Friday Five: Post Festive, Post Finking

1) As Pratchett once wrote, once you're trained to see symbols, you start to see them everywhere. So it seems to be with me and my thoughts on violence. I was only looking for the Pogue Colonel's quote in Full Metal Jacket and stumbled instead on this mini-essay on Private Joker and the Jungian Duality of Man. The author's stance is that for the entirety of Full Metal Jacket, Joker is trying to use ironic detatchment to deny the duality in himself that leads to him writing Natural Born Killer on his helmet and wearing a Peace symbol on his jacket, and that the scene in which the Pogue Colonel asks him about it is just highlighting this to make sense of the choices Joker makes. A thought-provoking read.

2) More central to writing is this twitter-thread from James Mangold on how he nearly made it, then nearly didn't, then did and the lessons he learned from that. It's a simple message - concentrate on your writing and its quality, not where it's going to take you - but an important one. And probably heard from him rather than me, so click on through.

3) On the theme of twitter threads, if people are looking for some inspiration and knowledge around the wider world, here's some good ones on African architecture and the origins of Aztec god names - and yes, twitter threads might be my favourite thing I've discovered this year.

4) This one probably isn't worth a whole article by itself, but I read a post on the 'rules' of foreshadowing the other day on a forum that stated nobody remembered foreshadowing from book 1 if its not used again until book 10. I read this approximately 3 minutes after finding examples of people doing just that with The Wheel of Time. Sure, this was the hardcore geeks at play, with the other hardcore geeks going "Oh wow, I missed that", but even so, it's not often I get to see somebody's certainty about writing proven wrong so quickly. Which is a good reminder that we shouldn't be thinking about writing in terms of absolutes, and that most rules are flawed in places. In the same thread, I saw someone say their critique group told them that no foreshadowing should be used unless its resolved in the same book. I'm sure there's some wisdom to the general gist of the idea, but as an absolute rule? R+L=J is all I have to say to that.

5) One final writing article to be shared for the year - Neil Gaiman's eight tips for writing short stories. I particularly like Number 3.