The Cloven Hoof
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23 January 2015 at 18:30 #37514
@bluesqueakpip @purofilion @janetteb
(Just looked over this post and it got a bit lengthy… sorry!)
Well, yes. Arbutus Jr. is a very bright boy, a delight in most respects. He is however living in optimism that when he reaches the promised land of uni, he will neither have to take any humanities courses ever again, nor have to write any papers that will require the use of anything other than the internet for research purposes. A product of his generation, he truly believes that there is no useful information that can’t be found online. Since I can’t seem to argue him out of this view, I usually end by telling him to suck it up and just do the bib assignments! 🙂
The issue of English curriculum is bound to always cause debate, I think, because there is value in the core classics, but I also understand the “try to keep it relevant” approach to some degree. When I was in school, as Puro and Janette say, we did novels, short stories, Shakespeare, poetry, etc., every year. (Note to Janette: in Canadian high school, we all had to read Handmaid’s Tale, because, you know, CanLit! 🙂 Still true, apparently, as Arbutus Jr. had to read it last year.) I enjoyed it all, pretty much, because English was one of my strengths. My son, on the other hand, while a strong reader, has always viewed writing as a torment, and because he resents having to view anything through a lens of symbolism, loathes literary analysis. (Anecdote: When he had to do a writing assignment involving Freudian thought, he was completely offended by the whole concept and just could not bring himself to do it. I suggested that instead, he write a short essay explaining Freudian analysis to demonstrate that he understood it. He wanted to call it “Freud or Fraud?” I suggested that unless he were going to actually research opposing theories, that that wouldn’t be an accurate title, so he agreed not to go down that path.)
They do seem to take an “old-school” approach to curriculum here as far as I can see. In Grade 8, the focus was on essay writing for the most part: my son spent the entire first term learning to write a thesis statement. In grade 9, they did a lengthy poetry unit, during which they had to compose many, many sonnets. I’m still not quite sure why the huge love affair with the sonnet. Poetry is not fun for my literally-minded boy (except for Haiku, which he appreciates for its directness). They also did the Atwood novel, and Romeo and Juliet. (We had some hilarious conversations about this, as he felt that everyone behaved very stupidly in that play, and I remember feeling exactly the same sense of frustration when I studied it years ago!) They also did a journalism unit, which I thought was great, as I think it is so important to understand the different kinds of writing we encounter in the media, and what to take away from them.
What I would really love to see (and I wonder if they are teaching this in any other places) would be a realistic examination of the internet. Currently here, the official line tends to be along the lines of “don’t trust it unless it’s an educational site, never use Wikipedia, etc.” This sort of fearmongering isn’t helpful, because it doesn’t teach them how to assess the information that they find online. I have taught my son that Wikipedia can be very useful, if the article hasn’t been flagged for any issues and has citations which can be followed up. They never tell them this at school, they just say “don’t go there” like they would say “don’t talk to strangers”. The world of the internet, like it or not, is the world that our children have to navigate, and simply telling them to ignore it isn’t any more helpful than trying to prevent teen pregnancy by saying “Don’t have sex.”
Oh dear, now I’ve gone on a rant. Sorry, this got very long. But we’re allowed to shoot our mouths off in the pub, aren’t we? 🙂
23 January 2015 at 18:33 #37515@ichabod Do not get me started on the funding of public education. Here in British Columbia that is a battle we are fighting every day. We have a great system that they are quite literally penny-pinching to death. My husband is a PAC chair (like the PTA) and sits on a couple of school board committees dedicated to improving infrastructure for cycling and technology, and there is lots of talk and little action, largely because no one wants to spend any money. Some days, I would truly like to put our provincial government in front of a Dalek firing squad!
23 January 2015 at 18:51 #37516Couple of things:
@barbaralefty – I wholly disagree that Moffat’s Holmes if fanfic. It is an adaptation and the striking thing about it – especially the first two trilogies – is how very respectful of the source material (while not being constrained by it). See also US TV’s Elementary. Even post-Reichenbach the change was more to pull the leg of fans (to the outrage of the more ARSEy end of the fanbase, obv).
@ichabod – I also (quite vehemently) dispute the claim that some things “need fixing”. If you disagree with an author’s vision then write critique, discuss in places like this or – best of the lot – write your own fiction rooted in your own ideas.
A friend is a very successful (award-winning) author of LGBT romance (much to her husband’s bemusement). She knows the market, knows exactly what boxes to tick and knows (or rather knew, before she met us) what she could get away with – bad, fanfic-rooted writing.
But, getting feed back pushed her into her own ideas (still formulaic but fresher) and massively improved her writing. Curiously. her writing outside the LGBT market is still an order of magnitude better – utterly wonderful, at its best – and still redolent with LGBT metaphor to those attentive enough to see it.
We don’t call that fanfic
Who is this “we” of which you speak? 😉 My mate Jonathan Pinnock’s book adopted basically the same approach, has the great advantage of being uproariously funny from beginning to end and is also not fanfic – and avoids pastiche. The idea that if you use previously existing characters then it is fanfic seems to me to be straying in the direction of sophistry and is at best self-serving (on the part of the writer).
The one writer who admitted his follow-up of other’s work was Eoin Coiffer’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and…well, the les said about that the better. At least it was the damned movie.
Also, when Wilf Self was restaurant critic for the Grauniad he was a heroin addict – so had no functioning taste buds!
Anyway, what this shows is that mention of the word ‘fanfic’ makes it all but impossible to discuss writing (and that is about as bigger condemnation as I can think of, so watch this space).
(@JimTheFish – is it worth setting up a “Writers’ Retreat” (I think the traditional name is The White Hart) forum for this stuff? Nothing more annoying that a bunch of monomaniacs hogging the pub)
23 January 2015 at 18:54 #37517@all
So anyway, this afternoon I bumped into a friend I haven’t seen since I stopped chairing (and attending) my local writer’s group.
