Laurell K. Hamilton, vampire writer par notorious, not so long ago wrote a post on the topic of muses that's been making its rounds of the blogosphere. This has already been snarked, ably and hilariously, by writers far more capable than I, but I wouldn't be me if I didn't want to butt in where I didn't belong. And, to be frank, I have a few thoughts on the topic myself.
'Muse' in the world of online fiction, especially fanfiction, has become shorthand for 'inspiration' and 'character I like.' Young fangirls, new to the 'net and convinced that they're the funniest thing ever, will often have long conversations with their muses (usually harassed anime guys) in the authors' notes of their stories. Ms. Hamilton describes her muse as an outsider, who challenges and is challenged, and occasionally needs to be forced . . .
. . . I think. The blog wasn't entirely clear on that point.
If that IS what she's saying, though, then there seems to be a grain of truth in it. Sitting on your butt waiting for divine inspiration isn't going to get your work done; if you want to be a writer, you have to train yourself in putting ass to chair and producing. Write when you're in the mood. Write when you're not in the mood. Write when it's one AM and your head hurts, and the room is spinning a little. Produce, produce, produce. If the muse is indeed not upon you, then you should be writing anyway.
And you know what? 95% of what you produce will be crap. Utter, complete, festering shit. But because you've trained yourself to get the work done, to get in the habit of putting words on paper, things will be that much easier when the inspiration does come. If Thalia or Melpomene decides to poleaxe you with an idea and you're just plain not in the mood, it might get away, and you could lose a gem. Think of it as spending hours running in circles on the track, getting nowhere, in preparation for the big marathon.
So I have to defend Ms. Hamilton on that point, if she is saying what I think she's saying. However, I think she's making a mistake in anthropomorphizing her inspiration to the extent she is.
If you get in the habit of thinking of inspiration as a person, it can become a crutch: it's not my fault I didn't get anything done, it's my muse's fault for not inspiring me. Since Ms. Hamilton already has a track record of getting a little too invested in her characters (see the infamous Dear Negative Reader post), I hope she isn't as invested in her muse as she is in Anita Blake and company. That could get real nasty real fast . . .
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
Realism: Military Nicknames
I can't tell you how many times I've read a story, fanfic or otherwise, where I've encountered a badass military protagonist with a blatantly stupid name. Any military-based fandom especially seems to attract them--characters with nicknames like Death-dealer or Shadow Lady or whatever else sounds appropriately hardcore and dramatic. The names often reference blood, death, darkness, steel, etcetera, all in the service of underlining how Tough and Dark and Gritty the character in question is.
The problem is that in real life, calling yourself Shadow Lady would only get you mercilessly mocked, at the very least. Nicknames usually don't sound cool because nicknames arise organically, from an in-joke or a situation at hand or a stupid thing you once did. Even cool people get uncool nicknames.
A few examples. My brother D. served four years in the USMC and then four years in the Army, where he met an awful lot of people, got drunk several times, and was in at the liberation of Abu Ghraib. He personally knew guys nicknamed Bad Dog, El Sapo, and D20. Why? El Sapo means "the toad" (guess what he looked like), D20's name began with D and was way too long for anyone to remember, and Bad Dog was a pilot who once pissed himself in midflight.
What writers often forget is that military units are composed of . . . people. People have several ways of dealing with extreme stress, and a lot of them will choose humor. (Seriously, just check out 90% of the soldier-made videos on YouTube. The 114th MP Co.'s demonstration of how to tactically clear a porta-potty is a personal favorite.) If you get a nickname, chances are it'll be for something insulting, humiliating, and/or just plain weird. Real people very rarely get seriously addressed as Razor or Panther.
If you're picking a nickname for a military character, consider the tone of the unit. Fantastical worlds can get away with slightly more badassery in terms of nicknames, depending on how much reality is suspended, but if the characters are anything like real, modern soldiers, there's always going to be a certain element of humor or just the blowing off of steam.
(And not just modern soldiers. Bad jokes and dark humor have a long history among the military: when Alexios V Doukas, would-be emperor of Byzantium was finally captured by the Crusaders they decided to execute him by dumping him off the Pillar of Constantine. Death by symbol of your own ambition--ouch.)
The problem is that in real life, calling yourself Shadow Lady would only get you mercilessly mocked, at the very least. Nicknames usually don't sound cool because nicknames arise organically, from an in-joke or a situation at hand or a stupid thing you once did. Even cool people get uncool nicknames.
A few examples. My brother D. served four years in the USMC and then four years in the Army, where he met an awful lot of people, got drunk several times, and was in at the liberation of Abu Ghraib. He personally knew guys nicknamed Bad Dog, El Sapo, and D20. Why? El Sapo means "the toad" (guess what he looked like), D20's name began with D and was way too long for anyone to remember, and Bad Dog was a pilot who once pissed himself in midflight.
