June 13, 2019
The blah-blah-blah filter
Kate observed a while back that the dialogue in a drama communicates more than the raw semantics, such that technically incomprehensible dialogue need not impede comprehension (citing a scene from the classic police procedural Kojak).To be sure, "dialogue can't be all connotation and jargon." But when
the dialogue carries weight with the characters, it carries weight with the audience. Meaning is determined as much by context, reaction, intonation, and individual word choice as by any insider knowledge.
I'm going to try approaching this idea from a slightly different angle.
As a general rule, while the audience doesn't have to understand everything a fictional character is saying, we do have to believe that the writer understands what he is making his characters say and why. We make a leap of faith and implicitly trust the source of the information we are getting.
Which is why the audience is so easily fooled by an unreliable narrator.
For example, few people outside the uniformed services comprehend all the intricacies of military rank and hierarchy ("captain" and "sergeant" are particularly problematic). But the screenwriter of a war movie had better know what he's talking about. Or else the actors had better sell it.
In the anime series Hyouka, Hotaro even begins to wonder if his "powers of deduction" are due to his ability to spin the facts of a case into a compelling tale. In one episode, he has Eru present him with a randomly-chosen incident, from which he invents a convincing "proof."
The comical payoff is that he inadvertently solves an actual crime in the process.
But Hotaro has a point. The power of the human brain to filter the randomness out of random events also gives it the power to create cause and effect out of whole cloth. Hence conspiracy theories.
But when that blah-blah-blah filter doesn't work at all, we can be equally left in the dark. True fluency in a foreign language comes down to the blah-blah-blah filter.
I understand news and NOVA-type science shows in Japanese pretty well. But when watching Japanese medical dramas and police procedurals (without subtitles), I often have difficulty grasping what technobabble matters and what doesn't and in the process lose track of the plot.
Jargon and slang and mumbled lines and people talking over each other make things even murkier.
Of course, the former and the latter are working at cross-purposes. The point of a documentary is to explain technically complicated concepts to a lay audience, while the information presented to the viewer in a crime drama has the initial intent of obfuscating the existence of a simple explanation.
Practically every mystery drama ends likes a game of Clue. It's the narrative equivalent of Occam's Razor, a simple enough explanation that everybody in the audience will comprehend in the end. Clouding the waters is the whole point.
Observe how quickly a one-hour drama proceeds from climax to denouement. I recently happened across the last ten minutes of an episode of Elementary and had little difficulty figuring out what had happened in the previous fifty. But, of course, that is not why we watch.Columbo was a highly influential series in Japan. Yutaka Mizutani's detective in the hugely popular Aibo series is a clever combination of Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes and Peter Falk's Columbo. He's a lot of fun to watch even when I only understand about a quarter of what he's saying.
But after stumbling all the way through a crime drama in Japanese, I can often work backwards through the episode and figure out what was going on earlier. This suggests that the Japanese version of Columbo would be easier to follow. Aibo follows a more traditional mystery plot structure.
Telling the story backwards doesn't always work with medical dramas unless I can identify the particular issue at the core of the conflict. Though common plots like "cute kid waiting for a transplant" are easy enough.
Labels: television, thinking about writing, writing
February 23, 2017
In a world
High-minded critics like to describe the low-minded readers of genre fiction using terms such as "wish-fulfillment" and "projection," summed up in the epithet "Mary Sue." This as opposed to the more serious task of deciphering the text for its socially-relevant "messages."
Not that there's anything wrong with that! (Says this unrepentant post-modernist deconstructor of Star Trek.)
But no story can ever be effective if read solely as a sermon. Sitting in the choir and being preached to is certainly the less demanding mental exercise. For readers to project themselves into a story, they must engage in world-creation and role-playing, as in the role-playing game.
As Kate explains,
I believes this better accounts for the attractions of the action movie and the romance novel. Sure, the average guy can enjoy pretending for two hours that he is John McClane in Die Hard, but he's also smart enough to know that, placed in similar circumstances, he would last about two seconds.
He also knows that, in the course of his everyday life, he will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid literally walking across broken glass in his bare feet.
The appeal of the action movie is imagining a world where beating up the bad guys or blowing up the Death Star (or two or three) solves the problem. Or in the world of romance, where
Nobody sums it up better than Don LaFontaine, the legendary master of the Hollywood movie trailer, who coined the expression, "In a world."
It's not this world but a made-up movie world, a hypothetical model of the universe, where alternative realities can be played out with the promise that "no animals were harmed during the making of this movie."
As G.K. Chesterton, that great defender of popular fiction, observed, "The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."
Or in Terry Pratchett's paraphrase, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
Not that there's anything wrong with that! (Says this unrepentant post-modernist deconstructor of Star Trek.)
But no story can ever be effective if read solely as a sermon. Sitting in the choir and being preached to is certainly the less demanding mental exercise. For readers to project themselves into a story, they must engage in world-creation and role-playing, as in the role-playing game.
As Kate explains,
The desire to exercise the creative impulse means that while people want to get swept away by Middle Earth or Asimov's robots or Ahab's Pequod, they also want to imagine themselves inside those worlds. Or at least imagine that world as a real experience.
I believes this better accounts for the attractions of the action movie and the romance novel. Sure, the average guy can enjoy pretending for two hours that he is John McClane in Die Hard, but he's also smart enough to know that, placed in similar circumstances, he would last about two seconds.
He also knows that, in the course of his everyday life, he will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid literally walking across broken glass in his bare feet.
The appeal of the action movie is imagining a world where beating up the bad guys or blowing up the Death Star (or two or three) solves the problem. Or in the world of romance, where
everyone has a one and only and recognizing that one and only transcends everything from orientation and gender to age and occasionally, in Japanese manga at least, blood relations.
Nobody sums it up better than Don LaFontaine, the legendary master of the Hollywood movie trailer, who coined the expression, "In a world."
It's not this world but a made-up movie world, a hypothetical model of the universe, where alternative realities can be played out with the promise that "no animals were harmed during the making of this movie."
As G.K. Chesterton, that great defender of popular fiction, observed, "The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."
Or in Terry Pratchett's paraphrase, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
Labels: criticism, literature, social studies, thinking about writing, writing
November 12, 2015
Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry
Tracing the provenance of an anime title can get tricky at times. Anime titles often originate in manga and light novels, though sometimes the anime comes first and the manga follows. A third important source is the visual novel.
In the U.S., the visual—or interactive—novel is the medium of the future, and always will be. But it's been well-established in Japan for twenty years (there's a lot of cultural information in that fact that deserved a Ph.D. dissertation). One of the big players in visual novels is Key VisualArts.
Co-founder and scenario writer Jun Maeda is largely responsible for Key's first three titles, Kanon, Air, and Clannad, which established Key's own sub-genre of magical realism fused with operatic melodrama.
Kanon and Clannad (that's the two-part anime series, not the New Age Irish band, though they're not bad either) are two of my all-time favorite tear-jerkers in any medium. Hope Chapman does a good job analyzing how Jun Maeda pulls it off in "Why Clannad Made You Cry."
The paradoxical reason, Chapman points out, is not because "life sucks and then you die." Even done well, that approach is only depressing and ultimately silly and self-indulgent.
Rather, the exact opposite. "Make 'Em Laugh," as Donald O'Connor argued. And so, "For every five minutes of weepiness in Clannad, there's at least twenty minutes of comedy (and that's a conservative estimate)."
This joy—far more than suffering (Tolstoy was largely wrong on this point)—draws us into the lives of the characters and builds the expectation that more good things can and ought to keep on happening.
Just as importantly, though, when the good things stop happening, they can't stop happening forever or we're right back to nihilism. As Chapman puts it, with Maeda, "Karma Always Comes Through." The scales of justice balance, even if it takes a bit of magical realism to make it work.
C.S. Lewis noted the ("educated") human propensity to infuse more "authenticity" in the negative than the positive, even when the one is no more factually substantive than the other. And when it is that essential faith in the "happy ending" that accounts for the human will to exist in the first place.
Tolkien's word for this was eucatastrophe, "the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom." Like Lewis, Tolkien applied it not only to fiction but to theology.
The universality of the eucatastrophe has fashioned it into a framework on which solid storytelling can be constructed. It shows up across the spectrum of style and genre, from thoroughly westernized fairy tales like Disney's excellent Tangled to anime like Scrapped Princess and Madoka Magica.
The pervasiveness of the form and the formula is easily criticized as "convention." But the key word in the "same only different" is the "same." That sameness exists for a reason: ignoring convention is a good way to create uniquely bad art.
His respect for, and mastery of, the formula is what makes Jun Maeda a storyteller whose work always deserves a second look.
In the U.S., the visual—or interactive—novel is the medium of the future, and always will be. But it's been well-established in Japan for twenty years (there's a lot of cultural information in that fact that deserved a Ph.D. dissertation). One of the big players in visual novels is Key VisualArts.
