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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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Re: Huh?
Date: 2009-06-14 10:02 pm (UTC)Hee. That they do. And confusing.
I think that's part of the problem, if you aren't careful you can give the reader/viewer the wrong impression and they can leave and never come back. Whedon, I think, without meaning to, may have done that in a couple of his stories - providing metaphors that could easily be misinterpreted. On the other hand if you are too simplistic - you risk becoming preachy or didatic and alienating your audience for that reason. Very difficult, I think to find a happy medium.
Re: Huh?
Date: 2009-06-16 07:24 am (UTC)Rufus
Re: Huh?
Date: 2009-06-16 04:40 pm (UTC)From commentary, interviews, and the shows themselves - Whedon clearly isn't a "precise" or "careful" writer who outlines in detail or plans out his stories in detail or creates complicated character books a la Ron Moore, Gene Roddenberry (not sure if he did or not - it's up for debate) and the guy who did B5. He writes from his gut, and as such is not the most careful headwriter/showrunner on the planet. I kind of love that about him (it's one of the reasons I adore Whedon's writing)partly because it is admittedly how I write - but from my interactions with sci-fantasy fans online? I'm guessing Whedon probably drove 85% of the sci-fantasy fandom bonkers guessing what he was up to, what his intent was supposed to be, and where the heck his story was going and what they were supposed to feel or think about it.
The magic metaphor - from S1-S7 it is used as a metaphor for "sex","power addiction", "substance addiction", "escape addiction", and "control". Like the vampirism metaphor - the writers basically use it to represent whatever issue they are playing with at the time. A catch-all as it were. Which requires a lot of work on the part of the viewer - in that we have to figure out what the metaphor is being used for in the context of the episode, in the context of the scene, in the context of the series, and in context of the character - keeping in mind of course that it probably isn't consistent, it may be different for each, possibly even contradictory. Also, depending on the episode - magic may be nasty, or it may be wonderful.
Depends on the character weilding it. Their intentions.
Their motivation. And the context. So you can't do the superficial or general interpretative analysis that most people like to do. You have to look deeper and check the context. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes its not - depends on the context. Same here.
But Whedon liked to change the contextual meaning often within the same scene.
Example: A New Man - magic is shown as a metaphor for sex and a metaphor for addiction, and one for power and just experimentation. It has multiple metaphorical meanings in that episode.
I think the problem many fans may have had with the magic/vampire metaphors = addiction, is both metaphors were used simulataneously, often in the same episode and same scene to =sex. So the writers were clearly commenting on the nastiness of "sex" as an addiction, the power-plays in a sexual relationship, how we use sex to manipulate each other and get what we want, which makes people understandably uncomfortable.