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shadowkat[Decided to unlock, not that personal, actually the last post was more personal. I normally just lock deeply personal or deeply work-related posts...for obvious reasons (not that anyone from my work/personal life reads this, but you never know).ETA: for anyone who is remotely curious, the icon was made by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talkstowolves who does amazingly beautiful icons and did this to advertise yuko_anna's ebook - The Girl who Circumvented Fairyland - which is a YA novel inside a Novel. I may have to check it out. Since I'm playing with a fantasy novel inside a sci-fi story idea myself and am trying to figure out how to pull it off. But I'm guessing I should buy Palimpest first - it's an off-shoot from that novel, but you by no means need to have read that one in order to understand this one - which is being posted by chapter as a WIP, not unlike, by the way, what Stephen King once did ages ago - except King wasn't strapped for cash. King stopped because people who hacking in and stealing his chapters without paying, which pissed him off - he wrote a sizable rant about it at the time. (circa 1998-1999 or thereabouts, the early days of cyberspace. I only know about it because I was in the online publishing rights biz at the time.)]
The day was not as bad as expected. Still overcast, still rainy, but lighter, not as heavy. Considering 90% humidity, this is not a bad thing.
I should be working on a query letter - which is due next weekend for the multi-cultural writer's group I'm trying out. But somehow...I think the problem may well be that I've spent the last two days fretting over and frantically rewriting, rewording, an recommendation for award memo for work. These are about ten pages, and include an explanation complete with financial tables, stating exactly why the Railroad should award a contract to a vendor, and whether that vendor's price is either "reasonable " (if it exceeds the railroad's estimate by a significant amount) or "responsible" (if the Railroad's estimate exceeds it by a certain amount or margin.). The writing is of course formal. Precise. And as brief as possible.
Not at all like the free-form stream of consciousness writing I do here. Actually 80% of my writing is not at all like what I write here. Well not really.
I think I needed a break from looking for words to persuade.
So spent much of the day watching Tru Blood - the third disc in the Season 1 DVD. I'm renting them via netflix and since I'm on a budget, I'm getting them one at a time. It involves a bit of a wait, but not as long as if I were watching it in real time via HBO, which I so cannot afford. The series does get better as it moves along. I admit, I preferred Eric to Bill in the books. Bill is a bit...formal in the books and somewhat stiff. He's stiff here too, but Moyer moves well, and the stiffness is clearly just the character - a man of his times, as opposed to the actor (which makes me wonder what Moyer would have been like as Angel...not that I can remotely imagine him as Angel, but I suspect he'd have done the accent better, not to mention the moves.) What continues to work is the three-person point of view - Tara, Jason, and Sookie. I'm not sure I like Jason very much, but I'm equally uncertain if I'm supposed to. I didn't like him that much in books. And this Jason is a bit more interesting and less annoying than that one was. Still a skank and a free-loader, but...the actor provides a vulnerability that Harris couldn't.
What is a mite disturbing about Tru Blood, and this is true to a degree of other gothic serials on tv and in books - is the desire to equate the vampire metaphor with a disenfranchised minority. I'm not sure this works. I wasn't sure it worked when Anne Rice tried it in her Vampire series. The problem with doing this metaphor - is well it is akin to wanting your cake and eat it too, if you'll forgive the cliche. One the one hand you are using vampirism as a metaphor for addictive deviant behavior that results in horrible gruesome death and on the other, you are using how humans treat vampires as a metaphor for how they treat disenfranchised minorities. So, okay, what are you saying here? Are you saying that the disenfranchised minority is a deviant but that the straight/mainstream should be kind and patient, yet also wary? Or are you saying that they aren't really deviant at all, and it is all just in the majority's heads - and the majority's actions get themselves killed? If the latter, it could be a bit more clear, because I can sort of see that theme if I tilt my head sideways, and ignore well ...all the innocent deaths.
