George RR Martin, Joss Whedon, Jim Butcher, etc is not your bitch...

[shadowkat]

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/officialgaiman/525510.html?mode=reply&style=mine

Neil Gaiman in response to a question posed by a fan/reader who wants to know if they are entitled to be incredibly annoyed at George RR Martin for not delivering on the next installment of his Song of Ice and Fire series.

Short answer: George RR Martin is not your bitch.

Long answer - read the link above.

Comments

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed that, and really agree with it....
I'll confess that I'll be worried about a series which isn't finished (worried that JK Rowling could die before finishing the 7th book of the Harry Potter series... and then not liking that book after all).
But usually I'm more easy going than that. If Jim Butcher stopped writing Dresden completely now then I would feel that he ended at an incredibly interesting high point. Naturally I hope he continues, but I would never repine over all the fun I've had with that series.

If Joss has to stop writing Dollhouse because it is cancelled then my disappointment will be more that I know he has a lot more stories he would like to tell - because that is the tragedy - knowing there are plots in his head that won't be told and I"m missing out on them.
But then I never thought Joss was my bitch... I'm well aware that I'm Whedon's bitch!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I agree.

Re Dollhouse, and to a degree Firefly, and other shows that have been cancelled before their time - I think there's a big difference between a writer, such as George RR Martin deciding he just can't get out that next book in his series because nothing is coming, or he has nothing more to say - as Gaiman describes in his blog, and a network or publisher not allowing the writer to continue their work. Where would we have been if the publisher had chosen not to keep publishing each chapter of Dickens' Oliver Twist, which were originally released in serial form? Or Scholastic decided sales weren't high enough to justify publishing all of Rowlings novels - even though she plotted them out? The entertainment biz is often, in my opinion, at odds with artistic expression and creativity. My brother told me recently that he gave up trying to create his own reality tv series or produce his own series - when they told him he had to write it to fit a specific marketing nitch and meet these demands - sort of paint by numbers script writing. If he didn't color within the lines of the network's coloring book - they weren't interested. And he said, he'd rather die bankrupt than kill himself trying to fit their prerequisites.

Sigh. But I digress.

Anywho, I'm with you.

I've lost count of the number of online posters who whined/browbeat fanfic writers for not continuing a WIP or writing a fic a certain way. Can't make someone write something that isn't in them, after all. Nor are they going to write what is in your head. They are going to write what is in their head - if it fits what we want - then magic. But most of the time it probably won't.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is one of the great hopes of the internet: the possibility of creators getting to have some control over their creation rather than being completely at the mercy of the studio and/or network. Felicia Day said in an interview a couple of days ago that after her success with The Guild on line during it's first season, she had people approach her to take it over, not pay her very much, and probably even recast it so she wouldn't even be in it! *eyeroll*
Luckily MSN and Sprint came along and gave her enough money to keep her own vision going.

" They are going to write what is in their head - if it fits what we want - then magic."
I have to admit that I never have that clear an idea of what I want, and I'm happier when the writer exceeds my wildest expectations.... in fact I always feel let down if I get exactly what I expect because IMO it should go beyond the obvious/mundane answers I would come up with. I'm always reading/watching for that surprise element that opens up my imagination (which is pretty fertile on it's own) to new ideas. Like when Dresden animated the giant dinosaur bones in 'Dead Beat', I did not see THAT coming!