Discussion on literature and reading, how that affects a writer. What makes a book good? What is good literature? (30 minutes) McGuffin - an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot. A term that’s said to have been borrowed by the English film director Alfred Hitchcock, from a humorous story involving such a pivotal factor. Examples: Holy Grail, it’s never about the Holy Grail itself. It is an element which drives the plot onward to its conclusion, but the story is more about the searching and relationships, pride, determination, self-realization, etc. more so than the grail itself. Harry Potter – him fighting Voldemort. More about the scene in the train station with Dumbledore that then is a lens through which you see the rest of book 7 and the whole series in hindsight. The fight between Voldemort and Harry is simply the climax, but the story doesn’t stop there like you think it might. The train station scene is the denouement of the story of Hogwarts and the people in it, Harry’s life. Here, it all comes down to a choice of life apart from his family but with his friends, going after Voldemort who still has the Elderwand, or finally be reunited with those he has lost. The books are about friendships, relationships, relatable characters, Deathly Hallows, power and what you do with it, light vs. dark which you see in the battle, but isn’t the moment which the books rest on or what they are even, at the end of the day, about. Monster in Frankenstein. – About who the real monster actually is. Humanity created a monster. That in and of itself is rife with moral ambiguity, but the monster isn’t like what we think it is and see in movies. He is curious; he watches people and he emulates them, learns to read, reads philosophy, eloquent and seems more human at the end of the novel than the one who created him in the first place. Not about his monstrous qualities; it’s a philosophical questioning of what it truly means to be human and what happens when you put humans in an impossible scenario and how do you deal with the moral questions that follow. Why did Shelley choose to title the book, Frankenstein because the monster isn’t Frankenstein – he’s the man who created the monster. It’s about his decline into mania and obsession. Hazy moral ground, tears his life apart, flunks out of school. He is a sort of monster. The question is who is the real monster? Is the monster actually the monster? Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus Dracula- not about his vampirism. It’s about being afraid of the dark and what lurks in the dark. A girl dies a horrible death yes, and that’s in one way horrific, but this is a different level of horror that means something and is getting at something deeper than dark cloaks, pointed fangs, and a thirst for blood. Those things would be the McGuffin of Dracula. The story at its heart is really about a man dealing with being alone, hurting everyone around him, sadness and loss, and a grey sort of view of good and evil where Dracula changes in the reader’s eyes, and you hate him, pity him, even admire him. When they kill him in the end of the book, line “She thought for a brief moment that she could see a glimmer of peace on his face.” Not a redeemable quality in the entire book. Even his own existence is a cure, he despises himself, his own defeat is a relief to himself. Sin and evil, true victim of evil is him or the one he kills? He is also the victim of his wretchedness. His own evil dehumanizes himself. Fear of what a vampire actually is. They don’t kill people; they turn people into vampire. Turns to into something evil, takes what is good and distorts it, changes it and makes it evil. Real horror of it. There is a goodreads review of Dracula that is poignant to this topic: Dracula: the very name instantly brings to mind visions of vampires, stakes, garlic and crucifixes. But when I bothered to read the novel I realised, sadly, how twisted modern vampire fiction has become. Writing stories that are something of substance Good horror, real horror and real sci-fi, is about philosophy, real questions put into a supernatural setting. A setting that is evocative for modern culture. The vampire story isn’t just about a vampire sucking blood who lives in a coffin, it’s about marriage and love, loss and grief, and evil versus good. Frankenstein isn’t about creating a human being, effects of doing what should not be done. A good story is more than its elements. Not identifying what makes your skin crawl, it’s what gets into a person’s mind and causes them to question everything. Horror, modern slasher films. Something coming from behind. That’s easy to do. We should strive to write stories like these, ones with substance that mean more than their obvious elements. We should bare ourselves to out work. Much of those years' reaching will feed the work. Furhter, writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipie than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.
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