My claim to fame about her is that I made her cry.
She had just read some beautifully written and gloriously imaginative children’s fiction that everyone present loved (including me).
So: what queation did I ask that reduced her to tears, and why is she grateful?
23 January 2015 at 18:56 #37518@janetteb So many girls started reading SF in the same way — usually (in my youth, anyway) out in the garage, where parents wouldn’t find the stash of “trashy escapism” and confiscate it. I was a latchkey kid and got my books from the nearby public library, where the SF was thin on the ground at first, and when it did show up, the librarians *actively* steered girls away from it because it was “for boys”. So I’d go down to the corner store and have a malted milk for a quarter, which was my “rent” for standing for hours at a time at the magazine rack, reading pulp mags that my mom probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had been able to buy them. Poor me — Alfie Bester’s “Tiger, Tiger” in installments, Arthur Clarke, Chad Oliver, and on and on — great stuff. I was a goner from “Go!”
If you have time and want to catch up, check out the lists of nominees for the major SF awards over the past few years — the Hugo, the Nebula, five or six more (and don’t forget the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award, a newcomer — relatively — specifically designed to recognize SF/F/H etc. that “explores and expands” gender boundaries; their judges leave comments on the nominees so you can get an idea of what you might like — talk about filling in gaps!). I recce recent lists because that material is most likely to still be obtainable, through libraries, lending services, used bookstores, and online markets.
And congrats on your festival grant! You have fun in store, and also exhaustion, and it will all be worth it!
@jimthefish Yes, great point about Sherlock, could be extended into mainstream as well as we recycle old stories seen from the p.o.v. of different members of the original “cast” or with wildly different settings — Jean Rhys’s “The Wide Sargasso Sea” is Jane Eyre from the p.o.v. of Rochester’s mad wife; “Mary Reilly” is Dr. Jeckyl/Hide as seen by Jeckyl’s housemaid; Mike Bishop’s “Brittle Innings” is Dr. F’s monster in baseball (and very good), etc. P.D. James’s thing certainly is fanfic (and pretty crappy Austen, I have to say, but I’m no fan of James). And yeah, let’s not forget the fun-factor in fanfic — if you’re writing for free, you can do anything you can think of to dare to do, and hope that people will find it.
A total reboot? As in, ignoring the show history and starting with some version of the original characters from a modern square one? Hmm. We (sort of) did, here — if the whole family taking off with a weird science guy counts: “Lost in Space”. It’s pretty old itself now, of course. It was SF sitcom in form, as I recall. Which blog is about doing that? Curious!
@bluesqueakpip The getting paid for it thing = putting it out there for public criticism, if you can get it past the gatekeepers of the publishing industry. Putting fanfic up on the net is edging it into public view but sailing under the “This isn’t really $erious so no barrages of Hate please” flag. The dividing line is really copyright law; fanfic is not copyright-able because it uses characters already under copyright to the original work’s author, so no one *can* charge for fanfic because that would infringe on the original author’s copyright.
As for e-pub, well, there really wasn’t any choice, and a longtime fan who’d started early with a small “imprint” asked me if I wanted to publish some of my work back in 2000. He would do the work, and more importantly knew what he was doing, and I said sure; although I might have gone about it somewhat differently if I’d waited a while. Epub still only makes a handful of authors decent money, due to the difficulties of standing out in the enormous sea of crud and treasure now flooding cyberspace (because, no gatekeepers, mostly, so anyone can publish).
23 January 2015 at 18:58 #37519He is however living in optimism that when he reaches the promised land of uni, he will neither have to take any humanities courses ever again, nor have to write any papers that will require the use of anything other than the internet for research purposes.
As the owner of a BSc, you can tell him from me that universities have discovered the internet. Actually, universities helped invent the internet. And they know how to reference the internet, because Universities believe in referencing the way I believe in the Trinity. 😈
I can go into very boring detail if you want, but using the internet for research purposes just means that you have to learn how to reference internet pages, articles from an online journal and even computer programs in your bibliography.
Or even electronic books. ::shrug:: I’ve done bibliographies that consist almost entirely of online sources; I did a lot of Comp Sci courses. If anything, I find them more of a pain than the ones where sources consist almost entirely of dead trees. 😀
Over here, the job of teaching about biased sources is largely given to History. We do hear ‘don’t use Wikipedia’ a lot, though. ‘Don’t cite Wikipedia’ would be more honest, I think.
23 January 2015 at 19:06 #37520@pedant Well, me and the BBC. 🙂 Seriously, though, you’ve made the point I was trying to make, which is that the terminology is problematic.
(I should say that, after resisting the PD James book because I didn’t expect to like it, I finally read it and lo and behold, didn’t really like it. Not that it wasn’t well-written, but for me, it was neither Austen nor sufficient not-Austen, if you see what I mean. I think Mrs. Darcy Versus the Aliens actually sounds a lot more interesting!
Interesting note about your LBGT romance-writing friend. This makes a lot of sense to me precisely because of the strongly formulaic nature of romance writing. I took my shot at that field many years ago and failed because back then (in the early eighties) you still had to write to a plan that was essentially of another era, and I just couldn’t see my way to it. I think the genre has moved on quite a bit these days, but it still has to fulfill certain expectations and so on. I’m not surprised that your friend’s best writing would happen outside those constraints.
23 January 2015 at 19:10 #37521Oh, and I meant to say that I think the “Writer’s Retreat” idea is a great one, although it might be a good idea to title it in such a way that people don’t think they have to be writers in order to participate. I like “The White Hart”. 🙂
23 January 2015 at 19:11 #37522I must confess I find complaints about bibliographies bizarre. Once you have learned the Harvard Referencing System it is dead easy (Pedant, 2015) – although Microsoft has pushed people more towards tiresome footnotes.