What writers often forget is that military units are composed of . . . people. People have several ways of dealing with extreme stress, and a lot of them will choose humor. (Seriously, just check out 90% of the soldier-made videos on YouTube. The 114th MP Co.'s demonstration of how to tactically clear a porta-potty is a personal favorite.) If you get a nickname, chances are it'll be for something insulting, humiliating, and/or just plain weird. Real people very rarely get seriously addressed as Razor or Panther.
If you're picking a nickname for a military character, consider the tone of the unit. Fantastical worlds can get away with slightly more badassery in terms of nicknames, depending on how much reality is suspended, but if the characters are anything like real, modern soldiers, there's always going to be a certain element of humor or just the blowing off of steam.
(And not just modern soldiers. Bad jokes and dark humor have a long history among the military: when Alexios V Doukas, would-be emperor of Byzantium was finally captured by the Crusaders they decided to execute him by dumping him off the Pillar of Constantine. Death by symbol of your own ambition--ouch.)
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Fast away the old year passes . . .
For a self-proclaimed cynic, I get nostalgic and oddly affectionate an awful lot. This has been a problem throughout my life and arising from the oddest of circumstances--for example, my junior-year astronomy class, when I found myself getting misty-eyed over the professor's dry, academic description of the sun, because it reminded me of all the times my family used to go to the planetarium and I would play in the booths that pretended to launch you to various outer space destinations. (Even today, the words "You have arrived on the sun. It is a boiling ball of hot gasses" make me tear up a little, and no, that's not a joke.)
After the trials and tribulations of this year (not to mention the trauma, thievery, "Tarnation!" and tattie-bogles), I found myself browsing through the various ephemera related to my work. Every writer has a cache like it: half-finished story ideas, bits of info scribbled down and never picked up again, horrible, horrible pieces of work from your school days that you still have for some reason . . . when I came upon a pair of letters.
They were written by friends of mine, people I've never met in person but have nevertheless had warm if infrequent online communications with. When my book was published, I sent each of them a copy, and got a pair of letters in response. Reading those letters fills me with an odd mixture of happiness and shame: both are unabashedly enthusiastic about my work, but I know for a fact that they were written by people whom I've neglected to speak to much recently. The usual excuses interfere--work, life, etcetera--but that doesn't change the fact that I still feel like a heel. "If people are good enough to write to you . . ." as Florence King's grandmother put it.
So here it is.
Kiwi, Realityanalyst--I'm sorry. You don't know how much your letters meant to me; I still have them, and as creepy as it sounds, they gave me hope that I could actually make it in the business of fiction. The fact that I, the chronic paper-misplacer, still have them a year later, speaks to that. Thank you, and I'm sorry again.
And to all the writers out there--it's the new year soon. However alone you might think you are, there's always someone that has aided you in your work: a friend, a mentor, even just the girl at the coffee shop who smiles at you. Thank them. They're the people who keep you going no matter what, and they deserve more recognition then they get. Don't be Scrivvet. Thank them.
After the trials and tribulations of this year (not to mention the trauma, thievery, "Tarnation!" and tattie-bogles), I found myself browsing through the various ephemera related to my work. Every writer has a cache like it: half-finished story ideas, bits of info scribbled down and never picked up again, horrible, horrible pieces of work from your school days that you still have for some reason . . . when I came upon a pair of letters.
They were written by friends of mine, people I've never met in person but have nevertheless had warm if infrequent online communications with. When my book was published, I sent each of them a copy, and got a pair of letters in response. Reading those letters fills me with an odd mixture of happiness and shame: both are unabashedly enthusiastic about my work, but I know for a fact that they were written by people whom I've neglected to speak to much recently. The usual excuses interfere--work, life, etcetera--but that doesn't change the fact that I still feel like a heel. "If people are good enough to write to you . . ." as Florence King's grandmother put it.
So here it is.
Kiwi, Realityanalyst--I'm sorry. You don't know how much your letters meant to me; I still have them, and as creepy as it sounds, they gave me hope that I could actually make it in the business of fiction. The fact that I, the chronic paper-misplacer, still have them a year later, speaks to that. Thank you, and I'm sorry again.
And to all the writers out there--it's the new year soon. However alone you might think you are, there's always someone that has aided you in your work: a friend, a mentor, even just the girl at the coffee shop who smiles at you. Thank them. They're the people who keep you going no matter what, and they deserve more recognition then they get. Don't be Scrivvet. Thank them.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Night of the Vampire Humper
Ouch. That does it; I'm officially giving up any hope of keeping this blog regular, okay? Let's just pray for a post per month at this point. On the other hand, working longer hours pays for my Internet access, so I can't bitch too much . . .