I'm thinking this would work better, if the vampires were the majority, and the disenfranchised minority were the poor souls battling them. That actually makes more sense. Because if you think about, metaphorically speaking, the true vampires are those who scapegoat a minority to give themselves power. Whedon sort of played with this concept in his series, but he mixed the metaphors so often that it was not always clear and could be interpreted more than one way. How I was meant to interpret the sequences in Fool for Love and Lies My Parents Told me continues to confuse me. I mean, Spike's vampirism was used as a metaphor for: lust (most of S2, S3, and S6), incest (S2), arrested development (S2-S6), addiction (S4-S7, specifically Sleeper and Never Leave Me), disenfranchised or outcast (S4), the horrible white guy who is bigoted and slaughters minorities(S4, S2, S5, S7), date rape/rape in general (S2, S4, S6)....It gets to the point that you sort of want to hit the writer over the head with a whiffle bat and scream, pick one!!! But to be fair, they all do this. Star Trek was notorious for being unclear about their alien metaphors. My brother hated DS9 because of Cardiassans and Bajorans - who he said was a clear metaphor about the Middle East - with the Cardiassans representing evil Arabs/Muslims, a fact that he found distasteful and racist, and the poor Bajorans representing Israel. (After this discussion, I will admit, I had problems watching DS9 without cringing. Because I could see his point.) Although, Star Trek like most science fiction series tended to at least stick with just one metaphor - the political one. BSG likewise tended to be a bit clearer with their metaphors - although like with vampires, it is a bit dicey to use cylons as a metaphor for disenfranchized minority or societal outcast. Why? Well, I don't know about you, but if I were a disenfranchised minority or societal outcast, I might take exception to being compared to a "cylon" or a "vampire".
I know what they are trying to do, of course. They are trying to do the same thing that well Ann Rice did and Marvel comics with their mutants - through fantasy attempt to show how we are treating those who aren't like us. And they are using a fantastical creature to do it - often in a negative way - as a means of demonstrating that all of us, the entire human race, has a tendency to treat people who are dissimilar to themselves as deviants and monsters, particularly if someone who just happens to resemble these people hurts them or mistreats them in any way. ie. Joe raped me. Joe is a white man. Tony is a white man, he beat me. Ralph is a white man, he denied me a job. Alfred is a white man - he refused to book Joe and put him in prison. Therefore all white men are evil. The writers of the tv shows that we are watching are attempting to demonstrate to us that there is a major flaw in this type of thinking. People are individuals. You can't group them together and decided just because a bunch of white men treated you like shit, all white men will treat you like shit. It doesn't work that way. Sorry. But you can't say it like that. They also want to explore the fact that just because Ralph beat up John does not mean Ralph is going to beat up Sally or that Ralph won't save Sally's son and daughter from a fire. It is more than possible Ralph does save those kids from the fire, yet also beats John to a pulp. Hilter killed millions of people, yet he may have done some nice things (I don't know of any but it is more than likely.)
By the same token, it is possible for Terry to be a loving mother, to give to the poor, volunteer, and help those around her, yet still get drunk, get behind the wheel of the car, kill a small child, and drive off without thinking about it. Each episode of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Tru Blood, Star Trek, DS9, BSG, etc play with these themes - they ask these questions - what makes us do what we do, what makes us hate who we hate, how can we become better and how do we figure out a way to forgive those who hurt us, is it even possible? In short, they are morality plays just like the Greeks put on, and if we don't leave the play a bit pissed at times - they proably did something wrong.
That said, I am admittedly uncertain whether choosing to play around with the metaphors in this way works. Or if it merely confuses the issue, potentially causing the opposite outcome? I'm also equally uncertain whether the writer has even thought it through to this extent. In most, not all cases, writers write their tales much the way I am writing this post as a means of unraveling their own muddle of thoughts on the topic. They aren't preaching or even really telling you the story, so much as telling it to themselves. When we create stories, whether it be on screen or on the page - the first to see the tale is ourselves. Just as this post is first me talking to myself. Until you respond, if you respond, it stays that way inside my perspective. I'm not aware of you, except peripherially, until you speak up. I think to a degree the same can be said of tv and other writers...they really can't know how their tale is perceived by the masses until it is out there. And the perception is far from predictable. We never know how someone will react to what we write. As I've been told by friends, I'm bound to offend someone, there's no escaping that.
