Month: January 2021

I’m still fan boying Gillian Flynn and since I’ve read all she’s published I am reading books she has recommended. I found this link of her recommendations and latched onto the novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler.

I’m about half way through it. The most noticeable thing so far is how much the style of writing has changed since the 1970s. It’s a bit more formal, a bit more complex, definitely more adult but also more chaste. It was a strange time.

Give it a go.

I’ll admit that I wouldn’t have watched this if it weren’t for my wife. But then I would have missed a lesson in plotting. Whatever you want to say about the show, you can’t say that the plot isn’t complex.

The first episode set up in one hour so many narrative threads that when I looked back at it I was amazed by what they had done. Then as the show followed those threads they didn’t pull any cheats or deus ex machinas. As a guy who has written fairly straight stories and am now writing a more complex plot, I was blown away and had to applaud the writers.

Worth a watch.