. . . about that, anyway. Today I aim to get some thoughts off my chest regarding one of the bete noirs (and, at this point, Grand Dames) of the urban fantasy genre: Anita Blake, the creation of Laurell K. Hamilton.
Now, Anita Blake is to urban fantasy as Christopher Paolini is to hard fantasy: suffering serious backlash, and almost cool to hate in some circles. Obviously I won't be adding anything new to the massive, massive pile of criticism that has already been leveled at the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. However, I thought this would be a good opportunity to return to the roots of this blog and use it, Socrates-style, as a teaching aid on what not to do. Because I'm nitpicky like that.
Now there's a lot of Anita Blake books--twenty at last count--and a lot of ground to cover, so obviously there's no way we're going to be able to go through the entire list of sins. And many of those sins have already been covered: for example, a touchstone of controversy for the series is that in the book Narcissus in Chains Anita gains the 'ardeur,' a sex-fueled power which essentially turns her into a succubus who must have sex constantly (and I do mean constantly) to maintain her power levels. She also begins collecting a harem of boytoys, none of whom are allowed to sleep with anyone but her even while she has it on with practically every attractive male in the series. This has been gone over by many better snarkers than I. Instead, I'm going to stick with some of the items that are applicable to all genres and fiction writers, not just those of the fantasy persuasion.
Your preference is showing. Humanity (and inhumanity, depending on the genre) is prone to a wide variety of behaviors, appearances and tendencies. This is especially true in large cities, whose job opportunities tend to attract people from all walks of life, and America is of course known for its melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. So why is it that all the men in Anita's life are long-haired, fashionably pallid, and dressed in exciting leather clothing and lace-trimmed shirts?
One of the jobs of an author is to put aside one's own preference and depict the vast tapestry of humanity--the good, the bad, the ugly, and the sloppy jeans and flannel. While you certainly shouldn't feel shy about working your own preferences into your characters' appearance and tendencies, there should be more options available. Yet the vast majority of the men Anita Blake hooks up with are slender, femme, Gothily dressed and generally described with dramatic adjectives. (Emerald eyes, alabaster skin, etcetera.) These men--and eventually, women--tend to be part of the upper circles of the paranormal world, coming from a variety of fantasy species and representing several classic monster breeds, yet they all seem eerily alike.
The admirable sporker Satireknight summed this up better than I ever could in one of her Anita Blake critiques. Check out this chapter of the Bullet (book 19) sporking for an example scene involving several of the eerily similar man-toys at once.
It's understandable for a character to have a preference, but this reaches the point of bad parody. Some variety, please.
And that little scene also brings us to our next point, which is . . .
Hair, eyes, and what? One of the reasons I have difficulty connecting with the characters in the Anita Blake series is that their descriptions are mostly superficial. Look at the way Micah is described in that scene: hair color, eye color, build, rhapsodies about how pretty he is. Then the next guy: hair, eyes, build, excessively pretty. Then the next, and you start definitely seeing a pattern here. There's nothing to make these men stand out from each other--they're all introduced the same way, and they're all incredibly beautiful and delicate yet strong.
It's a trait of amateur fiction, much like it's a trait of amateur art, to distinguish different characters only by hair and eye color. The underlying reason is the same: the writer/artist isn't technically accomplished enough to see what does distinguish them besides those varying traits. Obviously Laurell K. Hamilton is no amateur, but she often introduces her characters like one. I can't tell Nathaniel from Micah, Jean-Claude from Asher, Truth from . . . dang, who's the other one? Ones?
When you're introducing a character in a new book--even if that character has already appeared in a previous book--you need something more than physical details. Does he slouch? Is he tapping his foot, reading a book, doing the New York Times crossword and making a hash of it? Involve the other senses, too: what does he smell like, Brut or Circus Peanuts? She mentions what voices sound like, but they're often just "smooth" or "resonant." That tells me nothing. Is he a bass? Countertenor? Does he slur his vowels, does he have a Hahvahd accent?
All of the details we're seeing are strictly surface material, and do nothing to make one character stand out from another. Although speaking of standing out . . .
Scarred 'n' sexy. This? Is a trope that needs to die, painfully.
One of Anita's gentlemen, the abovementioned Asher, is a fellow who's been badly scarred by holy water and hence has terrible issues; he believes no one can ever love him again, etcetera. Now this is a definite real-world problem for actual people--victims of fire, soldiers wounded in combat, and so forth. However, the way the scars are depicted here in no way actually mar the character in question. The fact that I've read almost a dozen Anita Blakes, yet still needed to look up which one actually had the scars, speaks to how memorable this makes him.