Pedant, F, 2015, The Cloven Hoof, p4, The DoctorWHoForum Craig’s Brain Publishing, Scotland.
23 January 2015 at 19:13 #37523back then (in the early eighties) you still had to write to a plan that was essentially of another era
A romance author friend assures me this is still the case for Mills and Boon.
23 January 2015 at 19:21 #37524@ichabod I too love LeGuin’s writing, although I’d say my personal favourite is probably The Dispossessed (with an honourable mention to the poetic beauty of the Earthsea Trilogy). Like @barbaralefty, years ago I read widely of the old school sci-fi writers such as Asimov, Heinlein, and so on, and never missed the female viewpoint. Interestingly, it was my husband who introduced me to LeGuin, as she was the only sci-fi writer who interested him at all. (He also introduced me to the fantasy writing of Anne McCaffrey, so I guess he was more of a feminist reader than I was!)
women and girls who had been waiting for SF to address issues from sociology and culture rather than mainly engineering or space war strategy and tactics
This is interesting, because it makes me realize that the mainstream, male-written sci-fi that I read did tend to be less about “space wars” and more about society. Because of course, there was a load of popular sci-fi that I never read, because I wasn’t interested in battles. I loved Star Wars when it first came out, not because of the laser battles, but because of the world-building.
Yes, the lack of gatekeepers is both good and bad. The same thing is happening in the music biz, with more and more young artists going the indy route and putting their stuff up on the internet. Some great stuff shows up this way, although it’s hit and miss whether you discover it. I’m inclined to think it’s a good thing, as pop music was another area in which I tried and failed because of “powers that be” getting to decide what was worth listening to and what wasn’t. I love to see the young groups today that aren’t afraid to go with unorthodox instrumentation and styles, because the audience can decide for themselves what they want to hear!
23 January 2015 at 19:25 #37525@arbutus Agree, the constraints on romance writing are still very limiting, from what I hear, although if you do something really spectacular that leaks out beyond the formula, you can always try marketing it to the mainstream — or, possibly, find a romance line that will accept it because it’s *good*. I tried my hand at it once, a little vampire romance with a theater setting, and it was rejected because “our readers don’t want to learn anything about the background except glamorous stuff — they just want to get to the sex, which your book doesn’t have nearly enough of”. That was some years ago, but it was a very clear lesson. SF/F flourishes so wildly and with such ubiquity because it began with fairly open rules (except the “boys’ own stories” aspect) and then exploded in all directions under the pressure of excellent and energetic writers who took the bit firmly between their teeth and ran with it like Secretariat.
So far as I know, that hasn’t happened with romance.
23 January 2015 at 19:30 #37526@bluesqueakpip To be fair, they do teach them how to reference the internet. His objection is the old-school bib assignments where they give you a topic and you have to include examples of various types of sources. I tell him that, while the day might come when all useful information resides freely and openly on the net, it hasn’t come yet. (Particularly in the area of scholarly journals, where they still want to force you to either pay for access, or get on the bus and trudge out to your local university library to look at the physical copies! At least in musicology this is definitely true, and personally it drives me mad that the sources are available online, but I can’t access them without paying outrageous fees.)
‘Don’t cite Wikipedia’ would be more honest, I think. Absolutely agree with this. I actually think that Wikipedia is a very useful aggregator, but it took us a few tries on research projects before he got it into his head that he should only use the info he finds there if he can cite the source the article got it from.
@pedant The issue is the stubbornness of a teenage boy with very vocal views on what is and isn’t a waste of time, and (as yet, anyway) very little ability to just get it done for an easier life. 🙂
23 January 2015 at 19:31 #37527Hmm. No Kate Willhelm? Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang is a classic. Joan D Vinge? (Marvellously intelligent reimagining of The Snow Queen)
I’d argue McCaffery is more Soft SF than fantasy (her dragons are rooted in science, albiet a not that well understood version – a scene in (iirc) All The Weyrs of Pern has a hilarious smoment in which the autoexec.bat of an AI system (which had survived 3,000 years underground) boots up. The future of Pern, resting on MS-DOS 3.1!
23 January 2015 at 19:34 #37528@pedant I stopped reading James when her books quadrupled in size, becoming stuffed to the gills with boring detail, because she had (IMO) decided that she *was* Jane Austen, more or less, and was writing Serious Literature reflecting Everything Worth Knowing about (Rich) British people in the last third of the 20th c including how many sugar cubes each character took in its tea, all seen through the structure of a crime story. Actually, I quit her before that for other reasons, including the fact that her poet-detective never gave the slightest sign of thinking like a poet of any kind.
It’s an indicator of the power of Austen’s work that I did pick up James’s Pemberley book at all, and, yep, found it duller than dirt, characters made of pewter and just as interesting . . . ahem. Enough of that, but it’s nice to know that others had similar reactions.
23 January 2015 at 19:40 #37529Fascinating. I can only assume that Mills & Boon et al know who their intended audience is, and aren’t especially interested in reaching outside it.
And yes, @pedant, you’re quite right about McCaffrey. I tend to do a basic dragons=fantasy equation, especially nowadays with all the dragon-based children’s lit out there, but her writing is definitely more science-based. I haven’t read the Pern books in a long time, but I really did enjoy them. I’ve always had a soft spot for the “humanity in the far future having forgotten their roots” theme, in any form.
(Yes, Kate Wilhelm, but I hadn’t heard of Vinge. I will check her out.)
