Story Telling

December 4, 2013

Thoughts on Remixing

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– Or In Which Emily Links You to Many Things –

I doubt I’ll ever pay someone to do a remix again, because there’s some amazing stuff just coming out of bedrooms.
– Trent Reznor

When I am displeased with how a genre is handling itself, I endeavor to write what I would like to see out of said genre. This, according to the video series Everything is a Remix, is remixing – the process of copying, transforming, and producing something new based on the work of others. In this instance, I am taking a genre, which has certain conventions and tropes associated with it, and reusing or transforming the tropes associated with that genre.

But what is the actual argument here? What is Kirby trying to say – because he certainly sounds negative. Well, that’s an issue of delivery, and we’ll return to that.

The point Kirby attempts to make over the course of four videos is that everything is the product of people accumulating ideas, playing around with them, and rereleasing those mashed-up and revamped ideas into the world as original products. This concept applies to music, movies, books, inventions, tv shows, and a myriad of other things that comprise our digital and physical culture. The problem is that American society has all but made remixing impossible by condemning copying.

Don’t get me wrong, simply reproducing someone else’s work without crediting the original creator is wrong (like, disgustingly wrong). However, as the remix videos point out, we learn by copying. Hell, that’s how genres become genres; someone writes a fringe story that doesn’t quite fit current conventions, someone else writes based on that fringe concept, and suddenly we have an All-Vampire young adult section at our local bookstores.

It is my belief that remixing – in it’s true, transformative role – fundamentally changes the concept behind the original work. It’s why the song The Warning by Nine Inch Nails sound completely different from The Warning [Stefan Goodchild Remix]. The remixed song conveys a different message; even though it contains the same lyrics, it tells a different story*. And if you change the story, you haven’t reproduced an exact copy. The story, for me (if you’ve been paying attention), is key to the ‘originality’ of something.

(As it happens, Nine Inch Nails runs an official remix site in which they release the tracks of all of their songs and encourage fans to remix to their hearts content. Trent Reznor has also released a nine-part album [four parts of which were free] to the world so that anyone could remix and change those tracks.)

I’m not going to get into an argument about copy right law here – though I want to, because copy right law is the most ridiculous thing – because Part 4 of Everything is a Remix makes the argument better than I can. What I will say is this – without remixes in music, we would have never had the ‘golden age’ of hip hop. We wouldn’t have an alternate interpretation of Year Zero (an album that went so far into storytelling, it created a universe). We wouldn’t have Star Wars or Star Trek or Stargate. Society would have missed out on countless books loosely based on life, on genre, on problems with fantasy.

Let the world remix, because we’re missing out on that kind of originality.

 

October 10, 2013

Anya

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– Or The Body  –

But I don’t understand! I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s, there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid! And, and Xander’s crying and not talking, and, and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why.
– Anya; The Body; Buffy the Vampire Slayer

If I were petty, (or perhaps just lazy) I would simply post this quote and leave it at that. But it is unfair to rip quotes out of their context and just expect people unversed to understand why something, contextless as this is, can be so important to a character.

I have always admired Joss for how he writes his characters. Namely, his characters are people — though, with Anya, that is a little less than true. She’s technically a demon (is this a good time to shout SPOILERS? Okay, spoilers). To top is off, she is, essentially, a replacement Cordelia – not totally Cordelia, of course, but she fills the roll of blunt, at times inappropriate, and generally the fringe member of the Scoobies.

But this speech defines her. It is a fantastic bit of dialogue that I bet my bottom dollar most writers would never think to give a character like Anya. Anya is supposed to be the 1000 year old blonde girl who is a bit on the evil side – better not humanize her in any way. That’s what makes this bit of writing unique.

Anya is terrified. She has never had to deal with the mortality of those around her, because a) she was previously immortal, and b) has never taken the chance to get to know the women she previously avenged. She doesn’t know what to do, so she asks the most morbid questions because she literally does not understand. No one is telling her why or what to do and she literally cannot comprehend the idea the Joyce is gone. And how could she – death was never real to Anya. She asks things like “Will we see the body” and “Will they cut open the body” because she is Anya, and mortal things confuse her, but it is incredibly plain to see that she has no concept of how one operates in grief.

We are meant, at first, to react like Willow does – horrified and disgusted that someone would even say such things about a women they all knew. And that’s why this speech is so important. It humanizes Anya in a way almost nothing else can and carries through the scene (the worry in hr voice when Xander punches through the drywall and ‘could have hit an electrical thingy’ is clearly part of her emotional hangover).