Yes, they're rather nasty-looking, and they go all the way down his body. But they don't impair his function; he's not half-blind or missing one arm, and judging by his presence in an Anita Blake book, he can still get it up just fine. Essentially, the scarring is yet another surface detail.
Let me give you an example. I've previously mentioned that I like the '80s Marvel G.I. Joe comics (yes, commence mockery); well, one of the protagonists of those comics, the ninja Snake-Eyes, has spent most of his fictional career being scarred and unsexy thanks to a burning helicopter crash. He survived, barely, but a large portion of his face and body were burned and his voice box almost completely destroyed. The comics reference him having spent months in the hospital, undergoing painful debriding procedures--where the burned skin is literally scraped off with wire brushes. Even when he healed, he was still mute and horribly scarred, to the point where he had to wear a rubber mask out in public. Once, when captured, his enemies put a bag over his head because his mutilated kisser made their soldiers sick.
Snake-Eyes is a character who has been through some really horrible things, and the way he is shows that. Asher, aside from some surgery to remove a partially scarred foreskin, is in no way impaired by what he's been through, and he even appears to have full sensation in the scarred parts. Essentially, trauma and scarring are another excuse for poor-me scenes and characters comforting each other. If actions don't have consequences, characters don't have depth.
I'd better stop there, or I could keep going all night. However, I may pick this up again soon . . .
. . . about that, anyway. Today I aim to get some thoughts off my chest regarding one of the bete noirs (and, at this point, Grand Dames) of the urban fantasy genre: Anita Blake, the creation of Laurell K. Hamilton.
Now, Anita Blake is to urban fantasy as Christopher Paolini is to hard fantasy: suffering serious backlash, and almost cool to hate in some circles. Obviously I won't be adding anything new to the massive, massive pile of criticism that has already been leveled at the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. However, I thought this would be a good opportunity to return to the roots of this blog and use it, Socrates-style, as a teaching aid on what not to do. Because I'm nitpicky like that.
Now there's a lot of Anita Blake books--twenty at last count--and a lot of ground to cover, so obviously there's no way we're going to be able to go through the entire list of sins. And many of those sins have already been covered: for example, a touchstone of controversy for the series is that in the book Narcissus in Chains Anita gains the 'ardeur,' a sex-fueled power which essentially turns her into a succubus who must have sex constantly (and I do mean constantly) to maintain her power levels. She also begins collecting a harem of boytoys, none of whom are allowed to sleep with anyone but her even while she has it on with practically every attractive male in the series. This has been gone over by many better snarkers than I. Instead, I'm going to stick with some of the items that are applicable to all genres and fiction writers, not just those of the fantasy persuasion.
Your preference is showing. Humanity (and inhumanity, depending on the genre) is prone to a wide variety of behaviors, appearances and tendencies. This is especially true in large cities, whose job opportunities tend to attract people from all walks of life, and America is of course known for its melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. So why is it that all the men in Anita's life are long-haired, fashionably pallid, and dressed in exciting leather clothing and lace-trimmed shirts?
One of the jobs of an author is to put aside one's own preference and depict the vast tapestry of humanity--the good, the bad, the ugly, and the sloppy jeans and flannel. While you certainly shouldn't feel shy about working your own preferences into your characters' appearance and tendencies, there should be more options available. Yet the vast majority of the men Anita Blake hooks up with are slender, femme, Gothily dressed and generally described with dramatic adjectives. (Emerald eyes, alabaster skin, etcetera.) These men--and eventually, women--tend to be part of the upper circles of the paranormal world, coming from a variety of fantasy species and representing several classic monster breeds, yet they all seem eerily alike.
The admirable sporker Satireknight summed this up better than I ever could in one of her Anita Blake critiques. Check out this chapter of the Bullet (book 19) sporking for an example scene involving several of the eerily similar man-toys at once.
It's understandable for a character to have a preference, but this reaches the point of bad parody. Some variety, please.
And that little scene also brings us to our next point, which is . . .
Hair, eyes, and what? One of the reasons I have difficulty connecting with the characters in the Anita Blake series is that their descriptions are mostly superficial. Look at the way Micah is described in that scene: hair color, eye color, build, rhapsodies about how pretty he is. Then the next guy: hair, eyes, build, excessively pretty. Then the next, and you start definitely seeing a pattern here. There's nothing to make these men stand out from each other--they're all introduced the same way, and they're all incredibly beautiful and delicate yet strong.
It's a trait of amateur fiction, much like it's a trait of amateur art, to distinguish different characters only by hair and eye color. The underlying reason is the same: the writer/artist isn't technically accomplished enough to see what does distinguish them besides those varying traits. Obviously Laurell K. Hamilton is no amateur, but she often introduces her characters like one. I can't tell Nathaniel from Micah, Jean-Claude from Asher, Truth from . . . dang, who's the other one? Ones?