Co-founder and scenario writer Jun Maeda is largely responsible for Key's first three titles, Kanon, Air, and Clannad, which established Key's own sub-genre of magical realism fused with operatic melodrama.
Kanon and Clannad (that's the two-part anime series, not the New Age Irish band, though they're not bad either) are two of my all-time favorite tear-jerkers in any medium. Hope Chapman does a good job analyzing how Jun Maeda pulls it off in "Why Clannad Made You Cry."
The paradoxical reason, Chapman points out, is not because "life sucks and then you die." Even done well, that approach is only depressing and ultimately silly and self-indulgent.
If a likable character dies in a story, that's sad. If a likable character dies and their loved ones suffer for it, that's sadder. If a likable character dies, their loved ones suffer for it, and then they get killed in a freak accident right after a messenger runs up to tell them that their family dog has also kicked the bucket, you've started spinning a bad comedy routine.
Rather, the exact opposite. "Make 'Em Laugh," as Donald O'Connor argued. And so, "For every five minutes of weepiness in Clannad, there's at least twenty minutes of comedy (and that's a conservative estimate)."
This joy—far more than suffering (Tolstoy was largely wrong on this point)—draws us into the lives of the characters and builds the expectation that more good things can and ought to keep on happening.
Just as importantly, though, when the good things stop happening, they can't stop happening forever or we're right back to nihilism. As Chapman puts it, with Maeda, "Karma Always Comes Through." The scales of justice balance, even if it takes a bit of magical realism to make it work.
Maeda uses magic to express his own feelings about the unfairness of reality, by "breaking" it just enough to give his characters what they've earned. If tragedy is usually absurdly unfair, why can't triumph come from equally absurd fairness?
C.S. Lewis noted the ("educated") human propensity to infuse more "authenticity" in the negative than the positive, even when the one is no more factually substantive than the other. And when it is that essential faith in the "happy ending" that accounts for the human will to exist in the first place.
The joy of the happy ending, or more correctly of the "good catastrophe," the sudden joyous turn (for there is no true end to any fairy tale)—this joy, which is one of the things that fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist." It does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure, but it denies universal final defeat, and thus is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy.
Tolkien's word for this was eucatastrophe, "the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom." Like Lewis, Tolkien applied it not only to fiction but to theology.
The universality of the eucatastrophe has fashioned it into a framework on which solid storytelling can be constructed. It shows up across the spectrum of style and genre, from thoroughly westernized fairy tales like Disney's excellent Tangled to anime like Scrapped Princess and Madoka Magica.
The pervasiveness of the form and the formula is easily criticized as "convention." But the key word in the "same only different" is the "same." That sameness exists for a reason: ignoring convention is a good way to create uniquely bad art.
His respect for, and mastery of, the formula is what makes Jun Maeda a storyteller whose work always deserves a second look.
Related posts
Angel Beats!
Clannad
Kanon
Labels: anime, jun maeda, light novel, movies, personal favs, pop culture, religion, social studies, television, thinking about writing, writing
May 18, 2015
Revealing words
Writers have reasons to be wary of technology. Ann Althouse points to an Amazon review of Fifty Shades of Grey that, thanks to the Kindle's search function, reveals the author's writerly peccadilloes:
But technology giveth even as it taketh away. Writers can now defend themselves against embarrassing lexical exposés with a wide range of free online word frequency counters (like here). But it's the phrase counters (like here, here, and here) that really reveal the flaws.
The free Primitive Word Counter is a standalone Windows program that does basic text analysis. (Keep in mind that it's so primitive it doesn't understand apostrophes or smart quotes.) Textanz ($39.95) is a little less "primitive," with more tools and supported text formats.
And then there's WordStat, which will set you back a whopping $3,795. Heck, for that much, it should write the novel, edit and publish it, and attend the signing events.
Danger, Will Robinson! A very real problem with these tools is that seeing your writing so dispassionately deconstructed can make you overly self-conscious, like listening to a recording of your voice. Not all repetition is bad. It won Hemingway a Nobel Prize, after all.
One of the biggest mistakes beginning fiction writers make is trying to come up with different ways to say "said." (See rule #3.)
A few phrases duplicated in an 80,000 word novel won't be noticed. Your attempts to eliminate them might be. One thing I discovered back when I was producing educational videos was the extent to which people don't see--until it's pointed out to them--continuity problems.
I'm talking about the obvious stuff, like a prop changing color in the middle of a scene. A fascinating psychological question is what makes us notice some continuity problems and ignore others. Of course, once pointed out, you can't not see it.
With those caveats in mind, these tools do a good job of uncovering rhetorical tics, overused adverbs, and inconsistent usages. But with the curtain drawn back on your creative subconscious, you'll have to consciously learn what to ignore.
Characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites her lip 35 times, Christian's lips "quirk up" 16 times, Christian "cocks his head to one side" 17 times, characters "purse" their lips 15 times, and characters raise their eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana's anthropomorphic "subconscious" (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58 references to Ana's "inner goddess," and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of "oh crap" (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to "holy crap," "double crap," or the ultimate "triple crap").
But technology giveth even as it taketh away. Writers can now defend themselves against embarrassing lexical exposés with a wide range of free online word frequency counters (like here). But it's the phrase counters (like here, here, and here) that really reveal the flaws.
The free Primitive Word Counter is a standalone Windows program that does basic text analysis. (Keep in mind that it's so primitive it doesn't understand apostrophes or smart quotes.) Textanz ($39.95) is a little less "primitive," with more tools and supported text formats.
And then there's WordStat, which will set you back a whopping $3,795. Heck, for that much, it should write the novel, edit and publish it, and attend the signing events.
Danger, Will Robinson! A very real problem with these tools is that seeing your writing so dispassionately deconstructed can make you overly self-conscious, like listening to a recording of your voice. Not all repetition is bad. It won Hemingway a Nobel Prize, after all.
One of the biggest mistakes beginning fiction writers make is trying to come up with different ways to say "said." (See rule #3.)
A few phrases duplicated in an 80,000 word novel won't be noticed. Your attempts to eliminate them might be. One thing I discovered back when I was producing educational videos was the extent to which people don't see--until it's pointed out to them--continuity problems.
I'm talking about the obvious stuff, like a prop changing color in the middle of a scene. A fascinating psychological question is what makes us notice some continuity problems and ignore others. Of course, once pointed out, you can't not see it.
With those caveats in mind, these tools do a good job of uncovering rhetorical tics, overused adverbs, and inconsistent usages. But with the curtain drawn back on your creative subconscious, you'll have to consciously learn what to ignore.
Labels: computers, language, software, technology, thinking about writing, writing
November 12, 2012
In medias res
One thing about this season's slate of new television dramas that jumps out at me is how hobbled they often are by unnecessary backstory blunders. Not just that the backstories are clumsily executed, but that they are there at all, and laid out in such a linear fashion.
Vegas got it right. Jack Lamb's backstory is covered in about three lines of dialogue, and then on with the show. The Mob Doctor and Revolution (and Arrow, though I could only stand to watch about ten minutes of it in total) get it wrong.
What they get wrong is starting before the beginning and systematically marching the viewer through the chain of cause and effect that leads to the real beginning of the show. Or, as in the case of Arrow, cramming a dozen excruciatingly long and detailed flashbacks into the first episode.
Ron Koslow's pretty good reboot of Beauty and the Beast (it's really more Beauty and the Incredibly Handsome Hulk with the Cool Scar and Anger Management Issues) got the backstory over with in about five minutes and a couple of refreshingly short flashbacks.
Even then, I would have cut the opening sequence in half.
When a series involves a twist on a familiar formula, like Vegas or Castle, it can be introduced while the story gets underway. The twist in House is all show and no tell, and the pilot episode could have taken place at any point during the first season.
The pilot episode of Person of Interest matches up the ruthless John Reese with the enigmatic Mr. Finch and the "Machine," and we're off and running. The biographical details of all three are revealed slowly throughout the series. House did this to great effect.
In Elementary, the simple mention of "Holmes" and "Watson" tells us everything we know in order to drive this car. The twist of Watson as a woman is self-evident. It was a big mistake to delve into her biography in the first episode. Let it work itself to the surface.
I think the producers and writers were so eager to "hook" the audience with touchy-feely material that they gave away too much too soon. House, by contrast, waited until the time was right to reveal House's backstory, and produced a brilliant episode.
Besides the mechanics of good storytelling, leaving the backstory to later can give the writers enough time to figure out exactly what it is. I have to believe that a dozen episodes watching Miller and Liu work together would have inspired them to create something less insipid.
In fact, a later episode did explore her backstory, and would have been much better if we didn't already know what it was. (The writers on Elementary also seem to have no idea what to actually do with Liu; Martin Freeman, by contrast, glues Sherlock together.)
Especially in science fiction, this compulsion to explain everything all at once can rob a show of a substantial source of tension and conflict. (Though Star Trek: TNG did wait way too long--almost to the end of the series--to figure out why Riker never got his own command.)