People are never only one thing – they are always changing, always growing in some way. To give a speech like this to a character that most TV shows would treat as a one dimensional cardboard cut out is what cements Joss’ skills (to me at least) in character development. He used emotions we all know – aching sadness and grief – and applied them to a character that would not understand the situation and (much like a child), grows up because, in the end, know one really has the answers she seeks.

October 7, 2013

About The Process

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-Or Visualizing the Writing Process–

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While reading through Toward A Composition Made Whole this week (it will never be finished. I will be blogging about this book until my dying day), I became enamored with the idea of visualizing my writing process. Perhaps it was because Shipka provides such an excellent example of a process map – done by a non English-y person, no less – or because it illustrated the idea that multiple things could impact your writing process, and that those things should be acknowledged, that I latched on to the idea.

So, here it is. Above is a scanned image of a hand drawn process map of my very own, tracking the vague writing process of a project I had in my Fiction class last semester. Now, to the explanations.

The project described here, a short story entitled ‘She Was,’ was one of the more difficult writing experiences I have ever put myself through. The drawing of my desk at home as the ‘production space’ was included because the idea was created there. I had been playing quite a bit of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and listening to the band Murder By Death at the time, so ghost stories and human augmentation were on the brain. I drafted a quick character study and left it up on my blog (warning: this post is an early draft and actually quite bad). Then, I forgot about it.

A month or so later, I started rearranging the character study and adding to it so that I could talk to my creative writing professor about it. He….was not impressed with my second draft. So I went back and, using his mark up, rewrote almost the entire piece in a night. Music was ever present, and tea was plentiful. The draft was finished at 4 a.m. on the due date.

The draft was read by my classmates. They critiqued it; later, I sat dow with a story that was too complicated and needed an extra 2000 words for my final portfolio, with critiques that were going to be of no help very rapidly. I put on a rap album on repeat and plowed through a fourth, and soon, a fifth draft. I rewrote that story from scratch about four different times over the course of the semester. I sat in plastic chairs and arm chairs, at desks and on the floor, and listened to rock, rap, and soundtracks over the course of 14 weeks, trying, desperately to get that story written. It makes me proud to see, visually, the conditions and places and things that helped me get through that particular project. It reminds me of how much work I put into that piece, and how much of myself is in it. It reminds me to be proud of it, even though (as I discovered today) it is riddled with typos.

Seeing a process is different than remembering it. I think it’s important to remind yourself of everything that goes into writing, and how not all of it is writing.

October 3, 2013

Silence is Golden

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– Or How Stories Can Be Written Without Words –

The end of ‘Hush,’ the tenth episode of season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most brilliant endings to a television show I have ever seen. It seems sort of obvious, but it’s fantastic.

But let’s start at the beginning.

There are a lot of ways to tell a story, but when someone mentions writing, society has taught us to think of text. Everyone recognizes that Television, Movies, Plays, and even Oral Performance involve writing because it is understood that the actors had to read a written script, or the performer is reading off of a written piece. This leaves out quite a bit, if we are only considering what is written out as dialogue, stage direction, or flavor text (in the case of multimedia presentations, including video games). It leaves out game mechanics, for example, and simple silence. This definition of writing leaves out musical cues, the absence of music, the cinematography decisions, and a myriad other things.

“But E,” you say, “those things aren’t writing.”

No, they aren’t writing in the traditional sense. In the case of ‘Hush,’ nearly the entire episode is silent. No dialogue. Yet, there was undoubtedly writing involved. It may have been in the form of direction on the page, which inevitably gave way to direction on set. Then, at the end, when all the characters have their voices back, Buffy and Riley sit down to have a conversation. There is no music, and, after the initial ‘I guess we need to talk’ conversation starter, there is no dialogue. This is brilliant, and was possibly barely written down (I wouldn’t know for sure, since I don’t have a script).

But let’s go to a more extreme example – the game Journey by That Game Company. Journey is a multiplayer experience in which the two players involved cannot speak to one another. There is no dialogue, flavor text, or reading involved in this game, which provides an interesting challenge to the players. They have to communicate through the game mechanics – drawing in the sand, or ‘chirping’ at one another.

The game itself is based on The Hero With A Thousand Faces  by Joseph Campbell, and is a silent exploration of the stages of the Hero’s Journey. At first glance, it is easy to say that That Game Company did not employ writers in the development process. Yet, at the end of the game, you have most definitely experienced a story. So where are the writers? They are the programmers, artists, character designers, sound designers, composers, engineers, and so on. Each person on a development team must have been aware of the story and feel that the game was supposed to have, and, though they did not have a writer, they wrote metaphors into their mechanics, cut-scenes, graphics, and music.

They told a story.

