The Inside Story

March 4th, 2010Blog0 comments

Hey writers and other wordtards, I just read this book a couple of times and I got a lot out of it: The Inside Story by Dr. Dara Marks.

Our good friend Dave suggested it to me so I picked it up right away. It’s about the transformational arc in a story — how a well crafted, intentionally designed story draws its characters, context, and conflicts from its core theme. It also concerns itself with studying character arcs — how change comes from a character’s internal conflict and reactions.

Okay, that was a lot of word spaghetti. But the great thing about this book is that it takes things that we all already inherently know and structures that information and organizes it. It gives these ideas names and allows us to be analytical about them. The book has already been extremely useful in helping me figure a few things out. So I recommend it.

I’m going through another Haruki Murakami phase. I go through one of these every five years or so, during which I get obsessed with Murakami and read 2-3 of his books. Then something else appears to distract me and I go read someone else.

I’m reading Norwegian Wood right now. One thing that books do very well is to give a long narrative impression of a human life. Movies aren’t very good at this, and TV can’t get you all the tiny, gritty details that a novel can. When you read a book you live with it for a while — you pick it up, put it down. You live in the protagonist’s skin in moments as you go through the motions of your own daily life. I think this is something Murakami really understands, and it shows in the ruminating nature of his work.

I think the only TV show that has ever come close to the ongoing complexity of a novel is The Wire. Which brings me to a very important confession:

I have seen every episode of The Wire except for the very last one. I have taken an oath to never, ever watch it. This fairly childish idea allows the show to live forever in my memory as an ongoing tale that never ended and never will end. I did not steal this idea from LOST. What happened was that I made the mistake of watching the very last episode of The Sopranos and I felt horrible for months afterwards. I will never be ready for some things to be over.

So back to Murakami: I will soon finish Norwegian Wood and then move on to Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart. Then something else will grab my attention. But in another five years the guy will probably have completed a couple more books, and the cycle will begin again.