Anime writers love post-apocalyptic plots as an excuse to overturn life-as-we-know-it, but they know that "why things turned out this way" is such an intriguing question that the smart thing to do is wait to answer it. Let the viewer find out the same time the characters do.
In a series like Yokohama Shopping Log, the "how" and "why" are only ever hinted at, the focus of the narrative being on the here-and-now. "What if all the lights went out" is sufficiently "high concept" to drive the story for a long time before delving into the backstory.
If at all.
Vegas got it right. Jack Lamb's backstory is covered in about three lines of dialogue, and then on with the show. The Mob Doctor and Revolution (and Arrow, though I could only stand to watch about ten minutes of it in total) get it wrong.
What they get wrong is starting before the beginning and systematically marching the viewer through the chain of cause and effect that leads to the real beginning of the show. Or, as in the case of Arrow, cramming a dozen excruciatingly long and detailed flashbacks into the first episode.
Ron Koslow's pretty good reboot of Beauty and the Beast (it's really more Beauty and the Incredibly Handsome Hulk with the Cool Scar and Anger Management Issues) got the backstory over with in about five minutes and a couple of refreshingly short flashbacks.
Even then, I would have cut the opening sequence in half.
When a series involves a twist on a familiar formula, like Vegas or Castle, it can be introduced while the story gets underway. The twist in House is all show and no tell, and the pilot episode could have taken place at any point during the first season.
The pilot episode of Person of Interest matches up the ruthless John Reese with the enigmatic Mr. Finch and the "Machine," and we're off and running. The biographical details of all three are revealed slowly throughout the series. House did this to great effect.
In Elementary, the simple mention of "Holmes" and "Watson" tells us everything we know in order to drive this car. The twist of Watson as a woman is self-evident. It was a big mistake to delve into her biography in the first episode. Let it work itself to the surface.
I think the producers and writers were so eager to "hook" the audience with touchy-feely material that they gave away too much too soon. House, by contrast, waited until the time was right to reveal House's backstory, and produced a brilliant episode.
Besides the mechanics of good storytelling, leaving the backstory to later can give the writers enough time to figure out exactly what it is. I have to believe that a dozen episodes watching Miller and Liu work together would have inspired them to create something less insipid.
In fact, a later episode did explore her backstory, and would have been much better if we didn't already know what it was. (The writers on Elementary also seem to have no idea what to actually do with Liu; Martin Freeman, by contrast, glues Sherlock together.)
Especially in science fiction, this compulsion to explain everything all at once can rob a show of a substantial source of tension and conflict. (Though Star Trek: TNG did wait way too long--almost to the end of the series--to figure out why Riker never got his own command.)
Anime writers love post-apocalyptic plots as an excuse to overturn life-as-we-know-it, but they know that "why things turned out this way" is such an intriguing question that the smart thing to do is wait to answer it. Let the viewer find out the same time the characters do.
In a series like Yokohama Shopping Log, the "how" and "why" are only ever hinted at, the focus of the narrative being on the here-and-now. "What if all the lights went out" is sufficiently "high concept" to drive the story for a long time before delving into the backstory.
If at all.
Labels: manga, person of interest, television, television reviews, writing
March 26, 2012
Selling the sizzle (not the mistakes)
Maohden (my current project) is the first in the "Demon City Blues" series, published before Yashakiden. It's half the length and moves a brisker clip than the latter, which clocks in at about half a million words. Yashakiden is Kikuchi's Moby Dick, and like Melville he writes a Wikipedia entry for every parenthetical and plot tangent.
(That world building is a fantastic accomplishment, but I wish that instead of a gory, erotic vampire thriller, he'd written a novel focusing on the Chicago-style politics of Demon City's mayor.)
Once you get past the info-dumps, Kikuchi rewards the reader of his adult novels (Demon City Shinjuku is safely Y/A) with plenty of BDSM kink and rape porn. These novels were originally serialized, and in Maohden, I could swear Kikuchi's editor gave him a list of fetishes and a quota.
It's not exactly my cup of tea, so I have to wonder about the market. Because it's sure there. This is hardly unique to Japan. Consider a far more successful literary import. From Steve Sailer's review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:
But what really caught my attention is the romance trilogy Fifty Shades (that started out as Twilight fan fiction). It's gotten gushy write-ups in the New York Post and the requisite handwringing from David Goldman in the Asia Times. To be clear, the sex scenes are garnering all this attention, certainly not the writing.
And yet if the sizzle was all that selling the steak required, then Hideyuki Kikuchi and E.L. James could have saved themselves a whole lot of work (and words). Not to mention all the competition from the near-infinite number of free offerings when it comes to sizzle-only entertainment.
I encourage everybody to go to Amazon and download the sample chapters for the first book. There's no sex in the sample. There is a by-the-numbers hypergamous romance formula on full display, "fifty cringingly cheesy pages of exposition before getting to the explicit sex scenes," as Chiara Atik describes it.
To be sure, I've got no beef with by-the-numbers (or, for that matter, sex scenes). Do a monomyth actioner right and I don't care how many times it's been done before. Scanning the sample chapters for books two and three, the plot of Fifty Shades apparently boils down to our alpha male corporate wonderboy having "issues."
Nobody in Kikuchi's novels has "issues." Or, rather, everybody's got issues, just of the zombie apocalypse sort, usually solved Buffy-style, with a stake through the heart.
But just as the readers of Fifty Shades-type fiction must want the kink cluttered up with "issues" and angst, so Kikuchi's readers want it couched in geeky science fiction and blood & gore action (with a hint of yaoi). This raises interesting questions about the necessary and sufficient conditions required for popular story creation.
Life in the real world is about aspiring to perfection but compromising with reality. We constantly negotiate how much of X we're willing to put up with to get Y. But I think something more subtle is involved with our entertainment choices. It's a threshold effect. Up to a certain point, it's not that we "put up with" X, we don't even notice it.
Given a good story, for example, I can forgive a lot of bad science in my science fiction. However, if I don't buy into the premise, it doesn't matter how golden the prose, high-minded the philosophy, or pristine the cinematography. Nor are these static standards, but shift from genre to genre and book to book, even chapter to chapter.
As Orson Scott Card puts it, "The stories and characters that endure do so for reasons having almost nothing to do with the talent of the writer."
Which is why the quality argument constantly thrown at fan fiction and self-publishing in particular misses the point. And why criticizing the literary quality of (and political and economic plot holes in) Harry Potter and The Hunger Games arouses such ire among their fans. You're messing with those thresholds.
Seth Roberts provides a good personal example. Wondering why he enjoyed reading The Hunger Games when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings bored him silly, he concludes that
Says Philip Pullman, "We need stories so much that we're willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them." At the end of the day, writing a "good" book won't satisfy your readers if what they really want is in the "bad" ones. In other words, if you want to get read a lot, write what a lot of people want to read.
Easy to say. A lot harder to actually do. I'm still working on it. But I'm sure it begins with disentangling what we wish about an audience's tastes from what they are actually looking for (which, of course, doesn't preclude providing a little something more on the side).
(That world building is a fantastic accomplishment, but I wish that instead of a gory, erotic vampire thriller, he'd written a novel focusing on the Chicago-style politics of Demon City's mayor.)
Once you get past the info-dumps, Kikuchi rewards the reader of his adult novels (Demon City Shinjuku is safely Y/A) with plenty of BDSM kink and rape porn. These novels were originally serialized, and in Maohden, I could swear Kikuchi's editor gave him a list of fetishes and a quota.
It's not exactly my cup of tea, so I have to wonder about the market. Because it's sure there. This is hardly unique to Japan. Consider a far more successful literary import. From Steve Sailer's review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:
I was at the local art-house cinema in 2010 when the third thriller [of the original Swedish trilogy] debuted, and it looked like Twilight for the elderly. The lobby was jammed with shuffling octogenarians. The restroom lines were moving so slowly that I fear many Larsson fans may have missed their favorite sexual-torture and sadistic-revenge scenes.
But what really caught my attention is the romance trilogy Fifty Shades (that started out as Twilight fan fiction). It's gotten gushy write-ups in the New York Post and the requisite handwringing from David Goldman in the Asia Times. To be clear, the sex scenes are garnering all this attention, certainly not the writing.
And yet if the sizzle was all that selling the steak required, then Hideyuki Kikuchi and E.L. James could have saved themselves a whole lot of work (and words). Not to mention all the competition from the near-infinite number of free offerings when it comes to sizzle-only entertainment.
I encourage everybody to go to Amazon and download the sample chapters for the first book. There's no sex in the sample. There is a by-the-numbers hypergamous romance formula on full display, "fifty cringingly cheesy pages of exposition before getting to the explicit sex scenes," as Chiara Atik describes it.
To be sure, I've got no beef with by-the-numbers (or, for that matter, sex scenes). Do a monomyth actioner right and I don't care how many times it's been done before. Scanning the sample chapters for books two and three, the plot of Fifty Shades apparently boils down to our alpha male corporate wonderboy having "issues."