When you're introducing a character in a new book--even if that character has already appeared in a previous book--you need something more than physical details. Does he slouch? Is he tapping his foot, reading a book, doing the New York Times crossword and making a hash of it? Involve the other senses, too: what does he smell like, Brut or Circus Peanuts? She mentions what voices sound like, but they're often just "smooth" or "resonant." That tells me nothing. Is he a bass? Countertenor? Does he slur his vowels, does he have a Hahvahd accent?
All of the details we're seeing are strictly surface material, and do nothing to make one character stand out from another. Although speaking of standing out . . .
Scarred 'n' sexy. This? Is a trope that needs to die, painfully.
One of Anita's gentlemen, the abovementioned Asher, is a fellow who's been badly scarred by holy water and hence has terrible issues; he believes no one can ever love him again, etcetera. Now this is a definite real-world problem for actual people--victims of fire, soldiers wounded in combat, and so forth. However, the way the scars are depicted here in no way actually mar the character in question. The fact that I've read almost a dozen Anita Blakes, yet still needed to look up which one actually had the scars, speaks to how memorable this makes him.
Yes, they're rather nasty-looking, and they go all the way down his body. But they don't impair his function; he's not half-blind or missing one arm, and judging by his presence in an Anita Blake book, he can still get it up just fine. Essentially, the scarring is yet another surface detail.
Let me give you an example. I've previously mentioned that I like the '80s Marvel G.I. Joe comics (yes, commence mockery); well, one of the protagonists of those comics, the ninja Snake-Eyes, has spent most of his fictional career being scarred and unsexy thanks to a burning helicopter crash. He survived, barely, but a large portion of his face and body were burned and his voice box almost completely destroyed. The comics reference him having spent months in the hospital, undergoing painful debriding procedures--where the burned skin is literally scraped off with wire brushes. Even when he healed, he was still mute and horribly scarred, to the point where he had to wear a rubber mask out in public. Once, when captured, his enemies put a bag over his head because his mutilated kisser made their soldiers sick.
Snake-Eyes is a character who has been through some really horrible things, and the way he is shows that. Asher, aside from some surgery to remove a partially scarred foreskin, is in no way impaired by what he's been through, and he even appears to have full sensation in the scarred parts. Essentially, trauma and scarring are another excuse for poor-me scenes and characters comforting each other. If actions don't have consequences, characters don't have depth.
I'd better stop there, or I could keep going all night. However, I may pick this up again soon . . .
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Life, 27. Scrivvet, 0.
Yep, I've been AWOL again. This time, at least, the reason for it is good; I've been going through a period of transition at my job, and hopefully will soon take up new duties that are closer to what I was originally hired for Regular posting will hopefully resume within a week, when things have calmed down a bit.
Oh, and yes, I do have a job! Anyone who tells you that an English degree isn't worth anything just hasn't been thinking outside the box. I'm a technical writer, meaning I translate from Engineer into People-Speak, and I've also been contracted to handle a new advertising strategy. Take heart, English majors: there is life after college.
Also, it's giving me some great ideas for villains and characters that need to be killed. That's a post in and of itself, I think . . .
Oh, and yes, I do have a job! Anyone who tells you that an English degree isn't worth anything just hasn't been thinking outside the box. I'm a technical writer, meaning I translate from Engineer into People-Speak, and I've also been contracted to handle a new advertising strategy. Take heart, English majors: there is life after college.
Also, it's giving me some great ideas for villains and characters that need to be killed. That's a post in and of itself, I think . . .
Friday, May 6, 2011
Rant: the Princess Fantasy
There's an old joke in the army about the three things you should never trust: a private saying "I learned this in boot camp," a second lieutenant saying "based my experience," and a warrant officer saying "hey, watch THIS." To which I now make my own addition: a blogger saying "So I've been thinking . . . " Especially not when said blogger actively chooses to update early in order to pursue said line of thought.
And yes, this will be Ranty McRant-style and contain a bit of my own "based on my experience." You've been warned, and you know where the Back button is.
Anyway. I mentioned a couple of posts back that one of the things that scared and inspired me when I was young was the Queen of the Night, from Mozart's Magic Flute. For years, I cherished the fantasy of being an all-powerful goddess-like sorceress queen, raining my wrath down on the fools who dared oppose me. Sarastro was serious dead meat on my watch.
However, like a lot of kids, I had more than one fantasy life. In one, I was the abovementioned sorceress queen. In another, I was a goddamn pretty princess.
Note the use of the "goddamn" there to defuse the phrase of its inherent saccharinity. This is my attempt to retroactively save my dignity by acting tough and/or aggressive, but the fact is that my fantasy life had all the trimmings: knights, dragons, a tower, and I'm fairly sure there was a moat full of lava at some point. Sure, my knight/prince/etc. had black armor, and I'm fairly certain he was riding a giant serpent at one point, but I think I can trace that back to all the gory fairy tales I was told around that age. A rescue daydream was in the hizzouse, bitches.
