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thrillingdetectivetales · 3 years ago

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Author Interview

I was tagged by the lovely @ianandmickeygallavich1

(Throwing a read more in here because this bitch got LONG!)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

I have 136 works across 45 fandoms, just to give you an idea of what a shameless fandom hopping multishipper I actually am.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

My total WC is 676,938.

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

By a Thread, By a String, By a Rope The Magnificent Seven (2016), WIP, Kudos: 987

Matinee Suits, 5125 words, Kudos: 947

Careful Application of External Pressure Grimm, WIP, Kudos: 876

This Night Ain’t for the Holy Man The Magnificent Seven (2016), 5578 words, Kudos: 875

Catch It Like a Butterfly Leverage, 1497 words, Kudos: 658

4. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try really hard to respond to every comment, but sometimes they pile up and the anxiety of seeing the number gets to me and I just mark them all read and start over with a clean slate. So, apologies if I skipped you. I promise it was nothing personal, just me trying to practice some fumbling self-care.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Probably Curtain Call, which is a Roy Harper-centric DCU fic exploring his feelings in the aftermath of the 2015 Red Hood/Arsenal run.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Pretty much all my fic have happy endings, so I’m not sure which one is the happiest. I feel like that’s a subjective question, haha.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I do write crossovers! I love crossovers and crack fic premises and wild “okay but just go with me here” scenarios, haha. They’re the most fun to figure out, imo. The craziest one I’ve ever written is probably the Shameless-meets-Ducktales crossover I did for Tumblr Jukebox a little while back, though the one I picked up as a pinch hit for the Crossworks Fandom Exchange just last month, crossing over Brooklyn Nine-Nine with Dragon Age: Inquisition is definitely a contender for that spot.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I received a couple of snide comments on a Matt/Foggy Daredevil fic I did under a different name back when I was in college, but that’s about it.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I do! I don’t think I’m particularly bad at it, though I do find it very difficult. I’m not sure what the “what kind” question is asking, exactly, but I actually do a smut writing challenge called Monday, Slutty Monday that includes a list of kinks I’m willing to write. You can give it a gander here, if you’re curious.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

No, though I have had someone ask if they could use the concept of the lover’s noose from By a Thread, By a String, By a Rope for their original works. I said no, largely because it’s a concept I intend to use in my own original works, though I welcome transformative, not-for-profit works to remix or reimagine or play in any of my sandboxes.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! I was lucky enough to have Doomed to Play, a Magnificent Seven werewolf/vampire AU, translated into Russian several years back!

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I have not! I am extremely interested, though, as I’m a huge fan of old-school, forum-style roleplaying and I really, really love collaborating on projects, so if you’re interested, please feel free to reach out to me and ask! I can’t promise anything, because I’m lucky enough to live a very full and busy life, but who knows!

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

I am not really sure that I have an all-time favorite ship. I have a few oldies but goodies that I revisit pretty regularly, including Harry/Draco, which was baby’s first ship, and Fraser/Kowalski of Due South fame, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a true OTP.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

God, so many of them, haha. I’m terrible about finishing WIPs because I have a very short attention span, but I’m not fully willing to write any of them off because I do periodically poke at the GDocs for a lot of them, even if they haven’t been updated in years. The only one I truly don’t foresee finishing is So Let Us Not Be Lonesome, which is a Magnificent Seven ghost/medium AU, and the only reason I don’t foresee finishing it is because I hope to one day revisit it as an original work.

15. What are your writing strengths?

I’m pretty routinely cheered in comments for writing true-to-character dialogue, really lush sensory descriptions, and tempting food descriptions, so I’ll go with those.

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

I tend to overwrite and I really fucking love adverbs, haha. I was a big reader of doorstopper fantasy in my youth, which tend to be really, really purple in their prose, so I lean in that direction. I have a lot of betas whose opinions I trust tell me I go too purple quite often, but I love my descriptive language so I’m not sure it’s a weakness I’ll ever overcome. Let’s call it a stylistic choice, for now, haha.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I do it all the time, and I really enjoy it in other folks’ fic, so long as the dialogue is something that a non-speaker can still understand from context. I think I probably wasn’t great with that when I first started writing Spanish-speaking characters into my fic, but I like to think I’ve gotten a better handle on it since then.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I think it was honestly Ronin Warriors, an anime that used be on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block way back in the day. I had a lengthy and involved Mary Sue self-insert fic that got be like, a few hundred pages long, though it never saw the light of day.

19. What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet but want to?

The two currently at the top of my list are Ted Lasso and 9-1-1, though I can hardly watch a piece of media these days without seeing something in it I want to explore that the creators didn’t have the time or inclination to explore, or that didn’t fit their narrative.

20. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Oh, this is so hard! I honestly don’t know. I don’t tend to go back and re-read my own fic too terribly often, so I’m really not sure, but I will say that one of the ones I think is underrated is The Lady and the Knife, which is a Luther/BBC Sherlock fic that came about because I got tired of Sherlock stans claiming his behavior should be forgiven because he was a high-functioning sociopath and thought it would be fun to see what happened if he ever crossed paths with someone who was actually a high-functioning sociopath and not just a dick. (Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the early BBC Sherlock and some of the fic is chefkissingfingers.gif, I just really hate it when people require their characters to be morally upright at all times. Let them be villains! Let them be dicks! Don’t apologize for finding that interesting!)

I am tagging @thesummoningdark, @blahblahblahclintnickiscanon, @townhulls, @ksansart @rubinecorvus @persipneiwrites @irolltwenties and anyone else who feels like participating! I have a lot of mutuals who write fic and I’m really bad at remembering everyone’s various handles, so please, if you want to participate but I didn’t tag you, go ahead and do it and @ my ass anyway!

Luh ya bbs.

#tec does a meme #tec writes

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pompompurin1028 · 3 years ago

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Ok, I just finished "The Setting Sun" and wow I may have read a little too fast towards the end because I was so excited and eager to finish but I'm very much in awe of the whole novel. I hope you don't mind if I just put down my thoughts about it :')

Ig I should put a SPOILER WARNING and obviously, there's:

TW: Mentions of suicide

First off, my opinions of the main cast:

I honestly had very neutral feelings towards Naoji in the beginning but shortly after his suicide and his note to Kazuko I felt that I understood him a lot more. Maybe it was partly because the story took place in Kazuko's POV that I had a more discontented viewpoint of him but afterward I felt I understood him more as a person.

With Kazuko, I personally liked her character and the fact that she didn't seem like she was written to be the "perfect woman" like I've seen in some novels. She has flaws and I think her love for her mother is something I found interesting. Although towards the end, I felt that her love for Mr. Uehara sort of anchored her down.

Kazuko and Naoji's Mother was honestly my favorite character of the whole series. I adored her from start to finish. All the way from when she was first introduced she had a sophisticated and genuinely kind aura and when she died I honestly felt a little part of me die as well, haha. But her last line in the book: "It must have been a terrible rush for you" pulled my heartstrings a lot.

Secondly, I just wanted to ramble about some of my favorite quotes from the book lol

The first quote I highlighted was a line Kazuko says: "...The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people." Which honestly felt so Dazai-like. In both the case of Dazai-sensei and the BSD version of him. There were so many times I wondered if it was the character speaking or Dazai-sensei himself adding himself into the character.

Another one I liked was "I wonder how it would be if I let go and yielded myself to depravity." I don't really have a comment on it, I just sort of liked it lol.

I highlighted so many in all honesty but I also wanted to point out this one: "The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive--those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood." Again, it just seemed so beautifully raw and just something I envision BSD Dazai saying and believing as well.

In Naoji's suicide note I almost felt as though it was coming from not just him but from Dazai-sensei as well. Which I'm beginning to see is a recurring pattern in the novel. In particular, this one line stood out to me: "Why must I go on living after what has happened? It's useless. I am going to die. I have a poison that kills without pain. I got it when I was a soldier and have kept it ever since."

