(A MacGuffin is a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but the details of which are of little or no importance otherwise.
The element that distinguishes a MacGuffin from other types of plot devices is that it is not important what the object specifically is. Anything that serves as a motivation will do. The MacGuffin might even be ambiguous. Its importance is accepted by the story's characters, but it does not actually have any effect on the story. It can be generic or left open to interpretation.
The MacGuffin is common in films, especially thrillers. Commonly, though not always, the MacGuffin is the central focus of the film in the first act, and later declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out. Sometimes the MacGuffin is all but forgotten by the end of the film.)
The whole point of the MacGuffin is that it is irrelevant. In Hitchcock's own words, the MacGuffin is:
the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after... The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they're of no importance whatsoever.
Angus McPhail, who may have been the first to coin the term, explained its meaning with a nonsense story. Two men were travelling on a train from London to Scotland. An odd shaped package sat on the luggage rack above their seat.
"What have you there?" asked one of the men.
Oh, that's a MacGuffin," replied his companion.
"What's a MacGuffin?"
"It's a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands."
"But there aren't any lions in the Scottish Highlands!"
"Well, then, I guess that's no MacGuffin!"
The MacGuffin is the engine that sets the story in motion. It can be anything, or nothing at all. In The 39 Steps, it is "secrets vital to your air defence"; in Number Seventeen it is a valuable piece of jewellery, while in The Lady Vanishes it is, in the most perfectly abstract of all Hitchcock's MacGuffins, a coded message contained in a piece of music.
Hitchcock didn't invent the MacGuffin, but he made it his own, employing it time and again throughout his career. Nowadays, it is so closely associated with him that when it is used by others, as for example in Roman Polanski's very Hitchcockian Frantic (1988), it is often seen as either homage to, or a theft from, Hitchcock.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Moderne Papiamentstalige sprookjes van Roy Evers
Bestia ta meskos ku hende
Nan ta mira, nan ta tende
Tambe nan tin mashá maña
Un kos sí, nan no sa gaña
Dieren zijn precies als mensen, maar zij liegen niet.
Dat zegt Kompader in zijn nieuwste boek: ‘Komehein ta traha kas pa prikichi buta aden’. Het boek bevat een twintigtal verhalen (kuenta di gañagaña) waarin Curaçaose dieren - Wan Yuana, Linchi Chinchirinchi, Ton Raton, etc. – de hoofdrol spelen.
Op Curaçao kennen wij de traditie van de verhalen van de listige spin Kompa Nanzi, die op soms machiavellistische wijze zijn voordeel weet te behalen uit allerlei situaties en iedereen te slim af is. De dieren in de verhalen van Kompader daarentegen lijken allemaal op alledaagse Curaçaose mensen, met hun deugden en ondeugden, hun goede en slechte kanten. Het loopt ook niet altijd goed af met hen.
Het boek is op een bijzondere wijze ontworpen door de bekende kunstenares Ariadne Faries. De kunstenares heeft met haar foto’s de essentie van de verhalen weergeven.
Alhoewel de foto’s uit het dagelijkse herkenbare Curaçaose leven komen, is het verband tussen tekst en beeld op een abstracte, diepgaande manier te ervaren.
Het zou een leuke uitdaging zijn voor de lezer om het verband tussen verhaal en illustratie te ontdekken.
De redactie was in handen van de taalkundige Reginald Römer, zelf auteur van het boek ‘Papiamentu kulto i kastiso’.
Het boek is vanaf zaterdag 3 mei te koop in de boekhandels.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Een interview met Ian Fleming (schrijver van James Bond verhalen) in 1962
HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER
By Ian Fleming
People often ask me, "How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have." I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don't think there is anything very odd about that.
We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them
from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.
The first was the attempt on Bond's life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one con-tained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.
One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.
Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen's life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.
So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.
One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work - whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat - I was about to get married - a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.
The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.
But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the
typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.
I write for about three hours in the morning - from about 9:30 till 12:30and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.
I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500
words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.
I don't even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.
When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.
They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.
Such mistakes are really nobody's fault except the author's, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a dig at the author's vanity to realise how quickly the reader's eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.
But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?
First of all, they are financial. You don't make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a successful writer is a good life. You don't have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around
you.
Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.
By Ian Fleming
People often ask me, "How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have." I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don't think there is anything very odd about that.
We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them
from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.
The first was the attempt on Bond's life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one con-tained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.
One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.
Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen's life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.
So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.
One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work - whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat - I was about to get married - a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.
The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.
But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the
typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.
I write for about three hours in the morning - from about 9:30 till 12:30and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.
I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500
words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.
I don't even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.
When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.
They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.
Such mistakes are really nobody's fault except the author's, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a dig at the author's vanity to realise how quickly the reader's eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.
But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?
First of all, they are financial. You don't make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a successful writer is a good life. You don't have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around
you.
Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Konosé bo Isla 2008-04: Vroegere tijden
Het voorlaatste couplet van het gedicht ‘Nonze su kantika di tambú’ van Pierre Lauffer luidt:
Ata nan ta toka kachu,
pa mañan mi paga ple,
tira piki den baranka,
fish’i araña pa busá.
Vraag: Wat werd vroeger bedoeld met ‘paga ple’?
Sluitingsdatum: zondag 4 mei 2008
Prijs: een cadeaubon van Candy Barrel.
Sponsor: Datelnet n.v.
