Archive for the 'Storytelling' Category

Creating The World Within Which You’d Like To Live

Constance Ash February 25th, 2007

The following pull comes from today’s NY Times’s Art section, in an article about the photographic artist, Justine Kurland.  You can find the article here, with a slide show of some of her work.

[ “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist,” she said. And in a sense these new works also relate to the aesthetic of late 19th-century landscape photography, which “was really about this idea of projecting an idealism onto a landscape,” she said. “It was a way of settling the West.” ]

Her vision of past, present and idyll, is an interesting companion to the ideas raised (yet again! you’d think BY NOW, primatologists, at least, would get it, that the female of our species never was a passive beggar at best to great big alpha males hunting to get the food to feed herself and children) in the article about chimp mothers creating hunting weapons and tools.

However, most of all, I was struck by Kurland’s statement, “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist.”  Not always, but often, this would fit those of us who make worlds that don’t exist, as a matter of course.  It states succinctly, as well, why we make worlds like Sherri Tepper does, for instance, that are our deepest terrors.  Without political advocacy and activism, we cannot avoid the worlds that are our terrors, or bring into existence worlds that are better than a world of terror.

Kurland is a photographer, not a fiction writer.  This is something else I liked about her statement.  It shows us all that fiction is not the only path to envisioning worlds within which we could live comfortably, with our children, other creatures and each other.

Love, C.

The Serious Business of Funny Stuff

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 19th, 2007

Thalia weeps while Melpomene is still no doubt staring glazedly at the screen, giggling uncomfortably.  I must rant while this is all fresh in my mind.

I just had the instructional if less than pleasureable experience of watching The Half Hour News Hour on Fox News.  It’s supposed to be comedy, but about the only thing funny about it was the unintended irony of it actually addressing news-worthy subjects, such as global warming and candidates for the 2008 presidential race, contrasting rather sharply with the “straight” news item that followed, more breathless coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith, who died, like, a week ago.  This is more coverage than they did for the death of Gerald Ford or for that matter, Saddam Hussein.

For those uninitiated, THHNH was created by Joel Surnow, who also created 24, about my favorite suspense spy thriller show.   THHNH is Fox News’ answer to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show & The Colbert Report.  It’s supposed to be right wing comedy, but only comes off, at best, as embarrassingly lame playground humor.  This is not because there isn’t anything funny on the left, but because there are certain rules of comedy that must be respected if it is to have any hope of success, and for Thalia’s sake, I learned these on the playground.  And while I have a rather liberal bias myself, I’m more offended by bad right wing comedy than the idea of right wing comedy period.

So lo, I call upon Thalia, Muse of Comedy, to help me to best iterate the Rules of Comedy and the various infractions thereof, as evidenced by the first painful episode of THHNH:

I. Thou shalt not laugh at thy own jokes (This be a lesser sin if they be funny, but a mortal sin if they be not)

Perhaps the gravest sin of THHNH is the laugh track.  It’s bad, the laughs are obviously recycled from a tape, but worst of all, they follow lame jokes.  If a joke doesn’t fly or otherwise dies, you can recover by simply skipping on to the next one, but if you insist that it was supposed to be a joke by laughing at yourself–or having your canned laughter laugh for you–then your audience can’t simply ignore it.

II. Jests be as birds–smile gaily when they fly, look grave when they fall flat, then move on to the next.

It’s acceptable for comedians to smile and nod after delivering a punchline and pause for laughter, but if no one smiles, laughs, cheers or otherwise signals their appreciation, simply move on.  Really.  Honestly.

THHNH is obviously hobbled by not having a live studio audience; the actors have nothing to play against except each other and their own tin ears.

Maybe this will improve.  Somehow I doubt it.

III. The Joke of the Day is best fresh from the Marketplace, not day-old, week-old, month-old or worse.  This be because the News of the Day oft be a wittier jester than thee.

Let’s see, example from THHNH: joke about Britney Spears shaving her crotch.  A throwaway gag, hardly lingered over, but far less funny than the simple fact that yesterday Britney Spears shaved her head.

This could be followed by gags about Sinead O’Connor (the last female singer who did such a thing), jokes about K-Fed’s reaction (ex-husbands are always funny), or just random bald jokes made safe because of the simple fact that Britney Spears is a woman who shaved her head by choice, not a guy who went bald.  The news is its own amusement.

