Posts filed under 'Other'

when is a script not a script?

This is sort of a continuation of my last post.

Another thing I liked was this interview with David Lynch.

Specifically this part:

The A.V. Club: With Inland Empire, I understand there wasn’t a full script before production. Were you writing scenes as you went along?

David Lynch: Let’s clear this up. When you write a script, at least what my experience has been, you don’t suddenly see the whole script and spit it out and type it out with no typos, just perfect, in one sitting. That never happens, never will happen. You get an idea, and you write that one out, then you’re going along, you don’t have any script, you had an idea and you wrote it out. Then you go along, you get another idea and you write it out. Now you have two ideas, but you don’t have a script. You go along a little bit more and you get a third idea, you write it out. And you look and you say, “Wait a minute, I have three ideas, and none of them relate to one another.” Fine! No problem. There’s no script, just three ideas that don’t relate. You go along and you get a fourth idea, and this fourth idea relates to the first three, and you say, “Oh, something’s happening.” And then, when something starts happening, more ideas flood in, quicker! Quicker they come, like schools of fish, schools of fish! And the thing starts to emerge, and a script appears. That’s exactly the way it happens. And that’s exactly the way it happened on Inland Empire.

I don’t make movies, obviously, but that’s pretty much how I work. Pieces and ideas and scenes, and then eventually they start to fit together. It’s like what happened on The Jan Sleet Mysteries — a series of detective stories that started to turn into a novel (a “stealth novel,” as I called it at the time).

What I’m doing right now is a bit of a technical experiment (I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done), and it combines a couple of different ideas, as did the story before (which is why it was longer than the first two, which were basically one-idea stories).

I wouldn’t mind writing more one-idea stories, but it’s the connections that are often the most interesting parts.

Add comment May 4th, 2022

i was writing a blog post…

Actually, I wrote an entire blog post, but something was wrong. I had accumulated a list of URLs of articles (well, three) which I was going to use to illustrate my points (about why the articles were, in terms of their main points, wrong), but something wasn’t right, so I didn’t press the big, blue “Publish” button.

I always go by my gut when writing. As I’ve recounted before, I had a friend, a very long time ago, who was reading a book about the workings of the human brain, and he called me up and asked, “Do you write with the front of your brain?”

“No,” I replied, “I write by the seat of my pants.”

I finally figured out why the blog post should stay, permanently, in Draft mode. I really don’t want this to be the kind of blog that’s devoted to pointing out things that are wrong. Every time I go to YouTube, for example, I see all kinds of videos about what’s wrong with the final season(s) of Game of Thrones, why The Witcher sucks because it’s not like the video games (or the novels), why this or that Fast & Furious movie sucks, why The Walking Dead isn’t as good as it used to be, all the things Licorice Pizza stole from other movies, and why the ending of Killing Eve pissed everybody off and/or broke their hearts.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with any of those positions (okay, the ending of GoT did suck, and The Witcher totally rocks) — the point is that I realize (I’m pretty sure I’ve realized this before, maybe more than once) that I’d much rather write about things I like. I really don’t want to be one of those people who can’t shut down the computer at night because, to quote the classic cartoon, somebody is wrong about something on the internet(!).

So, some things I like:

1) There was nice weather yesterday and today. Both days I took some paper and a pen (okay, several pens) to the park and wrote a bunch. Very pleasant. Paper and pen: still the best way to write. (Also, everybody should watch David Lynch’s daily weather reports.)

 
2) Legends of Tomorrow has not yet been renewed for an eighth season. If this is the end, it would be too bad, but back when it started who could ever have predicted it would last this long and end up being so good? Sara and Ava are married, Sara is pregnant (with Ava’s baby — don’t ask) and all is well with the world. (Other than the fact that all the Legends are now in time jail, but they’ll think of something. They always do.)

 
3) Season 2 of The Witcher is over, so I was kind of looking for something else. I tried Peacemaker, since it was based on The Suicide Squad, which I really liked, but the first episode didn’t grab me (although the opening featured an amazing dance number behind the credits).

So, I settled on Moon Knight. I haven’t watched any of the other Marvel shows, and I’ve stopped watching the movies, but it’s supposed to be fairly free-standing — not completely tied into the overall mythology (well, the Marvel mythology — it’s very much tied into Egyptian mythology).

So far, it’s really good. The “heroes” and “villains” are all pretty complex, compromised, and damaged. It’s not as wild as Doom Patrol — although that statement applies to pretty much everything except possibly the new David Cronenberg movie (his first feature based on his own script since eXistenZ).

Also, it deals with DID (dissociative identity disorder), which I’ve been known to write about as well, so that’s interesting (of course, the term, the current replacement for Multiple Personality Disorder, is contentious, since not everybody agrees that it is a disorder in the first place).

