For the last few weeks of the year, I’m going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today’s stories are from November:

* There was this article in Vanity Fair: “Robert McKee’s Unconvincing Story”. Its author Jason Zinoman provides the set-up:

In the process of working on a book about the history of the modern horror film, adapted from a story I wrote for Vanity Fair last year, I’ve talked to most of the great horror directors of the 60s and 70s. That led to an interest in writing my own scary movie. So, a few weeks ago, I file into a room on the 18th floor of a hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden at around eight a.m. along with about 100 lumpy, underdressed fellow writers to participate in McKee’s one-day seminar on how to write a thriller.

Zinoman’s main point is a critical assessment of McKee’s ideas — “So how does McKee get away with being repeatedly wrong while still charging $250 for his daylong course and $645 for four-day seminars?”

Many critics distinguish the horror film from the larger thriller genre by focusing on the peculiar dynamics of its plot or on the presence of a monster, supernatural or otherwise, but McKee locates the essence of horror in its protagonist, who, he argues, must not be a hero. In the original Alien, he says, Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, just wants to survive, which by McKee’s logic, makes Alien a horror film. But in the sequel, she becomes a hero and the film moves into the realm of action. Like many of McKee’s sweeping claims, this sounds plausible at first but does not hold up to scrutiny. Isn’t the stoic protagonist who fights off the zombies in Night of the Living Dead something of a hero? And what about the defiant scream queens who courageously stand up to and defeat the Jasons and Freddys and Michaels of the world? Can we really say that horror has no heroes? That depends, to some extent, on what you mean by “hero.” So, at a break in the session, I approach McKee and ask him to define the term. It’s a question that has been pondered by scholars and writers throughout the ages, but McKee dismisses it with a swing of his hand. “A hero,” he says in the voice of God, “is willing to sacrifice his life for another.”

Surely Ripley is fighting for the lives of her crew in Alien, right? Shouldn’t that make her a hero? Alien’s screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, for one, thinks Ripley qualifies as one.

We featured McKee in a conversation with another strident journalist here.

* New Yorker (11/16/09) had a fascinating article on F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Slow Fade,” by Arthur Krystal, who obtained access to a wealth of personal writings of Fitzgerald currently housed at the U. of South Carolina:

In July of 1937, Fitzgerald arrived in California to take a job at the M-G-M studio in Culver City. Fitzgerald lasted eighteen months at M-G-M, during which time he worked on five scripts, wrote another one more or less from scratch. The rap against Fitzgerald was that he couldn’t make the shift from words on the page to images on the screen. His plotting was elaborate without purpose; his dialogue arch or sentimental; and his tone too serious. On the face of it, he should have taken Hollywood by storm: he wrote commercially successful stories; he knew how to frame a scene; and his dialogue, at least in his best fiction, was smart, sophisticated, and evocative. Fitzgerald began trying to write for the movies as early as 1922, and yet, for all his efforts, he earned exactly one screen credit: a shared billing on “Three Comrades.”

If you could choose how to receive your favourite novel, how would you? Many of us have been programmed from childhood to accept that stories come on a page, as a book or on a screen, as a TV show or a movie. However new technologies are disrupting the publishing business as stories are downloaded to be consumed on e-readers, mobile devices and computer screens. Authors are increasingly “curators”, “story architects” or “experience designers” and are looking toward the creation of storyworlds rather than a linear stream. In addition, the relationship between consumers and media is changing as the value of print alters and the human tidal wave moving from print to screen-reading is causing seismic shifts in the way that entertainment and content is conceived and received.

The entertainment industries are no stranger to buzzwords. “Engagement”, “enhancement” and “immersion” have been bandied about over-zealously for years, but “transmedia” is one that’s sticking across a variety of mediums, especially publishing, and with good reason. Narratives are rapidly adapting to converge with digital publishing and transmedia storytelling offers options for readers and writers to engage and connect with stories. Whether you consider this a revolution or evolution, transmedia storytelling is beginning to change the way that books, film, TV and games are being developed and produced.

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There’s no doubt that these are times of radical changes and options are growing rapidly. Daily Lit emails novels page by page, Keitai – Japanese cell phone novels – are written, delivered and read on mobile devices, vook blends a book with video excerpts, with connectivity to friends through social media. Simon & Schuster recently published Promises by Jude Deveraux as a vook, Canongate released Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro as an iPhone app and Dutton harnessed ‘e’ when they published CSI writer, Anthony Zuiker’s Level 26, complete with calls-to-action drawing readers online to view cyber bridges. Reader interaction like this is shaping readers into active participants as they become engaged with the content, sometimes helping to shape or mash it.

“Transmedia.” Makes me wonder what Joseph Campbell would think about all this. I suspect he’d be excited about this aspect of globalization and storytelling on cross-platforms, making his theories about the universality of The Hero’s Journey even more relevant.

Tomorrow – some hidden gems I found in December.