Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Occupational Hazards (from Michelle)
I haven't really written much in about a week, on the blog or on my projects, because I had an experience that kind of upset me and I've been...rebuilding. I read a story of mine to some family members, and they ended up understanding way too much about me, myself, from hearing it. It's inevitable, I suppose, that people look for the writer behind the words, but I wasn't prepared for them to be so right. My listeners last week are kind people, of course, and didn't abuse the knowledge in any way, but it was scary to realize how much I can apparently reveal about myself without intending to at all.
Let me clarify that none of the characters in the story were me, none of their experiences were like mine, and I didn't write with any intention of revealing myself. It's just that you (or I, anyway) have to use my own emotional impulses, the things I find happy and the things I find sad and the things I find interesting, to write, because I have nothing else. Maybe that's what they mean by "writing what you know" - I've always wondered. As a writer, I suppose I'm a little bit like a method actor, needing to find the reality in myself before I can write about it convincingly.
But I found it really scary and upsetting, to discover that I can be so transparent in my writing, and I've had to process the revelation. But I've decided it's a bit of an occupational hazard of being any kind of an artist - you put your deepest self at the service of others and the truth. That's why certain roles are exhausting for actors, why it hurts so much to have your work rejected.
And I am driving home this truth to myself by posting about it on the blog where anybody can read it. So there.
Friday, September 19, 2008
"Does it need saying?" (Jillian)
Thursday, September 18, 2008
The Writer's Tale (from Michelle)
You can view the full article here, and it contains lots of lovely spoilerage for the Christmas special, as well as some things that make me sad (like, referring to River Song as "the Doctor's wife" - I really can't deal with the idea of him marrying that irritating woman. Too bad they couldn't get Kate Winslet, I probably would have loved her then...ANYway!).
But for those of you who don't suffer from Who addiction, I'll just extract the best bit, the bit any writer might be interested in:
You ask how a writer finds their voice. Now, that's a question!... Gaining a voice, whatever that is, comes with experience and practice - and the writing, again, is indivisible from the person. Your voice tends to be something that other people talk about, about you. It's not something that you think about much yourself, and certainly not whilst writing. I never - never - sit here thinking, what's my voice? You might as well ponder, who am I? It is, in fact, exactly the same thing. You can wonder your whole life and you'll never get an answer to that. After all these years of wondering, I've never realised those last four sentences quite so clearly! This Great Correspondence does me good.
So the voice exists simply because you exist. You find your voice by writing, by experience. You can see voices in scripts, can't you?...
...Again, again, again, scripts don't just live in Script World; they exist alongside everything else that you love and hate in your whole, wide, mad, lovely life. You copy from - or rather, are influenced by - everything...
It's so important to start writing, because then the process never, ever ends. Finding your voice isn't the last stage, just another stage along the way. You reach the top of that mountain, only to see a whole bloody, endless range of mountains waiting beyond. You've a million more things to reach for, a million more variations on your voice to articulate.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Showing the Monster: Cthulhu and Frankenstein (from Michelle)
Friday, September 12, 2008
Mary Poppins (from Michelle)
In honor of this auspicious occasion, here's a quote a friend sent me, from P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins:
Pluck me a Flower,
And catch me a Star,
And braize them in Butter,
And Treacle and Tar.
Tra-la!
How delicious they are!
Write something silly today, and have a great weekend!
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
More Thoughts on Character (from Michelle)
When I say that characters ought to be "consistent," I don't think I mean that they ought to be static. But they ought to be...whole, somehow. One being, not a cipher to do whatever you need them to do in a story.
Characters I can think of off the top of my head who undergo change but remain whole/consistent/real: Harold Crick in Stranger Than Fiction; King Lear; Ebenezer Scrooge; Pip from Great Expectations; the Beast in Beauty and the Beast; Frodo in Lord of the Rings; Cassandra in I Capture the Castle; Karenin (Anna's husband) in Anna Karenina (I adore the very human unreliability of his character!)
