Which is Filled With Many Quotes

Well, I managed to get in my healthy dosage of fairy-tale today, thanks to a little help from the Turner Classic Movies channel--I'm not much of a television person, but I do love TCM. And Food Network, but let's skip over that for now, shall we?

After finishing classes early today (10:15!) I opted to catch the bus back to the apartment building where I live. The trip seemed unusually fast, but perhaps that was only due to how long it took yesterday. I spent the entire ride reading "Dune", which I borrowed on my last visit to the library. I'm still not sure if I like it or not, but I am reading it steadily anyway, and am around three hundred pages in. Herbert certainly has a different writing style to that I usually enjoy, but I think he's winning me over with the sheer glory of his imagination, as well as a few wonderful passages, such as this: "It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult." No thumbs up yet, though.

But I digress . . . When I arrived back at the apartment I worked for about half an hour on my novel, and then went to make myself some lunch. While eating, I turned on the television to see if an interesting classic movie was showing, and fortunately for me, TCM happened to be showing "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940)! 

Which, I am afraid, I had never heard of before, but which captured my interest pretty much instantly. Somewhat pathetic (but yeah, good-lookin' . . .) prince + Beautiful princess + Evil vizier dressed all in black + Tempermental genie + Plucky young thief + Arabian Nights-esque fantasy setting + Magic and Intrigue and Peril = Brilliant fun. Oh, and it has lines like this:

The Genie: "You're a clever little man, little master of the universe, but mortals are weak and frail. If their stomach speaks, they forget their brain. If their brain speaks, they forget their heart. And if their heart speaks [he laughs] they forget everything."

At a mere ten minutes in, I was wishing fervently that my six-year-old self had seen this film, because I know she would have been absolutely enchanted. As it is, I still enjoyed it very much, though I wished it was longer: the conflicts were resolved a little too quickly for my tastes. It isn't a perfect film. Still, if you haven't seen it yet, you should, because I think you would like it. It is certainly the closest any film has ever made me feel as though I were actually reading a fairy tale. And I never knew that Disney's "Aladdin" was a copy-cat :(

Now I suppose I will set myself to finish my homework, and then return to writing. I found a fantastic quote about writing today, from Neil Gaiman of all people (read his poem 'Instructions' if you have not already, it's beautiful. I plan to copy it out one day to hang on my wall, and the wall of my children's nursery, if I ever do have children):

"You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different."

I think this is a very perceptive observation. So many books I read seem somewhat drab and lifeless, and I have difficulty pinning down why. I think this might be a part of it: Their descriptions do not illuminate what is distinctive about whatever images they have in their head (especially when it comes to characters), but instead err in one of two ways. Either they under-describe, or they over-describe, and either way it jars me out of my immersion in whatever world they were trying to suck me into. Perhaps that doesn't make sense. But it is part of why I love J.R.R. Tolkien so much; that he can describe Strider only as lean and keen-eyed, and yet I know instantly what he looks like and what he will act like. It's uncanny, but it's the magic of being a storyteller: to judge accurately how much a reader needs to be told to really see what is going on, and tell them exactly the right amount. This is why too, I think, I enjoy old epics and tales so much, because of the sparse yet lyrical descriptions (e.g. 'Swift-footed Achilles', 'Roland is fierce, and Oliver is wise') that manage to tell you exactly who these characters are. Food for thought, I suppose; what do you writers think?