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shadowkatSaw the tummy doc today, or gastrointestinalogist, who gave me a list of things I can't eat for ten days. Thinking of starting on Monday - since lunch is going to be problematic. May have to do a little investigating for bland
foods without bread. Also giving up OJ and Chocolat is going to hurt.
Oh well, partook of a chocolat chip cookie today - last one, but it was a yummy one - hot out of the oven. Pret Manger has freshly baked cookies. In fact when I arrived to get one along with yogurt (takes only ten minutes to go down elevator, get something from Pret, and whiz back up), the counter people were standing at the entrance of the oven trying to figure out how to take out the tray. They had no oven mits or those things you lift cookies off cookie sheets with, that I can't remember the name of, can draw it, just can't say it, which is hardly useful. Since I asked for one, they improvised - used a bundle of napkins and a plastic knife to scoop it off the sheet and into the brown baggie. I did pay for that cookie though - massive heart burn. Bye bye chocolat chip cookies. Actually starting tomorrow, bye-bye cookies and chocolat chips period. Ugh.
I was thinking about fanfiction again this week. Over July 4th weekend, I had intermittent discussions regarding it. One stuck in my head - the view that
fanfic only made sense if you were writing a teleplay or something similar to what the TV writers had done, with the desire to possibly present that teleplay to them. Make it good enough to get picked up. This is the purely practical form of writing fanfiction. It is in a sense what the Season 6 Virtual Writers are attempting. And by practical - I mean, that yes, you could submit a television script for an Angel episode to an agent in Hollywood and possibly get them to ask you to try a real script for their show, whatever it may be. If you are lucky? You might even get hired. Drew Goddard and Mere Smith got jobs by doing just that. Drew's was a spec script for Six Feet Under - which got him a job on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The trick is to write one for a show that has been cancelled or for a show that is on the air, but give it to another show that is not involved with it (a la Drew Goddard). You cannot write a spec script for Six Feet Under and give it to Six Feet Under because they'll never read it - fear of plagirism. Same thing about Angel, don't write a spec script for Angel and expect Whedon to read it, fear of plagirism - even though it's off the air, he can't do it if he ever plans on doing anything with the universe, or he risks the possibility of some nit suing him in the future. Want Whedon to read you? Write a spec script for BattleStar Galatica or Six Feet Under. How do I know all this? (Ah, as I told a guy at work who asked me a similar question once on a unrelated topic, I talk to people. Also read a lot.)
At any rate - Television Writing is all about taking someone else's characters and writing a believable script about them - of course you also have to play by that person's rules. The characters and stories you create must logically fit the world created prior to your arrival on the scene as a writer. You do not get to create your own character, or create your own version of the character, or even change the universe. It is a bit akin to getting a coloring book and being told to color within the lines. Or one of those books in which someone has drawn half the picture and you have to finish it, but it must resemble the pictures that came before? This is controlled creativity - putting it in a box, with walls around it, keeping it contained. "No, no, creativity, you must behave, stay controlled, within these borders we've set up for you. No jumping up and down on the bed or walking on that fence and don't even think of crossing the street without consent or a leash."
I think that in a nutshell is the reason I am not and never will be a television writer. Because honestly? That sounds like a Prison Camp for the mind. Or putting it on a leash. Leashes and me? We don't get along.
You do not get to write what pours forth from your heart and pores, you write what someone else orders you to write, within a set group of guidlines, and sure you can be creative - just as long as you stay within their box, their guidelines. And it's a very small box. Not a heck of a lot of elbow room. No wonder many tv writers dream of being the "head writer or creator of their own series" - a lot more fun to be the one creating the box than the one who has to play inside it, at least for me. Some people prefer to play in the box, they like having things set up for them ahead of time. Sort of like playing Dungeon and Dragons or any other role playing game - you have the dice, the characters on the cards, the skills, the map, the outline of the quest and the rules. Never quite worked for me. Any more than it worked for me to play Barbie's dream house or fashion show. Or use all the Barbie accessories. I prefered to create my own role-playing games. At the age of 7, a friend of mine and me created a series of story games that we took turns telling one another - often finding a different place in the neighborhood that fit. Creek tunnels might lead to an underground city, for example. I also liked taking bits and pieces of things I read or saw and melding them together or taking a story on TV and writing my own ending in my head - the TV shows I enjoyed the most, were the most narratively chaotic, they had no clear straight story - they darted around a bit. The Monkees and Kimba both were like that. There was no clear narrative, no rules, just what my child's mind brought to it.