There are probably more, but it's late and I'm trying not to write an endless post!
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Wisdom from Cassandra
When I read a book, I try to put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or, rather, it is like living it.
Ah, there's bliss!
Storyteller or Movie Mogul? (Jillian)
In a nutshell, the writer is begging George to please, please stop making useless, pointless films. It makes a lot of good points about how his projects over the past thirty plus years have all been related directly to either Star Wars or Indiana Jones. Basically, GL has literally built an empire on both franchises... to the point where I am inclined to gently insist, "Mr. Lucas, you created something wonderful years ago. I think it's time to stop." The article goes too far, however, to strike at the heart of all of those projects... to imply that the world might have been better off if Lucas hadn't had a stroke of madness (or genius) back in the 1970s. Is that really true? Come on.
I began my creative journey as a little devoted Star Wars fan back in 1997. Worlds away, I have since expanded my universe (ha ha) away from wars amongst the stars to TARDISes and adventures in the English countryside. Knowing what I know from eleven years of being immersed in the burden of Jedi and the continuing war, and creating my own installments in the eternal saga (that would one day be a part of my undergraduate studies), I can say that Lucas wasn't insane or greedy by any means when he set out to bring Star Wars to the world. It was his baby. It took him around three years to develop the story which would produce the first trilogy... based off of stories he loved as a kid while also drawing on A Hero With a Thousand Faces to guide him into more traditional, more meaningful story telling. How much did Star Wars mean to him? It was a low-budget project no one believed in, and between finalizing the script and directing it, he nearly gave himself a heart attack orchestrating the development of visual affects that would bring it to life. That combined with an array of personal crises demonstrates that Lucas was devoted to it completely. The fact he returned to deliver three more in my lifetime is utterly amazing... and merits the utmost respect. For the most part...
George Lucas is a story teller, but not the greatest writer in the world. I won't go into painful details about how the script of the "prequel trilogy" feels wooden and the story unnatural. That's the subject of a different rant. Those films did become the butt of many a movie-going joke... and still are to a wide extent. We could attribute it to a number of GL-based causes. But we cannot use those reasons - however legitimate they are - to destroy every thing that he worked for. His films are still powerful, still permanent. And they emerged for the first time to a world that was in desperate need of hope and of heroes who began their journeys as ordinary people literally thrown together in a garbage compactor on a enemy space station. GL worked hard against all odds to create the story that he needed to create, and the result was actually quite impressive. From Star Wars emerged the ability to look at story telling in films in a better light - less impossible to reach those limitless skies. Films we love (and those we make fun of) would not have been possible without GL making the first step. The one thing that I couldn't fathom not having? Peter Jackson's rendering of The Lord of the Rings. And what about Pirates of the Caribbean? The list is infinite.
One storyteller inspires another... who inspires another... building down the generations. A spark can start a fire...
Whatever he is doing now - such as releasing silly animated films still stuck in the Clone Wars - it does not necessarily tarnish the story he began telling with Luke Skywalker standing in the dusk watching the twin suns set above him and wishing to be far, far away... waiting for the chance to sacrifice himself for a galaxy that needed him desperately. GL may not be the most ideal or prolific writer, but he still has a story to tell... one that moves him to keep creating and maintaining a reality he knows better than anyone.
I personally won't give much thought to the Clone Wars. But I will give my nod to the man who started the wheels turning for my own ideas and my own galaxies all those years ago. The world would never be the same without such madness. I should know. Write because others say you're mad. Then, the world will talk.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Lorna Doone --- BEWARE SPOILERS!!! (by Michelle)
Last night I watched the 2000 BBC adaptation of Lorna Doone, and it has fired my soul with a single desire: namely, never to read Lorna Doone. I realize it's a beloved book of many, and the film had many good qualities. These include:
- The presence of the fanstastically named Honeysuckle Weeks (of Foyle's War fame) as John Ridd's sister;
- Barbara Flynn turning in a performance way too good for the whole project;
- Michael Kitchen in a Restoration-era wig;
- Jesse Spencer (Chase from House) with powdered face; and
- A valiant attempt by the villain to escape the whole ridiculous film via a pit of quicksand.
