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[Shamelessly lifted from boingboing. (In my well-they-did-it-first defense, it had already bounced around a number of blogs before arriving there.) I thought these rules work well for short films, too, with the possible exception of Rule #8. -sn]

Here’s some lovely advice on writing short stories, from Kurt Vonnegut’s collection, Bagombo Snuff Box:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.*
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

*which is to say, create or resolve tension.

My YouTube find of the month:

A while back, I posted Closing Moves on YouTube but never posted it here. Just in case any of you haven’t yet seen it, here it is. The resolution isn’t as high as the download on the official Closing Moves site, but you don’t need Quicktime 7 to watch the video on YouTube.

Here is the direct URL to the video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWEGVgbolbM

Feel free to share widely!

Monday nights are starting to be my movie night out while my wife runs her Creative Memories scrapbooking workshops at our home.

This week I saw The Lives of Others, winner of yesterday’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This claustrophobic story about Wiesler (a top East German Stasi officer), Dreyman (a prominent law-abiding playwright), and Sieland (a leading stage actress and Dreyman’s lover) begins in East Germany a few years before the wall came down and ends a few years after. When Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman for a party official, both become enmeshed in a drama which eventually places all three at odds with the state. Significantly ratcheting up the suspense is the ever-present paranoia — experienced by both Stasi and their prey — of life in East Germany.

The acting, especially that of Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, is outstanding. Mühe is able to portray Wiesler’s awakening human emotions while somehow maintaining the cold, emotionless facade necessary for his job.

Both a remarkable character study as well as a political thriller — replacing the physical violence of a Bourne Identity with subterfuge and an omnipresent threat of physical and psychological violence — this film is a slow burn gripper. Highly recommended.

I regularly follow A.O. Scott’s movie reviews in The New York Times (here is his review), but if you’d like to see a more comprehensive list of reviews for any particular movie, check out Rotten Tomatoes (and here are those other reviews).

I received Alice Munro’s collection of short stories Carried Away for Christmas this year.  The first story I read was the last story in the book, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” published in consecutive issues of The New Yorker in late 1999 and early 2000.  Powerful story, very well-told.  If you’re short on time, skip the rest of this posting…heck, skip reading any more of anything…until you’ve read this short story.

If this story is a fair representation of Alice Munro’s writing, I’m embarrassed that it has taken me until now to discover her writing.  The story is featured in a wonderful review (published in New York Times in 2004) of Runaway.

This story would make a great movie.  So upon returning home from vacation I start looking up Alice Munro to find out more about her (and whether she might be amenable to optioning her stories for film)…only to discover that the story has just been made into a film (Away from Her, starring Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, and Michael Murphy and directed by Sarah Polley).  It will be released in the U.S. in May 2007.  Too bad for me. 

Silver lining: It will be interesting to see how the story has been translated to the screen, compared with how I envisioned it.

2/2/2007 Update: A friend returned recently from Sundance, where he saw and liked Away from Her. “Great performances, moving film,” says he.