Back to fanfiction - I did not know fanfiction existed until 2001. December 2001 to be exact, when I discovered some fics on BTVS on a random site - they took place right after Wrecked. The writers, bereft of any new episodes for months, took what little spoilers they had available and wrote in the gaps.
Some took an abstract view and took the characters places the writers wouldn't have dared to on TV. Some rewrote movies or books they read but with these characters in the roles. It reminded me a bit of the games I played with TV shows as a child, often writing the ending or plotting what came next or changing the tale and coming up with something new, maybe even, in the case of Indiana Jones changing the gender of the hero (which someone actually did for a play we produced my senior year of high school - a spoof called Idaho Jones, I played the tall German villain, yes the reason I left acting in a nutshell, typecasting. I wanting Idaho, but he gave that roll to the cute petite girl in the class).
My brief forays into fanfiction - have been in a way doing what I did then. Playing with a piece or character I've seen on TV that haunts me, changing it, reformatting it, turning it upside down and sideways, then seeing what comes out. Like taking one of those toys made out of silly putty. Trying something that no one tried onscreen and I wondered why. The fanfictions I've enjoyed the most, have done the same.
This is no different than what Marion Zimmer Bradley did when she re-wrote the Arthurian Tales from the female perspective. Or Mary Stewart, who re-wrote them largely through Merlin's. The same can be said of Shakespeare who took the prose tale he found of Romeo and Juliet in Italian, translated it, and turned it into a play in iambic pentameter. Shakespeare also wrote RealPerson fanfiction if one thinks about it - Richard III, Henry V, and Hamlet. Or how about the many ways people have rewritten the stories of Hans Christian Anderson - the Snow Queen (I've seen four different versions), the Little Mermaid, and The Tin Solider. Or even the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
When I first discovered fanfiction and mentioned it to a work collegue, the first of many futile efforts to explain the concept of fanfiction to those who have never seen it nor appreciate it - she said, "but it's illegal - it's against copyright law!" Well actually, the only thing that might be a copyright infraction is using the trademarks and copyrighted logos/names of the universe and characters and obtaining commericial profit from them.
It is permissible under copyright law to refer to the title of a work in your own. It's also permissible to analyze, criticize or review the work. And it is permissible under the Fair Use Clause to play with the characters and universe if you are not infringing on the work's ability to make money. Parody and satire are allowed. It's probably more permissible to write fanfic than it is to do vids - vids are tricky since you are using and manipulating photographic images and likenesses of real people, in this case actors, and actors equity gets nervous about that. Also, the camerman and photographs who took the footage have their own set of rules. Photographic images have a tighter copyright protection than words do. That said? The industry as a whole seems to be turning a blind eye towards it, probably because it's free advertising and not hurting them any. They only seem to go after images and vids when someone is being overly blatant about it.
At any rate - what my friend failed to recognize is two things: one there is no such thing as a new idea or an original idea, just an original way of telling it. All our stories have been told before, we just keep finding new and interesting ways of telling them. Two - every writer if they are honest steals from another writer, often subconsciously. We can't help it. Something we read or see will play with our heads and come out in our words. Same thing with drawing, we borrow from each other.
When one writes fanfiction, they are in essence borrowing an idea or character or concept from another writer. They just are borrowing more than most writers do.
We scoff at fanfiction we don't like. But I'm not sure there is such a thing as the wrong way to write it. Any more than there is such a thing as the wrong way to do anything that involves creative energy. Whether we like it or not,
is more of a subjective thing I think. Is there bad fanfiction? Well, I suppose so, there's certainly quite a bit of fanfiction out there that makes me roll my eyes, irritates, unnerves, or just plain bores, but then there's also some bad published writing out there in my opinion that does exactly the same thing. I happen to think the number one bestselling novel in 2005 was a badly written novel - the Da Vinci Code. A good portion of it borrowed heavily from other works. But about a million people disagree with me, vehmently. Including the stars of a TV show I was rather found of. So I'm not sure it makes much sense to say that one type of fanfiction is more reputable than another...or better. Any more than it makes sense to say that fanfiction in of itself isn't a reputable form of writing. I think it is. It makes people happy. It gives them an outlet to express whatever is inside them. Does it matter whether you can make a living at it? Or get money? Another thing that has been pointed out to me, twice this week so far - does it matter if you make money at it, if it makes you happy and others happy?