So to ask a writer any writer to be more precise in their storytelling, is a bit like asking them to write a memorandum for a judge or an auditor as I do each day at work - with precise clear language that would make your head hurt. When we write like that, we slip into paint by numbers writing, a proven template or boilerplate, with set words, and set lines. The creativity expunged.
On the other hand...there's something to be said for writing carefully and clearly, because writing, good writing, is about communication. Whether it be to persuade or merely communicate a thought or an idea. And if you aren't careful - you risk misunderstanding and dischord. You lose the reader. And once lost...they may never return.
Writing...art...not easy sports, are they?
[Ugh. As an aside, I can't decide what is worse when it comes to formatting - Word or Livejournal.]
talkstowolves who does amazingly beautiful icons and did this to advertise yuko_anna's ebook - The Girl who Circumvented Fairyland - which is a YA novel inside a Novel. I may have to check it out. Since I'm playing with a fantasy novel inside a sci-fi story idea myself and am trying to figure out how to pull it off. But I'm guessing I should buy Palimpest first - it's an off-shoot from that novel, but you by no means need to have read that one in order to understand this one - which is being posted by chapter as a WIP, not unlike, by the way, what Stephen King once did ages ago - except King wasn't strapped for cash. King stopped because people who hacking in and stealing his chapters without paying, which pissed him off - he wrote a sizable rant about it at the time. (circa 1998-1999 or thereabouts, the early days of cyberspace. I only know about it because I was in the online publishing rights biz at the time.)]The day was not as bad as expected. Still overcast, still rainy, but lighter, not as heavy. Considering 90% humidity, this is not a bad thing.
I should be working on a query letter - which is due next weekend for the multi-cultural writer's group I'm trying out. But somehow...I think the problem may well be that I've spent the last two days fretting over and frantically rewriting, rewording, an recommendation for award memo for work. These are about ten pages, and include an explanation complete with financial tables, stating exactly why the Railroad should award a contract to a vendor, and whether that vendor's price is either "reasonable " (if it exceeds the railroad's estimate by a significant amount) or "responsible" (if the Railroad's estimate exceeds it by a certain amount or margin.). The writing is of course formal. Precise. And as brief as possible.
Not at all like the free-form stream of consciousness writing I do here. Actually 80% of my writing is not at all like what I write here. Well not really.
I think I needed a break from looking for words to persuade.
So spent much of the day watching Tru Blood - the third disc in the Season 1 DVD. I'm renting them via netflix and since I'm on a budget, I'm getting them one at a time. It involves a bit of a wait, but not as long as if I were watching it in real time via HBO, which I so cannot afford. The series does get better as it moves along. I admit, I preferred Eric to Bill in the books. Bill is a bit...formal in the books and somewhat stiff. He's stiff here too, but Moyer moves well, and the stiffness is clearly just the character - a man of his times, as opposed to the actor (which makes me wonder what Moyer would have been like as Angel...not that I can remotely imagine him as Angel, but I suspect he'd have done the accent better, not to mention the moves.) What continues to work is the three-person point of view - Tara, Jason, and Sookie. I'm not sure I like Jason very much, but I'm equally uncertain if I'm supposed to. I didn't like him that much in books. And this Jason is a bit more interesting and less annoying than that one was. Still a skank and a free-loader, but...the actor provides a vulnerability that Harris couldn't.
What is a mite disturbing about Tru Blood, and this is true to a degree of other gothic serials on tv and in books - is the desire to equate the vampire metaphor with a disenfranchised minority. I'm not sure this works. I wasn't sure it worked when Anne Rice tried it in her Vampire series. The problem with doing this metaphor - is well it is akin to wanting your cake and eat it too, if you'll forgive the cliche. One the one hand you are using vampirism as a metaphor for addictive deviant behavior that results in horrible gruesome death and on the other, you are using how humans treat vampires as a metaphor for how they treat disenfranchised minorities. So, okay, what are you saying here? Are you saying that the disenfranchised minority is a deviant but that the straight/mainstream should be kind and patient, yet also wary? Or are you saying that they aren't really deviant at all, and it is all just in the majority's heads - and the majority's actions get themselves killed? If the latter, it could be a bit more clear, because I can sort of see that theme if I tilt my head sideways, and ignore well ...all the innocent deaths.
