Okay, as promised, the first of the posts inspired by my thoughts on fantasy violence. This one is about violence as a literary device--what it does and why it works so well.
As I started to look at violence across the various texts I'm familiar with and think back over how it had affected me, I came to realize two things. First, there is a visceral response to violence--something in our brains that clicks into place when it detects it, that keys us up and gets us ready to act. This visceral response isn't one that gets triggered often when reading, but it can be. A well-written fight scene, one in which the reader can imagine oneself participating, can evoke that response and all the adrenaline and heightened awareness that it entails. Achieving this, in my opinion, does a great deal to draw the reader into the book, and I want to emphasize the importance of the heightened awareness part of an adrenaline rush here. When one really gets into a fight scene, one reads faster, but one also catches and digests every word. The brain kicks into high gear, and if its focus while it's in high gear is your writing, then you have a great opportunity to do a lot more than just provide an adrenaline rush to your reader. That's one thing that violence can do.
The second is that it can draw the reader closer to the protagonist who is the victim of the violence. Everyone has some personal experience of violence, except for maybe some of the youngest, luckiest children. Last summer I had a particularly bad bout of the flu, and I remember lying exhausted on the cold tile of my bathroom floor at 4 AM, after having thrown up for the third or fourth time since midnight, my head pounding, my stomach muscles burning, the sweat on my skin freezing me even as my fever worsened, and feeling like I was fighting for my life against something that had me completely in its power. That was violent--not in the same way as two people clashing with swords and shields is, but that last feeling, that I was fighting with everything I had just to stay alive, is one that I think is universal across violent situations, and even if it's not, to many readers it seems like it is, which is just as good for getting them to identify with a character who's getting the snot beaten out of them.
The reverse of that, of course, is that your reader, when they're lying on the cold tile of their bathroom floor begging for unconsciousness, will think back to the fight scene in your book. It may give them strength, or it may just give them something to think about other than the sorry state of their stomach, but either way it's a service that a writer can provide for readers, and in my eyes it's definitely a worthy one.
There are downsides to having violence in a text, to be certain. It can be distracting, it can result in people unconsciously thinking of violence as glorious when it's not, and it can make your writing unpalatable to certain audiences. But to me, at least, the benefits outweigh the costs--provided there's more to read for than just the violence.
Friday 29 February 2008
Thursday 28 February 2008
The body
Today I've had the sudden realization that I write much better when I'm feeling good. And I don't mean feeling well, feeling okay, not feeling ill, but feeling good. It's difficult to sit down and write anything (a paper, blog entry, or even an e-mail, let alone fiction) when I'm feeling tired or "old," as I describe the feeling I sometimes get when every ligament and tendon in my body seems to start aching for no particular reason. I generally don't feel like writing in this condition, and even when I force myself to do it, whatever I produce isn't very good.
It makes me think a bit of the professional eaters you see on TV. The ones who can scarf down 42 hot dogs in 2 minutes, but somehow look every bit as athletic as that guy you know who only eats protein shakes and works out 7 days a week. Clearly, these people work just as hard on their bodies as they do on their eating-an-ungodly-amount-of-food capacities (how exactly one trains for that I don't know, and I'm not sure I'd care to), and I can't help but wonder if staying in shape shouldn't be considered a part of my own professional development. After all, if feeling good is a prerequisite to writing anything halfway decent, shouldn't it be rather high on my priority list? And then maybe I can write off kickboxing lessons on my taxes, too. Hmm...
I suppose the other obvious solution is to learn how to write well even when I'm feeling down, and I'm sure that's pretty important too--after all, a deadline is a deadline, and no matter how you feel when it comes down to the wire you have to meet it. But I guess I would prefer to feel well and write well than just to write well, plus there's just something about feeling lousy that muddles my thoughts, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure about how to go about overcoming that.
It makes me think a bit of the professional eaters you see on TV. The ones who can scarf down 42 hot dogs in 2 minutes, but somehow look every bit as athletic as that guy you know who only eats protein shakes and works out 7 days a week. Clearly, these people work just as hard on their bodies as they do on their eating-an-ungodly-amount-of-food capacities (how exactly one trains for that I don't know, and I'm not sure I'd care to), and I can't help but wonder if staying in shape shouldn't be considered a part of my own professional development. After all, if feeling good is a prerequisite to writing anything halfway decent, shouldn't it be rather high on my priority list? And then maybe I can write off kickboxing lessons on my taxes, too. Hmm...