Nobody in Kikuchi's novels has "issues." Or, rather, everybody's got issues, just of the zombie apocalypse sort, usually solved Buffy-style, with a stake through the heart.
But just as the readers of Fifty Shades-type fiction must want the kink cluttered up with "issues" and angst, so Kikuchi's readers want it couched in geeky science fiction and blood & gore action (with a hint of yaoi). This raises interesting questions about the necessary and sufficient conditions required for popular story creation.
Life in the real world is about aspiring to perfection but compromising with reality. We constantly negotiate how much of X we're willing to put up with to get Y. But I think something more subtle is involved with our entertainment choices. It's a threshold effect. Up to a certain point, it's not that we "put up with" X, we don't even notice it.
Given a good story, for example, I can forgive a lot of bad science in my science fiction. However, if I don't buy into the premise, it doesn't matter how golden the prose, high-minded the philosophy, or pristine the cinematography. Nor are these static standards, but shift from genre to genre and book to book, even chapter to chapter.
As Orson Scott Card puts it, "The stories and characters that endure do so for reasons having almost nothing to do with the talent of the writer."
Which is why the quality argument constantly thrown at fan fiction and self-publishing in particular misses the point. And why criticizing the literary quality of (and political and economic plot holes in) Harry Potter and The Hunger Games arouses such ire among their fans. You're messing with those thresholds.
Seth Roberts provides a good personal example. Wondering why he enjoyed reading The Hunger Games when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings bored him silly, he concludes that
Sentence by sentence, even scene by scene, The Hunger Games is mediocre. It is not quotable. There is no vivid writing. The characters are barely interesting. It is not Jonathan Franzen, much less Vladimir Nabokov. But it does a wonderful job of supplying the four basic elements of a good story: a hero, a villain, making you care about the hero, and putting the hero in jeopardy.
Says Philip Pullman, "We need stories so much that we're willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them." At the end of the day, writing a "good" book won't satisfy your readers if what they really want is in the "bad" ones. In other words, if you want to get read a lot, write what a lot of people want to read.
Easy to say. A lot harder to actually do. I'm still working on it. But I'm sure it begins with disentangling what we wish about an audience's tastes from what they are actually looking for (which, of course, doesn't preclude providing a little something more on the side).
Related posts
Abstinence porn
Demon City libertarianism
The Business Rusch: Quality
Labels: books, movies, publishing, pullman, sex, writing, yashakiden
March 19, 2012
Superbad is superboring
Kate recently discussed the problem of the omniscient enemy in regards to The Mentalist. She concluded that "I will keeping watching The Mentalist, only keeping in mind that Red John is an amorphous force rather than a flesh and blood enemy."
I'm less forgiving. For me, the "omniscient enemy" eventually wrecked the logical foundations of the show such that I couldn't watch it anymore.
(Besides, other than Tim Kang as Cho, the rest of the regulars are horribly miscast. There's zero chemistry between Tunney and Baker. And what are rank rookies doing on this super-special task force?)
The omnipotent enemy is my biggest gripe with Yashakiden. "Princess" as a villain is so unstoppable that everything connected to her narrative moves forward according to her whims. Whimsy as a motivation drains the drama of any real tension when she's on stage.
As Kate puts it, "Characters held to the laws of probability are far more interesting than an omniscient enemy could possibly be."
The more interesting characters are Princess's subordinates, especially Kikiou, who can't take over the world without her help. And she doesn't really care about taking over the world. That's an interesting conflict. As I discuss here, the politics is where the action is.
Politics is what makes The X-Files different as well. The fundamental conflict is not between Mulder and the aliens. Or even Mulder and the Cigarette Smoking Man. It's between the aliens and the government (and then between those aliens and a second set of aliens).
So reasons can always be found for keeping Mulder around. Okay, they do get a bit tortured at times, but "eliminate Mulder" or even "give Mulder a hard time for no good reason" is not the motivation of any running character.
The omnipotent villain is the refuge of writers not smart enough to make them as smart as they're supposed to be. Randomness becomes an excuse for intelligence. But as Kate illustrates with Agatha Christie, a brilliant detective can find plenty of challenges solving ordinary crimes.
Both Lie to Me and currently Person of Interest also do a better job at getting the balance right. Most of the stories are about fairly average people burdened with fairly average problems that have gotten way out of hand and so have to be solved in interesting ways.
In fact, the premise of Person of Interest explicitly states that they won't get cases that involve the world ending as we know it.
On the other hand, a recent episode maneuvered the good guys into a no-win moral dilemma, which I consider equally problematic. Pretty much all of The Dark Knight consists of this manufactured "depth." Reproducing the vagaries of real life doesn't make fiction "better."
Spider-Man and Batman and the rest of the superheros would be a lot more interesting if the bad guys were a lot less bad and were a lot more predictable.
I'm less forgiving. For me, the "omniscient enemy" eventually wrecked the logical foundations of the show such that I couldn't watch it anymore.
(Besides, other than Tim Kang as Cho, the rest of the regulars are horribly miscast. There's zero chemistry between Tunney and Baker. And what are rank rookies doing on this super-special task force?)
The omnipotent enemy is my biggest gripe with Yashakiden. "Princess" as a villain is so unstoppable that everything connected to her narrative moves forward according to her whims. Whimsy as a motivation drains the drama of any real tension when she's on stage.
As Kate puts it, "Characters held to the laws of probability are far more interesting than an omniscient enemy could possibly be."
The more interesting characters are Princess's subordinates, especially Kikiou, who can't take over the world without her help. And she doesn't really care about taking over the world. That's an interesting conflict. As I discuss here, the politics is where the action is.
Politics is what makes The X-Files different as well. The fundamental conflict is not between Mulder and the aliens. Or even Mulder and the Cigarette Smoking Man. It's between the aliens and the government (and then between those aliens and a second set of aliens).
So reasons can always be found for keeping Mulder around. Okay, they do get a bit tortured at times, but "eliminate Mulder" or even "give Mulder a hard time for no good reason" is not the motivation of any running character.
The omnipotent villain is the refuge of writers not smart enough to make them as smart as they're supposed to be. Randomness becomes an excuse for intelligence. But as Kate illustrates with Agatha Christie, a brilliant detective can find plenty of challenges solving ordinary crimes.
Both Lie to Me and currently Person of Interest also do a better job at getting the balance right. Most of the stories are about fairly average people burdened with fairly average problems that have gotten way out of hand and so have to be solved in interesting ways.
In fact, the premise of Person of Interest explicitly states that they won't get cases that involve the world ending as we know it.
On the other hand, a recent episode maneuvered the good guys into a no-win moral dilemma, which I consider equally problematic. Pretty much all of The Dark Knight consists of this manufactured "depth." Reproducing the vagaries of real life doesn't make fiction "better."
Spider-Man and Batman and the rest of the superheros would be a lot more interesting if the bad guys were a lot less bad and were a lot more predictable.
Related posts
The Big Bad
Lying to The Mentalist
Demon City libertarianism
The Problem of the Omniscient Enemy
Labels: books, movies, person of interest, superhero, television, writing, yashakiden
December 12, 2011
Symbolic value
What can we learn from the great writers of literature about symbolism? First of all, to quit analyzing literature for symbolic value (the first rule of symbolism: do not talk about symbolism). As Sarah Butler reports in The Paris Review,
Amazingly, many of the famous authors wrote back. Ray Bradbury delivers a short, to-the-point lecture on the subject:
Speaking of Bradbury, in the comments, "Kevin" sums up what a lot of us felt in our high school and college English courses (redacted a bit):
But perhaps Norman Mailer sums it up most succinctly: "Generally, the best symbols in a novel are those you become aware of only after you finish the work."
That actually happened to me writing Serpent of Time. Well into the final draft stage, I started noticing some quite unplanned symbolism in the text. I did my best to ignore it because I didn't want it dictating the plot. But it's still there, and I'm now fully prepared to discuss it at length.
Hey, I've got two degrees in the humanities. I can deconstruct the unintended symbolism in my own stories too.
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors. "Did they consciously plant symbols in their work?" he asked. "Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?"
Amazingly, many of the famous authors wrote back. Ray Bradbury delivers a short, to-the-point lecture on the subject:
I never consciously place symbols in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise, and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to let the subconscious do the work for you and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural . . . .
If people find beasties and bedbugs in my ink-splotches, I can't prevent it, can I? They will insist on seeing them anyway, and that is their privilege. Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, he simply isn't there.
Speaking of Bradbury, in the comments, "Kevin" sums up what a lot of us felt in our high school and college English courses (redacted a bit):
I remember reading Something Wicked This Way Comes in high school. The whole lesson was centered on the symbolic meaning of every single person, place, or thing in the book. I knew there was no way the author meant every little thing to be a symbol.
But perhaps Norman Mailer sums it up most succinctly: "Generally, the best symbols in a novel are those you become aware of only after you finish the work."