I loved the Snake Metaphors(?) throughout the story. And especially Kazuko and Naoji's POV of their mother and how they call her "the last lady of Japan" I think they truly honor her and it's interesting to see such two somewhat lost and "tainted" characters almost obsess over this "light" and genuinely kind woman they hold in such high regard. It almost reminds me of BSD Dazai's opinion of Odasaku or even Atsushi.

That's mostly it- I just really wanted to talk about those things and overall I loved it a lot. It's been a while since I've been so absorbed in a book so reading it felt very relaxing and at the same time so riveting. I hope you don't mind me popping into your inbox and chattering on about this :')

Okay, before I begin, Ariel please don't apologize for putting down your thoughts here. I love discussing Dazai-sensei's novels, and I can't even begin to express how giddy, excited and overjoyed I am to receive this ask of yours. And please if you would ever like to discuss more of his works, feel free to chat with me as well, via asks or on discord it doesn't matter😭❤, I'm always down for it. And this whole thing is me rambling over this so please bear with me haha.

And, I want to say, I was extremely eager to read and finish the novel as well as I continued on reading. It is strangely alluring and compelling. And honestly, I tend to be in awe of Dazai-sensei's thoughts and writing as well😫💕.

Okay, so before I begin to address your thoughts on the novel. Let me write down some background information on the novel to hopefully give you maybe a better understanding of it and Dazai-sensei as well?

The book was published in 1947, not long after the end of the Second World War which ended in 1945. The book in general talks about the state of Japan after the Second World War, and the decline of the aristocracy that came with it. (It should be noted that Dazai-sensei came from an aristocratic background as well, but he also seems to have a sense of shame towards it). The title of the book is literally a metaphor for the decline of Japan. Japan is often known as the "land of the rising Sun", and therefore "The Setting Sun" as the title is fitting for this theme.

And well, this defeat created according to here (an article written in Chinese unfortunately😥) caused a great change in moral values in the Japanese society, which caused an uproar for democracy. Dazai-sensei, however, was quite critical of this, as he sees this as a sign that the Japanese do not feel any guilt or remorse for their actions in the war that took place. (From what I've read Dazai-sensei in his works is very much known for his sense, albeit unusual for Japanese writers from what I read, of guilt, remorse and in a sense seeking for atonement, in one of his prose he even wrote that he writes literature for "remorse, confession and reflection" [my translation from my native language]).

Also, it should be noted that The Setting Sun is also deeply inspired by a diary written by one of Dazai-sensei's lovers (especially chapters 1 to 5 I believe). However, Dazai-sensei himself is best known for his I-novels and their semi-biographical elements. In one of his short stories, or prose in his book I am reading, he confesses that he cannot write things he doesn't know or hadn't felt for himself...

Now onto your thoughts on the novel!

Naoji, I honestly felt the same about him at first, but the more I dove into the novel, especially in the chapters Moonflowers and his note to Kuzuko, I felt more connected to him. And when I read the novel I felt as though Dazai-sensei had actually reflected a part of himself in Naoji, and I read something from what @/bsd-bibliophile had said which confirmed that perhaps Naoji was in a sense an extension of Dazai-sensei himself. (Same for Mr. Uehara I should note, who is also an extension of Dazai-sensei, which I had also noted as well when reading the novel).

And yes! I loved Kuzuko as well, and I have to agree with your statement about her love for Mr. Uehara. I was somewhat disappointed with that as well. But I actually had just been reading on something today which is a bit interesting. However, I do not know enough on the topic yet, nor am I entirely confident at myself explaining it at the moment, but I will talk about it briefly down here.

CW Religious Mentions [Christianity] (Feel free to skip if it makes you uncomfortable <3 For this is simply for literature analysis uses)

Before I begin, I should note that Dazai-sensei is by no means a "religious person", many scholars do not believe so either. It was mentioned in a paper that he even holds a critical view of the Church. However, Dazai-sensei commonly mentions the Bible in well the prose of his that I am currently reading (which brought me to research this topic). It was written in some papers that I am reading that he simply understood the Bible through his own means and not what the Church says (perhaps he sees it as a piece of literature as well in a sense...). Some papers say that he formed his unique views of the need to find "atonement" for his own guilt due to this, which some say is not often seen in Japanese authors.

I'm getting off-topic, but what I'm trying to say is that some scholars say that that action by Kuzuko might've been an allusion in a sense. But what the paper was trying to say was that it was meant to be something powerful? But, personally, I'm not sure what I think of it, it might be a bit far-fetched. But I just wanted to make a note of it.

End of CW

And yes! I do agree I loved their mother as well. I loved how genuine and kind she was. I think she is my favourite too, but she also acted as a form of symbolism for the theme of the novel I believe, which I will talk about briefly later on.

"...The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people."

I really liked this quote too actually! And yes, I can definitely see Dazai-sensei saying this... It is hard to tell which part is him confessing, but most of his work tends to have elements of his own feelings and thoughts. Personally, I think it might be Dazai-sensei himself speaking... But I'm not sure, but it should be noted that Dazai-sensei held the concept of "tenderness" in high esteem (other people have also mentioned it here).

And honestly, I get what you mean when you say you don't know what to say about it haha. Sometimes authors just put sentences and words together so beautifully.

And yes, I definitely understand that! I felt that as well, and as I said, Dazai-sensei seems to have put elements of himself into Naoji...

And ahh the snake metaphor! I read on it a bit before, and some say that it might've been symbolizing the decline of Japan/the aristocracy. And the use of the term "the last lady of Japan" seems to symbolize the fall of the old traditions of Japan. It had seemed to me that their mother was a symbol of the "old Japan" that had fallen after the war.

And yes, they do hold her in very high esteem! I wrote that in my analysis as well before! From what I have read, Dazai-sensei does seem to hold such people highly, especially those that are honest and genuine it seems. And yes, exactly, it reminds me of BSD Dazai as well T^T.

And please, thank you for coming over to chat with me about it haha. You could probably tell by how long this is how excited I am about such topics😅. Don't hesitate to come by if you want to chat more! And I'm also really glad that you liked the book as well <33

#asks💌#Ariel🍄#kat rambles about dazai sensei #kat's dazai brainrot

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saturatedsinset · 3 years ago

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fic writing interview meme

tagged by @shes-a-voodoo-child and i am just copying her formatting

name: sin saturatedsinset everywhere <3

fandoms: i’ve only written for wrestling for the last couple years with the exception of my one jennifer’s body fic (god bless) but i came up in bandom (derogatory) and spent a while in one direction fandom (also derogatory). i wrote for both of them but published very little (i think i published 2 bandom fics ever and you’d be hard pressed to actually find them, and i never published one direction fic, a choice i think was correct)

two-shot: i don’t tend to have two-part things! it’s either the one individually or, uh, more than two. my only two-chapter fic is hungry and hollow - fair folk au my beloved. it has two chapters because i don’t like doing point of view shifts in the same chapter and it would’ve been difficult to resolve things from cody’s point of view - but you can probably put tolerate it in here as well, because matt and kenny don’t know how to stop being Like That.