I suppose the other obvious solution is to learn how to write well even when I'm feeling down, and I'm sure that's pretty important too--after all, a deadline is a deadline, and no matter how you feel when it comes down to the wire you have to meet it. But I guess I would prefer to feel well and write well than just to write well, plus there's just something about feeling lousy that muddles my thoughts, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure about how to go about overcoming that.
Wednesday 27 February 2008
But they're not books!
Ok, I'm pretty tired, so only a short post today, and one that may be entirely superfluous: the reasons why I talk so much about media that aren't books when it comes to lessons about writing.
It's not just because I love Anime, movies, and videogames that I take lessons from them--it's that in the search to differentiate oneself in a genre that, let's face it, is chock full of conventions that have grown a bit tired (why else do you think publishing houses aren't looking for new high or epic fantasy?), one has to draw from whatever outside sources are available.
Movies, anime, and videogames offer lessons to be learned in different ways of storytelling, which is where writers of everything but literary fiction really earn their keep, at least in my book. A close study of a particularly well written tv series, movie, or videogame can not only teach you about plot structure, story arcs, and character development, but can also offer you entirely new ways of writing. Videogames, for instance, generally have no narrator---but must convey the same information that a book must. So to learn how to do away with the narrative backstory one often finds in fantasy, one can do much worse than learn from them. And Anime, with its emphasis on using facial expressions to convey emotion, has a great deal to offer simply in learning which expressions convey which emotions effectively ("his jaw tightened" vs. "he became angry").
This is not to say that these same lessons can't be learned from reading books as well, but for me they have been much more easily accessible through other forms of storytelling--and perhaps more importantly, there is much less likelihood of directly ripping off another author's style when you're translating between media.
This seems a somewhat obvious point to me, but it is one that I think is nonetheless important--and I have found to be remarkably absent from all the "learn to write" books and lectures I've been exposed to.
It's not just because I love Anime, movies, and videogames that I take lessons from them--it's that in the search to differentiate oneself in a genre that, let's face it, is chock full of conventions that have grown a bit tired (why else do you think publishing houses aren't looking for new high or epic fantasy?), one has to draw from whatever outside sources are available.
Movies, anime, and videogames offer lessons to be learned in different ways of storytelling, which is where writers of everything but literary fiction really earn their keep, at least in my book. A close study of a particularly well written tv series, movie, or videogame can not only teach you about plot structure, story arcs, and character development, but can also offer you entirely new ways of writing. Videogames, for instance, generally have no narrator---but must convey the same information that a book must. So to learn how to do away with the narrative backstory one often finds in fantasy, one can do much worse than learn from them. And Anime, with its emphasis on using facial expressions to convey emotion, has a great deal to offer simply in learning which expressions convey which emotions effectively ("his jaw tightened" vs. "he became angry").
This is not to say that these same lessons can't be learned from reading books as well, but for me they have been much more easily accessible through other forms of storytelling--and perhaps more importantly, there is much less likelihood of directly ripping off another author's style when you're translating between media.
This seems a somewhat obvious point to me, but it is one that I think is nonetheless important--and I have found to be remarkably absent from all the "learn to write" books and lectures I've been exposed to.
Tuesday 26 February 2008
Fantasy Violence
The other night I was researching knife fighting in hopes of making one of my characters' combat scenes a little more realistic. In the midst of a bunch of videos of guys sparring with wooden knives I came upon a YouTube video of what a real knife attack actually looks like. Even though it was done with fake knives, it shocked me. The sheer brutality of it was unlike anything I'd ever seen. I don't flatter myself to have seen all that much, so that might be expected, but it did get me thinking hard about the role violence plays in fantasy, and the morality of using it to tell stories.
At first the stark contrast between the type of armed violence I saw that night and the way it's typically presented in fantasy abhorred me--it seemed wrong to cultivate in people a sense of armed conflict as beautiful or thought-provoking when in reality it's anything but. As I thought it over, however, I realized that contrast might in fact be fantasy violence's saving grace. The elegant, dance-like knife fighting of, say, Legolas in The Lord of the Rings films is nothing like the brutal stabbing of a realistic knife attack. Anyone who has seen the two would never confuse or conflate them. Whether or not it's incumbent upon the fantasy author to make this explicit to readers is a more difficult question.
