Following up on the last entry
May. 3rd, 2006 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseColin's parents have arrived in town. Alas! I expected them tomorrow, so nothing is cleaned, so my mother-in-law-to-be has already started helping us tidy. Fortunately, they're not staying here, or the state of my study would be a deep embarrassment; instead, they might not even be up here much, though they've declared that they're here specifically to help us do all the stuff not done in the course of wedding craziness. I'm getting off the computer soon to do some cleaning, nonetheless.
Last night I sat to write for what was literally meant to be the span of two songs. It ended up 4, plus some silence, and resulted in 500 words -- words that even seemed to go somewhere. Yay!
In an ideal world, I'd hammer out all this climax stuff before the wedding, and have a sort of finished draft, so i could come back after the honeymoon to revisions. (Normally, I wouldn't call two weeks time enough, but since I plan to be writing an entirely different project while out there, plus, of course, the whole Italy/Malta change of pace and scene, I suspect it will do. Besides, this revision would be the one to smooth things out enoguh for beta readers, not the one to do once I have beta feedback.)
Now, yesterday, I rambled on about Battlestar Galactica. (And for those who read same too early, I rewrote bits today to make it more coherent. I don't know if I succeeded.)
On my walk home, I did manage to come up with a partial explanation of why BSG's religious take bothers me.
We see religion in its big, mystical prophetic state, with the miracles and the hand of God moving people about, adn scriptures coming to life, and all that cool stuff...
... we almost never see everyday religion. The moms taking their daughter to church -- or any casual church attendance. The little rituals or gestures people do without thinking (Okay, the pilots have one -- but is it religious or a tradition based on military history? I thought the latter.) Bored friends discussing questions of religious history, religious ideology, or armchair theology on their off-shift time. Nobody's invited over for a party remotely equivalent, to, say,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cicadabug's Solstice party, or a staff Christmas party. We get one holiday that feels more civic than religious, more on the lines of Canada Day than Easter. Characters revealed (by the needs of the plot) to be religious, not casually or culturally, but deeply so, keep close about it until it has to be shown, even though their faith is in the majority, and even apparantly secular funerals are conducted by a priest of their faith.
I don't want the show's religion to come across as some equivalent to the loud evangelical branches of my own faith, for instance, where browbeating everyone about their God is the order of the day. But there's a lot of room between hiding it and that level of overdoing it.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that, while it's relevant to the plot more often than in most shows, it still only shows up in service to the plot.
__________________________
It's like this. People mistake plot for story. This is wrong, and when it happens, it tends to lead to serius disservice to the story.
Story is a complex, living organism. We can say it's comprised of plot, character, setting, idea, morality, and theme, like saying a human is comprised of two sets of two limbs each, an inefficient digestive system and an outright comical reproductive one, a head that serves to house brain and the majority of its sensory organs, and an upright stance that blatantly evolved out of a non-upright one, based on its various inefficiencies, all put together with a bilaterally symmetrical aesthetic.
Not exactly a complete idea, that.
People come up with stories a variety of ways. They can start with any one element of the above; a piece of plot -- if I were going to rob a bank, this is how I'd do it.... two characters whose interaction looks promising for making cool stuff happen. A sudden violent reaction to another story that went dreadfully wrong. A moral stance the writer feels a desperate need to talk about, but doesn't want to ponificate on. Et cetera.
The problem is, the thing that first inspired the story tends to get stuck in the writer's mind. It gets focused on, and fed. All its quirks are nurtured, even those that would be better discouraged. Ever read a story that was more soapbox than action? One that was a neat scientific concept -- with paper puppets guiding the reader through its intricacies? Just so.
Ever read a story with those kinds of flaws, and liked it anyway? I think we all have, especially if the story happens to use a particular personal hook in the surface trappings. No story is equally focused on all the pieces within it. This is usually a good thing, so long as the writer (or writers) recognize the difference between the one thing that happens to be most central to that story, and the Story itself, and endeabour to treat the other aspects fairly. This doesn't necessarily mean that your totally cardboard high fantasy setting with wizards and elves can't be an utterly cardboard setting with wizards and elves, if that's all you need to best tell your story -- it means it remains true to itself from beginning to end, instead of bending at the whim of the plot.
When one aspect of story is mistaken for the whole story, it can cause more damage than just, "Too much science, no real people". When, to go back to my original example, someone mistakes their great and beautiful plot for the story expressed by the plot, they might warp the details of the setting, so that the rules seem to shift and the ground is no longer steady. They might have characters -- not even cardboard characters, but ones well-drawn in the concept, and even well executed for as long as their natural personalities happened to coincide with the plot -- suddenly get sucked out of shape when the plot has to go *this* way and the characters would rather go *that* way.
(People say often enough, it's the character, dammit. But if character is mistaken for story, that can cause its own problems; characters who don't fit their setting, because setting doesn't matter; "she's this way, however rare that would be in that place/time". Plots that sag, because the author is so enamoured of spending time with her people that she forgets which conversations matter to the plot,a dn which are just cool details about people. Just to be fair.)
TV gets a lot more slack for this. The whole multiple-writers, multiple-directors thing sometimes means there are unspoken implications about character that someone misses -- and that's before you get to the opinions and interpretations of the actors (who can sometimes smooth over these gaps, but sometimes make them worse, if they feel too strongly that what they're doing is very right, or very wrong). Buffy gets praised for its characters, but there are moments all over where something feels just a bit off about a particular action, or a detail of life in Sunnydale. There are things tv shows I like have done for which i would hang a solo writer of a book.
