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shadowkatWhile discussing Caprica with an offline friend the other day, I realized how hard it is for people to watch or read serials. Or rather was reminded of it. Serials are works in progress. They aren't complete. And we don't really know if or when they will be completed. My friend, who I'll call "M" stated that she was having difficulties with Caprica because nothing was being wrapped up, the story was just dragging on. While she could handle this with daytime soap operas...night-time dramas, that aired once a week, and often two weeks or months off in between airings, felt endless. When, she asked, will we get a resolution? At least with an episodic series or even a combo such as say, The Good Wife - I know one plot line is wrapped up at the end. I don't have to keep track of it. I don't have to invest time in it or worry over the characters...because I know each week it will be wrapped up.
I remember thinking as she explained this to me, that I was the opposite. Oh sure, I like to watch movies and the occassional short story or drabble - rather love some of them, actually. But, I prefer the unpredictability of the serial plot line, how it meanders, how we often don't know when or if it will end, how a character we love can without warning die, or a characters we never thought would get together in a million years...do, and you can go back, rewatch old episodes and think, yes, that works, and whoa, why didn't I see that? I like the slow unravel of the story, the attention to tiny details, each and every bit of a character being examined.
I also like trying to outsmart the author, speculating on what he or she will do next, what
they'll do with the characters...and love it when they come up with something better than I came up with, and hate it when they come up with something I think is far far worse.
Yes, I admit it. I am a serial junkie.
But, I was thinking about this as well today...in regards to writers and art and everything really. I think as a reader or viewer - I owe it to the writer or artist to give them the benefit of the doubt, to let them tell their story, without second-guessing what they may or may not do ahead of schedule. It's in a way like when a friend cancels on you. They give you no explanation. Just an email stating that they are sorry they have to cancel at the last minute but something came up. Years ago, back in the late 1980s, this was twenty years ago and my memory of the events is somewhat foggy as you can well imagine - I had this happen to me. A friend stood me up. Gave me no explanation. I freaked and left numerous messages on her machine. Then I got much to my chagrin - a message informing me that she'd been in the hospital the entire night with another friend who had tried to commit suicide. She never forgave me for freaking out. And I learned a valuable lesson from the experience, which is making assumptions without all the information is stupid and foolhardy. You don't know what is going on with another person. The same I think is true with a story...we don't know what is coming next until the story-teller tells us. We owe them the benefit of the doubt, until we get that next chapter.
But we are impatient creatures. I told "M" this the other day. That it takes a great deal of patience to stick with a serial...more than a novel that has a beginning, middle, or end.
Yet...if you don't have the patience or you know from past experience that the story-teller is going to disappoint you, then as a reader you are well within your rights to stop reading.
To give up. I know I have. I've lost count of the number of stories I gave up on, fanfic, non-fanfic, etc. WIP's are hard. Because you get invested, but you have no guarantee the writer will keep writing. I remember a while back Neil Gaiman scolding a fan of George RR Martin, who'd asked Neil if a writer had an obligation to complete a story he was telling, to wrap it up in a satisfying way for the reader. Martin had written a serial entitled Song of Ice and Fire - with the first novel being Game of Thrones, and the last novel, or so we were told, Dance of Dragons, yet to be released or even written. It should have been published at least three years ago, or maybe four, I've lost track. But Martin went off to write other things and has yet to publish or write it to my knowledge. Driving his fans batshit in the process.
Gaiman in a post that was linked all over my flist at the time, including by me, stated to the fan that Martin was well within his rights not to complete the story. That he had no obligation to his readers. And well, sorry, to put it this way, but the writer is not your bitch.
It is, he stated, your choice to read him. He has not promised you an end, necessarily.
And you can choose to stop. But the creative process is not something we can turn on at will and we can't do it on demand. It was an interesting comment. That I have mixed feelings about now.
In some respects...Gaiman is right. And if Martin and Gaiman were writing as a hobby or not being paid for their fiction, I would agree. But this is their vocation. It is their day job. They get paid by publishers to deliver a manuscript within a certain period of time. Other's jobs are dependent on their ability to deliver. It would be a bit like me deciding not to go to work tomorrow and not write those RFP's and memos, and termination agreements - because I didn't feel like it. Do I get writer's block writing those things? Of course I do. I have sat staring at my screen, then hunting for boilerplates, and often not finding them. OR a television writer telling the network brass that he can't deliver a script because you know, writer's block. You can't do that. So, when you promised paying readers that you are going to finish your serial and that it does have an end, and there is a pay-off for buying the books - you sort of owe them that ending. It's an arrogant writer who puts the buying customer on hold.
