Boy Meets Girl

Back in college I saw a 1935 stage place called Boy Meets Girl. 

 

(Picture from here.)

 

It was what we would call these days a rom-com. It takes place in 1930s Hollywood with a failing leading man, a film producer, an unmarried, pregnant waitress, two script-writers, and the illegitimate baby the writers turn into a star.

 

It’s fun. I have not seen the Cagney film but the Wikipedia synopsis is pretty much what I remember. I’ll look for it.

 

Under the plot is the idea of a style of story: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. 

 

This has intrigued me ever since. I rewrote it as protagonist discovers target of desire, protagonist loses target of desire, protagonist attains target of desire.

 

Reframed in this way, it is a common story structure as either the main structure or as a thread within the main structure. For example, in the Netflix Wednesday show, a strong theme is Wednesday discovers friends, Wednesday loses friends, Wednesday gets friends. (For those familiar with the show, “friends” can be replaced with “Enid.”) This is the emotional arc of the show. 

 

In my own work, Jackie’s Boy is the story of Michael finding Jackie, Michael losing Jackie, and Michael getting Jackie. The rest of the book is wrapped around this armature. 

 

I think this is different from the Aristotelean Plot. According to Big A, there are two kinds of good plots: simple and complex. Simple plots involve a change in fortune and the characters response to this. There is usually an incentive moment—what we called at Clarion, an event— that triggers the cause-and-effect sequence of the plot. Complex plots involve a reversal of fortune and insight into one’s fate. The protagonist has more agency to change the plot.

 

As I understand it, in both of these plot types the change of fortune is outside of the protagonist’s control. In the boy-meets-girl paradigm, the chance element is only represented by the encounter to the target of desire. From then on, all agency relies on the protagonist, be they one or many. 

 

Hitchcock referred to a macguffin, an object of desire that has no intrinsic importance but is the attractant to the characters. The Holy Grail, Golden Fleece, and Maltese Falcon, all demonstrate a macguffin: the mystery and importance of these things reside only in the mind of the characters. Others believe that the macguffin must have importance to the audience (or reader) as well: the One Ring of LOTR, or the Lost Ark in the Spielberg film. In both of these cases, the macguffin has intrinsic importance especially when in the wrong hands.

 

LOTR and Raiders of the Lost Ark are both example of what I call big stories. Big stories involve the end of the world, good versus evil, light against dark. Small stories, on the other hands, are stories where the stakes are limited to the characters involved. I’ve written very few big stories—the closest I’ve come have been stories where the big events happen but as an afterthought consequence of the small stories. For good or ill, small stories are where I tend to live.

 

Boy-meets-girl is essentially a small story paradigm. It can reside within a big story—see Wednesday, above—but the stakes are local. Wednesday’s acquiring of friends has little bearing on the larger issues. The fact of her having friends by the end has an effect on the larger arc but the big story could have been told without it. 

 

These days, big stories are written with little stories embedded within them. That’s the current style—in Raiders the story of Indiana and Marian is important to Indiana and Marian but not to the Lost Ark itself. The best big stories are built that way. Heist films—Avengers’ Endgame and Ocean’s Eleven have big stories flowing right along without much in the way of small story support. (In the case of Endgame, the small story of loss motivates the big story but is ultimately left to one side when the heist gets going. It then returns at the end.)

 

Boy-meets-girl (so much less wieldy than protagonist-encounters-target-of-desire) is really built for the small story. It can be contorted to fit over a big story but it’s not often a comfortable fit. It’s not a coincidence that the small stories inside Raiders and LOTR are not boy-meets-girl but of a different style. In Wednesday, the BMG story is pushed to the background and emerges as needed to re-energize the characters and to introduce teenage angst as needed. (It is a story of high school, after all. What’s high school without teen drama?) The writers were careful to keep a little distance between the BMG elements and the big story of monsters, mayhem, and death.

 

I keep discovering the BMG paradigm in my own work and in the wild all the time. When you look at LOTR from the point of view of the One Ring, it’s BMG all the time. It’s either done straight—Gollum meets ring. Gollum loses ring. Gollum gets ring—or it’s inverted. As in Frodo gets ring, Frodo rejects ring, Frodo embraces ring. BMG is the small wheel that drives the ponderous architecture of both the novels and the film. 

 

Of course, it’s possible I’m projecting my own touchstone imagination onto works that don’t actually have it. Many times, we have phrases or magic words that mean worlds to us but have no real meaning to anyone else. 

 

That’s okay. Inspiration is not transferable. What inspires me might leave you cold. Your most important life affirming moment might be something I find trivial. 

 

It’s like the elephant dancing. The magic is not how clumsy or inept the inspiration is, but that it occurs at all.

 

 

Vicious Psychopath vs Senile Grandpa

(Picture from Dall-E.)

 

This is not the best presidential lineup. 

 

On the one hand, we have Trump who promises revenge for insults and slights he invented and can only stop lying when he stops breathing. On the other, we have Biden who has trouble putting together a coherent sentence.

 

As I said before, vicious psychopath vs. senile grandpa.

 

A friend of mine texted me when the debate was over: Biden told the truth and looked weak. Trump lied and looked strong.

 

It’s at times like this I really don’t like the winner take all process we have in this country. Ranked voting might well still get the same result but at least there would be a slim possibility of actual choice.

 

I can’t vote for someone who has tried to overthrow the government, condoned violence, and lied about everything from COVID to global warming. At least with Senile Grandpa, I can rely on people he has picked. It’s picking a lesser mistake to avoid a catastrophe. 

 

Make no mistake: Trump is a catastrophe.