23 January 2015 at 19:41 #3753023 January 2015 at 19:43 #37531@arbutus There were plenty of authors writing first-contact culture clash fiction, which brought in anthropology and (usually ancient) history to shape up alien societies as well as speculative chemistry, biology, etc. The field has always been much more varied than it appears to those unfamiliar with anything but the lowest common denominator Stuff that had spaceships, brass bras, and alien monsters on the covers.
23 January 2015 at 19:44 #37532@arbutus I am just being mean, about pewter . . . feels good, now and then. Got to keep your hand in, eh?
23 January 2015 at 20:21 #37533Well the pub is lively!
@ichabod The Vampire Tapestry looks great! How exciting.
@pedant and @jimthefish
I believe twas I, not @barbaralefty who said, upthread, that one might think of Moff and Gattis’ Sherlock as fan fiction. I stand by that. I disagree @pedant that something becomes a somehow loftier “adaptation” rather than fan-fic if it is “respectful” of the source material. It could be argued that BBC Sherlock takes some damn liberties – Sherlock shooting someone in cold blood in the head? I don’t think Conan Doyle would have approved – his Sherlock solves his cases with the brilliance of his mind not with a gun.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is, I submit, Stoppard writing Shakespeare fan fiction. Milton’s Paradise Lost is Bible fan fiction.
I dislike it when fan fiction is derided – it takes place in supportive social space, it is creative play, it is a space for people to practice the craft of writing.
23 January 2015 at 20:47 #37534@juniperfish — apologies for the mis-attribution.
And Wide Sargasso Sea. That’s surely fanfic too.
23 January 2015 at 20:48 #37535@juniperfish, I believe it was yourself. If ever a comment was guaranteed to make me come down on the side of fanfic tho it was @arbutus comparison with Indy music. Also, while I wasn’t making a direct comparison with Sherlock, but acknowledging others, namely @jumiperfish and Mr Lefty making the point, I’m quite willing now to go with it.
I’ll apologise if necessary, but I am least opened to the idea, if not chastened.
23 January 2015 at 21:08 #37540@barbaralefty – no need to apologise – being opened to an idea is always great!
Russell T. Davis argues that once a text is out there it belongs equally to audiences, who may do with it what they wish (in terms of both interpretation and textual re-working in fan works). I like his attitude:
‘Once a script has been made and transmitted, I honestly believe it belongs equally to those who watch it…I’ve got no more authority over the text than you!… That’s Doctor Who’s greatest legacy –an imagination that goes way beyond the screen, and all the way into your head, where it’s yours, forever’ (Hills Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century, 2010, p. 63).
23 January 2015 at 21:29 #37541@juniperfish Well, enjoy — there are some stories behind it, in terms of the writing of, but we’ll save that for — The White Hart? — and see if people would like to ask a question or two.
But didn’t Holmes carry and use guns in ACD? I know Watson refers occasionally to bringing along his service revolver when dealing with “criminal gang” activity, and I think Holmes has a handgun too; I don’t think he ever uses it. And yes, ACD was presenting the triumph of quality as the superiority of high intelligence over fire-power, which is what made Moriarty the perfect foil — high intelligence plus ruthlessness instead of morals.
I like your R&G and other “fanfic” analogies, but I wouldn’t go as far as you do. I do think there’s a difference between joining the long, long conversation that is the history of commonly accepted literature (example: “Don Quixote” was intended by its author to be a riposte to and satire of a certain popular brand of Romance fiction of his time, all knights and gallantry etc., which makes it ironic that its most modern version is the wildly Romantic “Man of La Mancha”) and taking characters from another fiction and putting them through paces that you want to see them put through, but mainly for your own delectation and that of a (more or less) small circle of friends, in (more or less) private. E.g., “R&G are Dead” was written to be staged and to make the playwright money and reputation in the theater public at large, capitalizing (literally) on Shakespeare’s popularity. “Paradise Lost” was, I imagine at any rate, written specifically to *be* part of The Big Conversation of which the Bible is a major historical root.
That Conversation goes on in full public; readers at large are specifically invited in and indeed sought after, as is critical approval that can lead to good earnings. Fanfic serves exactly the purposes you list, but those are quite different; I think they’re important — *very* important to the members of various fanfic communities — but are not usefully confused with The Big Conversation of literature, of which fanfic remains a (more or less) subset running alongside but with its own, much more specific concerns, and, consequently, a different set of “critical” standards.
So to some extent, it’s apples v. oranges: the goals are not the same, the means are not the same, the audience is not the same, etc., although there is plenty of overlap. I can understand the delight that some fans take in a brief and (IMO) rather well done bit of fanfic in which (for example) Malcolm Tucker and Clara Oswald commit serious ship (and yes, there’s humor in it — well, Malcolm!); and I can understand equally the shocked recoil of other fans from even having such an idea popped into their heads (apologies to any here — I am trying to be discreet).
I prefer apples, but will happily nibble a section or two of a just-right California navel orange now and then. But I’m unlikely to either confuse one with the other, or declare apples the hands-down superior fruit based on every possible criterion. Damn it, this is too LONG. Sorry.
23 January 2015 at 21:33 #37542Anonymous @
Oh boy. Now come on! Sherlock fan-fic? In what world? If that’s fan-fic then everything is, surely?
I’d have to agree with @pedant. Last night I was watching the two episodes that begin S3. Liberties were taken- but no, it was so much like the essence of Sherlock that I honestly see it as an adaptation. Gosh, Shakespeare wrote adaptations. Unless fan-fic is the new adaptation? 😉
“She had just read some beautifully written and gloriously imaginative children’s fiction that everyone present loved (including me).
So: what queation did I ask that reduced her to tears, and why is she grateful?”
