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shadowkatThe apartment hunting is not going well. It's become well complicated. And work, sigh, difficult and stressful. Windows 2010 reminds me a little of how Windows ME and Windows Vista - it's a nightmare. Things that used to take seconds take 20 minutes. And it's not the only new system they are implementing. The thing of it is, and bear with me as I attempt to find the words to explain myself, - is they are taking what was once simple and complicating it to the extent that it takes longer to do the work and when we try to fix problems, new one's occur. The reason this has happened is simple - the creators of Windows 2010 wanted to please everyone - they added every possible thing imaginable. They were in a nutshell trying to do too much. And as a result what once was a simple program, become complicated.
Been thinking about this a lot lately, because it is a recurring theme in my life of late. At the Haitian Forum it struck me that this was part of the problem - the forum felt a bit chaotic. All these ideas, all these solutions, all these problems, no consensus. It reminded me a little of
my old Legislative Class professor in Law School's speech about how government in a nutshell was organized chaos. Basically what happens is everyone picks out a problem and throws it into a hat, they don't agree on what the main problem is. Then everyone has a solution and throws it into a hat, because they do not agree on what the solution should be. And you just pick them out of the hat. What my professor did not know is that is basically true about most democratically run or for that matter large organizations where there is no clear guiding voice. At the forum - there were too many ideas and no real coherent solutions. I left it feeling frustrated and scattered. Overwhelmed. Drunk on information. Felt the same way after seeing four-five apartments this week and four to five last weekend. Overwhelmed and frustrated. Clarity gone.
If you know me at all, you'll realize how ironic it is for me to complain about people complicating things. For since I was a little girl, my parents used to say - your problem is you complicate everything. You are a complicator, sk. I try not to be. But my stories always got convoluted. And my papers in school - even more so. Instead of selecting something simple - I went after what was complicated. And most of the stories I wrote had that problem - convoluted plots.
Last night, I tried to watch the third episode of Sherlock a second time. Made it all the way through, even though I kept rewinding every ten to fifteen minutes because my mind wandered.
Spoke to a friend about it today, who'd also seen the episode. And also had difficulty following it. I thought it was just me. That my brain was on overload or something. No, said my friend, it was a confusing episode, drug in places, didn't make sense in others, ended on a cliffhanger and the lead character, Sherlock, was a bit too over-the-top - to the point in which he was almost not believable. In short it was a mess. I paused and thought about it. My friend was right - the writer and director of that episode was trying to do too much. The title of the episode was The Game - and it had two complex interlocking mysteries going on at the same time, plus this mysterious third character who may or may not be involved in both (my guess - just the one).
Also this weekend, I bought, read, and reviewed the latest Buffy Comic - Issue 38 - and after reading numerous metas and reviews, it hit me why the views on this comic, much like the Sherlock episode I described above are all over the map, and diametrically opposed. The comic has the same central flaw in structure that the Sherlock episode does. It tries to do too much and in doing so, falls flat on its face.
I vividly remember a Creative Writing instructor tearing me apart in class in undergrad over a story I'd written. He told me - and it was painful at the time, which explains I suppose why it stuck with me - what was wrong with my story. I remember his face scrunching up when he said it, puffed cheeks below rounded spectacles. He was not a big man. And whenever I think of him, for some reason in my head I see Lewis Carroll or some character out of Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps it was his voice? At any rate what he said was - you have to give your reader certain clues, a road map of sorts before they enter your story. They have to know the setting, the time, the place, who the characters are. Those things can't be the puzzle. I thought at the time he'd never read Beckett and may have muttered as much for he said in response, there is a big difference between a writer like Beckett and say William S. Burroughs and what you did here. Those writers provide the reader with a compass. Your story is so open to interpretation that you had five different views and all could be correct. That's a problem. The advice stuck.
And I find myself looking at two stories I'd been enjoying, yet was less than thrilled with this weekend - thinking these writers did the same thing I did. They overshot the target. They tried to do too much, and over-complicated their tale to the extent that the characters got lost, and the theme or multiple themes took over. The story instead of being a story became what can best be described as a bit of a mess.
