Up in the Air (2009)

A. Papatya Bucak, my professor and thesis chair, whose blog “Reading for Writers” is one of this blog’s progenitors, has a keen eye for spotting overused literary devices. I once overheard that she wrote a paper about the preponderance of literary heroines who commit suicide. Commenting on one of my stories, she spotted a female character with a need for intimacy, which immediately suggests a gender stereotype. Does her comment mean that we can never have females with a need for intimacy?

If you intend to generate reader interest for your fiction primarily on the basis of “freshness” and originality, I think it does.

If your female character has only one dimension, the desire for intimacy, and nothing else to complicate her character, I think you’ve made the mistake I made in my aforementioned story.

If you create a female character who has a need for intimacy, among other needs—that is to say, a more complex set of desires—I think you’re okay.

The topic at hand is not female stereotypes. The topic at hand is overused literary devices. Up in the Air uses the familiar device of sending a character home, “back to his roots.” Up in the Air portrays home as nearly all films—especially those marketing themselves as artistic or independent. Home is a small, rural town populated with bleak, stifling, and culturally deaf family and friends (as if those types can't be found in cities). It’s always a place “sophisticated” characters have outgrown. Is this more or less true of small town America? That’s not the point. The point is we see it over and over and over again and it gets boring.

A more specific aspect of the “small town” Up in the Air and most other films give us is the “broken family.” In the broken family brothers and sisters don’t speak, divorces are contagious, and the bills barely get paid. It’s “real life”…I get it.

I’m not trying to get all Fox News-ish, though. I’d hate a fiction that blindly praises “Main Street USA” without ever recognizing its limitations. I think it’d be quite refreshing to see “small town” life treated with more complexity, rather than a forgettable and regrettable childhood memory.

Anyway, I suppose this is an argument for awareness. A good writer identifies patterns in other works and makes sure to avoid them in her own.

Charade (1963)

Characterization Characterization Characterization. This is the mantra for fiction writers of “the program era.” At its most basic, characterization asks that we “round out” our characters with both good and bad personality traits, that we make them neither entirely “good” nor entirely “evil.” But, characterization also means “give me interesting characters—characters who will make me turn the page.”

One way to create characters who make a reader a turn the page, or a viewer forget she is eating her popcorn, is to endow them with charm. Charade, with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, remains modern despite the absence of triple flipping body doubles and exploding helicopters because its characters have charm.

Hepburn and Grant have large whites around their irises and slow blinking eyelids, but appearance, the textbooks tell us, is not the only aspect of characterization we writers need give attention. Speech deserves equal importance (as do thought and action).

One aspect of speech that makes Hepburn and Grant appealing is their ability to deliver one-liners at seemingly inopportune times. My favorite lines from this film seem to rescue moments of tension. For instance, in an early squabble, Hepburn shouts to Grant “You know what’s wrong with you?” “What?” he asks seemingly caught off guard. She pauses, blinking ever s0 slowly: “Nothing.”

Later, during another spat over dinner, Grant says, “Oh, you should see your face right now.” “What’s wrong with it?” Hepburn asks, touching it, reaching for a mirror. “It’s lovely,” he says.

There is a pattern to these exchanges. They occur in moments of tension. They begin with a misdirection—an oncoming insult. And then they deliver an unexpected and just cheesy enough compliment. (One-liners, I think, always need a little bit of cheese sprinkled on top. Just enough so that they can be consumed lightly.)

So, being the unoriginal imitator that I am, I impersonated Hepburn once. “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” I asked a girl. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me,” she said.

Oops.

But this exchange taught me a lesson. Charming as these two characters may be, they are not without insecurities. And the types of exchanges I’ve discussed fail unless the insecurities arise. What I find unique about charmers is that quite often they allow their insecurities to become strengths of character.