I cringe remembering these moments, but at the same time, I've become more and more irritated at that cringing. For all the barbs I throw at Twilight, one of the reasons it's a successful piece is that it's tapped into a very, very old fantasy that many women have at one point or another in their lives--what Florence King called "let's you and him fight." The idea of being valued enough for the objects of one's desire to fight and die to win you is incredibly egotistic, but it's also incredibly satisfying. There's a damn good feeling associated with being considered so beautiful/enchanting/powerful/etcetera that someone will fight a damn dragon to rescue you.
In recent years, though, we've seen the rise of an aggressive counterculture that actively disparages attempts at making oneself attractive to, or relying on the strength of, the opposite sex. (The heavy-handed high school films with the evil, vapid, boy-obsessed blondes, for example.) A big part of that has been knocking the princess fantasy and its associated tropes; a female character must now aggressively prove that she's always 100% tougher and more asskicking than the man, with the result that the guys often become auxiliary to the story.
Dislike of the princess fantasy has especially dogged the literary world. People who will angrily fight for the right of science fiction and fantasy to be called literature will turn up their noses at romance. It's usually written off as one step up from porn (if that) and tends to be associated with images of desperate, lonely women drooling over books with pictures of a shirtless Fabio on the cover.
The truth is that all genre fiction is about fulfilling daydreams of one form or another. It asks the question "what if?" in all its permutations. The difference between romance and sci-fi or hard fantasy is that romance has always been more open about indulging fantasies of a more personal, emotional nature, which has much less literary credo than writing yet another book where the Nazis won World War II. Romance and the princess fantasy have a long history together, and both are shunned by large numbers of people.
Now I have to ask: in this age of acceptance, when you have people exploring ever more unusual sexual orientations, family forms and fantasies, what's so friggin' wrong with this one? Women's lib has given us more options in the ways we want to live our lives and see our female role models portrayed, but that's the keyword here: options. A lady (or a lady character) can be an asskicking assassin, but what if she does want to be rescued and live that fantasy of let's-you-and-him-fight?
Personally, I think that if done right, the princess story can be both entertaining and, yes, pro-female. "Ropes of a woman's hair/ would bind the very elephant," as it goes. (Thanks to Crys for the Yoshida Kenko quote.) There is a (and yes, I'm going to use that phrase again) happy medium between "helpless ninny tied to the railroad tracks" and "I WILL CRUSH YOU WITH MY MIGHTY OVARIES."
(Tangent: I thought Tangled, the recent take on Rapunzel, did this very well. There was a certain amount of the rescue fantasy involved--the dashing (and slightly scandalous) hero provides the means for the heroine to escape from her tower, and ultimately tries to give his life to save hers--but the heroine does a fair bit of rescuing on her own, showing that skills cultivated in the isolation of the tower can still have quite a lot of applicability on the outside. The story sees them grow as individuals, and the romance is ultimately quite sweet, with a wistful component that's hard to pass up.)
Ultimately, the princess fantasy is the fantasy of being highly valued and desired by those you desire in return. And while, yes, this can quickly turn into a case of Find the Lady (and Bonk Her as a Reward), these days it doesn't have to. Can we please remove some of the stigma associated with this trope already?
Addendum: I will, however, happily join in the hate for some of the more ridiculous princess gowns. There's wanting to look good for the one you love, and then there's getting shrouded in thirty-odd pounds of ruffled lace. At my wedding, there should only be one gigantic, white, overdone flowery thing, and it had damn well better be the cake.
And yes, this will be Ranty McRant-style and contain a bit of my own "based on my experience." You've been warned, and you know where the Back button is.
Anyway. I mentioned a couple of posts back that one of the things that scared and inspired me when I was young was the Queen of the Night, from Mozart's Magic Flute. For years, I cherished the fantasy of being an all-powerful goddess-like sorceress queen, raining my wrath down on the fools who dared oppose me. Sarastro was serious dead meat on my watch.
However, like a lot of kids, I had more than one fantasy life. In one, I was the abovementioned sorceress queen. In another, I was a goddamn pretty princess.
Note the use of the "goddamn" there to defuse the phrase of its inherent saccharinity. This is my attempt to retroactively save my dignity by acting tough and/or aggressive, but the fact is that my fantasy life had all the trimmings: knights, dragons, a tower, and I'm fairly sure there was a moat full of lava at some point. Sure, my knight/prince/etc. had black armor, and I'm fairly certain he was riding a giant serpent at one point, but I think I can trace that back to all the gory fairy tales I was told around that age. A rescue daydream was in the hizzouse, bitches.
