After wading through over a thousand author websites, here’s some stuff I’ve learned:
Continue reading “The first page: what not to do in an author website”
Between the lines
One fandom activity I don’t like seeing and don’t enjoy doing is nit-picking plot holes. All fictional works have them, but some people relish the idea of pointing them out and castigating the writers of the fictional work. They relish complaining. Television is especially vulnerable to this because of tight writing schedules and multiple authors.
I hate nit-picking because I don’t like plot holes, they ruin my enjoyment of a book/show/film considerably, and I’d just as soon spackle over them and move on rather than grouse for fun and profit. Back in the hey-day of the ATPo board, we used to spend a portion of our time “spackling” BtVS and AtS plot holes using show canon or well-accepted fanon. We’d pack the hole with speculation, likely or unlikely, and end the post with “spackle, spackle” as a tongue-in-cheek wink to other posters (especially if our hole-filler was a stretch).
I suppose most plothole-filling in fandom occurs in spackle!fic rather than “meta.” And probably more convincingly as well, since fiction is a more visceral medium for making a case.
Regardless of how it’s done, spackling can work surprisingly well for the fan willing to put in the ThinksTooMuch time, because ofttimes the apparently dangling plot point was, in fact, established by the writers, just weakly, or in ways that were obvious to them but not to the viewers.
I am thinking of this today because one of the worst kind of plot holes there is is weakly-developed motivation in a character-driven story.
Writing meme
1. Go to page 77 (or 7) of your current ms.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.
Since it would be too much work to figure out what page is 77 (my chapters are in separate files), I am doing page 7. From my current untitled original fic:
The air was stagnant and thick with dust and age. They didn’t have far to go before they reached the plywood barrier Gen had put up. She shoved it open with one hand and tumbled out into a brick-and-mortar chamber tall enough to stand in.
Gen scrambled up and, one by one, lit a series of dangling lanterns. Her students each emerged and gasped at air fresher than the crawlspace, but sour with mildew. They took in the stacked wood crates marked with Chinese characters and other loose items scattered on the floor.
“How’d you find this?” Sean asked.
If I only had a brain…
One of the things I like about Once Upon a Time is that, so far, they are keeping Emma the empiricist and the skeptic who won’t believe the stories people tell her about the reality of the “fairytale world(s)” just because they say so. No real OUAT spoilers, just tangential thoughts
This could give me hours of amusement.
Ganked from superplin on PhaceBuk
http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm
“The fiction of praxis opens a space for the fantasy of pedagogical institutions.”
ETA: and hee! You get hi-brow commentary on your generated sentences of abtuse academia.
“‘Your painstaking examination of the fantasy of pedagogical institutions is a testimony to your diligence, if not to your perspicuity.'”
Introductory post
I don’t think I’ve ever done an introductory post before, seeing as I’ve known most of my flist for years and have survived internet kerfuffles, raging forest fires, and DoubleMeat Palace viewings with them. But I recently gained a few new flisties from a Merlin fandom friending meme and apparently an introductory post after that is what All the Cool Kids Do.
So if you know this stuff already, feel free to move along.
My weekend
Fan fiction. It’s not lying, it’s looking at things another way….
http://www.tempe-theatre.com/theaters/gammage-auditorium/wicked.php
Oh, BTW, your boyfriend is the boogeyman
The thing about Grimm is, even though it is a bit banal and repetitive (although getting less so as it develops its mythology), it hits a lot of my story kinks, like secret identities, hidden subcultures, and family legacies. I’m liking it more and more as the season progresses.
Tell me a story
I complained the other day about Hollywood’s trend of remaking current foreign films and TV shows and doing remakes of (slightly) older American films and TV shows (especially annoying when you are any age of adult and can remember the original like it was yesterday because it was).
This seemed to contradict a stray thought I had later that day in which I was remembering mourning the passing of television shows and film series I had loved (esp. Deep Space Nine, Angel, and Harry Potter) and how I comforted myself with the knowledge that “something new will come along I will love, it always does.”
“New”, of course, is relative. It can be argued there are no truly “new” stories to tell, but I think it depends on what you mean by “new.” If stories are stripped down to their archetypal bones, then no, there probably aren’t any new stories out there, but there are plenty of new ways to tell the same archetypal story. Make your Odysseus a female character in the modern day instead of a male. Pile this culture/era/sub-culture’s baggage atop the archetype instead of that culture/era/sub-culture’s baggage–no one will recognize the story archetype without a lot of wincing, and it becomes fresh again.
Likewise, easily recognizable tropes or characters can be made fresh again with a fresh angle to them. Set the (yet another) vampire story in the American south, or have the vampire share a flat with a werewolf and a ghost. Give your formerly-Victorian characters cell phones and sophisticated 21st-century adversaries to test their skills against.
That said, there IS such a thing as trope-fatigue. And making your “adaptations” too thinly-disguised by your “variations” to be fresh enough.
Sometimes, what I really want is to curl up and revisit the same story told the same way I remember it. Sometimes, what I really want is a story trope/archetype/kink that’s deep in my bones told in a way so different from what I’ve heard before I don’t recognize it at first. Sometimes I want a film/show that was done forty years ago, and not too well, to be given a decent (and fresh) treatment.
But I rarely want to see the same story told in just a slightly tweaked way ten years or one year after I saw it before.
The real meaning of “Meta”
Okay, this is exactly why I get so annoyed when fandom refers to the writing of any commentary on a show or book that isn’t itself story-telling (i.e., fan-fiction), as “meta”. Witness: last night’s episode of Once Upon a Time.
In a previous episode, the Mayor (AKA Evil Queen in the Fairytaleverse) found the “Once Upon a Time” book her son Henry had hidden from her. He has carried this prop around for the entire season. It tells the true story of everyone’s real lives back in the Fairytaleverse. Its very existence as a prop on the television show OUAT is an example of “meta”–when a story breaks the fourth wall in that subtle, non-intrusive way, and exposes itself as a story.
The Mayor destroys the book. Or tries to. But then, lo, a newcomer comes to town. He has a mysterious box. In the box, we discover, is a typewriter. This identifies him as a writer, and a more or less contemporary writer at that. Now one aspect of the OUAT television show they have mentioned repeatedly is that these characters, ostensibly modern, contemporary people, are trapped in the town of Storybrooke. They never leave, not because they can’t, necessarily*, but because no one really has a mind to. Likewise, outsiders entering the town is a strange thing. Other than Emma Swan, who as we know, is not really an outsider at all–being the biological daughter of two residents of Storybrooke–no one is new. It is a bubble-prison of the Mayor’s making*.
This week, we saw the writer repairing the tattered remnants of the story book–drying them off, weaving them back into a proper binding, then leaving it for Emma to find. This shows that the writer is, in fact, the Writer, a self-insertion of the series writers themselves, entering the story and mending it, mending hope that the spell will be broken and their old lives returned. It is absolutely necessary to the concept of “meta” that the writer be an outsider to the town. He is not part of the story. Not part of Storybrooke. He is outside the story, outside the book, mending it, weaving it.
* I found the previews for the next episode interesting. Spoilers
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 