Fictional Writers
I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but I love Castle. I think it's a fun, usually lighthearted mystery show, and (particularly early on), it said a lot about the writing process. There's often this moment where Nathan Fillion's character, the eponymous Richard Castle, is looking at the mystery they're solving and thinking that the details aren't consistent -- or, at least, that they don't make a very good story.
It reminds me a little bit of the Yann Martel quotes (he apparently uses the idea frequently) that he chooses to look at the world (at least in his novels) as though there is a God, because that makes the better story. But I digress.
One of the really fun things about Castle is the novels written by the fictional Castle that appear in our real world: Heat Wave and Naked Heat both hit the bestseller lists when they came out (around #16, I think), which means that the fictional Richard Castle is, in reality, a bestselling author. It boggles the mind. I really think there's a college paper here about postmodernism and the metatextuality of rewriting reality to reflect fiction or some such. In the mean time, I think it's just fun. (Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote also has a number of books published under her name, though I think her success was always more modest, both in the real world and in her own TV show, than Castle's.)
It also makes me think about other fictional writers I've enjoyed in books I've read and consider how much meta-text real-world writers create with fictional writers who then ended up writing, say, short stories or something. For example, celebutante and glamazombie Amanda Feral, who used a "ghost writer" (mdhenry) for her memoirs but writes smut on her own. There have to be other authors doing this -- I'd love to be reminded of any you can think of. :)
I started thinking about this today because someone brought Richard Castle, the character, to Barbara Vey's blog party today (it's mystery/thriller day!), and rather than assuming the character had been brought along in the prose, my initial thought was that whoever is responsible for the Castle twitter account had, in fact, donated something to the party! Alas, no "official" Castle presence, but the prizes and party are stellar nonetheless.
It reminds me a little bit of the Yann Martel quotes (he apparently uses the idea frequently) that he chooses to look at the world (at least in his novels) as though there is a God, because that makes the better story. But I digress.
One of the really fun things about Castle is the novels written by the fictional Castle that appear in our real world: Heat Wave and Naked Heat both hit the bestseller lists when they came out (around #16, I think), which means that the fictional Richard Castle is, in reality, a bestselling author. It boggles the mind. I really think there's a college paper here about postmodernism and the metatextuality of rewriting reality to reflect fiction or some such. In the mean time, I think it's just fun. (Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote also has a number of books published under her name, though I think her success was always more modest, both in the real world and in her own TV show, than Castle's.)
It also makes me think about other fictional writers I've enjoyed in books I've read and consider how much meta-text real-world writers create with fictional writers who then ended up writing, say, short stories or something. For example, celebutante and glamazombie Amanda Feral, who used a "ghost writer" (mdhenry) for her memoirs but writes smut on her own. There have to be other authors doing this -- I'd love to be reminded of any you can think of. :)
I started thinking about this today because someone brought Richard Castle, the character, to Barbara Vey's blog party today (it's mystery/thriller day!), and rather than assuming the character had been brought along in the prose, my initial thought was that whoever is responsible for the Castle twitter account had, in fact, donated something to the party! Alas, no "official" Castle presence, but the prizes and party are stellar nonetheless.