 
4)I appreciated this article: “How to recognize gaslighting and respond to it.” When I used the term “gaslighting” twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, I almost always had to footnote it. Now, similar to “triggering,” it is used constantly, to refer to a wide variety of unrelated things.

I always remember watching a TV drama with my father back in — I think — the late 1960s. The episode was about an actress (or maybe she was a singer — I forget her exact profession), who was starting to think she was losing her marbles. Halfway through, my father announced, “It’s Gaslight!” As indeed it was. I’m sure that was the first time I learned what it meant to “gaslight” someone, and where the term came from.

 
5) Good music from Tangerine Dream recently, both composed and improvised.

 
6) Also, Billie Eilish may be winning me over.

Add comment April 17th, 2022

fifty million french people: right or wrong?

I was interested in this article: “In a Nonbinary Pronoun, France Sees a U.S. Attack on the Republic

(First of all, the idea that anybody, on any side of any “culture war” in the United States, is thinking, even for a minute, about the effect their opinion might have on the French… Well, that’s just adorable. 🙂 )

I’m all for maintaining rules for language (“farther” and “further” are not interchangeable, for one example), but if someone or something new, or previously unseen, exists in the world, languages need to evolve. Pronouns (and words in general) should adapt to people, not the other way around.

Also, if someone wants to be addressed by a specific name, or described with a specific pronoun, to do otherwise is simply rude.

(I am not, obviously, including situations of deliberate fraud. I remember there was a guy years ago who checked into various fancy New York hotels and ran up big bills while pretending to be David Bowie. That’s not okay.)

I also have never liked the idea that “when it comes to the choice of pronouns for groups of women and men, the male form takes precedence over the female; and when it comes to adjectives describing mixed gatherings, they take the masculine form.” Likewise the practice, which I learned in school, of referring to an individual of undetermined gender as “he” (though I’ve been writing for many decades about a famous amateur detective who proudly does just that).

I do think it’s funny that the French make a point of not finding out how many of their citizens might be of which race or place of national origin, but they insist on gendering everybody and everything, including household furniture (for example, “chair,” in French, can apparently, according to Google Translate, be either masculine or feminine, depending on which word you decide to use).

Add comment January 5th, 2022

unfortunately, “agathism” doesn’t mean what I thought it did

I get the A.Word.A.Day emails every day, and yesterday’s was about “agathism,” which I thought was a coincidence since I had just talked about Agatha Christie in my last post, but it turns out the word is not related in any way to Dame Agatha.

Oh, well.

 
I’ve hit a bit of a roll on my new story — I finally got to a scene that has some momentum. Until then it had been basically me pulling the story along, paragraph by paragraph, like dragging a heavy kid on a sled.

(This may be why I stay away from metaphors.)

I would consider starting to post it, except that it doesn’t have a title yet. That’s one of the things that’s specific to writing serial stories — you have to commit to the title at the beginning of the process, rather than at (or after) the end. So, I view this as part of the process — if the story isn’t clear enough to have a title, it isn’t clear enough to start posting either.

 
I thought this article was interesting also (although rather longer than it needed to be): “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.”

I have always stayed away from “trauma plots.” I have characters who have suffered various kinds of trauma, and that informs their actions and reactions, but that’s knowledge I hold — backstory, not story. And I have characters with what are generally considered mental problems and I’ve never given a “reason” for their condition.

This part of the article caught my attention specifically:

Classics are retrofitted according to the model. Two modern adaptations of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” add a rape to the governess’s past. In “Anne with an E,” the Netflix reboot of “Anne of Green Gables,” the title character is given a history of violent abuse, which she relives in jittery flashbacks. In Hogarth Press’s novelized updates of Shakespeare’s plays, Jo Nesbø, Howard Jacobson, Jeanette Winterson, and others accessorize Macbeth and company with the requisite devastating backstories.

Reminds me of Orson Welles’ take on Iago. Various productions and adaptations of Othello have conjured up a reason (or reasons) for Iago’s actions, but that’s a modern sensibility. As Welles put it (paraphrasing here), everybody who’s spent any time out in the world has met an Iago or two.

Needless to say, “Rosebud” from Citizen Kane was not Welles’ idea.

Add comment December 29th, 2021

the wheel of time

I am watching, and, so far, enjoying, the Amazon Prime adaptation of The Wheel of Time. I read the first book in the series a very long time ago, but I don’t remember much about it.

The first two episodes were made up of very standard fantasy elements (many of which, in fact, mapped directly onto elements of The Fellowship of the Ring), but the third episode did have one moment that surprised me. Since then, things have been improving week-to-week.