most popular multi-chapter fic: ao3 tell me it’s hanging on the edge of nothing, which is wild to me because i was absolutely certain that fic had a target audience of three. shoutout to wrestling fic readers for liking when the men do kink bad and then have to take three chapters to process it, i guess

actual worst part of writing: dialog. every time. dialog. i can’t write dialogue, i struggle to write in a voice that isn’t my own, it stresses me out. i hate it. there’s a reason all my fic is Like That about the narration to dialog ratio. at one point during writing hanging on the edge of nothing i couldn’t figure out what kenny would say so i had to write 500 words in both directions. hate it. but also: i really don’t like writing porn! it’s difficult and i always feel like i’m flying blind, which i know is legitimately a wild thing to say from someone whose posted fic is like 50% explicit but it is True

how you choose your titles: song lyrics usually. generally once i start writing i notice certain lyrics jumping out at me when i listen to music so i keep a little note of possible titles for the current fic. sometimes i don’t have song lyrics jump out at me or i feel like i’m unsure as to whether something fits the entirety of the fic rather than the moment it’s based around - i had this moment with at arm’s length, where i kept thinking about lyrics about like ~hands being tied~ and then realising that the majority of the fic is. not that. in those cases i tend to just try and, like, feel out a decent title? sunshower couldn’t be called anything other than sunshower. found in translation couldn’t be called anything other than found in translation. at arm’s length is a bad title but at least it’s a title

do you outline: i mean my instinct is “no” but the actual answer is, like, yes but i don’t call it outlining. usually i talk through whatever happens in the fic with quinn or enj or drea before i write it and that serves as a good guide to not let it get super out of hand. most of my fic is based around a specific moment and i build the fic from there.

ideas you probably won’t get around to, but it would be nice: every time i open my fic folder the matt kink fic is just. there. staring at me. waiting. i wouldn’t say i won’t get around to it, but i keep having other ideas. bean elite won’t get written the way i planned on writing it, as a huge big-bang-type thing, but it’ll probably get the fair folk au treatment as a collection of oneshots.

callouts @ me: uhhh cool it with the purple prose. you have a collection of three tropes that you recycle endlessly and it’s predictable. also why is it so hard for you to write in entirely fictional/closed canons i know you can do it

best writing traits: i think i’m really good at constructing a Vibe and keeping it consistent through the whole fic. also at zeroing in on the little terrible moments and keeping the reader trapped there. also my word choice is very good. good job sin.

spicy tangential opinions: uh. god i don’t know. anyone surprised by the lack of major industry change after speakingout is naive at best and ignores the voices of women at worst. fandom culture in general is wildly annoying. i don’t know. are these spicy. absolutely seconding drea’s take about misogyny in wrestling culture

if you want to do this just say i tagged you <3

#sinjamin

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spockandawe · 5 years ago

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Okay, I want to pull together more detailed thoughts at some point, I think, because the sheer amount of material means I have about ten billion thoughts to sort out. But I’ve read all three of the mxtx novels now, and loved all of them, in different ways. Though I already tried to figure out if I can pick a Favorite, and tbh, I can’t. I love them all in ways that are too distinct to let me rank them easily. And... man, it’s lucky for my friends that social distancing is in place, or I’d be hassling them shamelessly to give these novels a try.

RIGHT. So.

The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System: Shen Yuan goes to bed full of rage directed at a trashy webnovel with a grimdark blackened hero who conquered the world and collected hundreds of women into his harem.... and wakes up in novel, while that hero is still an innocent youth. As the hero’s abusive teacher. Who is doomed for a horrifying death unless he can somehow turn things around.

I think I had the most fun with this one. I really enjoy self-referential stories, and stories poking fun at certain genres, and I’ve run into the concept of transmigration before (the idea being a person enters a fictional world, a la lost in austen), though I’m blanking on any media like that I’ve actually consumed. This was chronologically the first book mxtx wrote, and it has less of a sprawling cast with complicated relationships than the other two books, but it definitely has the thing where she lays early groundwork for later revelations that shatter my poor heart.

And there may be fewer relationships to play with, but my GOD, do I love the relationships we got. I’ve been rolling around in svsss fanfic since I finished the book, even more so than mdzs or tgcf. There’s a lot of good crunchy relationship content with the 79 ship (they destroy me, all day every day), Liu Qingge owns my whole-ass heart, and Luo Binghe makes for a fascinating love interest. I love that even at his best, he remains a needy, needy, manipulative boy, who’s so smart and strong and nEEDY. I don’t love how the book handled moshang, but mmmm the fan content is Good. And Shen Qingqiu does the unreliable narrator thing that is usually not my jam, but works so WELL in these books, in that his unreliable narration is hugely skewed towards not giving himself nearly as much credit as he deserves. Xie Lian takes this to UNBELIEVABLE heights in tgcf, but in Shen Qingqiu’s case, it’s done on such a casual, immediate, personal level that I’m fascinated by everything he does.

And, since Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu is a millennial fan of trashy romance webnovels who gets yanked into the universe of a novel he hates, into an old-timey xianxia setting, the prose is SO COOL. You swing between modern slang and old school high society courtesies at the drop of a hat, and I’m honestly awed that the translators were able to catch so much of that. Like, in-setting, I love all the nuance you can get in ‘qi-ge should give his a-jiu the scroll’ vs ‘yue-shixiong should give this teacher the scroll’ vs ‘you should give me the scroll’. But then it adds a whole new layer when the person ALSO has modern-day casual speech bouncing around in their head. It makes for a fascinating, fascinating reading experience.

The Grandmaster Of Demonic Cultivation: Thirteen years ago, Wei Wuxian died. And then he wakes up! In someone else’s body. I’m not going to try to summarize the premise of this one, go look up The Untamed if you want someone to do a better job of this than me XD

Ahhh, this was the book I read first. I still haven’t watched the show (only clips) and I’m not sure I ever will, because adhd is a hell of a drug. But it’s hard to purely evaluate the prose when there’s also this gorgeous, beautifully-acted visual adaptation all over my tumblr to bias me in its favor. I think this book benefits a lot from the MYSTERY of it all. From the very start, there’s the question of ‘what the fuck is up with this goddamn arm’ that the characters pursue, even as that takes them through flashbacks and other arcs within the story. It gives a thrust to the novel that I think isn’t exactly there in tgcf, though I’m torn on which one is “better.” This gave the story momentum, yes, but it also meant I was much more impatient in yi city and the 3zun flashbacks, because this isn’t what I was focused onnnnnn this is cool but how much longer will we BE HERE--

That being said, I think I’ll be more patient with those flashbacks on my next time through the book, now that I have a better picture of where everything is headed. I think the balance and structure of the book worked really well, I was setting myself up for self-sabotage because of the pace I was plowing through the thing. My reading habits didn’t lend themselves well to the nonlinear storytelling, and it speaks to the story’s strength that it held up that well despite me. And the CAST. My GOD. I went in not caring about anyone but Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji and maybe the jackass nephew, but... that Did Not Last. I didn’t intend to care about 3zun? Nope, too bad, you care so much now. Who cares about Xue Yang? Me. I care. Way too much. HECK!!!

And something that happens in this book and tgcf that was much less of a thing in svsss is that there are some meaningful holes in the story that I’d like to be filled, and I really care about filling-- and the story doesn’t go there. But it doesn’t leave me unhappy, it leaves me cheerfully scrabbling around in the throwaway details trying to piece together a picture of what happened when I wasn’t looking. What happened to Wei Wuxian in the burial mounds? How did Hua Cheng take control of the ghost city? Idk, but let us Rummage and theorize and roll around in ideas and have a fantastic, speculative time. Svsss might hook me more than the other stories from an au+shipping perspective, but mdzs and tgcf do a great job of making me want to roll around and create within the bounds of canon.

Heaven Official’s Blessing: 800 years ago, Xie Lian ascended to heaven. And fell. And rose again! And fell again. Now he’s ascended for the third time, and things are Awkward.

God, I just finished this, and I’m still reeling. This is the LONGEST mxtx book, that’s for sure. I also think it’s the most tightly edited translation. All the translators did an unbelievable job, I could never even approach what they accomplished, but I am genuinely stunned that a book this long was edited so well. I blew through this in about 3.5 days (if not for work, i could have made it in three dghsafdsgf) and my brain was cooking in my skull by the time I was halfway through, but I couldn’t STOP. I was ENCHANTED the entire time! I was reading so much my head was destroying me and I still sulked so HARD every time I had to put my phone down and sleep.

