About Writing

10/11/2019

What Great Cover Songs and The Legend of Zelda Can Teach Us About the Disney Remakes

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Here’s a list of Disney Live Action Remakes that I enjoyed:

  1. Cinderella (2015)
  2. The Jungle Book (2016)
  3. Pete’s Dragon (2014)

Here’s a list of Disney Live Action Remakes that I did not enjoy:

  1. Beauty and the Beast (2017)
  2. The Lion King (2019)

Now, I could go into each and explain the things that I did and did not like about each movie (and certainly, there were things I did and did not like in each one), but given the amount and the general structure of these remakes, plus general quandary that are the Alice and Maleficent live action films, there is a question that most many some people ask which is:

“Why remake these movies at all?”

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12/31/2018

A Year in Review: 2018

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2018 had a lot going on, media-wise. We started Marvel’s endgame with Avengers: Infinity War, Jodie Whittaker took up the mantle of the Doctor, and an actual, unmistakable Science Fiction film won Best Picture at the Oscars. On top of that, Black Panther made all of the money, Neflix’s reboot of Queer Eye premiered, and the new title in the Smash Bros. series was released with a new storyline aspect that shocked much of the fan community.

Over here, in this small corner of the internet, we’ve gone a few new places, visited some old (and some really old) favorites, and played with some new ideas that will be carried through to the new year (I keep promising to normalize the schedule, maybe 2019 will be the year that it happens!). In addition to talking about stuff I like, which is this blog’s main purpose, I talked about a few things I didn’t (and explained why), and a few things that I like, but maybe with an asterisk. We also talked shop on the actual building blocks of story and some academic concepts that create the stories that we like to talk about.

So let’s talk about them just a little more.

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11/14/2018

Weekly Readings: Weeks Ending in 10/21, 10/28, 11/4, and 11/11

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So, it’s been a bit since I’ve updated the weekly readings. I’ve been reading quite a bit, I just have a really big post that needs to go up Sunday, so I’ve been occupied with research for that.

But right now, let’s run some blades.

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10/31/2018

Back to Basics: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

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Happy Halloween, everyone!

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheusis a classic of Science Fiction, Gothic Horror, and Romantic literature (but not romantic literature, of course). It is also very different from the story you probably know. First published in 1818, Frankenstein was always popular, though it took some time for critical opinion to catch up– there was a particularly scathing review of the book in The British Critic that ended by saying “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.” The review derided the book for the grotesque nature of its “disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures”, and expressing just how horrifying the book is, object to the wicked and immoral actions of its protagonist.

Of course, that’s the entire point, but they seem to have missed that.

Today, we’re going to go over the content, context, and themes of the book, and how they have grown into what we know of the story today.

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10/16/2018

Weakly Readings: Week Ending in 10/14

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Missed last week– sorry about that, things got a little crazy. I’m trying to get together a good Halloween post, so be on the lookout for that. And I have been reading! So let’s get into it.

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10/02/2018

Weekly Readings: Week Ending in 9/30 — An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

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So the only thing I read this week was An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green. This is for a couple of reasons– reading time + length of book = limited amount I can read a week, this last week was pretty busy, etc. — but that is not to say that AART is a long book that is difficult to read. On the contrary, I had to fight to put it down each time I picked it up. If I didn’t have to sleep, I would have read the whole thing at once as soon as I got my hands on it. This review will have spoilers, but I’ll try to keep them contained to one section that you can easily skip if you haven’t finished it yet.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is the premiere novel of Hank Green, one half of the Vlogbrothers, CEO and founder of several small internet companies, and proud nerd. It is a New Adult Science Fiction novel about a 23-year-old post-graduation, pre-career art student named April May, who is rocketed to internet stardom after she and her friend Andy make a viral video about the sudden appearance of a strange statue on 23rd Street in New York City. As it turns out, multiple copies of these statues, who are all named Carl after a joke April made in her video, have appeared all around the world at once, and all seem to be the exact same. Through a series of puzzles, a few calls from the President of the United States, and some very weird dreams, April has to figure out why the Carls are there and what it is they actually want.

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09/25/2018

Weekly Readings: Week Ending in 9/23

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So this week was two longer reads– one of which I haven’t even finished yet, but I’m still going to talk about because wow. Very short post this week, because, again, only talking about two books.

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09/18/2018

Weekly Readings: Week Ending in 9/16

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So, I’m trying to read more. I need to do it for several reasons, but part of it is I want to write more consistently over here and having a weekly post where I write about what I read each week will help with that. So this will be a weekly thing, not necessarily replacing the normal posts, but perhaps a little more consistently published.

This week I finished three books– JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, and 826DC’s You Will Be Able To Say A Thousand Words.

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09/13/2018

What is Plot Structure?

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So, we have setting, we have characters, now you want something to happen to them. These things that happen are plot and story.

When it comes to writing, your plot and story might develop concurrently, or you start with a plot and the story comes as you’re writing it, or you know what story you want to write and you try to write a plot around that. Basically, this is a disclaimer that while we will be talking about plot structure and discuss specific plot points in these structures, this discussion is more about theoretical frame work and thinking about how plot is structured in preexisting media than it is about how to create a plot. That’s not to say that you can’t use these as reference– think of it like a mac and cheese recipe. The overall product is recognizable, but maybe you baked yours in the oven as opposed to doing it on the stove top, or maybe you used Velveeta instead of actual cheese. The process that you use to get there is more important than making sure that it fits a specific outline. Furthermore, you’re not going to find a writer or storyteller that will tell you to sacrifice story for plot. Maybe you decide to throw bacon in with the mac and cheese, or want to try using blue cheese or feta instead of cheddar or Colby. If the story is pulling you in one direction, follow it. Even if you end up turning back later, you’ll have learned something about your writing instincts and what you want out of a story.

That being said, having an idea of where you’re going when you start can help guide that process.

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06/14/2018

An OASIS in the Desert of the Real: Ready Player One vs. The Matrix

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“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” – Jean Baudrillard (Accredited to Ecclesiastes)

What are the themes of Ready Player One?

We should, at this point, know the themes of The Matrix. Themes like “humanity cannot be contained”, or like “man’s hubris will be our downfall”, or perhaps the most important: “reality is always better than a dream”. The Matrix indulges itself in its themes, presenting as less of a film sometimes and more of a Socratic dialogue with automatic rifles. It’s Plato’s Cave crossed with the brain-in-a-jar theory, updated for the late 90’s, with Y2K looming and computers becoming household appliances. Artificial Intelligence– the idea that a computer might become smarter than its programmer, was awesome in the original sense, and people are still wary. But the choice, as it were, always comes down to the red pill or the blue pill. Do you stay in the dream, in the cave, in the construct, or do you go out and face reality?

Ready Player One doesn’t seem to have that problem.

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