It's like looking at a mathematical equation if you will, and you calculate it in say excel (computer program) and then on your calculator, and then on paper - and you get three different answers. Why? You fuss over it for hours, until finally you hit upon the simple explanation that it had to do with the rounding. Excel rounded the numbers one way, the calculator didn't at all, and well when you added them on paper, you may have rounded some and not others. The answer depends on what calculated it.
Story analysis or interpretation is much the same way. It depends on who is looking at it. And if the story is complicated, with lots of ideas plugged into it, and does not provide a clear and coherent or even straight forward plot - the interpretations will vary widely. If for example you aren't told when the story is taking place exactly - just that it takes place sometime after the events of the last book or tv episode, then your analysis of that tale varies based on when you think it takes place in the timeline. Same deal with character analysis - your view of Angel in the Buffy comics may well have a lot to do with how you viewed Angel's relationship with his son Connor. I've noticed that many of the people who are enjoying the comics and not having problems with Angel's portrayal in them, either were ambivalent about Connor, did not like Connor, did not know about Connor, or thought Connor was unimportant. They equally did not consider Angel's obsession with family important. Or his need to protect his family. While those who loved this aspect of Angel's character, can't quite wrap their mind around it being missing in the comics.
Add to that how you view family - not everyone views it the same way. Some people see family as the most important thing, friends are transistory, family for keeps, other's well the opposite.
When I read fanfic - I've noticed that with few exceptions, there are a bunch of warnings or headers. This is true of all fanfic not specific to one show or another. Example:
Author:
Rating: R for smut, language
Pairings:
BTVS Season 2, February
And in some cases there will be something like - takes place after such and such story that I wrote or this is in Scotland. Etc.
But we are told up front...when it takes place and what is canon. This is based in S2 BTVS and takes place in Feburary. If you don't tell the reader when it takes place and what took place before it upfront, you have to do the work and state it in the story. IF you don't the reader is left filling the blanks themselves, never a good idea. The more blanks you leave for the reader to fill in, the more ways they can interpret your story differently than you intended.
A lot of writers want to fool readers, trick them, so they can shock them later with a big reveal.
That's great. But it only works if your reader is given a few bread crumbs to follow you to the reveal. If you spend all your time giving them red herrings to send them scurrying elsewhere, by the time the reveal happens - your reader will be lost in another book or story, and have forgotten you. Reader's have short attention spans. You have to give your reader a few clues, let them in on the joke a bit. The plot-twist or surprise should not be the main focus of the story.
Agatha Christie was a master at plot-twists (that is until you read 20 of them...and started to figure out her technique but still a master. My favorites were Curtain and Murder on the Orient Express). But she led the reader to them. And perhaps the best plot twist in the Buffy TV series was Angel losing his soul after sleeping with Buffy and turning into her worst nightmare. That twist worked on all levels, tracked, made sense, and here's the thing? Simple. It was clear because it was simple. Not complicated.
Plots should always be simple. Make your characters complicated. Your plots simple. This I've learned the hard way. If you make your characters complicated - your plot will become interesting, because your characters will pull it forward. Use the plot to explore the character. That I've been told so many times, I've lost track. And every time I read or see a tv show or book that tries to do the opposite, I realize why it just does not work. The EVENT is an excellent of a tv series that has a complicated plot but simple characters and as a result is a bit of a mess.
While LOST in direct contrast is a fairly simple plot - a bunch of characters get stuck on an island and have to find their way off of it. The complexities in the plot come from the characters.
The mystery of the island really isn't important - it is a metaphor for the characters who are lost on it. All the flaws with LOST can be laid at the plot's door - when the plot got convoluted, it lost the audience and the story, along with its characters. Same with BSG - when BSG stayed simple - about people fleeing an apocalypse and trying to survive while being pursued by their own creations...it worked. When it got increasingly convoluted plot-wise and tried to handle one too many themes and threads...it lost its way.
Every critique of every show or book I've read seems to state - the plot makes no sense or its convoluted or it has multiple interpretations. Look at Dollhouse - that show fell flat on its face because it could not decide what it wanted to be. It was trying to be too many things at once.
And the plot was all over the place.
While Buffy - the TV show worked because it was fairly simple in plot structure, the characters were what was complicated.
I'm not saying complicated is bad, but sometimes it can lead to confusion and incoherence. A complicated plot can often get in the way of the emotional impact of the story the writer or teller is trying to relate. Simple is good. And this comes from a gal who is notorious at complicating her stories and art merely to entertain herself.