This book sprawls the hardest, I think, because it involves a cast made of mostly immortal/immortal-adjacent people, so time and space get... flexible. And I feel really bad saying this, because Lan Wangji is DEVOTED, but this is seriously the book with the most attentive and adoring and respectful love interest. Hua Cheng is..... god. I truly don’t think I’ve EVER read a character quite like him before, and I am so, so sad, because I don’t know how I’ll find one who lives up to these heights ever again XD I recommend reading this book just for the Hua Cheng experience, if nothing else. I was making audible noises at literally flailing at multiple points in the story, but most often, it was because of him.

Shipping is what usually drags me into a fandom hardest, and all of these books do pretty well for themselves, all of them have a nice selection of fluffy and crunchy ships to choose from. And this one... goddammit. I just realized, that the best, most crunchy ships are too spoilery for me to be willing to talk about them here. Hell. Goddammit. But I think tgcf has the crunchiest ship of all, even better than xuexiao. I was so invested, and then there were Reveals, and then I was like OH NO THIS IS TERRIBLE BUT MY INVESTMENT HAS EXPONENTIALLY INCREASED.

And something that I really, really appreciate, is that across the mxtx books, even though a lot of characters fit into strong archetypes, there’s nobody that is blurring together for me, either within or across the books. Liu Qingge isn’t Jiang Cheng isn’t Feng Xin. They’re all blunt, fighty boys, but all super distinct in my head, and what I want for each of them is distinct and character-driven. I want Liu Qingge to be properly cherished and I want Jiang Cheng to relax with his brother and nephew and I want Feng Xin to [goddammit i don’t want to spoil this book AGH]. It’s something I appreciated in the other books too, but I can really FEEL it in this book, with how long and luxurious it is.

And last thing I have to say, I think, is that tgcf is so long. It’s so, so long. But I would FITE if anyone tried to pare it down at all. I can’t think of anything I’d be willing to sacrifice. I enjoyed every last piece of it so much, and it was all ultimately SO well-constructed and interlocking, that any piece I can think of snipping out would take away significant emotional impact from what was left. It’s a nonlinear story, like mdzs is nonlinear, and I loved mdzs a lot! But the construction here is so, so, so elegant. I’m just in AWE of how well it was assembled. I was in Agony as reveals happened, because oh no no no no, now that they’ve told me this, that casts this whole other scene in a brand new light! The one I read hundreds of thousands of words ago! Literally, I need to go start the book over so I can savor the shitty teens in new ways, given [redacted] as revealed in like, the last twenty percent of the book. The book was a fun experience, but there’s so Much here that I know I haven’t even absorbed yet. I loved the other mxtx books a lot, and in many ways, they were easier to get a grasp on than tgcf was, but even before I finished tgcf I was already despairingly trying to figure out how easily I could fit a full reread into my life, and I think that says a lot

#tgcf #mdzs #svsss #long post/#[sad journaling noises as i realize that whatever ridiculous wordcount tgcf has still only counts as one completed book on my list]#i need to get an actual wordcount at some point #then stack up enough physical books to visually represent each of these monsters #i know i read a lot #enough that i very much want to know *how much* i read #because CHRIST

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prettylittlelyres · 4 years ago

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My Year in Writing (2020)

Hello and Happy New Year! I thought it might be nice to share with you all an overview of what I've written in 2020.

First of all, let me say that I haven't written nearly as much as I wanted to, but that's OK, and it's OK if the amount you've written feels or looks pretty similar. The point is, it looks some way (I daresay pretty) because you've taken up the pen and put some words on a page.

I don't want to gloss over how bad aspects of my 2020 Writing Year have disappointed me, because that would be as silly as casting a damper on the whole thing by focusing only on the trickier bits. What I'm aiming for here is a balanced review - even if it's a rather informal one - of my achievements, and my feelings about my writing this year. In the interest of balance, let's start with something GOOD!

Right at the beginning of the year - around January - I started redrafting a rather fabulously dark fantasy romance, of which you've probably seen a little bit on this blog: Songs from the Crypt Forest, which I dropped after 9,800 words, because I wanted - and needed to work on my first dedicated book, and on my Year Abroad Research Project.

I managed to write about 17,000 words of the dedicated book in its original form before I realised that it wasn't quite working, and that I ought to try a different tack. The story I was telling there is a story I still want to tell, but I just wasn't ready to write it at the time. I'm hoping to pick it up properly in 2021.

I realised I needed to try getting back into the world I wrote in 'Violins and Violets', by writing something set around the same time and involving some of the same characters. In March, I started writing 'Book J', for which I didn’t have a proper title until I was nearly done with its first draft! I gave it the working title 'Book J', because I was writing it for my friend Jenny. By the time summer came round I had 52,000 words, and a first draft that was as complete as I think it ever will be.

Lockdown hit my life quite hard in Spring 2020, and I lost my language assistant job in France when all schools closed, and I had to come back to the UK to live out the academic year with my parents. Nevertheless I had to carry on working with my Year Abroad Research Project, Which I was able to hand in by 18th May, having squeezed all my findings into a dissertation of 6,000 words.

Now that my YARP was out of my way, and I had no more work to do for university, I started redrafting Jenny's book, now called 'Vogeltje', and cut it down to 44,000 words, which I polished until August... when I had copies printed for Jenny, so that she could read a book written especially for her. I would have given it to her in person in France, but lockdown happened, and I ended up posting her copies from one part of South England to another. A rather typical outcome for a meetup planned in 2019 for 2020, I suspect!

During lockdown, I also trained as a proof-reader and copyeditor, and did some volunteer work for a company that needed translators. Online training courses have been a godsend, and I've particularly enjoyed a novel writing course and a travel writing course that I've been following. The novel writing course has pushed me to flesh out plans for a number of books, including more detailed and cohesive outlines for 'Songs from the Crypt Forest' and 'The Night Has Teeth' (two books I want to write in a similar universe), along with my on-again-off-again WIP 'The Manylove Quarter' - and the plans for these three alone come to 7,850+ words!

I moved back to Southampton in July, and took August to start drafting 'The Manylove Quarter ', but that ended up petering out with about 19,200 words of prose on the page. Still, I spent a lot of time querying, and got plenty of reading done, so - especially considering the heatwaves in my area and a pretty enormous academic crisis in my record (fixed in November, after writing a LOT of letters and reports!!! So, this is where I send a million hugs to my lecturers and tutors for all the help they've given me, thank you, thank you, thank you all SO MUCH!!!) - I still felt fairly well-accomplished at the end of the month. I also did quite a bit of painting.

In August and September, I started typing up the journal I've been keeping since the beginning of April, once I'd settled back into life in the UK, to keep track of my feelings about the pandemic and my reactions to what I've seen or heard in the news. I write an average of 6,000 words per month, so I'm coming up to 50,000 words on the whole thing (but have yet to type up November or December). One day, I'll use it to write some extremely illustrious memoirs about how much fun, I had stamping up and down the stairs in my parents' house in order to get my steps in! (I really did get quite fit, though, and I want to get back to it in the New Year!)

At the start of September, I published a 2,500-word travel log my university's "study abroad" blog, all about how much I came to love the French city of La Rochelle, where I spent my 3rd year working. I think I will polish it at least a little before I post it here, but I would love to post a redrafted version on this blog!

My final year of university (BA Modern Languages, French and German) started in October, so all my reading and writing that month - or so it felt - was linked to my course. However. I've lost count of how many pieces I've translated between English, French and German, just to prepare for each class. I love my course, but it doesn't leave much energy for anything else!

Welcome to November, when all my graded assignments were due at once, and the associated stress started taking its toll. Luckily, my tutors were there to help me get extensions for work I couldn't hand in on time because my brain had turned into mashed potato. By the middle of December, I ended up with a 300-word translation and 300-word scripted scene for French, a 1,000-word commentary on a translation into English, a 2,500-word essay for French History, and a 2,000-word short story for German, which I've translated into English, and will post here any day.