(Het inzenden van het antwoord op de prijsvraag gebeurt via e-mail:
revers@cura.net
of door een reply op de door U ontvangen mail van Learnforfun. De winnaar wordt door loting bepaald uit de goede inzendingen.)
Ata nan ta toka kachu,
pa mañan mi paga ple,
tira piki den baranka,
fish’i araña pa busá.
Vraag: Wat werd vroeger bedoeld met ‘paga ple’?
Sluitingsdatum: zondag 4 mei 2008
Prijs: een cadeaubon van Candy Barrel.
Sponsor: Datelnet n.v.
(Het inzenden van het antwoord op de prijsvraag gebeurt via e-mail:
revers@cura.net
of door een reply op de door U ontvangen mail van Learnforfun. De winnaar wordt door loting bepaald uit de goede inzendingen.)
Konosé bo Isla 2008-03: antwoord
Antwoord: Para di Yonchi
Er zijn 19 inzendingen, waarvan 15 goed:
Elodie Voorbraak
Leendert Pengel
Martha van Bergen
Jules Marchena
Delilah Eugenio
Papi Lareine
Nicole Hagemans
Solange Nijdam
Elaine Con
L.J.Chr. Dee
Ini Statia
Alexei Sleur
Loeki Peters
Niels Augusta
Maja Drenthe
Joan Augusta
Mathilde van de Beek
Tilly Peters
Madelyn Francisco
Iedereen bedankt voor het meedoen.
De winnaar is Papi Lareine
Er zijn 19 inzendingen, waarvan 15 goed:
Elodie Voorbraak
Leendert Pengel
Martha van Bergen
Jules Marchena
Delilah Eugenio
Papi Lareine
Nicole Hagemans
Solange Nijdam
Elaine Con
L.J.Chr. Dee
Ini Statia
Alexei Sleur
Loeki Peters
Niels Augusta
Maja Drenthe
Joan Augusta
Mathilde van de Beek
Tilly Peters
Madelyn Francisco
Iedereen bedankt voor het meedoen.
De winnaar is Papi Lareine
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Een uniek verhaal van L.J.Chr. Dee, een trouwe deelnemer aan de prijsvragen
Leo:
Onderstaand een uniek gedicht, dat Godfried Bomans maakte in opdracht van de AVRO. Iedere deelnemer aan het 40-jarig bestaan van de AVRO in het jaar 1963 kreeg dit als aandenken op een bord. Volgens mij is dit gedicht nergens gepubliceerd.
Al eeuwen was de hemel vol geluiden
vol blinde beelden en een zwijgend lied
Geen wezen wist dit heim'lijk schrift te duiden
wij waren doof, wij zagen 't niet
Nu zien wij wel en kunnen 't horen
maar waak, o mens en heb de moed
uw eigen stem niet te verstoren
en houd uw beeld in d'overvloed
Roy:
Als het gedicht niet gepubliceerd is, heb je het dan van eerste hand? Gelezen van het bordje?
Leo:
Juist, want ik was 1 van de deelnemers aan dat feest en heb het bordje nog steeds. Hoe kwam je daar dan bij, zal je zeggen? Ik was een verwoed danser en mijn dansschool had een formation van allerlei dansen door de jaren heen gedaan ter ere van het zoveel jarig bestaan van de MMS (Middelbare Meisjesschool). Daarna moesten we een medaltest voor zilver of goud doen en onze examinator was naar ik meen ene Albert van Linge. Voor hem deden we die formation nog even en hij vond dat zo leuk, dat hij ons uitnodigde voor AVRO-40 alwaar wij de dans Madison (toen modern maar nu in de vergetelheid) moesten doen in de Expohal in Hilversum. Zo is het gekomen. Later heb ik nog met een medestudent van het Gymnasium op een kerstbal een demonstratie van de Samba gegeven. Gelukkig, dat m'n geheugen nog goed is. Hihi.
Onderstaand een uniek gedicht, dat Godfried Bomans maakte in opdracht van de AVRO. Iedere deelnemer aan het 40-jarig bestaan van de AVRO in het jaar 1963 kreeg dit als aandenken op een bord. Volgens mij is dit gedicht nergens gepubliceerd.
Al eeuwen was de hemel vol geluiden
vol blinde beelden en een zwijgend lied
Geen wezen wist dit heim'lijk schrift te duiden
wij waren doof, wij zagen 't niet
Nu zien wij wel en kunnen 't horen
maar waak, o mens en heb de moed
uw eigen stem niet te verstoren
en houd uw beeld in d'overvloed
Roy:
Als het gedicht niet gepubliceerd is, heb je het dan van eerste hand? Gelezen van het bordje?
Leo:
Juist, want ik was 1 van de deelnemers aan dat feest en heb het bordje nog steeds. Hoe kwam je daar dan bij, zal je zeggen? Ik was een verwoed danser en mijn dansschool had een formation van allerlei dansen door de jaren heen gedaan ter ere van het zoveel jarig bestaan van de MMS (Middelbare Meisjesschool). Daarna moesten we een medaltest voor zilver of goud doen en onze examinator was naar ik meen ene Albert van Linge. Voor hem deden we die formation nog even en hij vond dat zo leuk, dat hij ons uitnodigde voor AVRO-40 alwaar wij de dans Madison (toen modern maar nu in de vergetelheid) moesten doen in de Expohal in Hilversum. Zo is het gekomen. Later heb ik nog met een medestudent van het Gymnasium op een kerstbal een demonstratie van de Samba gegeven. Gelukkig, dat m'n geheugen nog goed is. Hihi.
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