I remember when I was doing informational interviews in the publishing industry and comics industry (I sort of went everywhere that writing or books were involved) - more than one editor told me that the hardest part of their job was dealing with writers. They said writers have a tendency to be whiny, spoiled, and arrogant. And I remember at other companies that hired the dreaded creatives - the complaint was the same - the creatives are babies. They need to be coddled and stroked and catered to, it's annoying. As a writer, myself, and a creative, my back bristled when they made these comments. I'd have to work hard to bite my tongue. But now, reading professional writer's blogs? I'm finding myself nodding in agreement. Whiny is an understatement. Writing is hard work, but it is not as hard as getting up at 4am in the morning, driving 4 hours out in a blizzard to a railway track and looking at train that has derailed or driving out at 2am to see an accident, and blood everywhere. It's actually relatively easy. A lot of people write in their spare time. Which may explain why writer's get a bad rap? And they do. Tell someone you are a writer and they ask, what you've written, then their eyes glaze over, and well that's the end of it. Can't say I blame them. We've got people like Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer who clock over a million to two million a year, while people who hate what they do, struggle with it, are barely ecking out 20 bucks a month.
So, it's not surprising that a fan of say a Buffy comic, might be a little peeved that they won't get the final issue until sometime in 2011 or a fan of a George RR Martin novels isn't getting their fix until well whenever. What writers forget is without their fans, they don't have a living. They publish as long as we buy. If we decide to stop ecking out cash for Buffy comics, the Buffy comics stop being published. If we decide to stop watching Supernatural, that show gets canceled. The reader, the viewer, is the customer. So, yeah, in a way, the writer is our bitch. As long as they plan on getting paid for it. If they do it for free? Well that's a different story.
Don't misunderstand. I don't want the writer to cater to their fans. Not completely. In this respect, I think Gaiman is correct. The writer is not the fan's bitch - we do not tell them how or what to write in their story. Or what stories to write for us. Which to be honest, I think was more his point - that his fans should not tell him what or how to write his stories.
I'd be highly annoyed if Joss Whedon, for example, started reading his fan mail and decided, you know what? I am going to change this story to make this group of fans happy. To validate them, because I like them. Stupid move in any event, since with Buffy, which faction do you make happy? That's the problem with changing a story to validate a reader's desires or tastes - because all readers are unique, they aren't the same, and they have different needs. Whatever you choose to do, you will most likely piss some reader or viewer off. Someone is going to hate your story. Someone will be offended by your message. Someone will hate the relationship or characters you chose to explore or the fact that you chose to kill so and so off. Take for example the character of Dawn? Personally? I won't miss her - if he kills her off. I also think it could be a really cool and interesting twist for both the story and for the other characters. But, I know for a fact that there are people who would be royally peeved and hate the idea of Dawn dying. I think the writer should do what they want to do, and ignore us. If I wanted to see the fan's view of the story - I'd read their fanfic. That's what fanfic is for. But I also want to see the writer, the original creators, take on it. It used to annoy me no end when I'd read about fan's email campaigns to the writers and network to feature or focus on their "ship". Ugh. Daytime Soap Operas occasionally listened to them and you could always tell when they did, because the story would jump the shark until the writers figured out, okay, let's ignore the idiotic fans and just tell the story. Note to all writers out there - if a fan tells you exactly what they want corrected or dislike and it is clearly a subjective thing - such as can you please have Buffy end up happily ever after with X and tell X she loves him deeply? IGNORE THEM. If something bugs them, they can't quite express it, but it is clearly an objective thing - like say pacing, or the characters feel off somehow...DON'T. Fans are human and human beings tend to be fickle creatures, they won't respect you for catering to their whims - they can turn on a dime. But do be sure to deliver the story on time, or they'll wander off to a better one, elsewhere. Remember fickle and short attention spans.
There are days that I'm very happy I'm not the professional writer that I aspired to be.
As hard as my job is, at least I don't have to deal with constant reviews from people I don't know regarding it. Writer's love reviews. We just hate critical ones. Which unfortunately tend to be 75-80 percent of them on a good day.
I remember thinking as she explained this to me, that I was the opposite. Oh sure, I like to watch movies and the occassional short story or drabble - rather love some of them, actually. But, I prefer the unpredictability of the serial plot line, how it meanders, how we often don't know when or if it will end, how a character we love can without warning die, or a characters we never thought would get together in a million years...do, and you can go back, rewatch old episodes and think, yes, that works, and whoa, why didn't I see that? I like the slow unravel of the story, the attention to tiny details, each and every bit of a character being examined.