Writing, I think, becomes synonymous with story telling, but, like most things, we have to think about it more complexly. Writing words is on thing, but people also write code, scripts, directions, etc. and you can convey a story without any written words. Storytelling is more than just text on a page – it is action in a movie, metaphor in game mechanics, silence on the TV screen, and it’s time we recognized the writing is not the sole driver of these things. It’s the story.

September 26, 2013

City of S.H.I.E.L.D

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– Or Rough Beginnings –

If there is one thing I have learned to accept about Joss Whedon shows this semester, it’s that the beginning is going to be a bit rough. Enter Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and Angel, both of which have lackluster series premieres.

Let’s start with the older series, Angel. The opener of the series, if you’ve been watch Buffy like I have, is frustrating as all hell. The show opens with Angel pretending to be drunk at a bar (though, through the acting, it seems more like he maybe high), and then fighting off two vampires who are attacking—-a skinny blonde girl. This is alright in and of itself, I think, but Doyle, a clairvoyant half-demon, then sets Angel on a path to connect with a person and save them. Who is this person? Tina, the skinny blonde waitress who is lost and alone in LA trying to be a movie star.

See a pattern here?

The entire episode is an exercise in showing that Angel can kick ass on his own, but also is still being a sad panda over his break up with Buffy. Did I say sad panda? I meant constant source of melancholy and ‘woe is me’ vibes. Going from a strong, well rounded Buffy to a rather bland Angel is a bit of a rough ride.

On top of these disappointments is the fact that the first episode must assume that no one in the audience has seen Buffy — even though most of the audience was probably drawn from Buffy. Thus, the entire episode feels like a walk down a very overused memory lane.

To be fair to Joss, he was now in charge of two shows, and co-wrote the episode with David Greenwalt. There may have been network pressures or requirements involved. Still, the episode ‘City Of…’ was lackluster and was not an encouraging introduction to a series I was not all that excited about watching.

Now, on to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D premiered this week and it was…underwhelming. Once again, the show suffered from ‘getting those out of the loop into the loop’ syndrome, but less so than Angel. In fact, I was surprised at the number of things that, if one hadn’t seen the Marvel Movies or read the comic books, Agents just assumed you could figure out. (Extremis was a very blatant case of this glossing over effect). The plot was okay – seemed very episodic, as is the style with Joss – but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting out of a Joss Whedon premiere.

I think what got me were the casting choices (this, of course, can be attributed to the Casting Director). The female characters except Badass Asian Lady (pardon my monikers, I am bad with names) suffered from a serious case of Same-Face, and the Generic Action Hero was just that…generic. Perhaps it it because the last Whedonverse show I had particular contact with was Firefly, but man, does this cast seem a bit low on diversity.

It was not all bad. I recognize, both as a Whedon fan and a writer, that starting something is immensely difficult. Writing the beginning to anything, be it a television series or a novel, is tough work. I don’t know if Joss just hasn’t figured out the balance of mystery and invitation yet, but he’s getting there – Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is no ‘City of…’ Angel. I’m willing to see how both these shows turn out – if the writing and the casting and the other production elements can come together into something great.

Let’s hope they do.

September 19, 2013

Enter the Bad Ass

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– Or How Warped Has Our Image of Women Become –

As a writer, I pay a lot of attention to how people are portrayed in media. As a woman, I tend to also pay close attention to how women are portrayed because of how much of a Big Deal it is to me. Buffy, as a whole, does an excellent job of presenting characters that are human. They aren’t shamed, really, for who they are. Each character is well rounded and feels, you know, like an actual human being.

Buffy, in particular is fascinating to me because she is a ‘girly-girl’ – she’s into fashion, cheerleading, and boys – but the audience never once doubts that she is intelligent (just maybe not in a ‘public school’ sort of way), brave, strong, and empathetic. She was allowed to care about how she looked and also care about her physical strength. She is allowed to be caring and defensive and offensive and Bad Ass.

I wonder, sometimes, how girls in my generation would handle a character like Buffy today. I have seen arguments that would lead me to believe that, if they did not already associate Joss Whedon with feminist characters, they probably would not react well to Buffy.

There is this idea out there that a Strong Female Character must be Physically Strong, or Mentally Dominant, or Controlling. She must not care what anyone says about her, and must not care about others, except in a…leaderly way. She cannot be Motherly, Girly, or Conform to any Gender Norms.

But that’s a really limited definition of a ‘strong’ character, and perhaps strong isn’t the right word. In my opinion, Buffy is a strong female, but she is also a person. She has flaws and a personality that fluctuates as she tries to figure out who she is. She is simultaneously a typical teenager and a responsible adult in Band Candy. She is able to take charge and deal with Angel’s conflation of strength and cowardice (while crying, might I add) and she is not seen as weak. On the other end of the spectrum, we quite literally see two sides of Willow in Dopplegangland, and both, I would argue, are excellent representations of women. Yes, one Willow is Vampiric, and a little sadistic, but she’s still her own person, not a cardboard cutout side character.