The Wheel of Time (the show) exists, reportedly, because Jeff Bezos said, “I want my Game of Thrones.”

Which has led to a lot of articles comparing the two series, but I think that’s a waste of time. Bezos was not making a genre request — he was making a request (demand) for a show which would attract attention and eyeballs and buzz and, as we used to say, “ink.” In other words, water cooler discussions (as we also used to say).

And, frankly, a too-obvious an attempt to create “another GoT” would have been immediately called out for what it was. WoT was written before GoT, and it relies on a lot of the tropes that GoT deconstructed (and/or trashed).

I’m not a big fantasy buff, but there is one specific reason that I’m enjoying the show as much as I am.

There’s a main character named Moiraine. She’s basically the Gandalf character (magic user, from a group of magic users, wandering the world for reasons of her own, befriending and protecting and leading, or trying to lead, the — much younger — main characters).

Unlike Gandalf, though, Moiraine does not travel alone.

She’s an Aes Sedai, one of the society of women who use magic in this world, and, like most Aes Sedai, she has a Warder, named Lan. A Warder is a man who travels with an Aes Sedai — a bodyguard, a confidante, a sounding board, a partner. They are magically linked, so they are always aware of each other’s feelings and situation. Some Aes Sedai/Warder pairs are also lovers, and some are not, and it seems that they don’t usually advertise which it is. (Moiraine and Lan are apparently not lovers, but they did share a long soak in a hot tub in the first episode.)

The Aes Sedai is generally in charge, but the Warder apparently has some leeway when there is danger or potential danger, as a bodyguard should.

(Lan has noticed that Moiraine has muted their psychic connection for the evening — for personal reasons.)

Lan: Get back before dawn.
Moiraine: Is that an order?
Lan: Did it sound like a suggestion?

You can probably guess why I find this relationship interesting.

 
Update: A couple of caveats after the most recent episode.

1) The show is a “chosen one” story (definitely my least favorite fantasy trope), and now, of the five possible chosen ones, the least interesting character (by a wide margin) appears to be It.

2) A good deal of this episode was taken up with adolescent hormones and angst, which was a bit annoying because, unlike in the books, the characters in question are quite a bit past adolescence. I understand the need to “age up” young book characters when making a TV show (Game of Thrones did it, too), but sometimes you have to then do some rewriting to make it work.

Add comment December 16th, 2021

stories/writing

I’ve been writing down scenes and ideas as they occur to me, but so far nothing has coalesced for a new story.

The other thing I’ve been doing is re-reading the first three stories in the current series (“The Marvel Murder Case,” “The Town Hall Mystery,” and “The Heron Island Mystery“), mostly because I knew there were some threads which I wanted to pick up again, but I also found some little, tiny glitches here and there (word choice, punctuation, etc.).

So, I’m thinking this would be a good time to go back and fix those. Not for the “Heron Island” story — it’s too soon to work on that one again — but the other two could benefit from a little (just a very little) polishing.

Also, having gone back and re-read the first two stories, I’m starting to feel that the story which should come next is not the one I’ve been assuming I ought to be writing…

 
Anyway, following up on my last post, Legends of Tomorrow has just had their 100th episode, and it was wonderful.

Gideon, who was the AI on the team’s (now destroyed) ship the Waverider, has now joined the team as an actual person, and the episode was a trip through her memories, including a lot of appearances by actors who are no longer on the show. It was nice to see all the familiar faces again, and the episode made excellent use of the fact that Amy Louise Pemberton, who has played Gideon since the first episode of the show, has a really good singing voice. There are also a couple of inside jokes based on the fact that over the years the show has had a lot of British actors playing American characters.

Also, regarding Doom Patrol, I loved this clip (and the episode it’s in). The young girl in the woods is Kay. She’s the core personality of Jane, who has 64 personas, all created to protect Kay, who was a victim of abuse growing up. She (Kay) usually stays in the Underground (Jane’s subconscious), but obviously she hears what Jane hears, and she decides to start dancing to the music, prompting Jane and then the other characters to dance also.

(I also love how Rita, the second person to start dancing in the real world, begins by standing, squaring her shoulders, clenching her fists for a second, and then moving forward onto the dance floor. She’s a studio-trained Hollywood actress, and that’s a nice moment of her “getting into character” for the scene.)

One thing that’s been new in this season is that Kay, who barely spoke in the first season, is becoming much more vocal and assertive now. She’s growing up, and healing, and this is unnerving to some of the other personas. This is a very interesting development, and I’m interested to see where it will go.

 

Also, a propos of nothing, here’s some Arcade Fire:

Add comment November 3rd, 2021

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