Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first book but in its format. In adopting the medium of fantasy, an author hopes to convince the reader not with the poignant accuracy of his images and characterizations, as in realistic fiction, but with the subtle, subliminal--but equally poignant--truth underlying the fabrication of plot and character. Kafka, Borges, Lem and Marquez succeed on this secondary level by treading a thin line between fantasy and realism--in The Castle, for example. Kafka's careful use of language preserves this ambiguity: the reader is never quite sure of what to accept as plausible, and what to reject as implausible...
...took him by surprise. It crept up behind him. It crushed him by the weight of its blow: the need for a plot. He left his typewriter and consulted the books in his den. Certainly one of them should provide a plot worth appropriating. He leafed through his books--all manuals. He had airplane manuals, car manuals, weapons manuals. And of course, a tattered sex manual. His head filled with story ideas, confidence renewed, he returned to his writing desk...
IMAGINATION did not agree with Liddy. He grew pale, his throat throbbed, irregularity plagued him. Still, he made no progress. On April 24, at 2:37 p.m., inspiration attacked. While thumbing through a Robert Ludlum novel, it hit him--characters. He swiftly plugged them into the plot: the "very Nordic" Rick Rand, suave financial genius; the "very oriental" T'sa Li, Rick's sex-hungry girlfriend; Mikhail Sarkov, KGB agent posing as multinational chairman Greg Ballinger; T'ang Li, T'sa Li's mammoth brother and Kung Fu expert. Liddy threw in a mafia don and several Company people because...
None of the set pieces have much to do with the plot, which has Moore as a composer growing bored with his longtime inamorata (Julie Andrews). His discontent takes the form of an obsession with a lovely creature (Bo Derek) whom he briefly glimpses in bridal gown and veil on her way to her wedding and ranks at the top of the familiar l-to-10 scale...
...plot summary can so easily capture the real McGee. One of the most complex long-run characters in American fiction, he is moody, sensuous, suspicious, quixotic, cynical, compassionate-and funny. He has achieved independence from "plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, checklists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, Junior Chambers of Commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny." Hence his license to purge iniquity. Unlike most of his fictional colleagues, the creaky crusader visibly ages. "He grows older at about one-third the natural rate," says...