- Oh, and swashbuckling. Gotta love swashbuckling.
I'm posting about it, though, because it actually got me thinking about character. Specifically, how to write decent ones.
My main quarrel with the film is that the characters were inconsistent, and I couldn't figure out their motivations. This is fatal in a story that purports to be about deep-seated jealousies and hatred. Nothing was deep-seated for these people. I don't blame the screenwriter, Adrian Hodges, for this, as it seems to be more or less the structure of R.D. Blackmore's book that these people have very short attention spans.
At the beginning of the movie, the whole problem with a relationship between John and Lorna is that he's a Ridd and she's a Doone (i.e., Oh noes! Montagues and Capulets!). However, John shows almost no struggle in getting over this obstacle, and he's not like Romeo, detached from his family feud. Instead, he's filled with hate and at the heart of it...until he realizes that apparently, Doones can be pretty, and all the visceral hatred goes out the window.
Then, halfway through, we find out that ***SPOILER ALERT*** she's not a Doone after all! However, I can't help feeling that really, this would cause very little change in her familial feelings. They would get more complicated, but she would still feel like a Doone. Well, you would think so, but it is not so, my friends. In a moment that reminded me strongly of the end of Arsenic and Old Lace ("Elaine! Elaine! I'm the son of a sea cook!") she pretty much just said "SWEET!" and got on with her life.
Unfortunately, we still had a lot of story to get through, so the tensions then had to come from elsewhere, and they came from similar about-faces from characters who formerly had held onto certain principles for dear life. For example, the maid who was all smiles about Lorna and John earlier suddenly decides that her precious mistress can't marry a farmer.
The villain similarly had very obscure motivations. I'm sure the actor, Aiden Gillen, had a clear idea of his character, but the story sure didn't. Was he just a punk? Was he power-mad? Was he obsessed with Lorna? Did he love the Doone Valley? The movie offered all of these explanations, but none of them were particularly convincing. He just seemed to be a Bad Man. And I'm afraid his final demise had me in stitches...sorry...but he looked just like Tony Shalhoub at the end of The Imposters.
OK, I'm cheap-shotting a lot at easy targets, but this kind of inconsistency in character is much more common than you might think. I was ultimately highly unimpressed with what I saw of Season 1 of Heroes, because I felt that the scripts had many of the same problems. Take Milo Ventimiglia's character and his love interest: her father is dying, and she's making eyes at his nurse?? Her father's death was just a script vehicle to get the pretty faces together. Likewise, Ali Larter's character wakes up in a room spattered with blood and corpses, and in the very next scene, she's calling her son, saying tranquilly, "I'll be home soon, sweetheart." Where was the residual horror about her situation?
I'm just noticing a lot lately how often characters are just cardboard cutouts for the writers to walk through their outlandish situations. They're collections of quirks and qualities (this one has a really deep voice and a lot of anger; this one is addicted to painkillers; this one works in an art museum and is kind of funky), but they don't respond consistently to the events in their "lives."
This is why I have nothing but the deepest respect for Russell T Davies and Doctor Who, because the characters are, by and large, consistent (please enjoy the photo of Donna's character standing up to deep scrutiny). Even when the story's getting weird, he always remembers what his characters hold most dear, what they would think of first and foremost. Hence, we get the continual family theme in Rose's stories, and almost all the episodes in Series 2 comment in some veiled way on the sacrifices Rose and the Doctor will make for each other.
This is also why my favorite character in Lorna Doone was Anthony Calf's: Tom, the Reformed Highwayman. He actually responded to things consistently, didn't undergo any total metamorphoses. He was a criminal; decided to change his life; fell off the wagon; came back. He had much more consistency than anyone else in the whole thing.