I also like trying to outsmart the author, speculating on what he or she will do next, what
they'll do with the characters...and love it when they come up with something better than I came up with, and hate it when they come up with something I think is far far worse.
Yes, I admit it. I am a serial junkie.
But, I was thinking about this as well today...in regards to writers and art and everything really. I think as a reader or viewer - I owe it to the writer or artist to give them the benefit of the doubt, to let them tell their story, without second-guessing what they may or may not do ahead of schedule. It's in a way like when a friend cancels on you. They give you no explanation. Just an email stating that they are sorry they have to cancel at the last minute but something came up. Years ago, back in the late 1980s, this was twenty years ago and my memory of the events is somewhat foggy as you can well imagine - I had this happen to me. A friend stood me up. Gave me no explanation. I freaked and left numerous messages on her machine. Then I got much to my chagrin - a message informing me that she'd been in the hospital the entire night with another friend who had tried to commit suicide. She never forgave me for freaking out. And I learned a valuable lesson from the experience, which is making assumptions without all the information is stupid and foolhardy. You don't know what is going on with another person. The same I think is true with a story...we don't know what is coming next until the story-teller tells us. We owe them the benefit of the doubt, until we get that next chapter.
But we are impatient creatures. I told "M" this the other day. That it takes a great deal of patience to stick with a serial...more than a novel that has a beginning, middle, or end.
Yet...if you don't have the patience or you know from past experience that the story-teller is going to disappoint you, then as a reader you are well within your rights to stop reading.
To give up. I know I have. I've lost count of the number of stories I gave up on, fanfic, non-fanfic, etc. WIP's are hard. Because you get invested, but you have no guarantee the writer will keep writing. I remember a while back Neil Gaiman scolding a fan of George RR Martin, who'd asked Neil if a writer had an obligation to complete a story he was telling, to wrap it up in a satisfying way for the reader. Martin had written a serial entitled Song of Ice and Fire - with the first novel being Game of Thrones, and the last novel, or so we were told, Dance of Dragons, yet to be released or even written. It should have been published at least three years ago, or maybe four, I've lost track. But Martin went off to write other things and has yet to publish or write it to my knowledge. Driving his fans batshit in the process.
Gaiman in a post that was linked all over my flist at the time, including by me, stated to the fan that Martin was well within his rights not to complete the story. That he had no obligation to his readers. And well, sorry, to put it this way, but the writer is not your bitch.
It is, he stated, your choice to read him. He has not promised you an end, necessarily.
And you can choose to stop. But the creative process is not something we can turn on at will and we can't do it on demand. It was an interesting comment. That I have mixed feelings about now.
In some respects...Gaiman is right. And if Martin and Gaiman were writing as a hobby or not being paid for their fiction, I would agree. But this is their vocation. It is their day job. They get paid by publishers to deliver a manuscript within a certain period of time. Other's jobs are dependent on their ability to deliver. It would be a bit like me deciding not to go to work tomorrow and not write those RFP's and memos, and termination agreements - because I didn't feel like it. Do I get writer's block writing those things? Of course I do. I have sat staring at my screen, then hunting for boilerplates, and often not finding them. OR a television writer telling the network brass that he can't deliver a script because you know, writer's block. You can't do that. So, when you promised paying readers that you are going to finish your serial and that it does have an end, and there is a pay-off for buying the books - you sort of owe them that ending. It's an arrogant writer who puts the buying customer on hold.
I remember when I was doing informational interviews in the publishing industry and comics industry (I sort of went everywhere that writing or books were involved) - more than one editor told me that the hardest part of their job was dealing with writers. They said writers have a tendency to be whiny, spoiled, and arrogant. And I remember at other companies that hired the dreaded creatives - the complaint was the same - the creatives are babies. They need to be coddled and stroked and catered to, it's annoying. As a writer, myself, and a creative, my back bristled when they made these comments. I'd have to work hard to bite my tongue. But now, reading professional writer's blogs? I'm finding myself nodding in agreement. Whiny is an understatement. Writing is hard work, but it is not as hard as getting up at 4am in the morning, driving 4 hours out in a blizzard to a railway track and looking at train that has derailed or driving out at 2am to see an accident, and blood everywhere. It's actually relatively easy. A lot of people write in their spare time. Which may explain why writer's get a bad rap? And they do. Tell someone you are a writer and they ask, what you've written, then their eyes glaze over, and well that's the end of it. Can't say I blame them. We've got people like Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer who clock over a million to two million a year, while people who hate what they do, struggle with it, are barely ecking out 20 bucks a month.
