Is Inception overrated?

Short answer: Yes.

When you see an accomplished storyteller come down so far from his creative peak, you're forced to come to terms with where the cracks first started to show. Despite the merits of that piece, it's tainted by the artist's faults which would become more obvious in subsequent pieces, like a pretty woman who loses her mystique the more you get to know her.

For Christopher Nolan, that slide began with Inception.

Ten years ago you may have left the theater blown away by the thrilling visuals, the intertwining dream sequences, the booming Hans Zimmer score, and the subjectivism of reality (that Total Recall and The Matrix executed better). You may have thought it was one of the best movies you'd ever seen. I thought so.

We know now the emperor has no clothes. Nolan's first movie after Inception was The Dark Knight Rises, bloated, poorly paced, and scatterbrained. Then came Interstellar, whose plot in service of a theme of love completely falls apart in the second half. The final straw was Dunkirk, barely thrilling, deliberately confusing, and painful to the ears.

(Temper your expectations for Tenet accordingly.)

Nolan is a talented filmmaker, but his lack of restraint is his undoing. Inception tries to do too much. It's a bildungsroman set in an action movie set in a heist movie set in a sci-fi movie. Even if you execute all the individual elements perfectly, the balancing act is impossible. You risk giving the audience whiplash with all the abrupt narrative shifts. It's how a 2.5-hour movie can feel rushed. When the credits roll, I'm not sure what to feel. I'm just overwhelmed.

My biggest beef with Inception is the incessant expositional dialogue. Nolan said the decision to hit the heist movie tropes helped justify the large amount of exposition. The problem is there's more exposition needed to tell this story. It's not just that Cobb is trying to get home to see his kids. It's that he can't get home because his wife killed herself and framed him for her murder because he incepted the idea in her mind that her world isn't real. This exposition is needlessly drawn out over three scenes, two of which are momentum killers.

Another problem with Inception's exposition relates to the rules of shared dreaming: They keep being rewritten. One rule very clear from the start is that you wake up when you die in a dream. Not so in the Robert Fischer job because of the sedative they use. Useful information that Cobb should have shared with the team, yes? When Fischer dies, Cobb assumes the mission failed, but someone has the bright idea of recovering Fischer from limbo. Wait, you can just go into limbo and revive a dead guy one dream level up? This on-the-fly rule bending feels more like a convenience to the script than a natural outgrowth of the setting.

The fights in Inception are poorly shot and poorly choreographed. Let's take a scene in the beginning of the movie. Arthur is crouched next to a sleeping Saito while Nash is trying to wake Cobb who is in a chair on the edge of a bathtub. Arthur tells Nash to dunk Cobb in the tub. At the same time Saito wakes up and pulls a gun on Arthur. (Why is there a gun under Saito's pillow? Never mind.) Cobb falls in the water and wakes up. Saito walks past Arthur, takes Nash hostage, and points the gun at Arthur. Cobb knocks Saito down from behind. Nash elbows Saito in the face and knocks him out. The sequence is unrealistic and makes Arthur look feckless. It's unclear why this needed to happen and why it had to happen this way. A lot of the fight scenes are like this, the spinning hallway fight being a notable exception.

There are countless little oversights in Inception that bug me. Something as simple as how Cobb can't see his kids' faces resounds thematically for his tortured soul, but think about it. The kids' nanny can't email him a picture? Projections of Cobb's subconscious repeatedly interfere with the job, but no one else's projections interfere. Why not? Cobb, not the stewardess, slips the sedative in Fischer's drink on the plane. Why? I could go on.

All that being said, I don't dislike Inception. I like it for what it does well, namely its score in service of the tempo of different dream levels, stunning visual design, and how it shows the invasion of someone's mind and the planting of an idea.

The latter is of particular interest to me as a writer. Cobb's simple, well-meaning deception drove his wife to kill herself, an unrivaled setup for a tragic hero that should be front and center in the narrative, not diminished to a revelation after the 2-hour mark. Just as poignant is Fischer's reconciliation with the memory of his father. The finale in the vault just feels right as the culmination of the plot and character progression. My eyes still water when Fischer sees the pinwheel in the safe.

So, in all a good movie, but far from Nolan's best, and farther still from the best. Here's my ranking of his movies. (I haven't seen Following.)

1. Memento
2. The Dark Knight
3. The Prestige
4. Batman Begins
5. Inception
6. The Dark Knight Rises
7. Insomnia
8. Interstellar
9. Dunkirk

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

If you're looking for something to read, you can read the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Over the hump

I'm 14,000 words into drafting The Water Siege, the first book of my as yet unnamed epic fantasy trilogy. It will really be one long book that I intend to release in three ~50,000-word installments. The Water Siege will be the hook, and I'll give it away for free while charging for the second and third installments. I've seen other authors try selling books this way, with varying level of success.