IV. Whether low and base or high and refined, a jest must relate to its subject.

The best example of this from THHNH: There was a long and extended (and generally tiresome) bit of business about Barrack Obama having a (completely fictional) magazine devoted to him and his life, with this as the knee-slapper: It’s called B.O. magazine!

The trouble with this is that the relation of the gag is tenuous at best and is a pretty thin thread to hang the rest of the segment upon, especially since Senator Obama isn’t noted for any body odor.  Worse, the joke could have been used effectively if used as part of a gag about “What sort of parents name their child ‘Barrack Hussein Obama’?” with a back and forth answering that “Barrack” is a fairly ordinary name in some parts of the world (Barruch in Hebrew) and that the parents had no way of looking into the future and knowing that “Hussein” and “Obama” might one day have unpleasant associations, with the final zinger: “What sort of parent sends their child to elementary school with the initials ‘B.O.’?” and a response about “Well, fortunately for Senator Obama, he attended elementary school in Indonesia” followed by a bit of business about the lengths parents have to go to to protection their children after unfortunate naming choices.

V.  Do not tackle the Unspeakable Taboo unless guarded by the Aegis of Truth and armed with the Sword of Hilarity!

Okay, case in point: THHNH had a mostly forgettable and boring running gag about environmentalist actor Ed Begley coming to the studio in his electric car, having it run out of juice, refueling it with human waste (I’m not making this up), having it run out of “gas,” then getting picked up as a homeless person and thrown in prison where rival gangs were fighting over him.  “As a center for prison basketball?” (Begley is notably tall)  No, for something else….

Yes, a long running gag is finally ended by a prison rape joke.  And it’s unforgiveable because, instead of having any degree of truth or even poetic justice, it’s just a sadistic fantasy.  And this is the last gag of the whole stinking show.

VI. Thou Shalt Not Open with Thy Strongest Joke or Thy Claim to Fame and follow with something banal

The best bit in the whole show was the opening act, the already leaked skit with Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter as President and VP in 2009.  I’d actually thought it was rather lame one the whole (though Limbaugh did deliver a good line about being upset that Pelosi had his phone number), but really, that was it?  Two famous right wing personalities as guest stars followed by four comics I’ve not only never heard of, but who had considerably less flair and stage presense than Limbaugh?

Good gods.

Gaiman, Composition & Tarot on the Well

Constance Ash February 16th, 2007

The writing process facilitated by recourse to queries of the Vertigo Tarot Deck.

Scroll down to:

inkwell.vue.292 : Neil Gaiman, “Fragile Things”
permalink #3 of 46: Elise Matthesen (lioness) Tue 6 Feb 07 20:08

Vertigo Tarot, King of Swords: “Is the inner world of a story too big to get onto the page?”

You can view the Vertigo Tarot (published by Vertigo Comics / DC) here.
Love, C.

 

Devil in the Details Redux: China Dolls and Chandlers

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 11th, 2007

Blame National Geographic.

When I was twelve or so, staying over at my grandparents with a cold, I read an issue of National Geographic which gave the history of gemcutting, the history and provenance of the various cuts–the emerald cut, the sapphire cut, the diamond cut, the rose, the brilliant and so forth–and I happily commited all this to memory, along with the rough dates of when each was developed and became popular.  Which of course some years later totally ruined a television show for me, “The Wizard,” 1986, because while I could deal with the concept of a four-foot-tall mad inventor MacGuyver type, when he pulled out the ancient Incan emerald and it was not only faceted but cut in the brilliant cut that wasn’t invented for diamonds until about the 19th century?  And it was the size of a baseball but flawless which is likewise impossible for an emerald?  The suspenders of disbelief were snapped.

Yes, I know, we’re supposed to look the other way and not raise our eyebrows.  No one seriously believed that Yul Brenner was Thai either, no matter how much tape he put on his eyelids.  And Al Jolson was not really black.

That all said, there’s a big step between “Imagine if you will” theatricality and simply getting stuff wrong, and in a big way too. Continue Reading »

Got Questions: Chapter Length

Kate Elliott February 10th, 2007

Over in Questions?, Lizza writes:

The hardest part i’d have to say though, was getting my chapters to be more lengthy. They were short and to the point. I wanted to be able to keep the reader hanging with suspense until the final word of the chapter. This is still something that I seem to have trouble with.
How long must your chapter be? How long do publishers recommend them being?

How long must a chapter be?

Long enough to do what it needs to do.

What does it need to do?

