Q

I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl on my phone, and was so obsessed with her writing i immediately tore through Dark Places and Sharp Objects. They were all fascinating reads, but in different ways. In Gone Girl, the cutting descriptions of love as it can be: cruel, sour, obsessive, was especially immersive. I found myself hoarding Diary Amy’s words – a fiction weaved within a fiction but almost embarrassingly real.

As a side note, underlying embarrassment should be what compels a writer’s subscription to Mary Sues: the inability to fully recognize or reveal themselves as flawed as they really are. Gillian Flynn’s characters are either superficially polished but severely messed up inside, or else rotten through and through (Dark Places). She doesn’t see the need for a redemptive theme, so eagerly pursued by many American authors (Good triumphs Evil! Bad situation lead to Personal Growth! etc.), which I love and is a feature of a great many Japanese novels.

Beyond the shedding of Mary Sue types, it occurred to me that the most subtle devices employed crafted the most believable characters. As opposed to telling me what or how the characters were, there were little irrelevant details Flynn intersperses into the text:

I take baths. Not showers. I can’t handle the spray, it gets my skin buzzing, like someone’s turned on a switch. So I wadded a flimsy motel towel over the grate in the shower floor, aimed the nozzle at the wall, and sat in the three inches of water that pooled in the stall. Someone else’s pubic hair floated by.

I’m not sure how this tells me something about the character, but it does. It fascinates me how writers can conjure up the most mundane, detailed aspects of everyday life. Is it something they think up on the whim, or an extract from their actual lives? I’d love to try incorporating it to my own writing.