That actually happened to me writing Serpent of Time. Well into the final draft stage, I started noticing some quite unplanned symbolism in the text. I did my best to ignore it because I didn't want it dictating the plot. But it's still there, and I'm now fully prepared to discuss it at length.
Hey, I've got two degrees in the humanities. I can deconstruct the unintended symbolism in my own stories too.
Labels: criticism, literature, serpent notes, serpent of time, writing
May 16, 2011
Room for the Holy Spirit
I've previously noted what could be taken as covert Mormon references and/or jokes in Bones. Kate recently pointed out another one, "The Death of the Queen Bee" (season 5, episode 17).
The episode takes place at Brennan's class reunion. She and Booth are dancing together. She'd like to dance closer, but he's still struggling with his feelings for her, so he takes a step back and says, "Just keeping room for the Holy Spirit, that's all."
Okay, Catholics attending parochial school probably hear the same thing, a testament to the universality of a conservative religious upbringing. Booth, to be sure, is a cafeteria Catholic, but he eats what's on his plate, and his character is written and acted that way.
Kate thinks there might be two writers riffing off each other. Either way, this confirms my belief that an objectively conservative writer will more accurately capture the essence of quite different religious ideologies than all the touchy, freely "diversity" activists.
This comprehension is also demonstrated in how Brennan's rigid empiricism is evenly matched by Booth's apologetic rationalism. This requires an understanding of how the conservative mind interacts with the modern world, rather than the typical straw men.
Mormonism doesn't reject empiricism or even evolution out of hand, and so has the potential for producing C.S. Lewis-type apologists (like my father with a Ph.D. from Caltech). Whatever their religion background, the writers on Bones often skillfully bridge that divide.
The most recent episode, "The Truth in the Myth" (season 6, episode 18), essentially reframes the main argument of The Silver Chair, without Brennan sacrificing her scientific integrity or Booth giving up on faith. It would have made C.S. Lewis proud.
The episode takes place at Brennan's class reunion. She and Booth are dancing together. She'd like to dance closer, but he's still struggling with his feelings for her, so he takes a step back and says, "Just keeping room for the Holy Spirit, that's all."
Okay, Catholics attending parochial school probably hear the same thing, a testament to the universality of a conservative religious upbringing. Booth, to be sure, is a cafeteria Catholic, but he eats what's on his plate, and his character is written and acted that way.
Kate thinks there might be two writers riffing off each other. Either way, this confirms my belief that an objectively conservative writer will more accurately capture the essence of quite different religious ideologies than all the touchy, freely "diversity" activists.
This comprehension is also demonstrated in how Brennan's rigid empiricism is evenly matched by Booth's apologetic rationalism. This requires an understanding of how the conservative mind interacts with the modern world, rather than the typical straw men.
Mormonism doesn't reject empiricism or even evolution out of hand, and so has the potential for producing C.S. Lewis-type apologists (like my father with a Ph.D. from Caltech). Whatever their religion background, the writers on Bones often skillfully bridge that divide.
The most recent episode, "The Truth in the Myth" (season 6, episode 18), essentially reframes the main argument of The Silver Chair, without Brennan sacrificing her scientific integrity or Booth giving up on faith. It would have made C.S. Lewis proud.
Related posts
The Sin in the Sisterhood
Translated correctly
Labels: kate, lds, religion, television, writing
May 05, 2011
A common comic enemy
Kate wondered recently why so many time-travel television episodes/movies include a variation of the line: "In the future, I can't believe a B-actor will be elected president!" Okay, maybe writers are frustrated elitists who hate actors, but don't the actors have any self-respect?
Benjamin Schwarz gets at an underlying reason in this article about screenwriter James Cain (simply replace "Los Angeles" with the latest Hollywood gripe du jour):
Because, as William Goldman observed, "Nobody knows anything" in the movie business, the reflex is to keep repeating whatever worked the last time until it utterly and undeniably fails, and then a few more times after that to make sure. So any "derisive commentary"--any trope no matter how overused--that once went over well takes on a life of its own.
Though it's also the result of the never-ending search for a Great White Menace that writers can mercilessly mock without arousing the ire of the professional offense takers. Add to this the earnest belief that there is nothing worse than having at any time (infancy included) been associated with anything held in high regard by religious conservatives.
The best way to dissociate oneself from the latter is to flock to the former like crows to road kill. Jokes about Republican politicians serve these ends perfectly. Actors willingly diss their own profession out of loyalty to their own ideological beliefs (and, to be sure, loyalty to a paycheck). Though I imagine self-knowledge has a lot to do with it too.
Benjamin Schwarz gets at an underlying reason in this article about screenwriter James Cain (simply replace "Los Angeles" with the latest Hollywood gripe du jour):
Just as hipsters today use white pejoratively, denoting sterile, bland, non-ethnic suburbia, so sophisticates in Cain's day enjoyed skewering Los Angeles--[then] America's whitest, most Protestant, most bourgeois big city--as an artificial tropic teeming with displaced rubes, an opinion Frank Lloyd Wright neatly encapsulated in his contemptuous remark, "It is as if you tipped the U.S. up, so that all the commonplace people slid down to Southern California." So conditioned, writer after writer churned out the same derisive commentary on Los Angeles.
Because, as William Goldman observed, "Nobody knows anything" in the movie business, the reflex is to keep repeating whatever worked the last time until it utterly and undeniably fails, and then a few more times after that to make sure. So any "derisive commentary"--any trope no matter how overused--that once went over well takes on a life of its own.
Though it's also the result of the never-ending search for a Great White Menace that writers can mercilessly mock without arousing the ire of the professional offense takers. Add to this the earnest belief that there is nothing worse than having at any time (infancy included) been associated with anything held in high regard by religious conservatives.
The best way to dissociate oneself from the latter is to flock to the former like crows to road kill. Jokes about Republican politicians serve these ends perfectly. Actors willingly diss their own profession out of loyalty to their own ideological beliefs (and, to be sure, loyalty to a paycheck). Though I imagine self-knowledge has a lot to do with it too.
Labels: criticism, kate, television, writing
January 27, 2011
Embracing rejection
Why you should submit your MS to the Journal of Universal Rejection (these rules apply equally when it comes to agents and traditional publishers too):
And while I'm taking pot shots at the old publishing paradigm, books like this should put the tired old "rigorous editing" claims by the "big six" six feet under as well.
And that's a non-fiction tome. In any case, one long-needed change that ebooks should bring about is treating the written word the same as software. You can fix a typo on Smashwords in an hour, 24-48 hours on Amazon, and it doesn't cost a thing.
The Kindle has a built-in dictionary. How about a built-in ebook updater and typo reporter? Crowd-sourced editing can be very effective (though such efforts will constrained by the power law paradox that attends any shareware project).
• You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100 percent certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
• There are no page-fees [common practice with academic journals; a sure sign of unscrupulous behavior anywhere else].
• You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
• The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
• You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
• Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.
And while I'm taking pot shots at the old publishing paradigm, books like this should put the tired old "rigorous editing" claims by the "big six" six feet under as well.
General Motors, [the author] writes, was bought by Fiat, "an event unimaginable just a couple [of] years earlier." Yes, and it still is: the Italian carmaker did not purchase GM, but a 20 percent stake in Chrysler. France gets "almost 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear sources." The OECD says the figure is close to 80 percent.
Ms Moyo’s editors are as bad as her fact-checkers. If they couldn’t spot the analytical flaws, they might have done something about the stylistic ones that range from curious analogies to long phrases in parentheses. End notes are used almost at random.
And that's a non-fiction tome. In any case, one long-needed change that ebooks should bring about is treating the written word the same as software. You can fix a typo on Smashwords in an hour, 24-48 hours on Amazon, and it doesn't cost a thing.
The Kindle has a built-in dictionary. How about a built-in ebook updater and typo reporter? Crowd-sourced editing can be very effective (though such efforts will constrained by the power law paradox that attends any shareware project).
Labels: books, ebooks, publishing, writing
January 17, 2011
As strange as fiction
"Write what you know," goes the writer's mantra. Good advice, but the self as a resource has it limits, and sometimes you have to write what you don't and trust your research, your instincts, and your editor (Beth Bentley, in this case).
Still, it's always reassuring when you stumble across a real example of something you made up. In this case, a scene in The Path of Dreams that has Elly going to Planned Parenthood presaged this real-life article in the New York Times, and even strikes a similar philosophical note at the end.
From "Single, Female, Mormon, Alone" by Nicole Hardy:
From The Path of Dreams:
If you're not Mormon, I'd recommend reading chapter one of The Path of Dreams to put Hardy's article in context.
Still, it's always reassuring when you stumble across a real example of something you made up. In this case, a scene in The Path of Dreams that has Elly going to Planned Parenthood presaged this real-life article in the New York Times, and even strikes a similar philosophical note at the end.
From "Single, Female, Mormon, Alone" by Nicole Hardy:
And that brought me to tears, sorrowful for the ways in which we all suffer, in whatever ways we do, and grateful for the unlikely refuge [offered by Planned Parenthood]. Grateful also for the safety granted my own tears, prompted by the delicate weight of a hand on my shoulder, the warmth of her palm against my back.