I’m shit with these puzzles: Is she the actual writer, or the reader -“she had just read”. But being in a writer’s group (which you may have conducted) she’s the writer/author and the reader. It’s not LBGT fan-fic (sorry had to put that in, being slow, I’m thinking what the hell is LGB…oh, I think I get it!), so it’s “imaginative” and glorious. She’d read it and it’s about to be published but not necessarily. The crying and the question connect -obviously:
“Do you have a copy I can give to my nieces/nephews?” You conducted the original class/es.
Right? Wrong? Horribly stupid? Too obvious?
@arbutus yes, one rather obvious thing I forgot was that in Science as in Home Ec (we still call it that) and even in PE, theoretical essays are still written and whilst in-text referencing is essential, a bibliography is also necessary. But a certain amount of actual books need to be included (if appropriate) as well as authentic (hate the word) web sites.
The National Curriculum teaches students how to assess the quality of a web site.
We use Pat Hipwell’s excellent little book: Logon Literacy to help children read. I could say “de-mystify” text, but I won’t 🙂 Whilst I wasn’t on the national curriculum council which began this fundamental change, I did write for one year which involved some rather harsh 16 hour days structuring lessons and their, “find and prepare”/hand outs for several History units and even two geography units. I’m rather proud of that work: the $ was total shit and the hours also. Frankly, management was useless, and so after 12 months, I quit. Still, I look over The Black Death unit and go ‘hum, that IS good.’ Everything else, not so much!
Hmm, the pub is probably winding down and I’m just waking up: and the roof hasn’t shattered with hail. Yet.
Regards, puro
23 January 2015 at 21:43 #37543@barbarlefty Oh, *yes* — but this is such a huge watershed divider, it needs further comment. I’m of the RTD opinion, myself, because I’ve had the very pleasurable experience of having readers come up with insights about my own work that had never occurred to me, but that expand my own appreciation of it. I’m an organic garden kind of writer (start with a question, water and fertilize and see what shape of an answer it grows, if any), which means I love seeing new buds sprout from my take on the plant. A lot of the writers I know who dislike reader interpretations that differ from their own authority intentions are, by contrast, what I think of as Engineers of fiction. They tend to start with a pretty good idea of the answer, and write to a pre-drawn outline of where they’re going and how they plan to get there, a bit like designing and building a bridge from here to there; so any new insight that doesn’t fit their plan is seen as extraneous at best, a dangerous detour at worst.
I once visited a poet and fiction writer who was working on a novel and who had notecards about its characters, settings, etc., strung up on a network of strings running under the ceiling of her workroom, but low enough for her to reach so she could push the cards around into new configurations as the work progressed. In her fiction writing, she was a quintessential Engineer, having more or less built her book in the form of a primitive one-person computer in her study. The book was a political novel, with lots of characters and events taken from the real world political scene of the time, so frankly she seemed to have come up with a damn good plan of attack. I would have gone nuts and abandoned the project in her place, but then I never would have taken on her subject; and when I got three books into a 4 book SF series, I was messing around with index cards myself, and would have given a leg or so for a book/computer of my own . . . So to some extent, I think the type of work you’re engaged with determines how much of a gardener or an engineer you’re going to have to become to make it work. You need access to all methods, but will gravitate toward one side or the other (and maybe there are many more sides than just two + a mixture of both).
23 January 2015 at 22:01 #37544Sherlock shooting someone in cold blood in the head? I don’t think Conan Doyle would have approved
Holmes: If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.This is in The Adventure of The Three Garridebs, just after Holmes has thumped the guy with his pistol, so he’s telling someone who’s half-concussed and fairly helpless that, yes, he would have shot him in cold blood. Then there’s the death of Moriarty (in Doyle), plus Holmes (and Watson) shoots at Tonga in The Sign of Four.
So while it’s a bit of a departure (she says politely), it’s not uncanonical that Holmes might kill someone – given that they had Watson being the one blackmailed. The Doyle Holmes threatens, but in the Gatiss-Moffat adaptation, he carries it through.
23 January 2015 at 22:03 #37545@ichabod reading everything you wrote here! But, an ‘author voice’ needs to be strong, no?
“A lot of the writers I know who dislike reader interpretations that differ from their own authority intentions are, by contrast, what I think of as Engineers of fiction”.
Should a writer contain their author voice and hold to that interpretation?
23 January 2015 at 22:29 #37546The problem with Sherlock/ Rosencratz etc = fanfic is that it means The Omen is Book of Revelations fanfic (and presumably Good Omens is The Omen fanfic) and every film adaptation ever is also fanfic.
It is an entirely self-referential argument that tries to allow people to call themselves writers without actually doing the hardest bit of writing.
Moffat and Gatiss, Stoppard, Pratchett and Gaiman have represented their own imagining of situation, plot, character and theme many times over. So when they are asked to adapt (say) Holmes for the 21st century it happens because they have done the hard bit for themselves, they have demonstrated that they have the chops. Stoppard gets taken seriously when he looks at the side characters in Hamlet for exactly the same reason. And Arcadia was a better play, anyway.
I think there is a great story to be told about those in the Star Trek universe who do The Federation’s dirty work (because no civilisation could be that peaceful without ’em). Somewhere The Federation has its Walsingham. Also, I’d love to see the story of the Horgwarts-emberg Trials. But you know what? I want the heirs to Gene Roddenberry’s rights to do it, I want JK Rowling to do it. And if they don’t, that’s fine because it is their world and their choice (even if Warner Bros owns the trademarks to all the the Potter characters). But most of all, I think it would be terrific fun to sit with the writer and shoot the breeze about it, with the greatest accolade being to get a nod in the acknowledgements if in some tiny way I’ve helped something along.
RTD is very cool, (and anyone who isn’t grateful for what he has done for the Whoniverse is a complete tool) but somebody needs to introduce him to an Intellectual Property lawyer.
@purofilion
She was the writer, reading her own work (the clue is in it being at the writers’ group 😉 ). At the time she had no publisher and no agent.
