Write Lightning is a blog from writer Deb Thompson.
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Fri, Jul 09 2010
How do you tell truth and fiction apart, if you do at all?
What if you wrote some shocking fiction and everybody who read it came away with different ideas of what you had written? Richard Fausset's essay on Pulp Fiction sees that story as more than just a blood-and-guts violent kind of tale. He shows us the story through the bottom of a Coke bottle to remind us that the story seems over-the-top until one holds it up to the absurdity of what goes on every day in real life on this planet.
I read Orwell's 1984 in the late 1960s, but it probably didn't have quite the impact then that it had when he first wrote it. We had Civil Rights marches, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, My Lai, The Beverly Hillbillies, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, go-go boots, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, very wide ties for men, Jefferson Airplane, Chappaquiddick, the Manson Murders, President Richard Nixon, President Lyndon Johnson, Che Guevara, Lucky Charms, Hurricane Camille, the introduction of Arpanet, National Organization for Women, Tang, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Led Zeppelin, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the Richard Speck murders, The Pill and Jimi Hendrix. It took a lot to shock my generation and a lot to impress it. I think it still does. When you see that much change and upheaval in society you aren't easily changed by one book or one movie. If Quentin Tarantino had made movies in the 1960s his work might have been overshadowed by the horrors of JFK's assassination or some other atrocity. And maybe he realized that, so by the time he got around to making the film he named the work Pulp Fiction, so that we'd all be reminded that, strange and messy as the story is, truth is still stranger and messier.
posted at: 17:46 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
What if you wrote some shocking fiction and everybody who read it came away with different ideas of what you had written? Richard Fausset's essay on Pulp Fiction sees that story as more than just a blood-and-guts violent kind of tale. He shows us the story through the bottom of a Coke bottle to remind us that the story seems over-the-top until one holds it up to the absurdity of what goes on every day in real life on this planet.
I read Orwell's 1984 in the late 1960s, but it probably didn't have quite the impact then that it had when he first wrote it. We had Civil Rights marches, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, My Lai, The Beverly Hillbillies, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, go-go boots, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, very wide ties for men, Jefferson Airplane, Chappaquiddick, the Manson Murders, President Richard Nixon, President Lyndon Johnson, Che Guevara, Lucky Charms, Hurricane Camille, the introduction of Arpanet, National Organization for Women, Tang, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Led Zeppelin, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the Richard Speck murders, The Pill and Jimi Hendrix. It took a lot to shock my generation and a lot to impress it. I think it still does. When you see that much change and upheaval in society you aren't easily changed by one book or one movie. If Quentin Tarantino had made movies in the 1960s his work might have been overshadowed by the horrors of JFK's assassination or some other atrocity. And maybe he realized that, so by the time he got around to making the film he named the work Pulp Fiction, so that we'd all be reminded that, strange and messy as the story is, truth is still stranger and messier.
posted at: 17:46 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