Strong, I think, is the wrong word. Well-rounded is better, but that calls to mind ‘well adjusted’ for me. Buffy and Willow represent people to me – their personalities are malleable and they have flaws and they are not shamed for anything that they do. They suffer through the consequences of their actions, but they are never, ever, outright shamed. I think that is what makes Buffy and Willow great representations of women in the media; they were written, first, as people.

December 4, 2012

Revision

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– Or Noone No One Gets it Right the First Time –

If you have been paying attention to this blog in any way (and even if you haven’t because I’m about to tell you what you should have noticed anyway), you’ll have noticed that most of my posts are littered with typos and grammar mistakes. Even, in one massively embarrassing case, I attributed a quote about technology to Milton. MILTON.

Anyway, my point is, I screw up, often and spectacularly. And that is okay. Screwing up the first time around is okay, and frankly, necessary.

Why? Well, the first go around, you just write out the skeleton of your idea. You have dumped everything you have about your topic contained in your brain onto a page. You have, perhaps, shaped it into paragraph format, organized it a bit, and voila. You have the first draft of whatever you are writing about.

Now comes the fun part – revision. Most good writing is developed in revision ( I paraphrased this from a John Green video. He may have been quoting someone else. Who knows) and that’s why it’s so awesome. You get to play with your language. Whe else are you allowed to mess around with your words in an attempt to make it sound better? It’s super easy – you already have the framework laid out in front of you, so the hard work of conjuring content out of thin air is complete. Now, you just have to make is sound fun or intelligent or serious or what have you.

Don’t get carried away, though. Revision can quickly become a sickness, if you let it. It infects you, makes you think your writing must be perfect the first go. It doesn’t. Resist that urge, the urge that tells you to revise your first paragraph before moving on to the second. It’s evil and it will eat your soul.

Well, maybe it won’t eat your soul, but it will certainly eat your productivity. You will never finish with the goal of a perfect first draft. First off, those rarely, if ever, get produced. There are always things to change, to tweak, to tighten up for precision’s sake. That in mind, leave them be. Your first draft is allowed to suck. It’s called the first draft for a reason; it implies that there will be MULTIPLE drafts. There may only be two. There may be a thousand. You can always make more changes.

(Be warned though; at some point, it’s time to stop editing and just let the work go. It’s okay. There will probably be one or two more mistakes in it, but I promise you are the only one who notices.)

So go forth! Find the mistakes in this first-draft-blog. Find your own mistakes. Appreciate them. Love them. Fix them. Revise, my pretties, revise!!

April 18, 2012

Just a Ditch, Really

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– Or Emily is Going To Accost You With More Description –

Yes! Another exercise in description. It’s happening. Hold on to your hats.

 
“It’s just a ditch, really.”

Well, of course it’s just a ditch, if you’re just looking at it. It fits the colloquial description of a ditch – low depression, usually made for draining water out of an otherwise flat field, but in this case they’re probably just totally normal scars in the landscape. Except they’re not. Except that a synonym for ditch is, in fact, trench.

It’s a trench – and what you fail to see for your act of just looking is that they are important and are more deserving of description than your – ever so clever – ‘just a ditch, really.’ This is a trench where people lived, ate, slept, read, and died. Rotted away, in some cases. Drowning in their own fluids in others. It’s a trench, in a country field in the east of France, where soldiers fought one of the worst wars in human history. More than a ditch, really. Closer to a grave, actually.

I could show you a picture, but I don’t want to – perhaps because standing here in a grass covered trench on a narrow brick pathway that, oh, close to 100 years ago now, was covered in at least an inch of water, mud on both sides, and miles upon miles of barbed wire, makes me a tad emotional. Though, that’s as much of an understatement as ‘ditch,’ considering I am about as close to all out sobbing right now as I ever plan to be in public. The history and importance of this place has that effect on me, I think.

You’re going on about how you don’t see the point in memorializing this place and I consider describing the effects of chlorine gas on the body and exactly what that looks like while you are desperately trying to flee the grenades and machine gun fire of the Germans just that side of No Man’s Land, but I don’t. I don’t because you don’t internalize history like I do. The images I would paint would shock you, gross you out, but little more than that. The horror of ancient battle formations meeting brutally efficient new technologies is lost on you, as it is lost on many, because it won’t happen again. A World War III would be all atomic bombs, incineration, and nuclear fallout – history won’t necessarily repeat itself.

