A few random things for this week:
- Clinical psychologist rips Fifty Shades a new one – This article, “Fifty Shades of Grey Giving Bondage a Bad Name,” is an opinion piece written by a clinical psychologist and published in the Sydney Morning Herald. In a nutshell, the author, who in 2006 published what at the time was the largest empirical psychological study on people in the BDSM community, doesn’t have a lot of great things to say about the book. While I agree with her on most counts — that the sex is “boring, repetitive, and leads women to aspire to undesirable and frankly unattainable goals,” that “in BDSM terms, Grey is a lightweight,” and that “Fifty Shades is just another bodice ripper,” I disagree that it demonizes BDSM and the people who practice it. Although I haven’t read all three books (I’ve skimmed most of the first two), from what I’ve read, it’s the protagonist who thinks it’s terrible (or odd, or unusual) at first, not the author. The protagonist becomes a convert, at least to an extent.
Of course, her argument that the book gives the (false) impression that all people who practice BDSM are psychologically disturbed is not without merit. As a writer, I’m inclined to defend the author, purely from a standpoint of a good story needing good conflict. If Christian Grey was emotionally stable, Fifty Shades couldn’t have sustained a trilogy — nor would it have galvanized a bidding war for the movie rights.
Regardless, it’s an interesting article. Check it out.
- 5 Ways to Know If You’re Showing or Telling – Although the section on “dialogue tags” contradicts itself, lots of good suggestions here for improving writing quality.
- A few weeks ago I was involved in a Facebook discussion about how gay characters are portrayed on screen.
Then on Sunday I attended a script reading and listened to a script by someone completely unconnected to the community above, who wrote a script where the main character was gay and one of the points of the script is that his gayness was “not the driving force of the movie.” Coincidence or alien plot? You decide.