How unprepared I was to experience tenderness in the place I had been warned so vehemently against. How unprepared for the flood of relief, the bud of hope, after a life devoted to keeping myself separate from my body. Here was a path, an opening; here was empathy.
From The Path of Dreams:
At the back of her mind—perhaps because of the association with female reproduction—she had made a connection between Planned Parenthood and Relief Society. The difference was, Planned Parenthood only cared about Elaine Packard, here and now. Nothing else. Her soul was her own business. And so the unexpected answer came to her in this atmosphere of nonjudgmental amity, so casually that at first she thought she was lying. But she knew she couldn't lie that glibly.
An hour ago, she couldn't have explained what she was doing there. Now she knew exactly what she was doing there, and for that she was truly and deeply grateful.
If you're not Mormon, I'd recommend reading chapter one of The Path of Dreams to put Hardy's article in context.
September 27, 2010
The sunk cost of well-written crap
The Dear Author blog runs a weekly "First Page" anonymous writing evaluation. About four months ago they posted that they were running low on submissions so I sent in a first page. My first thought when they ran it this weekend was, Oh great, that draft is at least six months old by now
And my sister had already made most of the critiques in the comments. Namely that it's horribly overwritten. Not only the info-dumping, but I had twice as many names and proper nouns as necessary (the reader was going to benefit from all my research, whether she liked it or not).
I know what I was thinking when I wrote it: I was still irked by people who'd assumed qualities about the characters in Angel Falling Softly totally unsupported by the text. As in a three-part freshman essay, I was going to define all the facts up front and foreclose misinterpretation.
A Sisyphean task if there ever was one. But here's the most recent draft from a couple of weeks ago:
I rewrote it a dozen times, but it still bugged me. All tell, no show. Ultimately redundant. Finally I hit delete and fed the whole chapter (plus a thousand words beyond that) to the digital compost pile (i.e., cut and archive and maybe the bits and pieces will come in useful later).
A big problem with writing something that doesn't quite work and doesn't belong (versus stuff that is just bad) is that you end up investing so much time trying to make it work and belong that you start valuing the invested effort over the actual value, the sunk cost over the true worth.
Human nature. It's surprisingly hard letting go of the useless, and thus surprising how much things improve when you do. Anyway, I'm pretty sure "Get rid of prologues" is on one of those writing advice bullet point lists I've read somewhere. It's still a prologue even if you call it a chapter.
Oh, and to "Mai": yes, an HEA in this life (and good call on "hungry ghost"; I'd carried that term over from my source material and hadn't fixed it).
And my sister had already made most of the critiques in the comments. Namely that it's horribly overwritten. Not only the info-dumping, but I had twice as many names and proper nouns as necessary (the reader was going to benefit from all my research, whether she liked it or not).
I know what I was thinking when I wrote it: I was still irked by people who'd assumed qualities about the characters in Angel Falling Softly totally unsupported by the text. As in a three-part freshman essay, I was going to define all the facts up front and foreclose misinterpretation.
A Sisyphean task if there ever was one. But here's the most recent draft from a couple of weeks ago:
Matsu's soul tore free of its human vessel.
Whether severed from Chieko's body by Hatakeyama's sword or ripped asunder by her own despair, she was reborn in the netherworld of the damned, in an icebound Naraka. A Buddhist hell fashioned from her own karma.
In temporal terms, not two days had passed since she and Chieko first met. For a mayfly of a moment, Matsu lived the life she'd never known she wanted. And now could not imagine living without. But that brief candle was out. She was a drifting shadow, the bloody price of her wishful thinking staining every conscious thought.
The infested waters of the Sanzu River gave up her shipwrecked psyche to the permanent midnight of a windswept tundra. The bitter air stabbed at her lungs. Aching cold wracked her body. Her tears froze before striking the ground.
But the pain was a flea bite compared to the millstone of guilt strapped to her back. She had one recourse left to her—to embrace the hell within and be reborn as a vengeful ghost. Every time Hatakeyama and Ouchi cast off the mortal coil, she would await their reincarnations and hunt them down and haunt them to their miserable deaths.
In her mind she could hear Priest Gendo quoting his gods: Self-mortification is as grievous a sin as self-absolution. And Chieko quoting hers: Vengeance is mine.
But vengeance was hers and she would repay.
I rewrote it a dozen times, but it still bugged me. All tell, no show. Ultimately redundant. Finally I hit delete and fed the whole chapter (plus a thousand words beyond that) to the digital compost pile (i.e., cut and archive and maybe the bits and pieces will come in useful later).
A big problem with writing something that doesn't quite work and doesn't belong (versus stuff that is just bad) is that you end up investing so much time trying to make it work and belong that you start valuing the invested effort over the actual value, the sunk cost over the true worth.
Human nature. It's surprisingly hard letting go of the useless, and thus surprising how much things improve when you do. Anyway, I'm pretty sure "Get rid of prologues" is on one of those writing advice bullet point lists I've read somewhere. It's still a prologue even if you call it a chapter.
Oh, and to "Mai": yes, an HEA in this life (and good call on "hungry ghost"; I'd carried that term over from my source material and hadn't fixed it).
Labels: deep thoughts, writing
June 14, 2010
Where language goes to die
Valiantly defending the value of a liberal arts education in the pages of the New York Times (i.e., dog bites man), David Brooks argues that
It's not clear to me how institutions so reluctant to admit that there is a non-relativistic human nature or that there are non-relativistic universal truths will do any better. Brooks wants secular liberal arts programs to do the one thing they have been laboring valiantly for the past century to not do--preach that old time religion.
You don't need a humanities degree from Harvard to understand why "a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator." It's covered in the Bible (for starters), the part about David and Bathsheba. Nor do I find the utilitarian argument any more compelling. Stating the obvious, Brooks says that
Brooks overwhelms me with his low expectations for higher education. Writing a "clear and concise memo" is a subject that should be tackled in high school, or freshman English at the very latest. And according to Oxfordian Helena Echlin, attending graduate school in the U.S. may have exactly the opposite result. No one in her English and American literature classes
As far as Echlin is concerned, the study of literary criticism in the Ivy Leagues "is a hoax." She was not allowed graduate credit for a writing workshop taught by novelist Robert Stone ("Having Stone teach literature is like having a gorilla teach zoology"). So she audited the class and learned more from him "than from all my other professors put together."
Yale, she concluded, is "the place where language goes to die" (after emptying your pockets).
Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion . . . . [E]conomics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology . . . are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling.
It's not clear to me how institutions so reluctant to admit that there is a non-relativistic human nature or that there are non-relativistic universal truths will do any better. Brooks wants secular liberal arts programs to do the one thing they have been laboring valiantly for the past century to not do--preach that old time religion.
You don't need a humanities degree from Harvard to understand why "a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator." It's covered in the Bible (for starters), the part about David and Bathsheba. Nor do I find the utilitarian argument any more compelling. Stating the obvious, Brooks says that
[s]tudying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
Brooks overwhelms me with his low expectations for higher education. Writing a "clear and concise memo" is a subject that should be tackled in high school, or freshman English at the very latest. And according to Oxfordian Helena Echlin, attending graduate school in the U.S. may have exactly the opposite result. No one in her English and American literature classes
mentioned enjoying a book. Analysis is practised completely free of evaluation. Manifestly, analysis is more important than the texts themselves. In a class on The Canterbury Tales, the secondary literature dwarfs the Tales. We are asked to review books on Chaucer, and even review reviews of books on Chaucer. I see an infinite sequence of mirrors into which Chaucer has disappeared.
As far as Echlin is concerned, the study of literary criticism in the Ivy Leagues "is a hoax." She was not allowed graduate credit for a writing workshop taught by novelist Robert Stone ("Having Stone teach literature is like having a gorilla teach zoology"). So she audited the class and learned more from him "than from all my other professors put together."
Yale, she concluded, is "the place where language goes to die" (after emptying your pockets).
September 16, 2009
Abstinence porn
I was reading this entertainingly nasty review of the Twilight series by Christine Seifert, which introduces the wonderfully precise term: "abstinence porn." And I had an epiphany.
Granted, Seifert takes the standard lit. crit. line, namely way overreacting to the horror, the horror of conservative mores invading the hallowed ground of pop culture (which has always been as reliable "real" as a Ken Burns documentary, right?), not to mention treating such frivolities so deadly serious to begin with.
I enjoy taking pop culture too seriously too—but with tongue firmly wedged in cheek. Lefty academics treating bad genre fiction as a poisoner of tender young minds and a threat to civilization is no different than the religious right getting riled up about sex education and evolution (at least the religious right is ideologically consistent about policing thought).
Besides, as Moriah Jovan points out, every time the literary critics pull on their scorn-laden boots and resolve to squish the paleo-romance genre to death once and for all, it just pops out someplace else under a new, superficially politically-correct guise (such as yaoi).