But it still moves me to tears, because these trenches, these unassuming ditches in the French countryside, show cased the brutality of the human race, and the terrible things soldiers were made to suffer in the war that began, frankly, because everyone wanted ‘a good war.’ And they got one. Because it was a good war, really, if you just look at it.

 

April 5, 2012

Literary Superiority

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– Or Storytelling 4; Let the People Read What They Want (Emily Gets Ranty) –

‘The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.”’

-Joel Stein, New York Times “Room for Debate”

In his op-ed, “Adults Should Read Adult Books,” Joel Stein expresses his opinion that adults, unless reading them to a child, should not read books like Harry Potter, or The Hunger Games. These books were written ‘for children,’ and therefore have none of the complexity, depth of vocabulary, or thought provoking points that adult books have. And Stein knows this without having read The Hunger Games, and he vows “I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.”

This is the sort of argument that I hate, and it always seems to arise from authors, or English majors, or journalists – it’s the argument of Literary Superiority. It’s the argument that, because some 30 year old is reading Candide, he/she is superior (mentally?) to the 30 year old reading Harry Potter on the plane.

I’ve heard several variations on this argument, and every single time I am left with the position of “What?” I genuinely don’t understand where this argument comes from – I am usually just ecstatic to see people reading in general. I don’t understand why these “levels of acceptable books” exist.

I understand that, if an author is determined to write a book for 13-year-olds, its going to be vastly different from a book for 16-year-olds. It will have a different vocabulary, it will have different plots, but that does not mean that it is any less valid, any less thought provoking, any less relevant. Some are better than others (I’m not saying every piece of Young Adult fiction/Children’s fiction is a work of art) but you can’t lump them all together and say that they are less than adult books simply because of their genre.

There are several “kid’s” books part of literary cannon – The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland – these are all considered literature, and they are all stories written for children. Children’s stories and books, Young Adult books – the best ones often tackle deep, frankly adult issues. Childhood has the association of innocence, that we can’t teach them about death, illness, or the evils of the world. Therefore, books written for teenagers or children are lesser because they aren’t ‘adult.’

But the fact of the matter is, people like Joel Stein don’t read children’s/young adult books because of this ideal, and then think that the have a basis for an argument because “they’re written for innocents. Don’t read them because you’re not innocent.”

Joel Stein says: “Let’s have the decency to let tween girls have their own little world of vampires and child wizards and games you play when hungry.”

You’re not being decent; you sir, are being ignorant of the impact fantasy and reading can have on children, teens, and adults. If an adult wants to read The Hunger Games, let them read it. They are open minded enough to give it a chance – if you have a problem with it, please go bury your nose in your ‘real literature’ and leave us ‘children’ alone.

April 3, 2012

Don’t Let Me Near Art Supplies

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– Or If You Give an Emily a Creative Spark, She’ll Want to Accost You with Description –

This is going to be a slightly different blog post – if  there is even a norm for my blog posts. What follows is an exercise in description, because…well, mostly because I can and I’ve been feeling overly creative lately. It’s not part of a larger whole – it just is, so take it for what you will.

Rain comes very rarely in the desert. You can feel it approaching – you wake up, and the heat seems closer to your skin, the air is still, and clouds black as pitch hang over the horizon. You spent months praying for rain; suddenly, it doesn’t seem so pertinent now. The rest of the caravan wakes and you hope against hope that the storm isn’t hovering over the town you’re steering towards.

This is a false hope, of course. When it rains in the desert, the rain becomes just as all encompassing as the heat. You march forward anyway, everything covered in tarps and children fumbling with ponchos.

The heat is still there, hung with humidity and dust kicked up by the returning wind. The thick air makes progress hard, pulling energy from the bodies of those following you. Fits of coughing rise in the stirring wind. Then, it comes – the deluge of water and wind, freezing in comparison to the heat before. You press forward, urging the caravan to move through the already flooding plains, moving feet and wagons through shifting sand. The heavy drops almost sting when they impact your skin, and you can’t see more than a few inches in front of you. You can’t stop. Lives ride on reaching the town, the oasis in the middle of the salt flats and deserts, and you press forward, grabbing the children that fall around you, desperately trying to keep together. Keep to the path. Don’t get turned around.

And, as suddenly as it came, the rain stops. The clouds roll onwards, and everything stops for a moment. It’s still. The air stops moving, the water stops flowing, and the caravan stops. You press forward still, gathering what water you can, who you can, and move on. The cool air will simmer in the sun; it is better to move forward in it than to pause and enjoy it. And so you move, as you moved through the storm, ever seeking a refuge that is so far off.

 

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