on snakes and tails
the best part of Knives Out (there are many best parts of Knives Out; it is a movie comprised exclusively of best-parts glued together with a southern drawl and a sly wink) is the coffee mug. in the opening shot of the movie the camera lingers on a mug with the words “my house, my rules, my coffee” in goofy red font. it catches your eye because it’s so tacky, because the rest of the set is all class and money and there’s this ugly-ass dollar-store mug proclaiming power in a way that the genuinely powerful rarely do because they don’t have to.
you don’t think about that mug again until the final scene, when (SPOILER) the former maid takes a slow sip from it as she contemplates everything that now belongs to her: the coffee, the house, the rules themselves.
i think i might have cackled out loud when i saw it. i might have fist-pumped. partly it was the simple but pure delight of seeing undeserving rich people stripped of their wealth--another best part of Knives Out is the reading of the will--but partly it was the deep satisfaction of watching a wild sprawl of story resolve itself into a perfect, clean circle.
i feel like there’s probably a term for this that i don’t know because i’ve never taken a writing class. it’s the thing where a story echoes with itself, where every stray hair is tucked neatly into place, nothing wasted, nothing forgotten. it sounds like it would feel contrived or mechanical, and maybe it does when it’s done poorly. but done right--there’s nothing like it. it’s a key in a lock, a snake swallowing its own tail.
there’s not very much writing that really, truly feels like this. i seem to find it more often in short stories and film, probably because word limits encourage a certain economy. my best example right now is Paddington 2 (i’m serious). it’s like a perfect little music box of a movie, where every action ripples and repeats and every character trait exists for a reason. or the first Pirates of the Caribbean (i’m still serious), which is terrible and absurd but also invents its own mythology and believes in it with admirable, self-referential abandon. the pirate’s code. parley. leverage. will turner’s unlikely but useful ability to throw swords in such a way that they bury themselves point-first in wooden objects. even the soundtrack plays along, repeating the same adventurous notes every time someone is about to do something incredibly stupid.
i don’t have a lesson here, except that i want to do that. i want my stories to echo against themselves and i don’t know how. (if any of you know the secret, please do tell me. i will make an embarrassing fortune writing perfect stories and mention you in the acknowledgements of all my books). i bet it take lots of rewriting--returning to the beginning and weaving your endings into the opening, tucking away every stray hair of story. i bet it helps to look at what you’ve already written as you write. to pull from your own mythology rather than constantly, exhaustively inventing new things and places and people.
i bet it’s one of those things you do best when you’re not trying too hard, like ping pong or baking. i am haunted by the memory of salinger’s glass brothers playing marbles in the magic hour before dusk, and seymour advising his brother: “could you try not aiming so much?” bastard. he was probably right.
news
there’s a lot this month! i am compelled to use many more exclamation points than i normally would!! in an effort to communicate the anxious, guilty glee i feel toward my own good fortune!!! The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. this means that mary robinette kowal (mary robinette kowal) called me on the phone (the phone) and i cried (while on the phone with mary robinette kowal). 2019 was a phenomenal year in SFF publishing, and it’s an absurd honor to be nominated alongside arkady martine, tamsyn muir, sarah pinsker, silvia moreno-garcia, and charles gannon.
also….my next title and cover were revealed at bookriot!! and it’s. so. beautiful. it’s tangled and thorned, with venom hidden among the vines, and i can’t tell you how well it suits the book i wrote. it was designed by lisa marie pompilio at Orbit Books, and reader? i would die for her.
The Once and Future Witches comes out in October of this year (this year). i talked a little more about the book here.
other reading
this tweet and accompanying video--a compilation of all the bananapants questions asked on the 90s show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction--is maybe the funniest thing i’ve ever seen. the internet was leading up to this point, and it’s all downhill from here.
i’m supposed to be reading a bunch of exciting books for blurbing, but instead i got swallowed whole by tasha suri’s Books of Ambha series: Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash. they were both absolutely fucking great. the perfect combination of indulgent, heart-fluttery romance and high-stakes epic fantasy. sometimes (always) all i want in the world is to watch a woman save (or destroy) an empire while falling for a gentle, tortured man trying desperately to be good in a cruel world.