Hi all It’s great that a place like this exists and I’m excited to have joined. I usually write short stories, but I’m trying to write more poetry and flash fiction. I’m currently doing a master’s degree in creative writing (with publishing), which is demanding but fun. I look forward to getting stuck in with the workshopping.
Hello and welcome! You've come to the right place for support and encouragement in your writing journey. And we have flash, short story and poetry contests, hope to see you there. Looking forward to seeing you in the forums!
Noir by any chance? Or I suppose neo-noir if you're writing it now. I became obsessed with that quite suddenly a few years ago—movies at first, and then bought a bunch of books. I've only read a couple of the stories so far though.
Heloo @Bodeddy We host contests rather regularly so you can always practise your hand at those. The current one is Christmas themed you can enter here https://www.writingforums.org/threads/poetry-contest-386-uninvited-christmas-guest.176341/ (make sure before 31st). Bearing in mind your writing will be read and judged by other members here if you enter a contest. If you’d rather receive constructive criticism, you can post to the workshop but you need to make two critiques first if you decide to post to the workshop. If you decide to submit something to the contest, you can’t post it to the workshop because submissions made to the contest are anonymous and that would be a giveaway. Look forward to seeing more from you.
I'm not quite sure yet. I do like the idea of writing neo-noir, but I've also read The big sleep, which I loved. In fact, I want to read more of the pulp literature from the mid-twentieth century, especially the Mike Hammer books by Spillane. Do you have any recommendations for the neo-noir stuff? Movies or books.
*Rubs hands together and prepares to make a long post, decides to eat breakfast first* I could go on at great length about this—movies mostly—but I'll try to whittle it down somewhat. My own obsession started when I vaguely remembered a movie called Body Heat from the 80's with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. I remembered it being good and very stylish, so I got the blu-ray. And from the BTS I learned it was a neo-noir. I tend toward obsessivness about the things I like, so I started looking into it and getting more movies. Recommendations— Noir: Just about anything with Bogart in it. The ones I've seen and liked— Casablanca To Have and Have Not The Big Sleep Maltese Falcon Also Veronica Lake. She never played a femme fatale, though you'll see all over the internet that she did. I got all her noir-related movies plus a few more, and she was always a real sweetheart, sort of an earthbound angel trying to help the lead actor in most cases. Her films I like: The Blue Dahlia This Gun For Hire (really good one) The Glass KeyAnd not a noir, but a romantic comedy called I Married a Witch that was the source for both Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie a couple decades later. All the well-known noir detectives, in particular Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer. It turns out the detective stories/movies are different from actual noir, if you go by the definitions. Technically a noir (black film or story) is about a character who's doomed because he has no moral code, he's fallen into moral decadence and is already done, he just doesn't know it yet. But the detectives (for the most part anyway) have a strict moral code that saves them from this fate. They have the strength of will to reject the advances and avoid the traps of the femme fatale, which lesser men in the noir world lack. And they can always take effective action when needed and plot their way through tricky situations. You know what, it's hard to remember the names of a lot of these. I need to look in the movie boxes and make a little list. Can't do this just from my failing memory. Ok, list follows: Murder my Sweet The Postman Always Rings Twice Decoy I found it on a little 2-movie collection called Classic Crime Collection, released by Warner Bros, with a (not nearly as good) movie called Crime Wave Kiss Me Deadly Gilda Detour Nightmare Alley Double Indemnity My starter kit was a really excellent set called Film Noir 10 Movie Collection (subtitle 10 Movie Spotlight Collection) released by Universal. Highly recommended, and several of the movies I've already listed are included on it. I would start here. Neo Noir: Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway) The Long Goodbye a Phillip Marlowe movie starring Elliott Gould Postman remake starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange The Last Seduction Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter—on a Hannibal Lecter collection with a third movie that was crap Fargo Blood Simple Brick starring Joseph Gordon Levitt The Hot Spot starring Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame and Jennifer Connely Chinatown Many movies we're all familiar with turn out to be neo-noirs (Hah! I'll bet The Matrix is one come to think of it). Terminator 2 is one. Think about it, the dance club was called Tech Noir, and Cameron apparently created a new genre of that name with this movie. Finally a couple of comic-book related entries that also have movies or Netflix series based on them— Daredevil Jessica Jones Sin City Wow, a lot of writing, and I even had to get up and go do some research for this one. Enough for the day. If you have questions just ask.
I've got a few blog entries with some good info on noir if you're interested: Notes on Neo-Noir (and The First Two Terminators) Looking into Film Noir, found some good articles Getting a fix on what Film Noir is
I should also add this link: Black Mask Magazine @ Archive.org Black Mask published noir fiction, or maybe hardboiled, but it at least included a lot of noir. Nice to be able to browse through such a huge collection and read whatever grabs your fancy for free.
One more link, this time a story, and it's online for free reading. This is a story I really like from a book called The Hardboiled Omnibus. Originally from Black Mask magazine: Sail @ Archive.org I wrote up some stuff about it a while back on this thread: Hard boiled fiction inner dialogue and dialogue Lol, in fact I did the thing I did here, where I make a bunch of posts in a row. I do that sometimes. I went into some detail about inner monologue and objective POV in hardboiled fiction—at least in some of the stories. I'm not sure if it qualifies as noir or just hardboiled, I'd need to brush up on the differences, but I think noir is a subset of hardboiled.
Thank you for this Xoic - it's much appreciated! There's plenty to dive into over Christmas. I've seen a couple of these movies before. Sin City is amazing. It never occurred to me Daredevil was a noir movie! And I've been dying to watch Fargo for some time. *Rubs hands together and prepares to make a long post, decides to eat breakfast first* I couldn't help but chuckle at this!
I should clarify (by that time I had run out of juice and stopped going into enough detail)—the Daredevil that's noir is the Netflix series, based on the comic book run written (and largely drawn) by Frank Miller (who also was behind Sin City). The movies might have some aspect of his writing in them, but not to the extent the series does, which was entirely based on it. Miller was apparently weened on film noir, and probably read a lot of the stories as well. He saturates everything he does with it.