Been thinking about this a lot lately, because it is a recurring theme in my life of late. At the Haitian Forum it struck me that this was part of the problem - the forum felt a bit chaotic. All these ideas, all these solutions, all these problems, no consensus. It reminded me a little of
my old Legislative Class professor in Law School's speech about how government in a nutshell was organized chaos. Basically what happens is everyone picks out a problem and throws it into a hat, they don't agree on what the main problem is. Then everyone has a solution and throws it into a hat, because they do not agree on what the solution should be. And you just pick them out of the hat. What my professor did not know is that is basically true about most democratically run or for that matter large organizations where there is no clear guiding voice. At the forum - there were too many ideas and no real coherent solutions. I left it feeling frustrated and scattered. Overwhelmed. Drunk on information. Felt the same way after seeing four-five apartments this week and four to five last weekend. Overwhelmed and frustrated. Clarity gone.
If you know me at all, you'll realize how ironic it is for me to complain about people complicating things. For since I was a little girl, my parents used to say - your problem is you complicate everything. You are a complicator, sk. I try not to be. But my stories always got convoluted. And my papers in school - even more so. Instead of selecting something simple - I went after what was complicated. And most of the stories I wrote had that problem - convoluted plots.
Last night, I tried to watch the third episode of Sherlock a second time. Made it all the way through, even though I kept rewinding every ten to fifteen minutes because my mind wandered.
Spoke to a friend about it today, who'd also seen the episode. And also had difficulty following it. I thought it was just me. That my brain was on overload or something. No, said my friend, it was a confusing episode, drug in places, didn't make sense in others, ended on a cliffhanger and the lead character, Sherlock, was a bit too over-the-top - to the point in which he was almost not believable. In short it was a mess. I paused and thought about it. My friend was right - the writer and director of that episode was trying to do too much. The title of the episode was The Game - and it had two complex interlocking mysteries going on at the same time, plus this mysterious third character who may or may not be involved in both (my guess - just the one).
Also this weekend, I bought, read, and reviewed the latest Buffy Comic - Issue 38 - and after reading numerous metas and reviews, it hit me why the views on this comic, much like the Sherlock episode I described above are all over the map, and diametrically opposed. The comic has the same central flaw in structure that the Sherlock episode does. It tries to do too much and in doing so, falls flat on its face.
I vividly remember a Creative Writing instructor tearing me apart in class in undergrad over a story I'd written. He told me - and it was painful at the time, which explains I suppose why it stuck with me - what was wrong with my story. I remember his face scrunching up when he said it, puffed cheeks below rounded spectacles. He was not a big man. And whenever I think of him, for some reason in my head I see Lewis Carroll or some character out of Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps it was his voice? At any rate what he said was - you have to give your reader certain clues, a road map of sorts before they enter your story. They have to know the setting, the time, the place, who the characters are. Those things can't be the puzzle. I thought at the time he'd never read Beckett and may have muttered as much for he said in response, there is a big difference between a writer like Beckett and say William S. Burroughs and what you did here. Those writers provide the reader with a compass. Your story is so open to interpretation that you had five different views and all could be correct. That's a problem. The advice stuck.
And I find myself looking at two stories I'd been enjoying, yet was less than thrilled with this weekend - thinking these writers did the same thing I did. They overshot the target. They tried to do too much, and over-complicated their tale to the extent that the characters got lost, and the theme or multiple themes took over. The story instead of being a story became what can best be described as a bit of a mess.
It's like looking at a mathematical equation if you will, and you calculate it in say excel (computer program) and then on your calculator, and then on paper - and you get three different answers. Why? You fuss over it for hours, until finally you hit upon the simple explanation that it had to do with the rounding. Excel rounded the numbers one way, the calculator didn't at all, and well when you added them on paper, you may have rounded some and not others. The answer depends on what calculated it.