The question was “What is it about?” It threw her into a a tearful tizzy, about which I continue to tease her, but also drove her back to the story.
About 9 months later she pitched it to Barry Cunningham (who, among many other things, discovered JK Rowling) who took it on. It got all the way up the chain (and several rounds of edits) until, in the finest tradition of publishing marketing departments, it was nixed by lackbrains who wouldn’t be in a publishing marketing department if they had any actual skills, and couldn’t work out how to sell it because they had never seen anything like it before. But she remains hugely grateful that I didn’t just say “That’s great. Keep up the good work!”
23 January 2015 at 22:35 #37547@purofilion Ah, well, that is the question, isn’t it? Except that I don’t think “should” really applies here. You’re either relaxed (or downright enthusiastic) about interpretation, or you’re, um, retentive, and can’t stand the idea of somebody straying from what you want them to get from a particular work of yours. The problem I see with the latter position is that creativity by its nature cannot be contained, on the one hand. A book or printed story is a machine. It translates a developed concept from my brain into the reader’s, by means of the reader’s performance art. When I read a page of print, I don’t get *exactly* the concept the author had in mind because of the (glorious) imprecision of language — her words won’t mean exactly the same thing as the meaning I construct from them in my own mind. I perform my version of her story in my head as I read, which is also a creative act, and it can easily lead to other creative acts consisting of me thinking new what-ifs about her characters and events. So as soon as her story is read, it starts to proliferate into as many internally performed versions as the story has readers. So “control” except in the broadest sense (“No, that character is NOT a version of Jar Jar Binks, you idiot, it’s my take on Edward Rochester!”) is literally (in every sense) and practically impossible.
And as culture rolls on through history and v.v., what readers bring to the page inexorably changes too, which changes the “meaning” of the text/machine for all but maybe academic specialists who keep some version of the original authorial intention alive (again, “Don Quixote/Man of la Mancha”, and all the old books being reinterpreted using this or that current theory of literary analysis).
Creativity — the readers’ as well as the writers’ — wins hands down, because stasis is not a sustainable state. As a writer I can “fix” my story in verbal amber, but time will unfix it, assuming I am lucky enough to write something that actually lasts a while: example, of course, LeGuin’s major works, among many others’. In fact, because she is a creative live wire, LeGuin has herself deliberately participated in this process, writing another Earthsea book to address reader concerns about the gender politics of the earlier ones, and coming back to “Left Hand” with a story in which default “he” is replaced by default “she” for the Gethenians, for ditto reasons. These changes, by the hand of the author herself, cast a new light of meaning on the earlier works. Greater love hath no writer — for her work and also in her regard for her readers.
23 January 2015 at 22:38 #37548Oh, and I’ll join the LeGuin love-in (with the possible exception of Always Coming Home, which was a bit auteurist even for my tastes).
The Dispossessed contains my all time favourite literary quote:
“They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life, each single life, is not new then why are we born?”
23 January 2015 at 22:39 #37549NotaFish — sorry for your friend’s unhappy adventure, but yeah, things will turn out better if she stays with it. I’ve had the same experience over and over, notably with people taking film options and getting right put to the top level of decision-making — and *then* getting a thumbs down. Nerves of steel are highly recommended when creatives have to deal with the marketplace, which is full of nerves of spaghetti.
23 January 2015 at 22:40 #3755023 January 2015 at 22:43 #37551sorry for your friend’s unhappy adventure
But that’s the thing – she didn’t see it as an unhappy adventure. She got closer than most do and was grateful for being asked a question (and not being let of the hook when she tried to dodge) that encouraged her to write a better story.
23 January 2015 at 22:53 #37552“Anyone, anyone at all?” @ichabod
Sorry but Bueller is a…thing…
@arbutus when I said I liked the Black Death Unit and the rest “not so much” I didn’t mean that the units I wrote were great and others, not. Goodness, how vulgar! I wrote a few ‘units’ (a topic might be a unit of study with many of these consisting of 6-8 week 60-70 mins lessons of which there are three p/week) and many fine people wrote excellent units. Unfortunately it suffers from a lack of consistency resulting, in part, from the line managers coming from schools like Brisbane Boys Grammar which study six hours of History per week from Years 6-10 and have no idea how to write for the average child in ‘rougher/tougher’ schools.
Having said that, Boy Ilion begins High School on Tuesday and I’m aware that additional to History (where he’ll begin with a rich analysis of Medieval Europe contrasted with Medieval Japan), he’ll have what I call The Sign of 5: (History/Geo is included), English, Maths, Science, PE (the latter is heavily theoretical now).
But there’s also: music/drama; Manual Arts/Arts (Hitting and Banging); Home Ec/Art and another form of PE called Be Prepared to Die Tuesday Afternoon Sport -inter-school sport where the students from ‘my’ school oppose the students from Boy Ilion’s school and always lose (ie: they need the ambulance service) due to the size and heft of the star players: I blame New Zealand 🙂
23 January 2015 at 22:55 #3755323 January 2015 at 23:08 #37554@arbutus well, that was even more confusing!
Arts is actually design -picture architect’s tables and computers. Actually, I don’t want to picture anything because whilst Child’s snoring around now (still!), I’m having Acute Anxiety trying to imagine how they’ll cope in High School. I’m thinking of the students in Clara’s class and Sunnydale High School (Buffy) and I wig out completely. In Oz, Years 7 to 12 are in the one school: 11-12 yr olds mixing with 18 year olds! They have ‘separate’ areas which blend into the one area after about two months. I think Child of Ilion’ll need a ray gun.
Regardez-vous, Puro.
23 January 2015 at 23:11 #37555@bluesqueakpip Which often translates into “It doesn’t fit our marketing categories”.
NotaFish — Got it, and good — if she got that far, that’s a triumph in itself, but it’s not quite what she wanted, right? But she well get it, by the sound of things.