Still, on general principle: ALL HAIL THE BBC! Even when they're not so great, they give me something to think about. And I don't mean to suggest that creating characters is easy: the fact that some of the most lauded shows in the business have trouble with it should tell you that it's hard. But absolutely worth doing!
Why Daedalus? (by Michelle)
The myth of Daedalus is worth knowing, even if it is one of ancient Greece's more disturbing contributions to our cultural heritage. It nevertheless makes an interesting corollary to the story of his son, Icarus (the guy who flew too close to the sun and consequently fell into the sea).
Daedalus was a craftsman of Crete, and the queen of Crete, Pasiphae, developed a passion for a bull (yuck). He built her a cow suit so she could consummate it (double yuck). The result was the Minotaur, a monster half man and half bull.
Daedalus then built the Labyrinth as a prison for the monstrous creation. Unfortunately, he was then imprisoned himself, presumably so the awful truth wouldn't get out. But he built an escape: wax wings, so he and his son, Icarus, could fly away from Crete. His son was a bit thick and ignored his injunction to "take the middle path" (let's hear it for the golden mean!) and so his wings melted and he fell into the sea.
What's the point of my telling this slightly gross story? Simply this: Icarus is often allegorized as a model for people who want to achieve something that is not a guaranteed success: "Carpe diem! Seize the day! If you never try you'll never know. Who cares if you fail as long as you fail gloriously?" Or, alternately: "Remember Icarus. Don't overreach yourself. Just be content with what you have." But I'm not a Romantic or a pragmatist, and I don't particularly want to go down in flames.
So what about Daedalus? Perhaps he is a better candidate for allegory, for the artist anyway. Be clever, develop your artifice. If you make something horrible (like a Minotaur), you can figure out how to neutralize it. And if you end up in deep trouble (imprisoned on Crete) you can be resourceful and devise a way out. You will find a way to keep living and keep making things. Invention is a powerful thing; it doesn't make life perfect, but you can trust to your inventive abilities to help you to live.
It's not a perfect allegory. Don't ask me anything about Perdix, Attic blood, or what Daedalus' failure to impart any good sense to Icarus means. I don't know. I'm not a medieval encyclopedist.
Check out Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VIII if you want to read about Daedalus and Icarus first-hand. I like the Oxford Classics edition, translated by A.D. Melville. But, as LeVar would say, you don't have to take my word for it...
Monday, September 1, 2008
Michelle's Inaugural Post
I'm a writer of sorts, starting out and seized by stories and trying to figure out how it fits into my life. It's a pretty thankless task, because we live in a society that doesn't think things are worth doing unless they are a certain path to at least a moderate amount of money and a health care plan. (I am not for a moment knocking health care plans.) I'm pretty convinced that there are many more writers out there than dare to announce themselves as such, and who can blame them?
There are lots of great resources on the interwebs that help you with what to do once you have a story or a poem or a play. Even before you're ready to publish, however, and in fact because of the terror that that the publishing world can inspire, it takes courage to create.
I solemnly promise that on this page you will not find any lists of How To Ingratiate Yourself To Editors, nor will you discover any catalogs of How Long It Took Me To Get Published. I don't mean to devalue such things; they are necessary and helpful. God bless The Writer's Market, but am I the only one who gets a migraine just by seeing the thing across the room?
We all need rejuvenation, encouragement, the little nudge to get us "making things" again, and so I solemnly promise that you will find here a good book recommendation, a fun quote, a beautiful photo, or an absurd critical essay on Postmodernism in Doctor Who.
This is the blog I need, and I can't find it. I doubt that I am the only one.
Whoever you are, please enjoy, and feel free to comment. I love feeling that I'm not writing into a void - though of course, rules of civility apply. Disagree by all means, but please be urbane about it. :)
Welcome
To read more about why Daedalus Notes exists, click here.