Portait of the Artist as a Younger Man, II

[bellatrys]

In the last entry, we saw how Ellison managed to cram in just about every single nasty stereotype of women from antiquity into under five pages, along with enough self-flattery to choke even Lee Siegel (well, that may be an exaggeration.) Seriously, we've got that 1) women are vain, 2) shallow, 3) materialistic, 4) fickle, 5) bullying, 6) gullible

Comments

Yup

[bellatrys]

Now, every author does this to a degree, or you don't have a story. You set up some parameters and exclude various options so that you have a conflict, you have a dilemma, and (ideally) people can't say "but why didn't they just use the radio?" or something obvious like that, there's an internally-consistent reason why they can't just radio for help or whatever, (altho' IRL most TV and movie scripts fall down pretty badly in that "plausibility" regard, (often connected to continuity problems too) and that gives us lots of fun reasons to shout at the screen and MST3K them and write snarky essays or parodies of our favorite or least-favorite shows.) Every drama is necessarily somewhat "contrived" (even ones based on RL situations, they have to be pruned down and uncomplicated to work onstage) because the point of the story isn't solving the murder/escaping the wrecked ship/catching the Evil Overlord before he sets off his Space Bomb, it's *really* about the chance for great lines and lots of emoting, to get all meta.

But - just like in The Cold Equations - the amount of "forcing" to make the story happen the way he wants it to happen is so extreme that it falls into both dishonesty and implausibility.