I cringe remembering these moments, but at the same time, I've become more and more irritated at that cringing. For all the barbs I throw at Twilight, one of the reasons it's a successful piece is that it's tapped into a very, very old fantasy that many women have at one point or another in their lives--what Florence King called "let's you and him fight." The idea of being valued enough for the objects of one's desire to fight and die to win you is incredibly egotistic, but it's also incredibly satisfying. There's a damn good feeling associated with being considered so beautiful/enchanting/powerful/etcetera that someone will fight a damn dragon to rescue you.
In recent years, though, we've seen the rise of an aggressive counterculture that actively disparages attempts at making oneself attractive to, or relying on the strength of, the opposite sex. (The heavy-handed high school films with the evil, vapid, boy-obsessed blondes, for example.) A big part of that has been knocking the princess fantasy and its associated tropes; a female character must now aggressively prove that she's always 100% tougher and more asskicking than the man, with the result that the guys often become auxiliary to the story.
Dislike of the princess fantasy has especially dogged the literary world. People who will angrily fight for the right of science fiction and fantasy to be called literature will turn up their noses at romance. It's usually written off as one step up from porn (if that) and tends to be associated with images of desperate, lonely women drooling over books with pictures of a shirtless Fabio on the cover.
The truth is that all genre fiction is about fulfilling daydreams of one form or another. It asks the question "what if?" in all its permutations. The difference between romance and sci-fi or hard fantasy is that romance has always been more open about indulging fantasies of a more personal, emotional nature, which has much less literary credo than writing yet another book where the Nazis won World War II. Romance and the princess fantasy have a long history together, and both are shunned by large numbers of people.
Now I have to ask: in this age of acceptance, when you have people exploring ever more unusual sexual orientations, family forms and fantasies, what's so friggin' wrong with this one? Women's lib has given us more options in the ways we want to live our lives and see our female role models portrayed, but that's the keyword here: options. A lady (or a lady character) can be an asskicking assassin, but what if she does want to be rescued and live that fantasy of let's-you-and-him-fight?
Personally, I think that if done right, the princess story can be both entertaining and, yes, pro-female. "Ropes of a woman's hair/ would bind the very elephant," as it goes. (Thanks to Crys for the Yoshida Kenko quote.) There is a (and yes, I'm going to use that phrase again) happy medium between "helpless ninny tied to the railroad tracks" and "I WILL CRUSH YOU WITH MY MIGHTY OVARIES."
(Tangent: I thought Tangled, the recent take on Rapunzel, did this very well. There was a certain amount of the rescue fantasy involved--the dashing (and slightly scandalous) hero provides the means for the heroine to escape from her tower, and ultimately tries to give his life to save hers--but the heroine does a fair bit of rescuing on her own, showing that skills cultivated in the isolation of the tower can still have quite a lot of applicability on the outside. The story sees them grow as individuals, and the romance is ultimately quite sweet, with a wistful component that's hard to pass up.)
Ultimately, the princess fantasy is the fantasy of being highly valued and desired by those you desire in return. And while, yes, this can quickly turn into a case of Find the Lady (and Bonk Her as a Reward), these days it doesn't have to. Can we please remove some of the stigma associated with this trope already?
Addendum: I will, however, happily join in the hate for some of the more ridiculous princess gowns. There's wanting to look good for the one you love, and then there's getting shrouded in thirty-odd pounds of ruffled lace. At my wedding, there should only be one gigantic, white, overdone flowery thing, and it had damn well better be the cake.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Writer: Man of a Thousand Voices
The "voice" of any given author can be quite distinct. Spend enough time reading and you'll quickly learn that there are some ways a given writer will say things and some ways they never, ever would, no matter what the circumstances--all because their methods of thinking and their viewpoints are being expressed in the manner in which they construct their prose. Rule of thumb: anyone whose work is published in an Oxford Classic Edition does not have a voice that accommodates the word "douchebag."
Students in some creative writing programs are encouraged to develop their own specific voice in order to make their writing stand out, but I don't quite agree with that. While a certain amount of uniqueness is definitely a good thing--a well-developed voice can add a memorable flavor to a piece of text--anybody who's spent time in one of these programs has doubtless met the student who sacrifices everything for the sake of originality . . . including things like, y'know, spelling and grammar.
There is a happy medium here, though, and it's surprisingly fun too. Play with developing your own voice, but don't turn up your nose at practicing other writers' voices too: not only does it add variety to your own writing (making it easier to swap narrators, draft in-story documentation, and so forth) but it's fantastic for parody.
