colleague at our next meeting, and will keep it in mind in my own writing as well. Less can be infinitely more.

Lawrence Kasdan, the writer who created this character, and Mick Jackson, the director, deserve major kudos for this tour de force, as does Kevin Kostner who played the role.