But that just means, I suspect, that when there's enough of it for me to notice, they are messing up bigger than they should.
Last night I sat to write for what was literally meant to be the span of two songs. It ended up 4, plus some silence, and resulted in 500 words -- words that even seemed to go somewhere. Yay!
In an ideal world, I'd hammer out all this climax stuff before the wedding, and have a sort of finished draft, so i could come back after the honeymoon to revisions. (Normally, I wouldn't call two weeks time enough, but since I plan to be writing an entirely different project while out there, plus, of course, the whole Italy/Malta change of pace and scene, I suspect it will do. Besides, this revision would be the one to smooth things out enoguh for beta readers, not the one to do once I have beta feedback.)
Now, yesterday, I rambled on about Battlestar Galactica. (And for those who read same too early, I rewrote bits today to make it more coherent. I don't know if I succeeded.)
On my walk home, I did manage to come up with a partial explanation of why BSG's religious take bothers me.
We see religion in its big, mystical prophetic state, with the miracles and the hand of God moving people about, adn scriptures coming to life, and all that cool stuff...
... we almost never see everyday religion. The moms taking their daughter to church -- or any casual church attendance. The little rituals or gestures people do without thinking (Okay, the pilots have one -- but is it religious or a tradition based on military history? I thought the latter.) Bored friends discussing questions of religious history, religious ideology, or armchair theology on their off-shift time. Nobody's invited over for a party remotely equivalent, to, say,
cicadabug's Solstice party, or a staff Christmas party. We get one holiday that feels more civic than religious, more on the lines of Canada Day than Easter. Characters revealed (by the needs of the plot) to be religious, not casually or culturally, but deeply so, keep close about it until it has to be shown, even though their faith is in the majority, and even apparantly secular funerals are conducted by a priest of their faith.I don't want the show's religion to come across as some equivalent to the loud evangelical branches of my own faith, for instance, where browbeating everyone about their God is the order of the day. But there's a lot of room between hiding it and that level of overdoing it.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that, while it's relevant to the plot more often than in most shows, it still only shows up in service to the plot.
__________________________
It's like this. People mistake plot for story. This is wrong, and when it happens, it tends to lead to serius disservice to the story.
Story is a complex, living organism. We can say it's comprised of plot, character, setting, idea, morality, and theme, like saying a human is comprised of two sets of two limbs each, an inefficient digestive system and an outright comical reproductive one, a head that serves to house brain and the majority of its sensory organs, and an upright stance that blatantly evolved out of a non-upright one, based on its various inefficiencies, all put together with a bilaterally symmetrical aesthetic.
Not exactly a complete idea, that.
People come up with stories a variety of ways. They can start with any one element of the above; a piece of plot -- if I were going to rob a bank, this is how I'd do it.... two characters whose interaction looks promising for making cool stuff happen. A sudden violent reaction to another story that went dreadfully wrong. A moral stance the writer feels a desperate need to talk about, but doesn't want to ponificate on. Et cetera.
The problem is, the thing that first inspired the story tends to get stuck in the writer's mind. It gets focused on, and fed. All its quirks are nurtured, even those that would be better discouraged. Ever read a story that was more soapbox than action? One that was a neat scientific concept -- with paper puppets guiding the reader through its intricacies? Just so.
Ever read a story with those kinds of flaws, and liked it anyway? I think we all have, especially if the story happens to use a particular personal hook in the surface trappings. No story is equally focused on all the pieces within it. This is usually a good thing, so long as the writer (or writers) recognize the difference between the one thing that happens to be most central to that story, and the Story itself, and endeabour to treat the other aspects fairly. This doesn't necessarily mean that your totally cardboard high fantasy setting with wizards and elves can't be an utterly cardboard setting with wizards and elves, if that's all you need to best tell your story -- it means it remains true to itself from beginning to end, instead of bending at the whim of the plot.
When one aspect of story is mistaken for the whole story, it can cause more damage than just, "Too much science, no real people". When, to go back to my original example, someone mistakes their great and beautiful plot for the story expressed by the plot, they might warp the details of the setting, so that the rules seem to shift and the ground is no longer steady. They might have characters -- not even cardboard characters, but ones well-drawn in the concept, and even well executed for as long as their natural personalities happened to coincide with the plot -- suddenly get sucked out of shape when the plot has to go *this* way and the characters would rather go *that* way.
(People say often enough, it's the character, dammit. But if character is mistaken for story, that can cause its own problems; characters who don't fit their setting, because setting doesn't matter; "she's this way, however rare that would be in that place/time". Plots that sag, because the author is so enamoured of spending time with her people that she forgets which conversations matter to the plot,a dn which are just cool details about people. Just to be fair.)
TV gets a lot more slack for this. The whole multiple-writers, multiple-directors thing sometimes means there are unspoken implications about character that someone misses -- and that's before you get to the opinions and interpretations of the actors (who can sometimes smooth over these gaps, but sometimes make them worse, if they feel too strongly that what they're doing is very right, or very wrong). Buffy gets praised for its characters, but there are moments all over where something feels just a bit off about a particular action, or a detail of life in Sunnydale. There are things tv shows I like have done for which i would hang a solo writer of a book.
But that just means, I suspect, that when there's enough of it for me to notice, they are messing up bigger than they should.
