May 2022 Newsletter

Click here to subscribe to this newsletter and receive it each month in your very own inbox.

Welcome to the May 2022 edition of author David Claiborne’s newsletter, a monthly publication about stakes and hell month.

Last month I wrote about one of Pixar’s latest movies, Turning Red. Specifically about how it failed to establish the stakes required to invest an audience fully in the conflict. It turns out that red pandas are relatively harmless, so they don’t make great adversarial plot devices. Try this evidence on if you don’t believe me.

Continuing my trend of being a writer who writes about writing, and lest someone think I only write about bad writing, or even writing that merely needs to stay in the oven a few more minutes, this time I want to write about the latest Spider-man movie: No Way Home. By the way, if someone can explain to me why “Spider-man” is hyphenated, but “Superman” is one word, I would be grateful. Also, this is more a rhetorical request, meaning I don’t really want someone to explain it to me.

Spider Men

I implied that the latest Spider-man movie has some good writing, which you might interpret as an endorsement of the movie. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, the existence of the internet had spoiled all the cool surprises by the time I got around to watching it, which probably decreased my enjoyment factor. (Seriously, when did it stop being gauche to post spoiler headlines and photos from a movie that’s still in theaters in your news feed?) As one of the characters says, lower your expectations and you’ll never be disappointed, advice I failed to heed. I didn’t come away thinking it was as good as I was led to believe. I thought it was better than the second Tom Holland-led pic, and probably about as good as the first one led by the same guy. (Tobey Maguire movies one and two remain my favorites.) It has at least one specific moment of good writing which I want to touch on, but I wouldn’t call it great.

Anyway, on with the show. As one who eschews all things gauche, consider this your warning that I’ll be spoiling this movie like milk that expired last year.

What was so great about the writing? In contrast to Turning Red, No Way Home gives the title character a meaningful choice to make with significant consequences.

Peter Parker enlists Dr. Strange to help make the world forget that he’s Spider-man after the villain Mysterio tells the world his secret identity. Peter botches the attempt and ends up summoning everyone who knows he’s Spider-man into his reality, including the most recent living Spider-men along with their villains. By the end of the movie, Dr. Strange must use all his power to hold reality together and prevent an entire universe of Spider-men and villains from invading. To stop the influx, Peter proposes the solution of making the entire world forget who he is altogether, not just that he’s Spider-man. Dr. Strange informs him that no one at all will remember him if he goes through with it. Not his best friend, not his girlfriend MJ, not the Avengers, not the people at MIT where’s he’s applying for college. No one. (His aunt May is out of the picture at this point.) Peter must choose between protecting his world’s reality and being an absolute nobody. At least no one will remember that he’s Spider-man. Indeed, by the end no one remembers him at all.

Those are powerful stakes. That’s something to get an audience invested in what happens to the character. My only gripe is that they should have introduced this option earlier in the movie rather than at the end. That would have given Peter the additional burden of fighting against inevitability, and the idea wouldn’t seem to be coming out of nowhere from the audience’s perspective.

It’s also something of a neat little cheat since it allows the studio, Sony Pictures in this case, who still owns the Spider-man character even if Disney seems to own everything else in the world, to cut ties with the larger Marvel Universe if it so desires. Cynically, Sony now has a narrative-driven reason to pries its most popular comic book character back from the House of Mouse and make movies on its own without needing to make a deal first with the most powerful entertainment company on the globe. The post-credit scene which features Tom Hardy’s Venom indicates they intend to do just that. But I’ll give them a pass since the story works.

Various

As I said last month, my editor delivered Part Two’s manuscript to me on March 24^th (did I mention he’s a professional?), meaning that all the work has been squarely back in my lap since then. By way of a tangent, at my old job April used to be the busiest month of the year bar none. October was a close second, but still didn’t compare. I thought when I got out of that line of work that April would return to something resembling normalcy. Much like the post-pandemic society that wants to but has not quite arrived yet, April continues to be hell month; that is, an extremely difficult month of the year as opposed to a month devoted to the Lake of Fire. My wife’s work has always been at its busiest in April, and this year was no different for her. Her busyness becomes my busyness, which is a long way of saying that I haven’t made much progress on editing. However, all the tiny students at the university no longer have to call her “doctor” and may address her by her first name now, which means I hope to have my evenings back to work on all things book. We’re still on schedule for a summer release, however.

The full audiobook for Planet Mission: Part One is up on YouTube now. Go give it a listen. You can subscribe to my channel for free here. 

You can find my Amazon page here.

Follow me on Facebook here.

Follow me on Instagram here.

You can subscribe to my newsletter here. You get a free short story as a bonus for signing up.

In Closing

Remember, the stakes are important. Let them be known at the beginning if you can, but by all means make sure they’re present. Mothers are also important, so make sure to tell yours happy Mothers Day!

David