I'm thinking this would work better, if the vampires were the majority, and the disenfranchised minority were the poor souls battling them. That actually makes more sense. Because if you think about, metaphorically speaking, the true vampires are those who scapegoat a minority to give themselves power. Whedon sort of played with this concept in his series, but he mixed the metaphors so often that it was not always clear and could be interpreted more than one way. How I was meant to interpret the sequences in Fool for Love and Lies My Parents Told me continues to confuse me. I mean, Spike's vampirism was used as a metaphor for: lust (most of S2, S3, and S6), incest (S2), arrested development (S2-S6), addiction (S4-S7, specifically Sleeper and Never Leave Me), disenfranchised or outcast (S4), the horrible white guy who is bigoted and slaughters minorities(S4, S2, S5, S7), date rape/rape in general (S2, S4, S6)....It gets to the point that you sort of want to hit the writer over the head with a whiffle bat and scream, pick one!!! But to be fair, they all do this. Star Trek was notorious for being unclear about their alien metaphors. My brother hated DS9 because of Cardiassans and Bajorans - who he said was a clear metaphor about the Middle East - with the Cardiassans representing evil Arabs/Muslims, a fact that he found distasteful and racist, and the poor Bajorans representing Israel. (After this discussion, I will admit, I had problems watching DS9 without cringing. Because I could see his point.) Although, Star Trek like most science fiction series tended to at least stick with just one metaphor - the political one. BSG likewise tended to be a bit clearer with their metaphors - although like with vampires, it is a bit dicey to use cylons as a metaphor for disenfranchized minority or societal outcast. Why? Well, I don't know about you, but if I were a disenfranchised minority or societal outcast, I might take exception to being compared to a "cylon" or a "vampire".
I know what they are trying to do, of course. They are trying to do the same thing that well Ann Rice did and Marvel comics with their mutants - through fantasy attempt to show how we are treating those who aren't like us. And they are using a fantastical creature to do it - often in a negative way - as a means of demonstrating that all of us, the entire human race, has a tendency to treat people who are dissimilar to themselves as deviants and monsters, particularly if someone who just happens to resemble these people hurts them or mistreats them in any way. ie. Joe raped me. Joe is a white man. Tony is a white man, he beat me. Ralph is a white man, he denied me a job. Alfred is a white man - he refused to book Joe and put him in prison. Therefore all white men are evil. The writers of the tv shows that we are watching are attempting to demonstrate to us that there is a major flaw in this type of thinking. People are individuals. You can't group them together and decided just because a bunch of white men treated you like shit, all white men will treat you like shit. It doesn't work that way. Sorry. But you can't say it like that. They also want to explore the fact that just because Ralph beat up John does not mean Ralph is going to beat up Sally or that Ralph won't save Sally's son and daughter from a fire. It is more than possible Ralph does save those kids from the fire, yet also beats John to a pulp. Hilter killed millions of people, yet he may have done some nice things (I don't know of any but it is more than likely.)
By the same token, it is possible for Terry to be a loving mother, to give to the poor, volunteer, and help those around her, yet still get drunk, get behind the wheel of the car, kill a small child, and drive off without thinking about it. Each episode of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Tru Blood, Star Trek, DS9, BSG, etc play with these themes - they ask these questions - what makes us do what we do, what makes us hate who we hate, how can we become better and how do we figure out a way to forgive those who hurt us, is it even possible? In short, they are morality plays just like the Greeks put on, and if we don't leave the play a bit pissed at times - they proably did something wrong.
That said, I am admittedly uncertain whether choosing to play around with the metaphors in this way works. Or if it merely confuses the issue, potentially causing the opposite outcome? I'm also equally uncertain whether the writer has even thought it through to this extent. In most, not all cases, writers write their tales much the way I am writing this post as a means of unraveling their own muddle of thoughts on the topic. They aren't preaching or even really telling you the story, so much as telling it to themselves. When we create stories, whether it be on screen or on the page - the first to see the tale is ourselves. Just as this post is first me talking to myself. Until you respond, if you respond, it stays that way inside my perspective. I'm not aware of you, except peripherially, until you speak up. I think to a degree the same can be said of tv and other writers...they really can't know how their tale is perceived by the masses until it is out there. And the perception is far from predictable. We never know how someone will react to what we write. As I've been told by friends, I'm bound to offend someone, there's no escaping that.