That depends.
Continue Reading »

The Text and its Story

Lois Tilton February 3rd, 2007

The people who do literary theory and criticism like to use the word “text” a lot, but I suspect I am going to be using it here in a way they might not approve. The text as I conceive it is the arrangement of words that tell a story, but it is not itself the story. The story itself exists prior to the text, in the mind of the author, and beyond it, in the minds of the readers. The act of writing a story is the attempt to recreate the story in the author’s mind in the medium of written words – a text. The act of reading the text is the recreation of the story in the reader’s mind.

Of course words are not the only medium in which a story can be told, and some people call those other forms of telling “texts” as well. It is possible to tell the same story in different ways – not only in different words, but in different media, yet it remains, in some fundamental way, the same story. “Cinderella,” for example, has been retold thousands of times, with and without using words: spoken, written, sung, danced, mimed, drawn. Yet through all these alterations, it remains at its heart the same story. The thing that we recognize behind the difference in media is the story itself.

In an art studio, we can often find a dozen different artists drawing the same model. The resulting portraits are usually quite different from one another. The artist is not, as a rule, attempting a perfectly exact replication of the model’s form and features. It is rather that in the mind of each artist there is an image of the model that he is attempting to capture and reproduce in lines or brush-strokes on paper; this mental image is the analogue of the story, and the lines of the pencil are the artist’s words.

By the story, then, I mean the “thing told”; by the text, I mean the particular telling of it. And that the story itself, in our minds, exists in our minds apart from and independent of any of its tellings.

Continue Reading »

The Devil in the Details — Descriptions

Kevin Andrew Murphy January 27th, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about descriptions — what works, what doesn’t, and what resonates down to a deeper level of truth.  It’s an author’s job to notice things, and to use what they notice in service of their story, details as keys to unlock the reader’s imagination and memory and let them experience the world.

The smallest things are often the most important, touchstones to memory.  When I was thirteen, my grandmother taught me how to make a pie crust.  Everything was fairly basic and straightforward, if tricky, until there came the moment to finish the pie.  My grandmother took a knife and drew three wavy lines down the crust, almost joining at the bottom, then used the knife to cut vents on each side of them, angled to make them look like three feathers or waving shafts of wheat.  She explained that this was the pattern her mother had taught her, and her grandmother before, and all the ladies in the neighborhood had used this back in the day.  It looked old and beautiful, something that wouldn’t look out of place in a pioneer woman’s hands, or a colonial kitchen, or an old Dutch master’s still life or even before.  Cutting that pattern a couple days ago, I couldn’t help but remember my grandmother.

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Stupid Writer Tricks: 10 Writing Tricks to Avoid

David Louis Edelman January 19th, 2007

Here are ten writing tricks and techniques you sometimes see in amateur manuscripts that I think it’s best to avoid. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, some of which I’ve noted below; there will always be exceptions to the rule. But in general, if you hew to these guidelines except in very special circumstances, you’ll be a better writer for it.

Let’s use a football analogy here. Sure, once or twice a season, you’re going to try a wacky, off-the-wall play that will completely take the opposing team by surprise. But your win/loss record is going to be largely based on how well you master the fundamentals: running, passing, blocking. The smart coach knows that the aim of most plays is to advance the ball a few yards down the field, not to make the spectacular 95-yard touchdown.

What I’m trying to say is this: If you find yourself using one of these tricks, give your story a close look to see if there’s some other problem you’re trying to compensate for. That’s all.

1. The unreliable narrator. This little sleight-of-hand has been done to death, and it doesn’t really add anything but cheap tension to the story anyway. Now, biased narrators are perfectly okay; everyone’s got a point of view and there’s no reason a narrator should be any different. But narrators that outright lie to the reader solely to throw a wrinkle in the plot should be avoided. Notable exception: Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

2. The typographical special effect. Prose is not a visual medium. Yes, the look and feel of the book in your hand can add to the experience (or detract). But I believe that typographical special effects and font changes should be used sparingly in most works of prose. Just like you don’t judge a wine based on the type of glass it’s served in, the ink and paper are just vessels to get your story across to the reader. Notable exceptions: Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.”

3. The intruding author. Inserting the narrator as a secondary character in a fictional story is boring, boring, boring. We’ve all seen a million examples of the wall between author and reader breaking down a la Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo and half of Stephen King’s novels. Richard K. Morgan had one of his characters at the end of Market Forces read a novel whose plot matched that of his Altered Carbon series, and I found that it temporarily jarred me out of an otherwise absorbing story. (Keep in mind that there are plenty of good fictional stories authors have written about themselves; but that’s not the same as chucking the author into an otherwise traditional fiction just for the surprise value.) Notable exceptions: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Breakfast of Champions.

