Formative Fiction and Cool Bits

So, anyone who has ever been pinned down at a bar and forced to talk speculative fiction with me has probably been subjected to a discussion of reading/writing/gaming by Cool Bit. A cool bit can be just about anything that draws you consistently to a story, and I believe understanding what moves you that way makes you a better reader/writer/gamer. The comments are particularly great at that link, where you can see lots of people thinking about the common elements that get them fired up about the stories that touch them.

Take my friend, J., who I shared books with and occasionally gamed with over the years. A few of his cool bits would be assassins, demons, violins (though he might say fiddles), stories about dads, redheads, and weaponsmiths. So I know that if I encounter a book with more than a couple of these elements, I might want to pass it on to him. Or if I run a game for him, he'll have more fun if I toss a few of these things in for his gratification.

Yesterday, I was working on homework and got a hankering to watch a movie. (Note: watching a movie while doing homework generally means that it's on as background noise, and I look up for the really good scenes. It's not really watching a movie, but I like a certain amount of friendly, predictable, white noise.) So I popped in an old favorite that I hadn't seen in a while--Dragonslayer--and got to work.

Because I will think about just about anything rather than outline, it occurred to me that it's likely that a comprehensive accounting of my personal cool bits could probably be connected directly back to most of the books and movies I loved as a child. In this case, in particular, Dragonslayer was the first place I saw a woman dressing and passing as a man for any reason. It's marvelous in Shakespeare, it's great in Dragonslayer, and it's a sure way to draw me into a story. Even before I was a women's studies major!

Since yesterday, I've been pondering what other cool bits of mine might be tied directly to the movies and stories I loved as a kid. My favorite fairy tale was always Beauty and the Beast, with Snow White and Rose Red running a close second. So many stories draw on the elements of fairy tales to shape the narrative--they're our shared mythos, so it only makes sense. Michelle Sagara West's Books of the Sundered come to mind as a story that draws heavily on the Beauty and the Beast story, without being a direct retelling of the fairy tale.

I might need to compile a list of my cool bits at some point, but for now, I'm going to pop in Beauty and the Beast and hit the books.