But — ” . . . by the hand of the author herself”? Too limiting, IMO. If the author *doesn’t* get around to doing something like that, why not others — once copyright restrictions are gone, assuming we’re talking about fiction for commercial publication — so long as they don’t claim the name of the author as their own? Or let me put it this way: saying NO is a principled position of opposition, but it will not prevent the flowering of explosive seeds found in the original work in the gardens of others, whether into weeds or excellent blooms, and my position is that prevention is not desirable.
Mind you, I did once say “No” to a request by a fan to write her own stories about an SF character and world of mine. That was years ago. I was so much older then, I’m young than that now — and I regret my prohibition. I think it was a mistake, and I wish I had a fanfic fandom of my own for those books that I could play in and with others myself. So you could say that my position isn’t neutral to begin with, which I freely acknowledge.
23 January 2015 at 23:26 #37556@pedant ah! Well, when I asked somewhat rhetorically “is she the writer?” what I really meant was: “was she reading from her own work about to be published?”
I told you I’m crap at these kinds of puzzles 😉
@ichabod thank you for the explanation.
I’m actually not much of a one for reading Sci-Fi which means I’m gonna get abused shortly. I suspect sci-fi and sci-fantasy have all these subgroups about which I’m not aware. This is hugely embarrassing for me to admit as this is a forum for all things Who….
OK. Asimov -ticked that box. Atwood -ticked. Ahem. Cough….
The sci-fi dummy, Puro.
PS: where should I start? Please don’t tell me about the author of Twilight. OK, that’s fantasy, from what I remember…Can I include subtitles from Buffy -coz that’s fantasy too?
23 January 2015 at 23:29 #37557Creativity — the readers’ as well as the writers’ — wins hands down, because stasis is not a sustainable state. As a writer I can “fix” my story in verbal amber, but time will unfix it, assuming I am lucky enough to write something that actually lasts a while
Exactly – nicely put. I’m always rather appalled by writers who hate the fact their audiences write fan fiction based in their universes – surely it is the highest compliment – that people wish to play in your sandpit!
It is an entirely self-referential argument that tries to allow people to call themselves writers without actually doing the hardest bit of writing
I don’t believe writers in the “canon” should be deemed worthy of respect and fan fiction authors deemed worthy of derision. One may make a distinction between the technical or imaginative quality and skill of one piece of writing over another, without needing to trash the author of the novice piece, their enthusiasm and milieu.
Yes, canon Holmes is not a pacifist, but neither is he a murderer (Moriarty excepted). BBC Sherlock picks up a thread in the Ur text (what Holmes will do for Watson) and exaggerates it, just as BBC Sherlock fan fiction where Watson and Holmes sleep together on the stag night does likewise. The technique is the same, even if the skill of execution and the remuneration differ.
23 January 2015 at 23:34 #37558why not others
As I said if people have earned the right by demonstrating that that have what it takes to bring a fully realised idea to fruition, then why not indeed?
But if someone is just trying to take a short cut, to skip out the really hard part of writing, then they have no claim on the property, whether copyright has expired or not.
So first, ask your fan to demonstrate that s/he is a good enough writer. A single item of Mary Sue-free original short fiction might be all it takes, but nobody is entitled to a free pass.
It is a bleak truth that, these days, the writer might as well ask “What shelf at Waterstones will this sit on?” before even bothering to start to write.
23 January 2015 at 23:36 #37559“The problem with Sherlock/ Rosencratz etc = fanfic is that it means The Omen is Book of Revelations fanfic (and presumably Good Omens is The Omen fanfic) and every film adaptation ever is also fanfic.
It is an entirely self-referential argument that tries to allow people to call themselves writers without actually doing the hardest bit of writing.”
I would agree.
@ichabod I love the Dylanesque but I still believe, as does A.S. Byatt, that an author’s voice is the author’s voice. I can see how simplistic such a concept is, but I’m a simple gal at hart.
Regards, p.
23 January 2015 at 23:44 #37560@juniperfish “I don’t believe writers in the “canon” should be deemed worthy of respect and fan fiction authors deemed worthy of derision.
Is it derision? Or is it a case of ‘this needs to be outstanding’ -even if it cannot be, or isn’t, published?
The problem of marketability is the issue -certainly in Oz where if something fits, then it’s published. Rather frightening when one considers Nick Earls unpublished poetry side by side with his lose, somewhat unstudied, published novels and short stories!
Regards, puro.
23 January 2015 at 23:45 #37561One may make a distinction between the technical or imaginative quality and skill of one piece of writing over another, without needing to trash the author of the novice piece, their enthusiasm and milieu.
Good critique doesn’t show mercy and it judges quality, of which invention, skill, craft and bunch of other stuff are all componts. But the greatest of these is invention.
If the writer hasn’t bothered to invent before moving into someone else’s universe then he or she will get a right shoeing. It may be done with a scalpel or a bludgeon, but a shoeing it will be.
23 January 2015 at 23:48 #37562@juniperfish That’s a rather lovely remark by RTD. In a way, it mirrors what happens in other art forms (painting, sculpture, music), where the original work is put out there, and has spawned, sometimes over a very long period of time, a “conversation”, as @ichabod puts it. I think I agree that the “Big Conversations” aren’t exactly the same as the FanFic chat, as it were. The problem is that I think that there can be serious overlap, at times. (Like a hybrid fruit, or is that an analogy too far? 🙂 ) I read the fan fiction entry in Wikipedia and found that those writers took take a much broader view of its meaning. But really, as it isn’t something I’ve thought much about before today’s conversation, I’m not best equipped to judge!