I write to express whatever is inside me. (Never been about money - although that would be nice, who doesn't want to make money doing what they love?) There's all this energy in me, this intense passion, bottled up, with nowhere to go - except when I start to write...then it pours outwards on to the page. But it is picky, it won't come if the assignment is one given to me or when it is told fit within the lines of a box of someone else's making. (And no, I don't mean grammatical lines, so much as creative ones.) Others...I think need that box to pour their energy into, they need the discipline. They need the board game or the outline to work from. I think we all operate so differently, but we want at the same time for people to operate the same way we do. Think somewhat the same. Or at least close enough to understand us, to want to read us. I don't know...been thinking on it a while now ...like a loose bead rolling about in my brain, if that makes sense.
foods without bread. Also giving up OJ and Chocolat is going to hurt.
Oh well, partook of a chocolat chip cookie today - last one, but it was a yummy one - hot out of the oven. Pret Manger has freshly baked cookies. In fact when I arrived to get one along with yogurt (takes only ten minutes to go down elevator, get something from Pret, and whiz back up), the counter people were standing at the entrance of the oven trying to figure out how to take out the tray. They had no oven mits or those things you lift cookies off cookie sheets with, that I can't remember the name of, can draw it, just can't say it, which is hardly useful. Since I asked for one, they improvised - used a bundle of napkins and a plastic knife to scoop it off the sheet and into the brown baggie. I did pay for that cookie though - massive heart burn. Bye bye chocolat chip cookies. Actually starting tomorrow, bye-bye cookies and chocolat chips period. Ugh.
I was thinking about fanfiction again this week. Over July 4th weekend, I had intermittent discussions regarding it. One stuck in my head - the view that
fanfic only made sense if you were writing a teleplay or something similar to what the TV writers had done, with the desire to possibly present that teleplay to them. Make it good enough to get picked up. This is the purely practical form of writing fanfiction. It is in a sense what the Season 6 Virtual Writers are attempting. And by practical - I mean, that yes, you could submit a television script for an Angel episode to an agent in Hollywood and possibly get them to ask you to try a real script for their show, whatever it may be. If you are lucky? You might even get hired. Drew Goddard and Mere Smith got jobs by doing just that. Drew's was a spec script for Six Feet Under - which got him a job on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The trick is to write one for a show that has been cancelled or for a show that is on the air, but give it to another show that is not involved with it (a la Drew Goddard). You cannot write a spec script for Six Feet Under and give it to Six Feet Under because they'll never read it - fear of plagirism. Same thing about Angel, don't write a spec script for Angel and expect Whedon to read it, fear of plagirism - even though it's off the air, he can't do it if he ever plans on doing anything with the universe, or he risks the possibility of some nit suing him in the future. Want Whedon to read you? Write a spec script for BattleStar Galatica or Six Feet Under. How do I know all this? (Ah, as I told a guy at work who asked me a similar question once on a unrelated topic, I talk to people. Also read a lot.)
At any rate - Television Writing is all about taking someone else's characters and writing a believable script about them - of course you also have to play by that person's rules. The characters and stories you create must logically fit the world created prior to your arrival on the scene as a writer. You do not get to create your own character, or create your own version of the character, or even change the universe. It is a bit akin to getting a coloring book and being told to color within the lines. Or one of those books in which someone has drawn half the picture and you have to finish it, but it must resemble the pictures that came before? This is controlled creativity - putting it in a box, with walls around it, keeping it contained. "No, no, creativity, you must behave, stay controlled, within these borders we've set up for you. No jumping up and down on the bed or walking on that fence and don't even think of crossing the street without consent or a leash."
I think that in a nutshell is the reason I am not and never will be a television writer. Because honestly? That sounds like a Prison Camp for the mind. Or putting it on a leash. Leashes and me? We don't get along.
You do not get to write what pours forth from your heart and pores, you write what someone else orders you to write, within a set group of guidlines, and sure you can be creative - just as long as you stay within their box, their guidelines. And it's a very small box. Not a heck of a lot of elbow room. No wonder many tv writers dream of being the "head writer or creator of their own series" - a lot more fun to be the one creating the box than the one who has to play inside it, at least for me. Some people prefer to play in the box, they like having things set up for them ahead of time. Sort of like playing Dungeon and Dragons or any other role playing game - you have the dice, the characters on the cards, the skills, the map, the outline of the quest and the rules. Never quite worked for me. Any more than it worked for me to play Barbie's dream house or fashion show. Or use all the Barbie accessories. I prefered to create my own role-playing games. At the age of 7, a friend of mine and me created a series of story games that we took turns telling one another - often finding a different place in the neighborhood that fit. Creek tunnels might lead to an underground city, for example. I also liked taking bits and pieces of things I read or saw and melding them together or taking a story on TV and writing my own ending in my head - the TV shows I enjoyed the most, were the most narratively chaotic, they had no clear straight story - they darted around a bit. The Monkees and Kimba both were like that. There was no clear narrative, no rules, just what my child's mind brought to it.