So to ask a writer any writer to be more precise in their storytelling, is a bit like asking them to write a memorandum for a judge or an auditor as I do each day at work - with precise clear language that would make your head hurt. When we write like that, we slip into paint by numbers writing, a proven template or boilerplate, with set words, and set lines. The creativity expunged.
On the other hand...there's something to be said for writing carefully and clearly, because writing, good writing, is about communication. Whether it be to persuade or merely communicate a thought or an idea. And if you aren't careful - you risk misunderstanding and dischord. You lose the reader. And once lost...they may never return.
Writing...art...not easy sports, are they?
[Ugh. As an aside, I can't decide what is worse when it comes to formatting - Word or Livejournal.]
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-14 04:25 am (UTC)At the time Star Trek first aired - Roddenberry clearly was examining the civil rights wars in the US and attempting to do it under the watchful and bigoted eyes of the networks and advertisers. (This is not unlike Whedon and Alan Ball attempting much the same thing with homosexual rights.) He was also attacking the US cold war with Russia/Soviet Union/Communism - the Klingons are obviously stand-ins for the Russians or rather our stereotype of Russians.
ST:NG was also clear in its metaphors for the most part. When the Bajorans showed up - they did feel a bit like Palestine, and the Cardassians - Israel, then it got muddled when Picard was tortured and DS9 began.
A lot of Trek fans have stated that the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict ruined Star Trek - that this storyline was offensive. I remember my brother ranting about it on more than one occassion. I can't quite remember if he thought the show equated the Cardassians with Iranians, Palestinans, or Israelies.
But I remember the show being tainted after his repeated rants.
I admittedly didn't watch all of DS9. I missed most of the seasons between 3-and the last one, 6? I saw the last episode, a good portion of the last season, and a smattering of episodes in the fifth and possibly fourth? It was impossible to find in KC and NYC - kept jumping around. And it was also clearly serialized, unlike all the other treks, so if you missed an episode, you could get lost.
I think in terms of metaphor - political and religious metaphor - Babylon 5 did a better job. B5 was tighter and less all over the place. Also it's metaphors were clearer - the switch of Londo Clarissian and G'kar from laughable clown/victim and foiled cartoon villian to tragic and at times frightening villian to tragic and at times inspiring hero, was a stroke of genuis, and it also covered in a clear and succinct manner the themes that I think DS9 and later BSG were attempting, which is often who we believe is the villian is the hero and who we think is the victim or kind saint is the villian, they may in fact be both. (Not sure you ever saw B5? But of the shows that have played with political metaphor - I think it was by the far the best. I also think it did a good job of playing with religious metaphor - taking it a step or two beyond what DS9 did. I bring up B5 - because it is the reason I missed so much of DS9 - they aired opposite each other in KC and then, when I moved to NYC, there as well, so I had to choose between them at one point.)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-15 12:48 am (UTC)I guess what I loved about DS9 more than any of the other modern Treks was that it WAS complex, that there were so many shades of gray, and so many ethical and theological questions raised and not always neatly answered. But it took them until season 4 to really develop the season-long story arcs and the interpersonal chemistry to really become addictive to me. The growth of the Ferengi characters from comic villains to heroes (in their own unique way) and even a Star Fleet officer in the case of Nog was one of the many pieces that redeemed occasional muddy episodes, for me. The growth of Garak into heroic status, and the redemption even of Dumar in season 7, not to mention the doomed quest for self-justification rather than true redemption on the part of Gul Dukat -- THOSE were the Cardassian storylines that moved me. And, I admit it, I was a closet Odo/Kira 'shipper long before the show developed that plotline. So, of all the later Treks, DS9 is the only one I've troubled to buy most of the seasons of on DVD, and the only one whose novels I still buy.