I mean, geez, people, can't you just laugh about it? Because I laugh more at critics wringing their hands about how "worrisome" and "disturbing" Twilight is, and how it's going to "undermine feminist sensibilities." Not to mention the annoying habit—again, usually expected from the right—of using "porn" to describe anything you don't like that's somehow related to sex.
Though I'll have to plead hypocrisy here too, because I rather like "abstinence porn" as a genre description, and see no problem in exploring and exploiting it the best I can. In any case, I would respectfully submit that when it comes to messing around without "crossing the line," a good Mormon like Stephenie Meyer knows what the heck she's talking about.
Unlike Seifert's aforementioned essay, in which she is surprised at "how successful this new genre is. Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot." (I glean from the tone that this is a bad thing.) What's more surprising is how clueless the writer—a professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City—is. Talk about fish discovering water last.
And when are we going to finally bury this hoary, pedantic insistence that if a given demographic enjoys a given genre of entertainment, then ipso facto they must desire what's represented in that entertainment in real life? I hope nobody takes the fact that I like Bruce Willis actioners to mean that I'm longing to get shot up by a bunch of Eastern European terrorists.
As my sister Kate puts it, "I can't think of anything dumber than telling a teenage girl that she should stop adoring Edward." Twilight, after all, turns on the fantasy of the
While Seifert's analysis turns hilarious when she notes a fan's "salient" (albeit "subconscious") "understanding of the theme Meyer has been establishing: that sex is dangerous and men must control themselves." A subconscious understanding? I'd call it FREAKING OBVIOUS! Getting teenage boys to corral their sexual impulses is what makes civilization function.
Which makes some teenage girls smarter than some college professors. You know all that fuddy-duddy stuff about chivalry and honor—Who cannot rule himself, how should he rule others?—gee, I have no idea why anybody would be attracted to stuff like that nowadays in a romance novel. Cue Meat Loaf singing "Paradise by the dashboard light."
And then (as Kate helpfully suggests), "I would do anything for love" (the same couple twenty years later).
That once married, Bella turns out to be really into rough sex is the icing on the cake. Didn't Nancy Friday cover this ground, oh, about forty years ago? It's the "hip" Meyer versus her "stuffy" critics. Her skills as a writer aside, I'm cottoning to the idea that Meyer understands women—perhaps especially Mormon women—a whole lot better than her oh-so-progressive critics.
In short, abstinence porn pretends to be celebrating chastity while reveling in carnality. But I believe that Mormon theology supports the contention—in contradiction to the Gnostic heresies—that within proper constraints, carnality deserves being reveled in. It's a fine line, but the struggle to tiptoe down those fine lines is at the heart of dramatic conflict.
To be sure, it's not the thing itself, but the contradictions inherent in the oxymoron that ultimately make the story compelling. And here I return to the point I originally intended to make, which is that Mormon culture provides one of the few contemporary American settings (aside from the Amish) where "abstinence porn" plots actually prove plausible.
Hawt Mormon romance abstinence porn—maybe that's the literary ticket to breakout publishing success!
Granted, Seifert takes the standard lit. crit. line, namely way overreacting to the horror, the horror of conservative mores invading the hallowed ground of pop culture (which has always been as reliable "real" as a Ken Burns documentary, right?), not to mention treating such frivolities so deadly serious to begin with.
I enjoy taking pop culture too seriously too—but with tongue firmly wedged in cheek. Lefty academics treating bad genre fiction as a poisoner of tender young minds and a threat to civilization is no different than the religious right getting riled up about sex education and evolution (at least the religious right is ideologically consistent about policing thought).
Besides, as Moriah Jovan points out, every time the literary critics pull on their scorn-laden boots and resolve to squish the paleo-romance genre to death once and for all, it just pops out someplace else under a new, superficially politically-correct guise (such as yaoi).
I mean, geez, people, can't you just laugh about it? Because I laugh more at critics wringing their hands about how "worrisome" and "disturbing" Twilight is, and how it's going to "undermine feminist sensibilities." Not to mention the annoying habit—again, usually expected from the right—of using "porn" to describe anything you don't like that's somehow related to sex.
Though I'll have to plead hypocrisy here too, because I rather like "abstinence porn" as a genre description, and see no problem in exploring and exploiting it the best I can. In any case, I would respectfully submit that when it comes to messing around without "crossing the line," a good Mormon like Stephenie Meyer knows what the heck she's talking about.
Unlike Seifert's aforementioned essay, in which she is surprised at "how successful this new genre is. Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot." (I glean from the tone that this is a bad thing.) What's more surprising is how clueless the writer—a professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City—is. Talk about fish discovering water last.
And when are we going to finally bury this hoary, pedantic insistence that if a given demographic enjoys a given genre of entertainment, then ipso facto they must desire what's represented in that entertainment in real life? I hope nobody takes the fact that I like Bruce Willis actioners to mean that I'm longing to get shot up by a bunch of Eastern European terrorists.
As my sister Kate puts it, "I can't think of anything dumber than telling a teenage girl that she should stop adoring Edward." Twilight, after all, turns on the fantasy of the
romantic other who totally understands us and totally wants us and never wants to leave us and is always there for us and knows what is best for us . . . [In real life,] this type of relationship would get very tedious very fast, but I think it is unfair to get after women who voice it.
While Seifert's analysis turns hilarious when she notes a fan's "salient" (albeit "subconscious") "understanding of the theme Meyer has been establishing: that sex is dangerous and men must control themselves." A subconscious understanding? I'd call it FREAKING OBVIOUS! Getting teenage boys to corral their sexual impulses is what makes civilization function.
Which makes some teenage girls smarter than some college professors. You know all that fuddy-duddy stuff about chivalry and honor—Who cannot rule himself, how should he rule others?—gee, I have no idea why anybody would be attracted to stuff like that nowadays in a romance novel. Cue Meat Loaf singing "Paradise by the dashboard light."
And then (as Kate helpfully suggests), "I would do anything for love" (the same couple twenty years later).
That once married, Bella turns out to be really into rough sex is the icing on the cake. Didn't Nancy Friday cover this ground, oh, about forty years ago? It's the "hip" Meyer versus her "stuffy" critics. Her skills as a writer aside, I'm cottoning to the idea that Meyer understands women—perhaps especially Mormon women—a whole lot better than her oh-so-progressive critics.
In short, abstinence porn pretends to be celebrating chastity while reveling in carnality. But I believe that Mormon theology supports the contention—in contradiction to the Gnostic heresies—that within proper constraints, carnality deserves being reveled in. It's a fine line, but the struggle to tiptoe down those fine lines is at the heart of dramatic conflict.
To be sure, it's not the thing itself, but the contradictions inherent in the oxymoron that ultimately make the story compelling. And here I return to the point I originally intended to make, which is that Mormon culture provides one of the few contemporary American settings (aside from the Amish) where "abstinence porn" plots actually prove plausible.
Hawt Mormon romance abstinence porn—maybe that's the literary ticket to breakout publishing success!
Related posts
Defining "abstinence porn"
Selling the sizzle
Labels: criticism, deep thoughts, lds, meyer, sex, twilight, utah, writing
September 07, 2009
Teach a man to Fish
As I noted a while back, the motto of my old Japanese professor, Watabe Sensei, when he was consulting for the (sadly defunct) TESOL software company I used to work at was: "Examples, examples, examples!" Unfortunately, our Japanese clients always insisted on: "Grammar, grammar, grammar!" And the customer is always right, even when they're wrong.
Especially when they're footing the bill.
Stanley Fish comes to similar conclusions about English composition. If teaching grammar means memorizing rules and making students afraid of breaking them, then "teaching grammar out of context" is indeed ineffective. What does work, though, is drilling students in "the forms that enable meaning; and these are not inert taxonomic forms, but forms of thought."
Teach a practical form or structure--a usage--and then drill with examples of that usage. To paraphrase Royal Skousen, "The usage is the description." That's what makes the Eijirou database so useful: it's nothing but examples.
Of course, at times a good definition or a simple grammatical analysis will suffice. But when it comes to real-world applications, examples of the form in action are far more useful than textbook explanations. I like Khatzumoto's comparison of language learning to the martial arts and the practicing of kata, or "choreographed patterns of movements."
In music, it's called "learning the scales."
I think this is what Fish means when he says that "content just sprawls around; forms constrain and shape it." It is important that language students understand there is more to language than solipsistic discussions about language. But it's more irresponsible to rhapsodize about content without emphasizing the hard work of learning through practice, and lots of it.
As Victor Brunell nicely sums up the fruits of Khatzumoto's approach (he uses Mnemosyne, I use Anki):
I can second this observation. Even though it's more a metaphor than a "thing," and although it ages in dog years and grows creaky and arthritic by the time you're twenty, Chomsky's fabled language acquisition device is still chugging away.
Especially when they're footing the bill.