In any case, I “heart” @ichabod’s comment for the phrase “commit serious ship”. 🙂
I also like the “engineer” analogy. I have read series in which the writer probably should have taken a more engineer-like approach, as I encountered internal inconsistencies that could easily have been avoided. The interesting thing about reader insight (or viewer or listener insight, as the case may be) is that you even find after a certain point, that the critics themselves won’t accept any insight that deviates from received wisdom about a work. I have encountered this attitude in both English and musicology , where only a certain take on a work was considered “correct”.
23 January 2015 at 23:57 #37563@purofilion
Ah, well. According Margaret Atwood, neither Handmaid’s Tale nor Oryx & Crake are science fiction, despite there being no sensible definition of SF that excludes either.
Genre snobbery is a thing.
(As Theodore Sturgeon – source of a few bon mots – said “If it’s not good fiction, it’s not good science fiction.”)
24 January 2015 at 00:11 #37564@purofilion I love these intimate looks into the education systems in other countries. It’s too easy sometimes to forget that most other places don’t do things very much the way your own place does. There is pretty much zero essay-writing in the high school science courses here, the most writing they get up to is lab reports. And I am certain Arbutus Jr. has never had to write anything for PE, other than a couple of brief tests on the rules of some sport. Most recently, they did a unit on karate, leading me to tell the teacher, when we met the other week, that I didn’t think giving my son the power to say “I know karate” in the course of a conversation was a good idea! (Yes, we had Parent Night! I kept thinking of Clara and Danny.)
On the other hand, Medieval Europe vs. Medieval Japan is a fabulous idea, wish we did that here.
Grade Seven does seem young to be in with the almost-adults. We have 8-12 here, and even then for much of the first year, my son’s approach to school was very tentative. He spent the whole year dressed in shades of grey (not his usual style at all). But he made some nice nerdy friends from whom he is now inseparable, and he walks tall. Hopefully it will go as well for Boy Ilion!
Congrats on your good work with the Black Death. (That makes you sound like someone from Medecins Sans Frontieres. Hee hee.)
24 January 2015 at 02:04 #37565Wow -dropping in and finding dozens of posts on the art of writing and fanfic etc. Loved the gardening
and engineering concepts – but isn’t it true it must be some of both. A stories rhetoric has to be tended
and cultivated as a garden but you also have to keep a spread sheet going for all the research I would
imagine? That was always my impression. I’m reluctant to add anything on writing cause I never follow thru
myself on tale telling. I pretty much just imagine bits for my own entertainment and I guess that’s the
test really about becoming a writer isn’t it?
The idea of comparing medieval eras of Europe and Japan seems like a very rich and rewarding history
subject for teens since it has that element of being like ‘a fantasy time’, doesn’t it ?
Considering we are in the age of Game of Thrones and karate classes and Video games with sword play.
I bet it is a very appealing subject that engages them a lot.24 January 2015 at 02:45 #37566@lisa — medieval Europe/Japan sounds like a good game-concept for an historical war game; I wonder if there is one out there? Or something that uses elements adapted from both histories to create new battles for players? I’m not a gamer, no idea, but seems like a natural.
And yes, you do want some of both the gardening and the engineering approaches, and in some respects the length of a work has a lot to do with it. The more characters and situations a series gets under its belt, the more engineering is required just to avoid major inconsistencies, which to my mind accounts for some of the more stilted aspects of late-in-a-series books, at least as I remember them. I don’t read much in series these days, so things may have changed.
@arbutus — The Black Death! Have you read Connie Willis’s “Doomsday Book”? I take issue with some of it, but have to admit that by the end the story has become extremely moving and deep-feeling. And you are heartily hearted back re committing ship — one wishes not to trample over sensibilities, after all, but English is *such* a deliciously flexible and multi-layered language — ! There’s always a way around.
@IAmNotAFish — well, but wait a minute: Mike Bishop wrote a very good book called “Brittle Innings” in which Dr. F’s monster is involved in baseball. Mike did not invent the monster, but he invented a good story around the monster, so does that invalidate the work? Granted, Mike is an established author with numerous well-regarded books to his name, but suppose a newcomer had written this book? I just don’t see “invention” the way you do, I guess. Likewise, “Wide Sargasso Sea”: Rhys didn’t invent Bertha, but did invent her entire backstory, so — what does that make this very effective novel? To me, the Big Conversation goes on in incidents of call and response: “Frankenstein” is a call; “Brittle Innings” is a response, among many other responses, some of them fanfic (not written for the general public, critical response, and possible income). “Dracula” itself a response to the call of both Gothic lit of the time and the stimulus of Henry Irving’s performances as Mephistophiles, becomes the call for, among others, Anne Rice’s books, and so the Conversation continues — but there are many other responses at many levels. Do we want to stop Rice from writing her vampires because she didn’t invent them? Or Fred Saberhagen, for another example, for writing a charming little novel called “The Dracula Tapes”, giving Dracula’s p.o.v. on Stoker’s plot? I don’t see it.
24 January 2015 at 02:52 #37567Also, on Atwood and her SF/not SF tales: she has taken both positions, but can be forgiven (or not) for waffling for fear of becoming tainted with genre cooties (“SF is inferior by definition,” per Sturgeon’s remark) and finding herself dissed for dabbling in that SF stuff (although dabbling it most certainly is not). Again, it’s a marketing issue: “mainstream” writing on her level gets admiring reviews in the broader media that help sales. SF written at similar levels gets reviewed in “Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine” and *maybe”, if you’re very lucky, somewhere in some best-of-the-year roundup somewhere, BUT also tends to deliver a readership of devoted SF fans that can bring respectable sales, even possible cross-over sales into mainstream, as with “Left Hand”. The issue of the “genre ghetto” never goes away (well, not so far, anyway), and if you’re making your living writing fiction, you’d best pay attention to such matters.
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