It's taken me awhile to get this far. I took up this new project in January, took a long break in February (during which I vacationed in Chile), and resumed writing with gusto in March. This past weekend put me over the hump and gave me the confidence I need.

Having written two books in 2 years, I have a feel for the process of writing a book. For me there's usually a point of crisis as I'm bringing the first act to a close. The idea that motivated me to write is depleted, and I'm forced to reckon with a lack of narrative momentum. Without momentum to propel the rising action, exposition and climax are all there is, which is to say not enough.

Getting over this hump is the difference between merely having an idea for a book and writing a book.

Here's how I know when I've gotten over the hump: When I've fully realized the setting and characters, and there's enough promising stuff to keep the reader's attention while I execute the plot.

There's a lot of risk in writing this part of the book. As I throw in various elements, seeing what sticks and what doesn't, it can get long and messy. Editing these "early middle" chapters will be important when I finish drafting.

Here's a rough sample from the start of chapter 6, which I drafted this morning:

After serving dinner, Gwen went onto the roof of inn, took the linens off the clothesline, and made up the beds in the attic and second story apartments. Her father liked to spread the guests out even if it meant having to clean the inn top to bottom every day, and tonight was no exception. He had even made Gwen move into Xavier’s old room so he could convert her room into additional guest space.

Xavier hadn’t liked it when she came in and touched his things, but that never stopped her. She often would find him stooped over his child-sized drafting table he used even as a young man, looking out the window at the buildings for inspiration. Like her, he was keen on their uncle’s trade, more so on the design side than on stonecutting. Still, his interest had given Gwen a plausible cover story for why there was an old set of stonemason tools in his room.

Now that he was gone and the room was hers, she tried to keep everything as he’d left it when he was pressed into the king’s service. The drafting table still stood before the window curtain. The chest of drawers still held his clothes, neatly folded. And his books, which she’d read through twice, still lined the shelf above the bed.

All her things she kept in a trunk by the door. She lifted a heavy satchel out of the trunk and touched the tools to ensure each one was in its proper place.

Quiet as a mouse she returned to the attic. Thomas’s bed was the farthest from door. She ducked under the gabled roof and spread the satchel under the top sheet next to the headboard. Satisfied no one would see it but him, she returned downstairs.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Die Hard and heroism

I like Die Hard a lot. Mostly because, like The Abyss, it leverages its setting to create unique and thrilling set pieces. Instead of 2,000 feet under the ocean surface, we're 30 stories up in a skyscraper. The setting is heavily involved in shaping the plot, and I find that aspect of action movies to be very satisfying. (As do most people, I suspect. The "Die Hard in X" action sub-genre is a testament to this.)

Die Hard has more things going for it, though, like the buildup to the action. This sets the movie apart in my opinion. It takes its time setting up John McClane as a stuffy jerk. People don't remember this, but the first 20 minutes show you a man who's easy to dislike. He has a wandering eye. He curses under his breath when he finds out his wife is using her maiden name. He makes an ugly comment about Japan not celebrating Christmas. He starts an argument with his wife soon after they meet. Bruce Willis fills McClane's shoes so comfortably that you buy in to who he is and why he's at Nakatomi Plaza. Then the action starts.

The action in Die Hard has gravitas. There's a scene early on that shows McClane stopping an elevator so he can get on its roof. It's a short and simple scene, easy to execute, but does so much to ground the action in the setting and show McClane's cunning. After seeing that, you readily suspend your disbelief when he stops his freefall by catching the edge of an air duct.

I wrote a year-and-a-half ago that McClane is not an archetype. I was wrong. He is many archetypes. He's the reluctant hero. He's the fish out of water. He's the scrappy underdog. He's the red-blooded American working class. His wife is the strong independent woman, then the damsel in distress. Hans Gruber is the suave criminal mastermind and the cold-blooded executioner. Whoever says you shouldn't use archetypes doesn't know how to use archetypes.

The two biggest roles after McClane, his wife, and Gruber belong to Al Powell and Dwayne Robinson. Good cop and bad cop, respectively. Or so I thought until this video by David V Stewart made me rethink it.

Powell is the true believer, the man who processes what his senses and instincts tell him and reaches the correct, although improbable, conclusion. Robinson is the skeptic, the one who's mind is made up and won't let something unexpected push him off what he's staked his career on knowing.

We love Powell and hate Robinson because we want to see McClane redeem himself as a heroic man, a protector of the innocent. There's a mini-metanarrative at work here. Powell represents our hope in great, self-sacrificing men, while Robinson represents our cynicism about selfish human nature. When McClane and Powell hug at the end, the validation of hope resounds.