Continue Reading »

And the Moral of Our Story

Madeleine Robins January 7th, 2007

This morning my younger daughter watched the film version of Bewitched, written and directed by the usually competant Nora Ephron. It’s an odd nested-metareferential sort of thing: fading film actor with Ego as Big as All Outdoors takes role in a present-day TV updating (meant to be a star vehicle for him) of that 1960s sitcom Bewitched, only the wrinkle is, the woman they hire to play Samantha is…gasp!…a real witch. Slight merriment ensues. While some things were cute–the look and much of the secondary-character casting–the whole film is basically as insubstantial as tissue.

So why even bring it up? Because Nora Ephron wrote it, and Ephron is a normally a better writer than this. What particularly irked me was how she telegraphs each character’s lessons. I couldn’t scrape up any pleasure at the denoument, because I not only knew early on (as one does, with a romantic comedy) that the protagonists would be together at the end, but what trauma/hangup/psychosis each of them would have to overcome to get to the end.

Don’t get me wrong. I was raised on the Ars Poetica (I was a theatre major, after all), and I believe that a satisfying story includes character growth and change, which frequently implies learning a lesson or overcoming some sort of obstacle, which can be read as a lesson or moral. It can be done skillfully, but so often it isn’t; you watch a movie where they establish the hero’s claustrophobia on stage in act one and know that in order to get to the end of the movie he’s going to have to face his demons and conquer them (cue triumphant music). And that’s exactly what happens in Bewitched, so clumsily and obviously that you don’t get a chance to be thrilled by anyone’s transformation. It’s either a very cynical movie or a very artless one, and given Nora Ephron’s track record I’m going for cynical.

How do you do it skillfully? Sometimes by making the lesson to be learned implicit (I’m thinking The Sixth Sense, where Bruce Willis’s psychiatrist not only has to figure out his own status in the world, but has to forgive himself for his prior arrogance and help someone before he can–literally–move on; but you don’t realize what his status is–and thus, what his transformation is–until the very end). Sometimes by raising so many other issues in the character’s life (or raising so many characters with issues) that the audience doesn’t immediately know which transformation is going to be pivotal to the story. Sometimes the story demonstrates that the moment for transformation was years before (I’m thinking of A Long Day’s Journey into Night) and the story is about the consequences of change or its lack. And sometimes–this is tough, but really interesting when a writer pulls it off–you do it by not doing it, by giving the character a chance to transform and have her refuse it (In Death of a Salesman Willy Loman more or less puts his fingers in his ears and hums loudly when realization and transformation approach). In that case it’s the audience’s view of the character which is transformed.

Is it unfair of me to ask that a light romantic comedy have the same resonance as a prize-winning drama? They set out to do different things. But I don’t want to walk away from Bewitched feeling like the writer has so much contempt for me that, after throwing a few sops to the conventions of the form at me, she can cash her paycheck and walk away whistling.

Recap:
Change and transformation, particularly when subtly wrought: excellent.
Heavy handed morals: not so much so.

Gummit Mandate: Superhero Registration

Constance Ash January 3rd, 2007

Spider-Man lassos White House in his web

The latest The Amazing Spider-Man comic (#536):

[ In Marvel Comics’ — ahem — “Civil War” story arc, the U.S. government passes the “Superhuman Registration Act” after hundreds of innocent American men, women and children become collateral damage in a superhero-related tragedy (the president of the United States even swings by the disaster site to assess the damage). The act mandates registration of all superheroes with the government. Spider-Man initially supports the act but then grows suspicious after discovering that unregistered captives are being held without civil rights at an off-shore prison called “the Negative Zone” (oh, and the prison was built with a no-bid contract). Detainees will remain there for life if they don’t register.

Now, to the present: In this latest Spider-Man comic, America’s favorite swinging web-slinger takes to New York City’s airwaves to publicly denounce the act.

“I’ve seen the very concept of justice destroyed,” Spidey begins (as written by J. Michael Straczynski). “I’ve seen heroes and bad guys alike — dangerous guys, no mistake, but still born in this country for the most part, denied due process, and imprisoned, potentially for the rest of their lives. … But there’s a point where the ends don’t justify the means, if the means require us to give up not just our identities, but who and what we are as a country.”

David Cassel, a Spider-Man fan and editor of 10zenmonkeys.com, said in response, “In thirty years of reading Spider-Man, I’ve never seen an attack so direct.” ]

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