Back to fanfiction - I did not know fanfiction existed until 2001. December 2001 to be exact, when I discovered some fics on BTVS on a random site - they took place right after Wrecked. The writers, bereft of any new episodes for months, took what little spoilers they had available and wrote in the gaps.
Some took an abstract view and took the characters places the writers wouldn't have dared to on TV. Some rewrote movies or books they read but with these characters in the roles. It reminded me a bit of the games I played with TV shows as a child, often writing the ending or plotting what came next or changing the tale and coming up with something new, maybe even, in the case of Indiana Jones changing the gender of the hero (which someone actually did for a play we produced my senior year of high school - a spoof called Idaho Jones, I played the tall German villain, yes the reason I left acting in a nutshell, typecasting. I wanting Idaho, but he gave that roll to the cute petite girl in the class).
My brief forays into fanfiction - have been in a way doing what I did then. Playing with a piece or character I've seen on TV that haunts me, changing it, reformatting it, turning it upside down and sideways, then seeing what comes out. Like taking one of those toys made out of silly putty. Trying something that no one tried onscreen and I wondered why. The fanfictions I've enjoyed the most, have done the same.
This is no different than what Marion Zimmer Bradley did when she re-wrote the Arthurian Tales from the female perspective. Or Mary Stewart, who re-wrote them largely through Merlin's. The same can be said of Shakespeare who took the prose tale he found of Romeo and Juliet in Italian, translated it, and turned it into a play in iambic pentameter. Shakespeare also wrote RealPerson fanfiction if one thinks about it - Richard III, Henry V, and Hamlet. Or how about the many ways people have rewritten the stories of Hans Christian Anderson - the Snow Queen (I've seen four different versions), the Little Mermaid, and The Tin Solider. Or even the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
When I first discovered fanfiction and mentioned it to a work collegue, the first of many futile efforts to explain the concept of fanfiction to those who have never seen it nor appreciate it - she said, "but it's illegal - it's against copyright law!" Well actually, the only thing that might be a copyright infraction is using the trademarks and copyrighted logos/names of the universe and characters and obtaining commericial profit from them.
It is permissible under copyright law to refer to the title of a work in your own. It's also permissible to analyze, criticize or review the work. And it is permissible under the Fair Use Clause to play with the characters and universe if you are not infringing on the work's ability to make money. Parody and satire are allowed. It's probably more permissible to write fanfic than it is to do vids - vids are tricky since you are using and manipulating photographic images and likenesses of real people, in this case actors, and actors equity gets nervous about that. Also, the camerman and photographs who took the footage have their own set of rules. Photographic images have a tighter copyright protection than words do. That said? The industry as a whole seems to be turning a blind eye towards it, probably because it's free advertising and not hurting them any. They only seem to go after images and vids when someone is being overly blatant about it.
At any rate - what my friend failed to recognize is two things: one there is no such thing as a new idea or an original idea, just an original way of telling it. All our stories have been told before, we just keep finding new and interesting ways of telling them. Two - every writer if they are honest steals from another writer, often subconsciously. We can't help it. Something we read or see will play with our heads and come out in our words. Same thing with drawing, we borrow from each other.
When one writes fanfiction, they are in essence borrowing an idea or character or concept from another writer. They just are borrowing more than most writers do.
We scoff at fanfiction we don't like. But I'm not sure there is such a thing as the wrong way to write it. Any more than there is such a thing as the wrong way to do anything that involves creative energy. Whether we like it or not,
is more of a subjective thing I think. Is there bad fanfiction? Well, I suppose so, there's certainly quite a bit of fanfiction out there that makes me roll my eyes, irritates, unnerves, or just plain bores, but then there's also some bad published writing out there in my opinion that does exactly the same thing. I happen to think the number one bestselling novel in 2005 was a badly written novel - the Da Vinci Code. A good portion of it borrowed heavily from other works. But about a million people disagree with me, vehmently. Including the stars of a TV show I was rather found of. So I'm not sure it makes much sense to say that one type of fanfiction is more reputable than another...or better. Any more than it makes sense to say that fanfiction in of itself isn't a reputable form of writing. I think it is. It makes people happy. It gives them an outlet to express whatever is inside them. Does it matter whether you can make a living at it? Or get money? Another thing that has been pointed out to me, twice this week so far - does it matter if you make money at it, if it makes you happy and others happy?