Roger Ebert famously hated the Powell-Robinson dynamic. I admit it's a little lowbrow, but it's effective in raising the movie's stakes beyond the lives of the hostages at Nakatomi Plaza. Can modern man be virtuous and strong? Do American heroes live on in these times? Die Hard shouts yes.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Craft vs titillation

When I was 14 I thought cursing was cool. I thought movies with a lot of profanity and explicit content were cool for that very reason. Pulp Fiction was my favorite movie.

I grew out of this fad by the time I struck out on my own at 21. I suppose that makes me lucky. Rian Johnson is 46, and he still hasn't grown out of it.

Although it’s primarily a whodunnit murder mystery, Knives Out looks like it will have its fair share of amusing moments, including one shown off in the first trailer where Chris Evans’ Ransom Drysdale-Thrombey points out members of his family and tells them to “eat shit.” One person even gets a “definitely eat shit.”

As it turns out, this Knives Out scene could have been a lot more profane, as Rian Johnson, the writer and director, originally had Chris Evans’ character drop f-bombs instead. But he ultimately reversed course in order to avoid his movie getting stamped with an R rating.

Because eat "s**t" is appropriate for 13 year-olds, whereas "f**k you" isn't? Sound logic. But I don't blame Johnson for working with the MPAA's weird standards so he can pollute the minds of as many theater-goers as possible.

Still, isn't there an artful way to show a character's contempt? Take this monologue from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for instance:

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.

Or how about this scene from There Will Be Blood?

You don't have to be one of the greats like Dostoevsky or Daniel Day-Lewis to show a character's misanthropy. Going back to Knives Out, Chris Evans's playboy character could scowl in silence while suffering his relatives' inanities. Perhaps that wouldn't jive with what Johnson wanted. He wanted to show a family at each other's throats. I can see how that would be cathartic for people who have hard feelings towards their family members. But if your movie doesn't show the family reconciling, what are you saying about family? Nothing good.

I too limit the amount of profanity, sex, and violence in my writing to appeal to a broad audience, but also because I don't want to titillate readers and give them over to sinful thoughts. It's also a craft thing for me. If I can achieve a high level drama without resorting to cheap profanity, I feel I've proven something about my craft that I wouldn't have otherwise.

I rate my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon, PG-13 based on language and violence. My second book, Seeds of Calamity, I also rate PG-13, but only for violence. There were nine curse words in Tendrils, but only one in Seeds, and it's a mild one. The violence in Seeds, however, is more pervasive and more intense. The sexual content in Tendrils is mild. It's practically nonexistent in Seeds.

I doubt I'll ever remove violence completely from my writing. My stories feature characters in conflict, and conflict erupts into violence. That's not necessarily a problem. Violence can be done for just ends.

There is the matter of presentation, though. You don't want the reader to revel in crushed skulls and disemboweled torsos. How much blood and gore do you want to show? As much to convey the action, is what I've come up with so far.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. For a free digital copy of Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here. I appreciate the support!

The war on book borrowing

Well, that didn't last long.

Only a week after Macmillan called off their ebook license embargo, tradpub opened a new front in the war on book borrowing: the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive, which hosts public domain books and loans licensed ebooks like a library, suspended borrowing limits during the coronavirus epidemic. This brought the ire of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, whose dues-paying members lose royalties but gain new readers from every book they don't sell.

They justify their actions better than I can:

On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable, locked away indefinitely behind closed doors.

This is a tremendous and historic outage. According to IMLS FY17 Public Libraries survey (the last fiscal year for which data is publicly available), in FY17 there were more than 716 million physical books in US public libraries.  Using the same data, which shows a 2-3% decline in collection holdings per year, we can estimate that public libraries have approximately 650 million books on their shelves in 2020. Right now, today, there are 650 million books that tax-paying citizens have paid to access that are sitting on shelves in closed libraries, inaccessible to them. And that’s just in public libraries.

And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection. As we anticipated, critics including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have released statements (here and here) condemning the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive. Both statements contain falsehoods that are being spread widely online. To counter the misinformation, we are addressing the most egregious points here and have also updated our FAQs.

One of the statements suggests you’ve acquired your books illegally. Is that true?
No. The books in the National Emergency Library have been acquired through purchase or donation, just like a traditional library. The Internet Archive preserves and digitizes the books it owns and makes those scans available for users to borrow online, normally one at a time. That borrowing threshold has been suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency.

Interestingly, you could flip the argument back on these writers. Libraries bought their overpriced hardcovers, which are sitting on shelves not being read due to bans on public gatherings. Libraries aren't asking for refunds, so why are they quibbling over ebook licenses?

