Movie Reviews for Writers: One Man’s Poison

Janet Frobisher is a writer with a problem. She’s got “Betty Davis Eyes.” Okay, that’s a song pun, not the actual problem. The problem is that she a crime writer who thinks that writing about crime will enable her to actually commit murder and get away with it. 

Now, I’m not saying that we thriller writers tend to try out hand at real-life murder to prove a point, but I’m willing to bet that most of us have already planned and committed at least a handful of ghastly killings and other crimes in our imaginations (even if they don’t eventually make it onto the page.) It can’t really be helped. It’s just the way our minds work. 

And it’s a good thing that we don’t actually try it because we’d quickly learn that no matter how well we plan the ideal murder in our books, we’d always leave out that one key thing that gets us caught. Murder is like dialog for writers. We don’t try to capture true speech with all it’s uhs and ums and stops and start-overs — we create the illusion of true speech for the page. In the same way, we don’t create true murder, we present the illusion of murder. We control all the variables, so of course we’d never get caught. 

Real life seldom works that way. 

But enough about murder. Let’s talk about writing. 

One of my favorite bits of dialog in this tightly woven, tense little thriller is this: “You asked a pretty question,” says Frobisher to her secretary. “I’ve given you the ugly answer.”

This, my friends, is the essence of most of fiction. Giving ugly answers to pretty questions. 

Read the full review:

https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/movie-reviews-for-writers-one-mans.html