Fantasy violence is very rarely meant to signify real violence. Fantasy, in my general experience, lends itself to parable and allegory. A fight to the death between two characters is usually a struggle between two competing abstracts--love and hate, selflessness and greed, empathy and callousness. The characters are made to embody one or more of these abstracts as the author understands them, the reader picks up on that characterization, and through the violence in the narrative (and in the best fantasy, internal conflict in the point of view character that mirrors the external conflict) is made to understand a.) that the two are in conflict and b.) something about the nature of that conflict.
This makes it important, in the end, that fantasy violence remain very unlike real violence. Not only would a stark description of realistic violence distract from the allegory, but the conflict between something like love and hate cannot be settled with a knife point--and an author wouldn't want anyone to accidentally get that message out of their story (I hope). By maintaining the unreality of the violence in one's story, one can use violence as a literary device without implying that violence must be used as a real-life solution.
That leaves, of course, the problem of conveying to readers the difference between fantasy violence and real violence. Unless a story is aimed at children, I think readers can generally be trusted to sort it out on their own, but while I haven't yet read fantasy that successfully contrasted real world and fantasy violence, it's not a bad goal (and it seems to me that someone must have done it, so if anyone has seen it I'd love to know where so I can read it).
That's a lot to think about (took me a few days to mull over, anyway) so I'll stop there for now, but writing this has launched a thousand ideas in my mind. Expect more to come on why violence makes an effective literary device, the fantasy world and what it signifies, and internal vs. external conflict in fantasy.
At first the stark contrast between the type of armed violence I saw that night and the way it's typically presented in fantasy abhorred me--it seemed wrong to cultivate in people a sense of armed conflict as beautiful or thought-provoking when in reality it's anything but. As I thought it over, however, I realized that contrast might in fact be fantasy violence's saving grace. The elegant, dance-like knife fighting of, say, Legolas in The Lord of the Rings films is nothing like the brutal stabbing of a realistic knife attack. Anyone who has seen the two would never confuse or conflate them. Whether or not it's incumbent upon the fantasy author to make this explicit to readers is a more difficult question.
Fantasy violence is very rarely meant to signify real violence. Fantasy, in my general experience, lends itself to parable and allegory. A fight to the death between two characters is usually a struggle between two competing abstracts--love and hate, selflessness and greed, empathy and callousness. The characters are made to embody one or more of these abstracts as the author understands them, the reader picks up on that characterization, and through the violence in the narrative (and in the best fantasy, internal conflict in the point of view character that mirrors the external conflict) is made to understand a.) that the two are in conflict and b.) something about the nature of that conflict.
This makes it important, in the end, that fantasy violence remain very unlike real violence. Not only would a stark description of realistic violence distract from the allegory, but the conflict between something like love and hate cannot be settled with a knife point--and an author wouldn't want anyone to accidentally get that message out of their story (I hope). By maintaining the unreality of the violence in one's story, one can use violence as a literary device without implying that violence must be used as a real-life solution.
That leaves, of course, the problem of conveying to readers the difference between fantasy violence and real violence. Unless a story is aimed at children, I think readers can generally be trusted to sort it out on their own, but while I haven't yet read fantasy that successfully contrasted real world and fantasy violence, it's not a bad goal (and it seems to me that someone must have done it, so if anyone has seen it I'd love to know where so I can read it).
That's a lot to think about (took me a few days to mull over, anyway) so I'll stop there for now, but writing this has launched a thousand ideas in my mind. Expect more to come on why violence makes an effective literary device, the fantasy world and what it signifies, and internal vs. external conflict in fantasy.
Monday 25 February 2008
All Good Things Must End, or "Avoiding the Dragonball Z Effect"
So I finished up watching the anime Bleach today (and by finished up I mean "caught up" to Episode 161. Woohoo!). I've been realizing as the current story arc plays out, however, that it seems to have succumbed to what I like to call the Dragonball Z effect.
To help those who have never watched the show understand the term, I'll explain a bit about the general plot structure of Dragonball Z. Villains appear. Heroes are defeated in an initial battle. Heroes regroup and train their guts out. Heroes complete their training. Heroes fight Villains again. Villains initially have upper hand. Then Heroes undergo grand transformations and achieve new, astounding powers (generally shown in an increase in hair length, unless you're the bald character). Heroes, with their new powers, defeat Villains.
