potboiler (ˈpɒtˌbɔɪlɚ), n.
- (vulgar) A literary work of poor quality, produced quickly for profit.
- A story entertaining enough that people will pay to hear it.
- Fiction for the highest common denominator.
A play is a machine, one that manufactures meaning. It’s a staggeringly complex machine, and many of its moving parts are invisible to the untrained eye, but it is a machine nonetheless, and it operates on certain principles that have gone essentially unchanged for thousands of years.
Michael Mark Chemers, Ghost Light
Deep Dive
Deep Dive
Research
Semiotics
A Precog Reviews
When I was a kid, I wanted to be the guy who caught Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham is clever, empathethic, and has a high-stakes job that requires him to reconstruct another person's inner life, based on a close reading of limited evidence: a non-nerd novelist, in other words.
In that spirit, To Catch a Reader is an attempt to profile readers by studying the MOs of their favorite stories.
Asking questions like:
- Why does "The Grunt" dream about a suit of power armor?
- "The Nemesis" loved The Woman King, but not The Northman: what ingredients from the Braveheart formula made the difference?
- What does "The Superman" want with a Fortress of Solitude, and what's it have to do with his heat vision?
PlotSimmer
Why settle for just a word processor?
The 3x5 killer, now in development.