This has really been a big year for letter-writing, especially since I came back from France. My cousin and I love writing longhand letters to each other, as I love writing them to my grandmothers, and, as such, I've written about one hundred letters this year! My cousin and I have kept every letter we've ever sent each other, and these collections have approximately doubled in size since the start of 2020.

I keep trying to redraft the first chapters of 'The Manylove Quarter', but never seem to get very far. With about 3 redrafts started since Autumn, I'd say l have about 1,000 words typed up. I can probably say the same of the story I'm trying to write as a kind of Standalone, kind of Sequel to 'This Still Happens' and 'Curls of Smoke', except that I'd put those around the 2,000-word mark.

If my Mathematic capabilities still stand up, I estimate I've written about 210,000 words in total this year (not including text messages, letters, emails and entries in my regular diary (which I keep separately to my pandemic journal)), which. honestly, makes me feel a little like I've failed myself.

That's why l'm making this post, actually, to address that feeling - because | know it's not rational, so I'm not going to call it "that fact" - and to tot all my work up in one place, so that I can see my achievements as one big hulk. Looking at my 2020 in terms of projects l've actually finished, it's disappointing! But to look at 2020 as a final wordcount makes me feel an awful lot better. My sister just pointed out that "210,000 words" is "nearly a quarter of a million words", and, put in that way, it's much easier to feel like I've accomplished something of which I can - and Should - feel proud. I've written a lot this year!

Now l'm asking all of you who feel like you've "not done enough work in 2020" to reassess the way you're looking at it all, and to see that:

Productivity shouldn't define how much you feel you're worth, no matter how productive you've been. Please don't fall into the capitalist trap of thinking you're only "doing the right thing" if you're working! You're worth a huge amount and you deserve to be proud of yourself!

You've achieved a lot more than you first thought, whether in the projects you've finished, the number of words you're written, the ideas you've had, the research and planning you've done, the time you've put in, the skills you've honed... OR THE FUN YOU'VE HAD! It all counts, and it's all important, and you can be proud of all of it, just like you can be proud of yourself.

If you don't feel like you've done enough, find a new angle from which to look at what you have done. I'm willing to bet someone out there can see how brilliantly you're doing already. Try to see yourself through that someone's eyes!

#writeblr #blog #writer's life #writing about writing #2020 in writing #motivation #positivity

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maddiviner · 6 years ago

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Dzień dobry and merry meet!

We’re all different. What works well for one witch might be a disaster for another. I believe keeping a notebook is useful for most witches, though!

I’ve written a lot about why a grimoire and keeping one can supercharge your magical practice.

It’s always going to be something I recommend. While not everyone can or does keep one, it’s always worth trying because for many of us it is so helpful.

The question becomes, though: how? What format should you use for your grimoire or Book of Shadows?

I’ve got an article about different types of grimoires here. Regardless of what style you choose, it can be helpful to keep it organized!

There are many advantages to keeping a binder-type notebook for a grimoire. It allows you to add and remove pages with ease! This means you can create tabbed sections for each Craft-related topic.

You can then add to each as you see fit, without disturbing the rest. It’s also very easy to find information in your grimoire when you need it!

In the past, I used hardbound notebooks. I loved the Peter Pauper Press line of journals, and the Leuchtturm 1917. Over the past few years, though, I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of the binder system.

I still use a normal Leuchtturm for my bullet journal. It doubles as my general magical diary and record.

When it comes to making notes on my research and gathering Craft information, I’ve begun using a binder. It's so easy! You might want to try a similar setup. I definitely recommend it!

Supplies

To start, I purchased a six-ring A5 binder. I chose a coral-colored Carpe Diem binder, because it wasn’t too expensive and I liked the color.

I chose A5 because it fits the size of my hands and my style of handwriting pretty well. If your hands are bigger or smaller, a different size might work for you. I also like A5 because it is quite portable. A three-ring letter-size binder could work, or even a small personal sized folio.

I filled the binder with dot grid paper. I chose the dot grid because of its versatility. If you’re sketching, making diagrams, or drawing, the dots make measurement on the page easy. If you’re only writing, they function as lines to keep your handwriting straight and neat on the page, too.

The dots are subtle and not intrusive, too, making any art you might want to do on the pages very clean and visible. Most A5 dot grid paper is prepunched with the six ring holes, and despite this, you can even print on it!

This is good, because it allows me to print longer bits of information or diagrams. Granted, most files aren’t designed for A5 size. Yet, it’s very, very easy to resize something for that format, even if it includes images.

Organization

I added some blank tabbed dividers, labeling them with different Craft-related subjects. There’s one for Tarot, astrology, spellcraft, spiritwork, etc.

If you do this, your dividers would reflect whatever interests you. I recommend sticking to four or five different topics to start with. Any more than that can be overwhelming.

I've written a bit of study tips for the self-taught here. If you’re a virtuoso who can juggle eight or nine topics without getting overwhelmed, go for it!

I keep the dot grid paper in the very back of the binder. I add pages from that to the different sections as I finished them.

What to include?

Your grimoire is your own; you can include anything and everything that you want! I included the following different sections in mine so far.

Blessings, Divination, and Spiritwork

First, I invoked celestial forces to bless this grimoire. Blessing your tools (including grimoire) can be very advantageous. You can ask the spirits and any deities you follow to bless your work. I used to have one of these at the front of mine, but recently ended up writing a separate blessing for each section.

You could devote a section to poetry or prose inspired by the spirits - I do, though I haven’t written much in it recently. Don’t ask me to ever share any of my poems, though - it ended up being very personal!

I devote a sizable part of my binder to writing about the divinatory exercises I do on my own. In other words, it's for notes on my personal Tarot, Lenormand, and scrying sessions. If you do divination, I recommend keeping such a record of your exploits! I also sometimes keep a dream journal.

Spellcraft Details

Without a doubt, it’s useful to record your own spells and their ensuing results. If you’re starting in spellcraft, you can jot down ideas and brainstorm.

Then, you have a record of the spell’s development from start to finish! This is helpful for refining your approach to spellcraft. It helps you become more effective with it.

If you’re casting spells another witch developed, you can record those, too! Whenever I cast a spell from a book or website, I record it by hand. I include my own notes on it, and any modifications I’ve made.

Of course, I also include a citation explaining where I found the spell and who wrote it, too. Credit where credit is due!

The biggest thing, though? Remember to go back and record the results as they manifest. I recommend doing this in as much detail as possible, too. Keeping track of how your magic flows can help you to develop greater finesse.

Print Information

I also print out public domain texts from the Internet to add to my growing trove of information in the binder. If you’re using an A5 binder, you may have to fiddle with formatting on anything you’re printing so that it’ll fit the page. It’s not hard, though!

Many older translations of Classical texts are public domain now. So, you might include that sort of thing! And yes, most printers will print on prepunched A5 paper!

Some witchblr folks will also allow you to print their work, and add it to your personal grimoire. Be sure to check with the person in question first, though! Always keep track of where each piece of information comes from!

For the record, it’s always okay to include spells <INSERT LINK HERE> I’ve written on this blog in your personal grimoire. That is, as long as a) it’s only for personal use, and b) you credit me, even if you’re only printing it for yourself.

Personal Notes on Books, etc

I’m a big fan of taking notes when I read a book, be it a Craft-related one, or even something else. Everyone has a different way of taking notes! My notes synthesize my readings from several different books on the subject.

I took inspiration from studyblr in formatting my notes. That particular tag on here offers lot of great tips for taking notes that are effective, neat, legible and even aesthetic.

I realize the studyblr “aesthetic” isn’t quite the type of thing you’d expect from a grimoire. I like it. I can find things in my notes with ease, they’re readable, and fun to make.