It's not as bad a plot structure as it sounds. It's fairly analogous to how we deal with problems in life. "Hmm, I didn't get into med school. Time to go get some related experience, maybe retake the MCATs, and apply again. Oops, forgot to get my hair cut because I was working so hard, but hey! I got in!" When there's interesting character development happening inside of it, it can work pretty well.
Where it becomes a problem is when it gets repeated five or six times in a row. A character can only say "I've reached my ultimate power!" or "This is my true form!" once (or never, if you're in the habit of writing decent dialogue---but hey, translated Japanese needs to be given some slack). If you want your characters and plot to stay interesting, their power needs to stop growing at some point. You need to decide ahead of time exactly how powerful they can get, and what's going to happen after they do. If you want a happy ending, your series is done. If you don't, you can kill them off (and for God's sake don't be afraid to, no matter how popular they are--anyone whom you claim is fighting for their life really ought to be) and let the bad guys win, maybe prolong the series by telling the next story through the villain's point of view or finding a new hero to take him or her down.
Bleach, sadly, seems to have taken the Dragonball Z approach to storytelling, with neverending new levels of power for its characters. I can't blame it for doing so, however. The reason? Commercial success.
Why mess with a formula that works? Take the characters people already love, add some longer hair, let them fly (or make them glow when they fly if they already can), make them teleport when they fight instead of moving around like normal, repackage the same story, and sell it again! You too, can reach 349 episodes, especially if you throw in some filler for good measure and have a killer theme song.
So if publishing is driven by market success, and presenting the same thing over and over again is proven to produce market success even as it drives a once-proud series into the ground and reduces great characters to the status of trained monkeys, performing their one trick over and again, where's the lesson to be learned about writing? Does one plan on running their series into the ground just to keep getting published and pay the bills, or does one risk abandoning the series that got them published--and therefore their career? Tough to say, but for me personally the answer comes through a videogame series called Final Fantasy, which starts from scratch with every new game.
The creators of Final Fantasy branded their product differently than most other storytellers do. What they promised consumers with every iteration was a well developed game with great production values, completely new characters, a completely new world, and a few elements that would stay constant throughout the series, just for fun. And they consequently wound up with one of the most successful videogame franchises ever.
Ok, this has gotten long, but the gist of it as I feel it applies to writing is this: all characters must, at some point, stop growing--especially when it comes to supernatural powers. In a series, they must die, even if it's peacefully, between books, because 100 years have passed (see Redwall series). Otherwise your world becomes stagnant and boring. If people know that they'll get everything they loved out of your first story in your second, they'll come back. You can even brand yourself with a paradoxical series name to help them make that cognitive leap.
Let me know your opinions world--I'm curious.
To help those who have never watched the show understand the term, I'll explain a bit about the general plot structure of Dragonball Z. Villains appear. Heroes are defeated in an initial battle. Heroes regroup and train their guts out. Heroes complete their training. Heroes fight Villains again. Villains initially have upper hand. Then Heroes undergo grand transformations and achieve new, astounding powers (generally shown in an increase in hair length, unless you're the bald character). Heroes, with their new powers, defeat Villains.
It's not as bad a plot structure as it sounds. It's fairly analogous to how we deal with problems in life. "Hmm, I didn't get into med school. Time to go get some related experience, maybe retake the MCATs, and apply again. Oops, forgot to get my hair cut because I was working so hard, but hey! I got in!" When there's interesting character development happening inside of it, it can work pretty well.
Where it becomes a problem is when it gets repeated five or six times in a row. A character can only say "I've reached my ultimate power!" or "This is my true form!" once (or never, if you're in the habit of writing decent dialogue---but hey, translated Japanese needs to be given some slack). If you want your characters and plot to stay interesting, their power needs to stop growing at some point. You need to decide ahead of time exactly how powerful they can get, and what's going to happen after they do. If you want a happy ending, your series is done. If you don't, you can kill them off (and for God's sake don't be afraid to, no matter how popular they are--anyone whom you claim is fighting for their life really ought to be) and let the bad guys win, maybe prolong the series by telling the next story through the villain's point of view or finding a new hero to take him or her down.
Bleach, sadly, seems to have taken the Dragonball Z approach to storytelling, with neverending new levels of power for its characters. I can't blame it for doing so, however. The reason? Commercial success.