 

This is not the of times and the best of a presidential lineup. But I’ll put my country’s fate into the hands of dementia rather than rest it with psychosis.

 

Convention News: Readercon 2024

 I will be at readercon this year. Readercon runs 7/11-7/14 at the Boston Quincy Marriott in Quincy, MA.

I’ll be on two panels:

• Mosaic Novels: Sunday, 7/14, 10:00 AM, Salon B: Mosaic novels (or sometimes called braided novels) are collections of associated stories that together have a continuing narrative. My contribution was to the Future Boston series where I contributed several stories and a novel. We were telling the future history of the city of Boston.
• Defining and Appreciating Cozy SFF, Sunday 7/14, 11:00 AM, Salon 4. Cozy SFF involves usually has small stakes rather than shaking the world. This describes most of my work.

Come one. Come all. Come often.

 

Consideration of Works Past: Dangerous Visions

I was never the audience for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

DV came out in 1967. I was fifteen. I read it but DV was intended for adults. While I was advanced for my age, I was still a fairly repressed teen in Alabama at the time. I was obsessed with science fiction but I was not part of the SF fan community. I didn’t really know about such a thing until much, much later. Thus, I did not grow up with the concept of readers contacting readers and discussing what they read.

 

When I was growing up the rule was, I could read anything I could reach on a bookshelf. My mother didn’t take into account my ability to climb so I read everything in the house. This included such things as For Whom the Bell Tolls, From Here to Eternity, The Arrangement, and As I Lay Dying. I read most of the library before I was twelve. 

 

I discovered science fiction as a branch from comics—of which I remain an avid reader to this day. I started at one end of the SF section in my local library and worked my way left to right. There weren’t SF novels in the house until I became a member of the SF book club. 

 

SF entered my life just before Junior High and has remained with me ever since.

 

I think I encountered DV late in high school. It was a good collection of stories. It wasn’t my favorite. My favorite collection remains the Robert P Mills Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (1960) with Anthony Boucher’s A Treasury of Great Science Fiction (1959) a close second. The Mills collection had such stories as Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon,  Bester’s The Pi Man, Heinlein’s All You Zombies, and McKenna’s Casey Agonistes. Treasury has Budrys’ Rogue Moon and Bester’s The Stars My Destination.

 

DV was fun but it didn’t strike me as all that interesting in comparison. Also, close to a quarter of the book was commentary. Ellison had a long introduction to the book and introduced every story. After each story, the author had an afterward. As far as I was concerned, this material was to be skipped. I’d rather the work speak for itself. It’s been nearly sixty years and I still can’t bring myself to read it. I’ve never much cared for literary commentary. 

 

(As a side note, since Ellison wrote all of the introductions and had a story in the collection, he ended up being the largest contributor. This may have influenced my opinion.)

 

I read DV and went on relatively unscathed. DV spawned Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), which I found somewhat impressive. Meanwhile, the long moldering Last Dangerous Visions will soon be published. I’ll probably make myself read it. 

 

Meanwhile, while DV didn’t have a strong effect on me, it did seem to have a strong effect on the field. In college, I met other SF readers and many of them thought this collection was world-shaking. It was amazing. It was dangerous.

 

Really? I thought. More dangerous than Rogue Moon, which examined an alien artifact in a work that seemed to channel Norman Mailer? More dangerous than The Stars My Destination, which as a main character who starts out a rapist and murderer and ends up a tortured saint? More dangerous than From Here to Eternity, which seems to me at this point in my life a deconstruction of the American idea? More dangerous than John Dos Passos? (whom I’d just discovered and thought was world-shaking, amazing, and dangerous. Also since he wrote his best work in the first half of the 20^th century, what does that say about me?)

 

I mean it was a good collection. Several stories won awards. Not all of the stories have aged well—Gonna Roll the Bones could use some really strong editing, is essentially a glorification of a philandering, gambling, wife-beater. I liked it when I was seventeen. Not so much now. A Toy for Juliette, The Doll House, and The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World are essentially hubris stories: where something is given to the main character which ends up destroying the person due to the person’s unthinking arrogance. The ideas surrounding them are interesting but not so the stories themselves. I didn’t like hubris stories in The Twilight Zone. I don’t like them in DV.

 

Other stories have been overtaken by time. For example, Anderson’s Eutopia, is a somewhat tired story about an alternate world traveler trying to get home. He’s persecuted for mysterious reasons throughout the story until finding his way back to his lover, a boy. (I’m not being facetious. The lover is directly referred to as a “boy” in the story.) This is presented as a surprise but it’s pretty obvious half way through the story. 

 

On the other hand, Spinrad’s Carcinoma’s Angels is pure genius. In this story, the main character is an unrepentant, successful, ambitious businessman struck with cancer. All cures fail and he resolves to tackle his cancer himself, by going inside with a cocktail of hallucinogens. From there on, every battle, encounter, and victory is metaphorical. 

 

I thing the “dangerousness” of DV reflected a lack of understanding of where SF sensibilities resided within the context of the literary world. DV has been described as launching the New Wave approach to characterization in SF. New Wavers considered themselves breaking from the whole pulp, American ideal, SF. 

 

I don’t agree with that self-assessment. The characterizations they discuss were already there in Bester, Budrys, and others in the field, and across the world outside of it.

 

But my agreement is not important. While I don’t think DV stories are as good as people think, the writers that came after it— Le Guin, Ballard, Delany, and Zelazny as a few examples—are as brilliant as any writers anywhere. I wasn’t much influenced by Ellison or the DV books, but I was inspired by those who were appeared subsequently. If DV enabled their publication, it deserves every honor given it.