I write to express whatever is inside me. (Never been about money - although that would be nice, who doesn't want to make money doing what they love?) There's all this energy in me, this intense passion, bottled up, with nowhere to go - except when I start to write...then it pours outwards on to the page. But it is picky, it won't come if the assignment is one given to me or when it is told fit within the lines of a box of someone else's making. (And no, I don't mean grammatical lines, so much as creative ones.) Others...I think need that box to pour their energy into, they need the discipline. They need the board game or the outline to work from. I think we all operate so differently, but we want at the same time for people to operate the same way we do. Think somewhat the same. Or at least close enough to understand us, to want to read us. I don't know...been thinking on it a while now ...like a loose bead rolling about in my brain, if that makes sense.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-14 05:08 am (UTC)book. Anything that involves ruling dice and counting out numbers to my way of thinking is performing within a box. (ie. Okay I roled a five, which means I didn't beat the wizard and have been frozen in time - according to the Dungeon Master's rule book.) So the version of the game, I've seen being played - all the creativity is with the Dungeon Master - and it is a box.
That of course does not mean there aren't other varieties.
I did play role-playing games as a child - I just didn't use a rule book or published guidelines. I made up my own games with those I played with. Course, part of the reason for that was monetary, the other access - we didn't have access to those games, were too young to be able to read them, were outside in the woods most of the time and not around a table, and well didn't have the money to spend on the books and cards (which weren't as accessible back then.)
So from your description? You are still playing inside someone else's box, it's just a bigger box. Until you throw out the published rule book, the board, the dice, and the cards and the character names and create in effect your own box, the walls are theirs. Not that there is anything wrong with playing in a box. All of us do literally and figuratively, heck I work in one. But in my time off - I need to create my own box to play in or I'd go nuts, for some people they require the opposite. And if you think about it - we all do live in a box - with rules, guidelines, structure. Some more than others. Much like your example above. But creating your own structure, own universe, own guidelines - that is a wonderous experiences no company can sell or advertise or publish, that is free and in my opinion the best thing on earth.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-14 06:59 am (UTC)Playing with a piece or character I've seen on TV that haunts me, changing it, reformatting it, turning it upside down and sideways, then seeing what comes out. Like taking one of those toys made out of silly putty. Trying something that no one tried onscreen and I wondered why.
--which, I'm still going to suggest, is common enough in gaming to at least merit notice. (I should emphasize that I'm talking about a group:game/setting::fanwriter:series relationship, here.)
Something the game in "Chosen" doesn't show is--well, actually, anything about gaming beyond "characters fight," now that I think of it. (It's a pretty simplistic game going on there, which makes sense considering who's GMing.) In any rpg but the most kid-friendly introductory ones, the players' characters are created by the player (personality, details, all of it), and the sheets (cards?) you're referring to are filled out by the players themselves. The GM designs and runs the setting, sure, and die rolls determine the outcomes of actions--but what those actions actually are comes from the players. So sure, maybe the dice tell you that you didn't beat the wizard and are frozen in time, but you decided whatever brought you to that situation, and made whatever action it was that (in this instance) failed--and the other players are now busily coming up with plans to get your character out of hiser predicament. Whereas in fiction, something succeeds or fails because you the writer say it does.
If I'm reading you right, you're acknowledging that fanfic too is "boxed," as opposed to creating everything from the get-go. I can't disagree with that, though I've always felt that the specific appeal of fanfiction--for me, anyway--was the fact that it is partially boxed; it's playing with a toybox you specifically look for in advance. If I read an original novel, I'm looking to be open to whatever the author introduces to me. If I read fanfic, I'm looking for an interestingly new take on an aspect of something--character, setting, alternate plot--which which I'm already familiar. (And I'd say that goes for historical fiction, movie remakes and adaptations and Shakespeare, too.) They're closely related experiences, but not exactly the same.
(Though they can be; once read a superb Man from UNCLE fan novel that, so far as I know, broke not at all with canon--but I as I happened not to be familiar with UNCLE at the time, from my perspective as a reader it was the same sort of experience as reading an original novel. But this is getting far afield of what you were talking about, I think.)