Why mess with a formula that works? Take the characters people already love, add some longer hair, let them fly (or make them glow when they fly if they already can), make them teleport when they fight instead of moving around like normal, repackage the same story, and sell it again! You too, can reach 349 episodes, especially if you throw in some filler for good measure and have a killer theme song.
So if publishing is driven by market success, and presenting the same thing over and over again is proven to produce market success even as it drives a once-proud series into the ground and reduces great characters to the status of trained monkeys, performing their one trick over and again, where's the lesson to be learned about writing? Does one plan on running their series into the ground just to keep getting published and pay the bills, or does one risk abandoning the series that got them published--and therefore their career? Tough to say, but for me personally the answer comes through a videogame series called Final Fantasy, which starts from scratch with every new game.
The creators of Final Fantasy branded their product differently than most other storytellers do. What they promised consumers with every iteration was a well developed game with great production values, completely new characters, a completely new world, and a few elements that would stay constant throughout the series, just for fun. And they consequently wound up with one of the most successful videogame franchises ever.
Ok, this has gotten long, but the gist of it as I feel it applies to writing is this: all characters must, at some point, stop growing--especially when it comes to supernatural powers. In a series, they must die, even if it's peacefully, between books, because 100 years have passed (see Redwall series). Otherwise your world becomes stagnant and boring. If people know that they'll get everything they loved out of your first story in your second, they'll come back. You can even brand yourself with a paradoxical series name to help them make that cognitive leap.
Let me know your opinions world--I'm curious.
Sunday 24 February 2008
First Post!
Okay, well, here I go. I've been spending the last couple of weeks holed up in my little nothing-by-nothing room in London researching publishing internships and thinking hard about how on earth I'm going to get my career off the ground. In that time I happen to have read, for about the thousandth time, about the importance of "building a platform" with which to market yourself. This tends to fall under the "advice for aspiring authors" category of most websites, but it seems to me that given the number of publishing people who seem to be on the internet all day, it can't hurt in networking for that career either. Blogging strikes me as a decent way to do that, or at least to begin participating in the community of which I hope someday to be a wildly successful member.
So first a little bit about me. I'm 21 years old. I'm a college student. The last time I blogged was in high school during an attempt to get a certain girl to like me (xanga, anyone?). I write epic fantasy. I've been working on the same novel for 7 years. I first tried to get it published at the age of 16, and, thank God, nobody was interested except for one fake agent who tried to scam me (have you no shame!? I was only 16!). I learn more and more every day about how to construct stories, how to write, how to move people, and how on earth to reach them through the crazy mechanism that is the publishing industry.
Next, about the blog: I intend to share that knowledge with anyone who reads this, in hopes that it might help and encourage others who started where I did (at 14 with huge dreams but nobody and nothing to guide me), and because it might even help keep me focused on my career. Also, the secret egotist in me keeps whispering that someday the legions of scholars studying my life to find out what made me such an amazing author will have a field day with it. Expect to find me talking about everything from my writing and my dreams for it, to failing to get internships, to why serialized Anime is worse than that which has a beginning, middle, and end, to why it might be a bad idea to plan on working full-time in the summer and doing a massive research project at the same time, to the agonies of my World of Warcraft addiction--and expect to hear, strangely, how most of it has taught me something about how to write better.
So first a little bit about me. I'm 21 years old. I'm a college student. The last time I blogged was in high school during an attempt to get a certain girl to like me (xanga, anyone?). I write epic fantasy. I've been working on the same novel for 7 years. I first tried to get it published at the age of 16, and, thank God, nobody was interested except for one fake agent who tried to scam me (have you no shame!? I was only 16!). I learn more and more every day about how to construct stories, how to write, how to move people, and how on earth to reach them through the crazy mechanism that is the publishing industry.
Next, about the blog: I intend to share that knowledge with anyone who reads this, in hopes that it might help and encourage others who started where I did (at 14 with huge dreams but nobody and nothing to guide me), and because it might even help keep me focused on my career. Also, the secret egotist in me keeps whispering that someday the legions of scholars studying my life to find out what made me such an amazing author will have a field day with it. Expect to find me talking about everything from my writing and my dreams for it, to failing to get internships, to why serialized Anime is worse than that which has a beginning, middle, and end, to why it might be a bad idea to plan on working full-time in the summer and doing a massive research project at the same time, to the agonies of my World of Warcraft addiction--and expect to hear, strangely, how most of it has taught me something about how to write better.
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