Spawning

This system works well enough for a while. Soon, you’ll find that the binder gets full, unwieldy, and bursting with information. What do you do then?

When it first happened with mine, I wasn’t sure. I tried taking the pages out, tying them with string, and stacking them on my shelf. This turned out to be awful and messy, and some of them got torn.

The trick here is simply to get another binder. Look through the sections in your main binder and find which one is largest. Then, get another binder and transplant that section into it.

Keep doing this as your main binder fills up again and again. You end up with two or three different binders dedicated to different subjects. This is, to me, an excellent way of organizing things, provided you label the binders! It’s wild binder mitosis!

Thus far, my main binder has “spawned” two more - one for astrology, and one for spiritwork. I suspect other sections in the main binder will someday need to move into new binders, too.

In Conclusion

Keeping a grimoire is fun! I definitely recommend it! This article only gives one way of organizing such a grimoire, the one I use. Your methods will no doubt be different. I hope my suggestions above are inspiring and helpful, though.

Stay magical, and blessed be!

#magick #witchblr #witch #witchcraft #grimoire #book of shadows #studyblr #occult #spellcraft #divination #eliza.txt

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abovethetitletheatre · 5 years ago

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What is a Play

Extract from The Theory of the Theatre by Clayton Hamilton

A play is a story devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience.

This plain statement of fact affords an exceedingly simple definition of the drama,—a definition so simple indeed as to seem at the first glance easily obvious and therefore scarcely worthy of expression. But if we examine the statement thoroughly, phrase by phrase, we shall see that it sums up within itself the entire theory of the theatre, and that from this primary axiom we may deduce the whole practical philosophy of dramatic criticism.

It is unnecessary to linger long over an explanation of the word "story." A story is a representation of a series of events linked together by the law of cause and effect and marching forward toward a predestined culmination,—each event exhibiting imagined characters performing imagined acts in an appropriate imagined setting. This definition applies, of course, to the epic, the ballad, the novel, the short-story, and all other forms of narrative art, as well as to the drama.

But the phrase "devised to be presented" distinguishes the drama sharply from all other forms of narrative. In particular it must be noted that a play is not a story that is written to be read. By no means must the drama be considered primarily as a department of literature,—like the epic or the novel, for example. Rather, from the standpoint of the theatre, should literature be considered as only one of a multitude of means which the dramatist must employ to convey his story effectively to the audience. The great Greek dramatists needed a sense of sculpture as well as a sense of poetry; and in the contemporary theatre the playwright must manifest the imagination of the painter as well as the imagination of the man of letters. The appeal of a play is primarily visual rather than auditory. On the contemporary stage, characters properly costumed must be exhibited within a carefully designed and painted setting illuminated with appropriate effects of light and shadow; and the art of music is often called upon to render incidental aid to the general impression. The dramatist, therefore, must be endowed not only with the literary sense, but also with a clear eye for the graphic and plastic elements of pictorial effect, a sense of rhythm and of music, and a thorough knowledge of the art of acting. Since the dramatist must, at the same time and in the same work, harness and harmonise the methods of so many of the arts, it would be uncritical to centre studious consideration solely on his dialogue and to praise him or condemn him on the literary ground alone.

It is, of course, true that the very greatest plays have always been great literature as well as great drama. The purely literary element—the final touch of style in dialogue—is the only sure antidote against the opium of time. Now that Aeschylus is no longer performed as a playwright, we read him as a poet. But, on the other hand, we should remember that the main reason why he is no longer played is that his dramas do not fit the modern theatre,—an edifice totally different in size and shape and physical appointments from that in which his pieces were devised to be presented. In his own day he was not so much read as a poet as applauded in the theatre as a playwright; and properly to appreciate his dramatic, rather than his literary, appeal, we must reconstruct in our imagination the conditions of the theatre in his day. The point is that his plays, though planned primarily as drama, have since been shifted over, by many generations of critics and literary students, into the adjacent province of poetry; and this shift of the critical point of view, which has insured the immortality of Aeschylus, has been made possible only by the literary merit of his dialogue. When a play, owing to altered physical conditions, is tossed out of the theatre, it will find a haven in the closet only if it be greatly written. From this fact we may derive the practical maxim that though a skilful playwright need not write greatly in order to secure the plaudits of his own generation, he must cultivate a literary excellence if he wishes to be remembered by posterity.

This much must be admitted concerning the ultimate importance of the literary element in the drama. But on the other hand it must be granted that many plays that stand very high as drama do not fall within the range of literature. A typical example is the famous melodrama by Dennery entitled The Two Orphans. This play has deservedly held the stage for nearly a century, and bids fair still to be applauded after the youngest critic has died. It is undeniably a very good play. It tells a thrilling story in a series of carefully graded theatric situations. It presents nearly a dozen acting parts which, though scarcely real as characters, are yet drawn with sufficient fidelity to fact to allow the performers to produce a striking illusion of reality during the two hours' traffic of the stage. It is, to be sure—especially in the standard English translation—abominably written. One of the two orphans launches wide-eyed upon a soliloquy beginning, "Am I mad?... Do I dream?"; and such sentences as the following obtrude themselves upon the astounded ear,—"If you persist in persecuting me in this heartless manner, I shall inform the police." Nothing, surely, could be further from literature. Yet thrill after thrill is conveyed, by visual means, through situations artfully contrived; and in the sheer excitement of the moment, the audience is made incapable of noticing the pompous mediocrity of the lines.

In general, it should be frankly understood by students of the theatre that an audience is not capable of hearing whether the dialogue of a play is well or badly written. Such a critical discrimination would require an extraordinary nicety of ear, and might easily be led astray, in one direction or the other, by the reading of the actors. The rhetoric of Massinger must have sounded like poetry to an Elizabethan audience that had heard the same performers, the afternoon before, speaking lines of Shakespeare's. If Mr. Forbes-Robertson is reading a poorly-written part, it is hard to hear that the lines are, in themselves, not musical. Literary style is, even for accomplished critics, very difficult to judge in the theatre. Some years ago, Mrs. Fiske presented in New York an English adaptation of Paul Heyse's Mary of Magdala. After the first performance—at which I did not happen to be present—I asked several cultivated people who had heard the play whether the English version was written in verse or in prose; and though these people were themselves actors and men of letters, not one of them could tell me. Yet, as appeared later, when the play was published, the English dialogue was written in blank verse by no less a poet than Mr. William Winter. If such an elementary distinction as that between verse and prose was in this case inaudible to cultivated ears, how much harder must it be for the average audience to distinguish between a good phrase and a bad! The fact is that literary style is, for the most part, wasted on an audience. The average auditor is moved mainly by the emotional content of a sentence spoken on the stage, and pays very little attention to the form of words in which the meaning is set forth. At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a while"—which Matthew Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his touchstones of literary style—the thing that really moves the audience in the theatre is not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's plea for his best friend to outlive him and explain his motives to a world grown harsh.

That the content rather than the literary turn of dialogue is the thing that counts most in the theatre will be felt emphatically if we compare the mere writing of Molière with that of his successor and imitator, Regnard. Molière is certainly a great writer, in the sense that he expresses clearly and precisely the thing he has to say; his verse, as well as his prose, is admirably lucid and eminently speakable. But assuredly, in the sense in which the word is generally used, Molière is not a poet; and it may fairly be said that, in the usual connotation of the term, he has no style. Regnard, on the other hand, is more nearly a poet, and, from the standpoint of style, writes vastly better verse. He has a lilting fluency that flowers every now and then into a phrase of golden melody. Yet Molière is so immeasurably his superior as a playwright that most critics instinctively set Regnard far below him even as a writer. There can be no question that M. Rostand writes better verse than Emile Augier; but there can be no question, also, that Augier is the greater dramatist. Oscar Wilde probably wrote more clever and witty lines than any other author in the whole history of English comedy; but no one would think of setting him in the class with Congreve and Sheridan.