I hope they keep this up because libraries represent a huge growth market for indie authors. By all means, Chuck Wendig et al., if you think libraries are violating licensing agreements by suspending borrowing limits for 3 months, take back your licenses and make your embargo universal and permanent.

From the @AuthorsGuild statement on the Internet Archive's most recent move. "Publishers, authors, bookstore owners, and readers have been coming together in magnificent ways these last few weeks to support this fragile industry, so much of which relies on razor-thin margins."

— Alexander Chee (@alexanderchee) March 27, 2020

Know who doesn't live on razor-thin margins? Independent authors and small presses. That's because ebook supply chain costs are basically zero, which puts traditional publishing with its leviathan infrastructure at a big disadvantage. You commonly see Big 5 books sell on Kindle for $10. The price point for indie authors is $5 and often less.

Both my books are available for a buck apiece. For hard sci-fi fans, Tendrils to the Moon tells the story of the first commercial expedition to colonize the Moon. Seeds of Calamity, my second book, is an action-adventure story set in space, featuring zero-gee acrobatics, evil corporations, and alien parasites.

As always, leave a comment below. I'll respond to you as soon as I can.

The mystery box is empty

Say what you want about the Jack Reacher series. Lee Child's explanation for how to write page-turning thrillers is brilliant:

How do you create suspense? I’m asked that question often, and it seems that every writers’ symposium has a class with that title. It’s an important technical issue, and not just for so-called suspense novels. Every novel needs a narrative engine, a reason for people to keep reading to the end, whatever the subject, style, genre or approach.

But it’s a bad question. Its very form misleads writers and pushes them onto an unhelpful and overcomplicated track.

Because “How do you create suspense?” has the same interrogatory shape as “How do you bake a cake?” And we all know — in theory or practice — how to bake a cake. We need ingredients, and we infer that the better quality those ingredients are, the better quality the cake will be. We know that we have to mix and stir those ingredients, and we’re led to believe that the more thoroughly and conscientiously we combine them, the better the cake will taste. We know we have to cook the cake in an oven, and we figure that the more exact the temperature and timing, the better the cake will look.

So writers are taught to focus on ingredients and their combination. They’re told they should create attractive, sympathetic characters, so that readers will care about them deeply, and then to plunge those characters into situations of continuing peril, the descent into which is the mixing and stirring, and the duration and horrors of which are the timing and temperature.

But it’s really much simpler than that. “How do you bake a cake?” has the wrong structure. It’s too indirect. The right structure and the right question is: “How do you make your family hungry?”

And the answer is: You make them wait four hours for dinner.

As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer. (Which is what I did here, and you’re still reading, right?)

I found this quote by way of this video critiquing JJ Abrams's mystery box method:

The takeaway from this is, as a writer, you shouldn't be in the same boat as your readers. You're the storyteller. You should know the answer to the questions you're asking, and you should know how to string readers along. It's okay if your first draft doesn't have that. But a finished work should.

Abrams is said to be a fan of the franchises he's rebooted. Perhaps that's why the Star Wars sequel trilogy sucks. He emulated a feeling he had when he watched Star Wars. That feeling comes from having a layered story slowly revealed to your imagination. When the creator himself doesn't know where a story is headed, he's reduced to gimmickry. Sure, he may be excited and motivated throughout the creative process as a fan, but it has to culminate into something tangible for the audience to feel invested.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. For a free digital copy of my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here. I appreciate the support!

Beat this bug

I can't recall a time like this since 9/11. I'm anxious, and I've been praying a lot more. The threat from the coronavirus is real. My concern is those poo-pooing the crisis and demanding we all get back to work will create a second wave of cases in April that will dig a hole 10 times deeper than the one we find ourselves currently in. These arguments may hold sway over the president, but so far as I can tell the governors are singing a different tune. (Although Governor Cuomo's talk about New York enduring 9 months of quarantine isn't helping the case for containment.)

At this point I'm not counting on the federal government for economic relief. Their responsibility is and should be disaster response. Let the American people take care of each other. The social bonds of church and neighborhood will bear up many people through this crisis.

It's a cliche that the night is darkest before the dawn, but it's true. When things are at their worst, they can only get better. It's in hindsight that you recognize how you composed yourself during the worst of times was what carried the day. Weeks and months from now, we'll see in hindsight that our actions today saved millions of lives.

How? you may wonder, and with good reason. How we do this is not at all obvious. But you must understand we will pull through this.

I'm fond of CS Lewis's Space Trilogy. In the second book, Perelandra, the hero Ransom musters up the courage to literally fight the devil:

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can. If you're looking for something to do while social distancing, I invite you to read the first 4 chapters of my new book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!