Story analysis or interpretation is much the same way. It depends on who is looking at it. And if the story is complicated, with lots of ideas plugged into it, and does not provide a clear and coherent or even straight forward plot - the interpretations will vary widely. If for example you aren't told when the story is taking place exactly - just that it takes place sometime after the events of the last book or tv episode, then your analysis of that tale varies based on when you think it takes place in the timeline. Same deal with character analysis - your view of Angel in the Buffy comics may well have a lot to do with how you viewed Angel's relationship with his son Connor. I've noticed that many of the people who are enjoying the comics and not having problems with Angel's portrayal in them, either were ambivalent about Connor, did not like Connor, did not know about Connor, or thought Connor was unimportant. They equally did not consider Angel's obsession with family important. Or his need to protect his family. While those who loved this aspect of Angel's character, can't quite wrap their mind around it being missing in the comics.
Add to that how you view family - not everyone views it the same way. Some people see family as the most important thing, friends are transistory, family for keeps, other's well the opposite.
When I read fanfic - I've noticed that with few exceptions, there are a bunch of warnings or headers. This is true of all fanfic not specific to one show or another. Example:
Author:
Rating: R for smut, language
Pairings:
BTVS Season 2, February
And in some cases there will be something like - takes place after such and such story that I wrote or this is in Scotland. Etc.
But we are told up front...when it takes place and what is canon. This is based in S2 BTVS and takes place in Feburary. If you don't tell the reader when it takes place and what took place before it upfront, you have to do the work and state it in the story. IF you don't the reader is left filling the blanks themselves, never a good idea. The more blanks you leave for the reader to fill in, the more ways they can interpret your story differently than you intended.
A lot of writers want to fool readers, trick them, so they can shock them later with a big reveal.
That's great. But it only works if your reader is given a few bread crumbs to follow you to the reveal. If you spend all your time giving them red herrings to send them scurrying elsewhere, by the time the reveal happens - your reader will be lost in another book or story, and have forgotten you. Reader's have short attention spans. You have to give your reader a few clues, let them in on the joke a bit. The plot-twist or surprise should not be the main focus of the story.
Agatha Christie was a master at plot-twists (that is until you read 20 of them...and started to figure out her technique but still a master. My favorites were Curtain and Murder on the Orient Express). But she led the reader to them. And perhaps the best plot twist in the Buffy TV series was Angel losing his soul after sleeping with Buffy and turning into her worst nightmare. That twist worked on all levels, tracked, made sense, and here's the thing? Simple. It was clear because it was simple. Not complicated.
Plots should always be simple. Make your characters complicated. Your plots simple. This I've learned the hard way. If you make your characters complicated - your plot will become interesting, because your characters will pull it forward. Use the plot to explore the character. That I've been told so many times, I've lost track. And every time I read or see a tv show or book that tries to do the opposite, I realize why it just does not work. The EVENT is an excellent of a tv series that has a complicated plot but simple characters and as a result is a bit of a mess.
While LOST in direct contrast is a fairly simple plot - a bunch of characters get stuck on an island and have to find their way off of it. The complexities in the plot come from the characters.
The mystery of the island really isn't important - it is a metaphor for the characters who are lost on it. All the flaws with LOST can be laid at the plot's door - when the plot got convoluted, it lost the audience and the story, along with its characters. Same with BSG - when BSG stayed simple - about people fleeing an apocalypse and trying to survive while being pursued by their own creations...it worked. When it got increasingly convoluted plot-wise and tried to handle one too many themes and threads...it lost its way.
Every critique of every show or book I've read seems to state - the plot makes no sense or its convoluted or it has multiple interpretations. Look at Dollhouse - that show fell flat on its face because it could not decide what it wanted to be. It was trying to be too many things at once.
And the plot was all over the place.
While Buffy - the TV show worked because it was fairly simple in plot structure, the characters were what was complicated.
I'm not saying complicated is bad, but sometimes it can lead to confusion and incoherence. A complicated plot can often get in the way of the emotional impact of the story the writer or teller is trying to relate. Simple is good. And this comes from a gal who is notorious at complicating her stories and art merely to entertain herself.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-10 10:03 am (UTC)Anyway, I've been saying all along that the lack of knowledge about what happened between Chosen and The Long Way Home #1 is a big problem. Not just because we're unsure when, but because so many decisions were taken without us knowing why - why bank robbing, why the castle, why is Dawn a giant... (Oh wait, they did get round to that after a couple of years.) There's been a disconnect since the start and asking the audience to fill in the blanks themselves is not a good strategy.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-10 11:36 pm (UTC)Too much is left out.