It is by no means my intention to suggest that great writing is not desirable in the drama; but the point must be emphasised that it is not a necessary element in the immediate merit of a play as a play. In fact, excellent plays have often been presented without the use of any words at all. Pantomime has, in every age, been recognised as a legitimate department of the drama. Only a few years ago, Mme. Charlotte Wiehe acted in New York a one-act play, entitled La Main, which held the attention enthralled for forty-five minutes during which no word was spoken. The little piece told a thrilling story with entire clearness and coherence, and exhibited three characters fully and distinctly drawn; and it secured this achievement by visual means alone, with no recourse whatever to the spoken word. Here was a work which by no stretch of terminology could have been included in the category of literature; and yet it was a very good play, and as drama was far superior to many a literary masterpiece in dialogue like Browning's In a Balcony.

Lest this instance seem too exceptional to be taken as representative, let us remember that throughout an entire important period in the history of the stage, it was customary for the actors to improvise the lines that they spoke before the audience. I refer to the period of the so-called commedia dell'arte, which flourished all over Italy throughout the sixteenth century. A synopsis of the play—partly narrative and partly expository—was posted up behind the scenes. This account of what was to happen on the stage was known technically as a scenario. The actors consulted this scenario before they made an entrance, and then in the acting of the scene spoke whatever words occurred to them. Harlequin made love to Columbine and quarreled with Pantaloon in new lines every night; and the drama gained both spontaneity and freshness from the fact that it was created anew at each performance. Undoubtedly, if an actor scored with a clever line, he would remember it for use in a subsequent presentation; and in this way the dialogue of a comedy must have gradually become more or less fixed and, in a sense, written. But this secondary task of formulating the dialogue was left to the performers; and the playwright contented himself with the primary task of planning the plot.

The case of the commedia dell'arte is, of course, extreme; but it emphasises the fact that the problem of the dramatist is less a task of writing than a task of constructing. His primary concern is so to build a story that it will tell itself to the eye of the audience in a series of shifting pictures. Any really good play can, to a great extent, be appreciated even though it be acted in a foreign language. American students in New York may find in the Yiddish dramas of the Bowery an emphatic illustration of how closely a piece may be followed by an auditor who does not understand the words of a single line. The recent extraordinary development in the art of the moving picture, especially in France, has taught us that many well-known plays may be presented in pantomime and reproduced by the kinetoscope, with no essential loss of intelligibility through the suppression of the dialogue. Sardou, as represented by the biograph, is no longer a man of letters; but he remains, scarcely less evidently than in the ordinary theatre, a skilful and effective playwright. Hamlet, that masterpiece of meditative poetry, would still be a good play if it were shown in moving pictures. Much, of course, would be sacrificed through the subversion of its literary element; but its essential interest as a play would yet remain apparent through the unassisted power of its visual appeal.

There can be no question that, however important may be the dialogue of a drama, the scenario is even more important; and from a full scenario alone, before a line of dialogue is written, it is possible in most cases to determine whether a prospective play is inherently good or bad. Most contemporary dramatists, therefore, postpone the actual writing of their dialogue until they have worked out their scenario in minute detail. They begin by separating and grouping their narrative materials into not more than three or four distinct pigeon-holes of time and place,—thereby dividing their story roughly into acts. They then plan a stage-setting for each act, employing whatever accessories may be necessary for the action. If papers are to be burned, they introduce a fireplace; if somebody is to throw a pistol through a window, they set the window in a convenient and emphatic place; they determine how many chairs and tables and settees are demanded for the narrative; if a piano or a bed is needed, they place it here or there upon the floor-plan of their stage, according to the prominence they wish to give it; and when all such points as these have been determined, they draw a detailed map of the stage-setting for the act. As their next step, most playwrights, with this map before them, and using a set of chess-men or other convenient concrete objects to represent their characters, move the pieces about upon the stage through the successive scenes, determine in detail where every character is to stand or sit at nearly every moment, and note down what he is to think and feel and talk about at the time. Only after the entire play has been planned out thus minutely does the average playwright turn back to the beginning and commence to write his dialogue. He completes his primary task of play-making before he begins his secondary task of play-writing. Many of our established dramatists,—like the late Clyde Fitch, for example—sell their plays when the scenario is finished, arrange for the production, select the actors, and afterwards write the dialogue with the chosen actors constantly in mind.

This summary statement of the usual process may seem, perhaps, to cast excessive emphasis on the constructive phase of the playwright's problem; and allowance must of course be made for the divergent mental habits of individual authors. But almost any playwright will tell you that he feels as if his task were practically finished when he arrives at the point when he finds himself prepared to begin the writing of his dialogue. This accounts for the otherwise unaccountable rapidity with which many of the great plays of the world have been written. Dumas fils retired to the country and wrote La Dame aux Camélias—a four-act play—in eight successive days. But he had previously told the same story in a novel; he knew everything that was to happen in his play; and the mere writing could be done in a single headlong dash. Voltaire's best tragedy, Zaïre, was written in three weeks. Victor Hugo composed Marion Delorme between June 1 and June 24, 1829; and when the piece was interdicted by the censor, he immediately turned to another subject and wrote Hernani in the next three weeks. The fourth act of Marion Delorme was written in a single day. Here apparently was a very fever of composition. But again we must remember that both of these plays had been devised before the author began to write them; and when he took his pen in hand he had already been working on them in scenario for probably a year. To write ten acts in Alexandrines, with feminine rhymes alternating with masculine, was still, to be sure, an appalling task; but Hugo was a facile and prolific poet, and could write very quickly after he had determined exactly what it was he had to write.

It was with all of the foregoing points in mind that, in the opening sentence of this chapter, I defined a play as a story "devised," rather than a story "written." We may now consider the significance of the next phrase of that definition, which states that a play is devised to be "presented," rather than to be "read."

The only way in which it is possible to study most of the great plays of bygone ages is to read the record of their dialogue; and this necessity has led to the academic fallacy of considering great plays primarily as compositions to be read. In their own age, however, these very plays which we now read in the closet were intended primarily to be presented on the stage. Really to read a play requires a very special and difficult exercise of visual imagination. It is necessary not only to appreciate the dialogue, but also to project before the mind's eye a vivid imagined rendition of the visual aspect of the action. This is the reason why most managers and stage-directors are unable to judge conclusively the merits and defects of a new play from reading it in manuscript. One of our most subtle artists in stage-direction, Mr. Henry Miller, once confessed to the present writer that he could never decide whether a prospective play was good or bad until he had seen it rehearsed by actors on a stage. Mr. Augustus Thomas's unusually successful farce entitled Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots was considered a failure by its producing managers until the very last rehearsals, because it depended for its finished effect on many intricate and rapid intermovements of the actors, which until the last moment were understood and realised only in the mind of the playwright. The same author's best and most successful play, The Witching Hour, was declined by several managers before it was ultimately accepted for production; and the reason was, presumably, that its extraordinary merits were not manifest from a mere reading of the lines. If professional producers may go so far astray in their judgment of the merits of a manuscript, how much harder must it be for the layman to judge a play solely from a reading of the dialogue!

This fact should lead the professors and the students in our colleges to adopt a very tentative attitude toward judging the dramatic merits of the plays of other ages. Shakespeare, considered as a poet, is so immeasurably superior to Dryden, that it is difficult for the college student unfamiliar with the theatre to realise that the former's Antony and Cleopatra is, considered solely as a play, far inferior to the latter's dramatisation of the same story, entitled All for Love, or The World Well Lost. Shakespeare's play upon this subject follows closely the chronology of Plutarch's narrative, and is merely dramatised history; but Dryden's play is reconstructed with a more practical sense of economy and emphasis, and deserves to be regarded as historical drama. Cymbeline is, in many passages, so greatly written that it is hard for the closet-student to realise that it is a bad play, even when considered from the standpoint of the Elizabethan theatre,—whereas Othello and Macbeth, for instance, are great plays, not only of their age but for all time. King Lear is probably a more sublime poem than Othello; and it is only by seeing the two pieces performed equally well in the theatre that we can appreciate by what a wide margin Othello is the better play.