So, it's not surprising that a fan of say a Buffy comic, might be a little peeved that they won't get the final issue until sometime in 2011 or a fan of a George RR Martin novels isn't getting their fix until well whenever. What writers forget is without their fans, they don't have a living. They publish as long as we buy. If we decide to stop ecking out cash for Buffy comics, the Buffy comics stop being published. If we decide to stop watching Supernatural, that show gets canceled. The reader, the viewer, is the customer. So, yeah, in a way, the writer is our bitch. As long as they plan on getting paid for it. If they do it for free? Well that's a different story.
Don't misunderstand. I don't want the writer to cater to their fans. Not completely. In this respect, I think Gaiman is correct. The writer is not the fan's bitch - we do not tell them how or what to write in their story. Or what stories to write for us. Which to be honest, I think was more his point - that his fans should not tell him what or how to write his stories.
I'd be highly annoyed if Joss Whedon, for example, started reading his fan mail and decided, you know what? I am going to change this story to make this group of fans happy. To validate them, because I like them. Stupid move in any event, since with Buffy, which faction do you make happy? That's the problem with changing a story to validate a reader's desires or tastes - because all readers are unique, they aren't the same, and they have different needs. Whatever you choose to do, you will most likely piss some reader or viewer off. Someone is going to hate your story. Someone will be offended by your message. Someone will hate the relationship or characters you chose to explore or the fact that you chose to kill so and so off. Take for example the character of Dawn? Personally? I won't miss her - if he kills her off. I also think it could be a really cool and interesting twist for both the story and for the other characters. But, I know for a fact that there are people who would be royally peeved and hate the idea of Dawn dying. I think the writer should do what they want to do, and ignore us. If I wanted to see the fan's view of the story - I'd read their fanfic. That's what fanfic is for. But I also want to see the writer, the original creators, take on it. It used to annoy me no end when I'd read about fan's email campaigns to the writers and network to feature or focus on their "ship". Ugh. Daytime Soap Operas occasionally listened to them and you could always tell when they did, because the story would jump the shark until the writers figured out, okay, let's ignore the idiotic fans and just tell the story. Note to all writers out there - if a fan tells you exactly what they want corrected or dislike and it is clearly a subjective thing - such as can you please have Buffy end up happily ever after with X and tell X she loves him deeply? IGNORE THEM. If something bugs them, they can't quite express it, but it is clearly an objective thing - like say pacing, or the characters feel off somehow...DON'T. Fans are human and human beings tend to be fickle creatures, they won't respect you for catering to their whims - they can turn on a dime. But do be sure to deliver the story on time, or they'll wander off to a better one, elsewhere. Remember fickle and short attention spans.
There are days that I'm very happy I'm not the professional writer that I aspired to be.
As hard as my job is, at least I don't have to deal with constant reviews from people I don't know regarding it. Writer's love reviews. We just hate critical ones. Which unfortunately tend to be 75-80 percent of them on a good day.
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Date: 2010-03-15 04:38 am (UTC)I owe it to the writer or artist to give them the benefit of the doubt, to let them tell their story, without second-guessing what they may or may not do ahead of schedule.
X-Files permanently effected my ability to assume a showrunner knows where he's going with a story, or even cares about where the story is going. Chris Carter didn't, and has since come right out and said they were winging it and making it up as they went along. And that this insanely complicated show had no bible.
And much as I think Joss Whedon is an amazing and gifted writer (and I really do) he put the final nail in my ability to watch serials.
The thing is, Joss really does seem to see Show as a continuously unrolling story. He doesn't appear to pay much (if any) attention to how Show is actually watched and the effect that should have on pacing the story. New episodes seen in random fits and starts spread over months, sometimes only one new show in a month ... that makes a huge difference in how a story is perceived by the viewers. Pacing isn't just the story in real time, it's also how the episodes filter through the much longer period they're view in.
And fundementally, I've also come to the conclusion that I'm not interested in the stories Joss wants to tell, only partially because of the way he wants to tell them. Somewhere along the way, showrunners started killing off regular charactors because the viewers need to not get comfortable with the charactors and the storyline. Joss is famous for saying he gives us what we need, not what we want.
No. At the end of the day, what I need is to be able to feel the charactors are going to end up in a good place. I just don't get that feeling from Joss, and I don't trust anyone else either. So that lets right out those stories that are going to drag out for years, with random charactors dead along the way.
So, no more serials for me.