Fanfiction is a great way to play with this. You can mine a lot of humor simply by using a different lens to look at a common topic, especially if you also take the opportunity to swap format. In the past I've written fanfics that were supposedly lost Shakespeare plays, customer-service phone call transcripts, and--my personal favorite--pretentious, over-analytic philosophy textbooks. A friend of mine wrote a short fic that actually told the story of several characters' relationships through the format of a shrink's interpersonal evaluation report. Sound dull? Trust me, it wasn't.
Switching voices can also give you a great opportunity to practice the nearly-lost art of the straight face--presenting something utterly absurd in a voice or format that, in the reader's own experience, is used primarily for serious works. The author is being so serious and analytic about something so bizarre or banal that the reader can't help but laugh.
Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, where he straight-facedly declared that the best way to end the Irish famine would be to have the Irish eat their children, is one of the best-known examples of this kind of satire. Further back we have Shakespeare's Constable Dogberry, who's utterly convinced that he is a significantly intelligent man and doesn't seem to realize how ridiculous his pompous discussions are. But in my opinion, the ultimate use of voice and format in satire has to be David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries.
It's the year 4022, and idealistic scientist Howard Carson has made a fantastic discovery: what appears to be a tomb from the golden age of the people of Usa, the lost civilization that ruled North America more than two thousand years before! In it are two skeletons, one sprawled on what appears to be some sort of soft-covered platform with the Sacred Communicator in hand, the other sequestered in a tiled chamber with a white porcelain sarcophagus and a mysterious, plasticlike ceremonial cap on its head. Every discovery in the tomb is catalogued extensively by the straight-faced narrator, and detailed theories about the uses of the various mysterious objects abound.
The truth of the matter is given away in the title, but even though the reader is in on the joke from the get-go it's impossible to stop reading. How far do Macaulay's deadpan academics go in hopes of recovering this ancient civilization's funerary splendors? Let's just say that seeing is believing, but it's not always understanding.
Consider letting a different voice into your life. It gives you a wider array of tools to use, sends your thoughts in different directions than you ever imagined, and gives you one of the greatest powers mankind can possess: the power to take the piss.
Students in some creative writing programs are encouraged to develop their own specific voice in order to make their writing stand out, but I don't quite agree with that. While a certain amount of uniqueness is definitely a good thing--a well-developed voice can add a memorable flavor to a piece of text--anybody who's spent time in one of these programs has doubtless met the student who sacrifices everything for the sake of originality . . . including things like, y'know, spelling and grammar.
There is a happy medium here, though, and it's surprisingly fun too. Play with developing your own voice, but don't turn up your nose at practicing other writers' voices too: not only does it add variety to your own writing (making it easier to swap narrators, draft in-story documentation, and so forth) but it's fantastic for parody.
Fanfiction is a great way to play with this. You can mine a lot of humor simply by using a different lens to look at a common topic, especially if you also take the opportunity to swap format. In the past I've written fanfics that were supposedly lost Shakespeare plays, customer-service phone call transcripts, and--my personal favorite--pretentious, over-analytic philosophy textbooks. A friend of mine wrote a short fic that actually told the story of several characters' relationships through the format of a shrink's interpersonal evaluation report. Sound dull? Trust me, it wasn't.
Switching voices can also give you a great opportunity to practice the nearly-lost art of the straight face--presenting something utterly absurd in a voice or format that, in the reader's own experience, is used primarily for serious works. The author is being so serious and analytic about something so bizarre or banal that the reader can't help but laugh.
Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, where he straight-facedly declared that the best way to end the Irish famine would be to have the Irish eat their children, is one of the best-known examples of this kind of satire. Further back we have Shakespeare's Constable Dogberry, who's utterly convinced that he is a significantly intelligent man and doesn't seem to realize how ridiculous his pompous discussions are. But in my opinion, the ultimate use of voice and format in satire has to be David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries.
It's the year 4022, and idealistic scientist Howard Carson has made a fantastic discovery: what appears to be a tomb from the golden age of the people of Usa, the lost civilization that ruled North America more than two thousand years before! In it are two skeletons, one sprawled on what appears to be some sort of soft-covered platform with the Sacred Communicator in hand, the other sequestered in a tiled chamber with a white porcelain sarcophagus and a mysterious, plasticlike ceremonial cap on its head. Every discovery in the tomb is catalogued extensively by the straight-faced narrator, and detailed theories about the uses of the various mysterious objects abound.
The truth of the matter is given away in the title, but even though the reader is in on the joke from the get-go it's impossible to stop reading. How far do Macaulay's deadpan academics go in hopes of recovering this ancient civilization's funerary splendors? Let's just say that seeing is believing, but it's not always understanding.
Consider letting a different voice into your life. It gives you a wider array of tools to use, sends your thoughts in different directions than you ever imagined, and gives you one of the greatest powers mankind can possess: the power to take the piss.
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