Stanley Fish comes to similar conclusions about English composition. If teaching grammar means memorizing rules and making students afraid of breaking them, then "teaching grammar out of context" is indeed ineffective. What does work, though, is drilling students in "the forms that enable meaning; and these are not inert taxonomic forms, but forms of thought."
Teach a practical form or structure--a usage--and then drill with examples of that usage. To paraphrase Royal Skousen, "The usage is the description." That's what makes the Eijirou database so useful: it's nothing but examples.
Of course, at times a good definition or a simple grammatical analysis will suffice. But when it comes to real-world applications, examples of the form in action are far more useful than textbook explanations. I like Khatzumoto's comparison of language learning to the martial arts and the practicing of kata, or "choreographed patterns of movements."
In music, it's called "learning the scales."
I think this is what Fish means when he says that "content just sprawls around; forms constrain and shape it." It is important that language students understand there is more to language than solipsistic discussions about language. But it's more irresponsible to rhapsodize about content without emphasizing the hard work of learning through practice, and lots of it.
As Victor Brunell nicely sums up the fruits of Khatzumoto's approach (he uses Mnemosyne, I use Anki):
My grammar acquisition proved to be quite rapid. It’s so strange: your mind simply begins to adapt itself to a certain way of thinking after seeing grammar repeatedly used in context, regardless of whether or not you have a concrete explanation in your primary language.
I can second this observation. Even though it's more a metaphor than a "thing," and although it ages in dog years and grows creaky and arthritic by the time you're twenty, Chomsky's fabled language acquisition device is still chugging away.
November 18, 2008
Dying electronic metaphors
Matt Springer observed in a recent post that the famous first line of William Gibson's Neuromancer has gone the way of the buggy whip:
I spent a good part of my teenager years repairing ancient B&W tube televisions, so Gibson's metaphor still resonates strongly with me. But you can't tune a modern television set to an "empty" channel. When no signal is detected, it simply displays a blue screen.
In the comments, Chad Orzel points out that Neil Gaiman homages Gibson in his novel Neverwhere (chapter 20, second paragraph):
I'm also reminded of an On the Media story from January 2005 about the (mostly) dead technology represented by the "record scratch" sound effect.
The intrepid reporter had no problem finding kids who couldn't identify the needle-on-vinyl source of the sound. But like a colloquial expression whose etymology has been lost in the mists of time, everybody still knows what the record scratch "means."
And for good measure, the story before that one documents the decline and fall of reel-to-reel analog recording tape.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I spent a good part of my teenager years repairing ancient B&W tube televisions, so Gibson's metaphor still resonates strongly with me. But you can't tune a modern television set to an "empty" channel. When no signal is detected, it simply displays a blue screen.
In the comments, Chad Orzel points out that Neil Gaiman homages Gibson in his novel Neverwhere (chapter 20, second paragraph):
The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen tuned to a dead channel.
I'm also reminded of an On the Media story from January 2005 about the (mostly) dead technology represented by the "record scratch" sound effect.
The intrepid reporter had no problem finding kids who couldn't identify the needle-on-vinyl source of the sound. But like a colloquial expression whose etymology has been lost in the mists of time, everybody still knows what the record scratch "means."
And for good measure, the story before that one documents the decline and fall of reel-to-reel analog recording tape.
Labels: deep thoughts, technology, television, writing
October 16, 2008
Making remote (online/offsite) backups
This topic came up over on the LDS Writers Blogck blog, so as a service to other paranoids like myself whose living very much depends on all those bits being safely stored inside their computers, I'll post my recommendations here as well.
First of all, if you have a reasonably fast Internet connection, you should definitely install Mozy. The first 2 GB are free, and at least for me, everything in My Documents (except for My Music) takes up less space than that.
Once Mozy is set up, it keeps your hard drive busy for several hours while it images your files. After that, it only saves the "delta" (files you've changed). It's fast and transparent (it can be instructed to make backups when the computer is idle), and has never given me a lick of trouble.With the "free" plan, you only pay if you have to restore more than one file a month. I think of it as fire insurance.
Another free Internet service is Box. Unlike Mozy, you treat Box like an ordinary external hard drive. The free plan offers 1 GB of storage with a 10 MB individual file limit.
In a pinch, you can email files (as attachments) to your Google or Yahoo email account. I also image my entire hard drive every six months or so using the ThinkVantage Rescue & Recovery software that came with my ThinkPad and an external USB hard drive (a similar product is Norton Ghost). Plus, I make critical backups (that I can immediately access) to a couple of USB flash drives.
First of all, if you have a reasonably fast Internet connection, you should definitely install Mozy. The first 2 GB are free, and at least for me, everything in My Documents (except for My Music) takes up less space than that.
Once Mozy is set up, it keeps your hard drive busy for several hours while it images your files. After that, it only saves the "delta" (files you've changed). It's fast and transparent (it can be instructed to make backups when the computer is idle), and has never given me a lick of trouble.
Another free Internet service is Box. Unlike Mozy, you treat Box like an ordinary external hard drive. The free plan offers 1 GB of storage with a 10 MB individual file limit.
In a pinch, you can email files (as attachments) to your Google or Yahoo email account. I also image my entire hard drive every six months or so using the ThinkVantage Rescue & Recovery software that came with my ThinkPad and an external USB hard drive (a similar product is Norton Ghost). Plus, I make critical backups (that I can immediately access) to a couple of USB flash drives.
Labels: technology, writing
August 07, 2008
"Breaking Dawn" at Dear Author
A review at the Dear Author blog (not a nice one). But these are people who love fantasy and romance. Not literary snobs. The kind of readers I identify with the most, who know there's good pulp and then there's not-so-good pulp.
The comments section contains a compelling discussion of character and story structure and meeting expectations in genre fiction. Who is responsible for a book's success? The writer? The editor? The readers?
I agree that the readers have the final say and ultimately render the only judgment that matters. But can too much love ruin a writer? Does sparing the rod spoil the child? Can the fans love an author to death?
Warning: plenty of spoilers along the way. You will know the plot of the whole book by the time you've read through all of the comments. Oh, and I made a similar quip about the Mormon naming business here.
The comments section contains a compelling discussion of character and story structure and meeting expectations in genre fiction. Who is responsible for a book's success? The writer? The editor? The readers?
I agree that the readers have the final say and ultimately render the only judgment that matters. But can too much love ruin a writer? Does sparing the rod spoil the child? Can the fans love an author to death?
Warning: plenty of spoilers along the way. You will know the plot of the whole book by the time you've read through all of the comments. Oh, and I made a similar quip about the Mormon naming business here.
Labels: criticism, lds, meyer, publishing, writing
May 01, 2008
Stephenie Meyer
A TIME magazine bio about Mormon fantasy writer Stephenie Meyer, author of the fabulously successful Twilight vampire series. My favorite quote in the article: "I rarely write about just humans," Meyer says. "You can get humans anywhere."
I would put it this way: "I don't want to write about reality. I already live there."
Here's some commentary by William Morris about the novels from a Mormon perspective, with a bunch of additional links. More here, wondering if the male protagonists in Twilight are just too good to be true.
Similar thoughts back at A Motley Vision, with Anneke Majors recommending D.H. Lawrence and arguing that
So what makes this guy so compelling?
And all a man asks of a woman is that she be "hot." Pretty dang easy in comparison to that, it seems to me.
Okay, I joke, I joke. But I do glean from the comments a fascination with a certain kind of stoic male sexuality, conforming to all the romance stereotypes: "Edward is expected to have all the self-control. Bella is not just passive, she is actively tempting and provoking him."
This was a theme in the first half of Buffy, and it ended badly. Buffy pretty much repeated herself with Spike, and the relationship was just as dysfunctional. Give Joss Whedon extra points for keeping it real.
I would put it this way: "I don't want to write about reality. I already live there."
Here's some commentary by William Morris about the novels from a Mormon perspective, with a bunch of additional links. More here, wondering if the male protagonists in Twilight are just too good to be true.
Similar thoughts back at A Motley Vision, with Anneke Majors recommending D.H. Lawrence and arguing that
I would much rather my teenage sisters read novels that would elevate their worldviews and deepen their respect and appreciation for human intimacy than see them swooning over the abusive, controlling vampire character of Edward Cullen.
So what makes this guy so compelling?
He's dangerous (a vampire!) but not really (he's good!). He is hot but doesn't care. He's rich but doesn't care and doesn't have to work for it. He is powerful but is helpless before Bella's charms after only a glimpse of her. He is attentive and loyal and thinks only of her.
And all a man asks of a woman is that she be "hot." Pretty dang easy in comparison to that, it seems to me.
Okay, I joke, I joke. But I do glean from the comments a fascination with a certain kind of stoic male sexuality, conforming to all the romance stereotypes: "Edward is expected to have all the self-control. Bella is not just passive, she is actively tempting and provoking him."
This was a theme in the first half of Buffy, and it ended badly. Buffy pretty much repeated herself with Spike, and the relationship was just as dysfunctional. Give Joss Whedon extra points for keeping it real.