This practical point has been felt emphatically by the very greatest dramatists; and this fact offers, of course, an explanation of the otherwise inexplicable negligence of such authors as Shakespeare and Molière in the matter of publishing their plays. These supreme playwrights wanted people to see their pieces in the theatre rather than to read them in the closet. In his own lifetime, Shakespeare, who was very scrupulous about the publication of his sonnets and his narrative poems, printed a carefully edited text of his plays only when he was forced, in self-defense, to do so, by the prior appearance of corrupt and pirated editions; and we owe our present knowledge of several of his dramas merely to the business acumen of two actors who, seven years after his death, conceived the practical idea that they might turn an easy penny by printing and offering for sale the text of several popular plays which the public had already seen performed. Sardou, who, like most French dramatists, began by publishing his plays, carefully withheld from print the master-efforts of his prime; and even such dramatists as habitually print their plays prefer nearly always to have them seen first and read only afterwards.

In elucidation of what might otherwise seem perversity on the part of great dramatic authors like Shakespeare, we must remember that the master-dramatists have nearly always been men of the theatre rather than men of letters, and therefore naturally more avid of immediate success with a contemporary audience than of posthumous success with a posterity of readers. Shakespeare and Molière were actors and theatre-managers, and devised their plays primarily for the patrons of the Globe and the Palais Royal. Ibsen, who is often taken as a type of the literary dramatist, derived his early training mainly from the profession of the theatre and hardly at all from the profession of letters. For half a dozen years, during the formative period of his twenties, he acted as producing manager of the National Theatre in Bergen, and learned the tricks of his trade from studying the masterpieces of contemporary drama, mainly of the French school. In his own work, he began, in such pieces as Lady Inger of Ostråt, by imitating and applying the formulas of Scribe and the earlier Sardou; and it was only after many years that he marched forward to a technique entirely his own. Both Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and Mr. Stephen Phillips began their theatrical career as actors. On the other hand, men of letters who have written works primarily to be read have almost never succeeded as dramatists. In England, during the nineteenth century, the following great poets all tried their hands at plays—Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and Tennyson—and not one of them produced a work of any considerable value from the standpoint of dramatic criticism. Tennyson, in Becket, came nearer to the mark than any of the others; and it is noteworthy that, in this work, he had the advantage of the advice and, in a sense, collaboration of Sir Henry Irving.

The familiar phrase "closet-drama" is a contradiction of terms. The species of literary composition in dialogue that is ordinarily so designated occupies a thoroughly legitimate position in the realm of literature, but no position whatsoever in the realm of dramaturgy. Atalanta in Calydon is a great poem; but from the standpoint of the theory of the theatre, it cannot be considered as a play. Like the lyric poems of the same author, it was written to be read; and it was not devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience.

We may now consider the significance of the three concluding phrases of the definition of a play which was offered at the outset of the present chapter. These phrases indicate the immanence of three influences by which the work of the playwright is constantly conditioned.

In the first place, by the fact that the dramatist is devising his story for the use of actors, he is definitely limited both in respect to the kind of characters he may create and in respect to the means he may employ in order to delineate them. In actual life we meet characters of two different classes, which (borrowing a pair of adjectives from the terminology of physics) we may denominate dynamic characters and static characters. But when an actor appears upon the stage, he wants to act; and the dramatist is therefore obliged to confine his attention to dynamic characters, and to exclude static characters almost entirely from the range of his creation. The essential trait of all dynamic characters is the preponderance within them of the element of will; and the persons of a play must therefore be people with active wills and emphatic intentions. When such people are brought into juxtaposition, there necessarily results a clash of contending desires and purposes; and by this fact we are led logically to the conclusion that the proper subject-matter of the drama is a struggle between contrasted human wills. The same conclusion, as we shall notice in the next chapter, may be reached logically by deduction from the natural demands of an assembled audience; and the subject will be discussed more fully during the course of our study of The Psychology of Theatre Audiences. At present it is sufficient for us to note that every great play that has ever been devised has presented some phase or other of this single, necessary theme,—a contention of individual human wills. An actor, moreover, is always more effective in scenes of emotion than in scenes of cold logic and calm reason; and the dramatist, therefore, is obliged to select as his leading figures people whose acts are motivated by emotion rather than by intellect. Aristotle, for example, would make a totally uninteresting figure if he were presented faithfully upon the stage. Who could imagine Darwin as the hero of a drama? Othello, on the other hand, is not at all a reasonable being; from first to last his intellect is "perplexed in the extreme." His emotions are the motives for his acts; and in this he may be taken as the type of a dramatic character.

In the means of delineating the characters he has imagined, the dramatist, because he is writing for actors, is more narrowly restricted than the novelist. His people must constantly be doing something, and must therefore reveal themselves mainly through their acts. They may, of course, also be delineated through their way of saying things; but in the theatre the objective action is always more suggestive than the spoken word. We know Sherlock Holmes, in Mr. William Gillette's admirable melodrama, solely through the things that we have seen him do; and in this connection we should remember that in the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from which Mr. Gillette derived his narrative material, Holmes is delineated largely by a very different method,—the method, namely, of expository comment written from the point of view of Doctor Watson. A leading actor seldom wants to sit in his dressing-room while he is being talked about by the other actors on the stage; and therefore the method of drawing character by comment, which is so useful for the novelist, is rarely employed by the playwright except in the waste moments which precede the first entrance of his leading figure. The Chorus Lady, in Mr. James Forbes's amusing study of that name, is drawn chiefly through her way of saying things; but though this method of delineation is sometimes very effective for an act or two, it can seldom be sustained without a faltering of interest through a full-grown four-act play. The novelist's expedient of delineating character through mental analysis is of course denied the dramatist, especially in this modern age when the soliloquy (for reasons which will be noted in a subsequent chapter) is usually frowned upon. Sometimes, in the theatre, a character may be exhibited chiefly through his personal effect upon the other people on the stage, and thereby indirectly on the people in the audience. It was in this way, of course, that Manson was delineated in Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy's The Servant in the House. But the expedient is a dangerous one for the dramatist to use; because it makes his work immediately dependent on the actor chosen for the leading role, and may in many cases render his play impossible of attaining its full effect except at the hands of a single great performer. In recent years an expedient long familiar in the novel has been transferred to the service of the stage,—the expedient, namely, of suggesting the personality of a character through a visual presentation of his habitual environment. After the curtain had been raised upon the first act of The Music Master, and the audience had been given time to look about the room which was represented on the stage, the main traits of the leading character had already been suggested before his first appearance on the scene. The pictures and knickknacks on his mantelpiece told us, before we ever saw him, what manner of man he was. But such subtle means as this can, after all, be used only to reinforce the one standard method of conveying the sense of character in drama; and this one method, owing to the conditions under which the playwright does his work, must always be the exhibition of objective acts.

In all these general ways the work of the dramatist is affected by the fact that he must devise his story to be presented by actors. The specific influence exerted over the playwright by the individual performer is a subject too extensive to be covered by a mere summary consideration in the present context; and we shall therefore discuss it fully in a later chapter, entitled The Actor and the Dramatist.

At present we must pass on to observe that, in the second place, the work of the dramatist is conditioned by the fact that he must plan his plays to fit the sort of theatre that stands ready to receive them. A fundamental and necessary relation has always existed between theatre-building and theatric art. The best plays of any period have been fashioned in accordance with the physical conditions of the best theatres of that period. Therefore, in order fully to appreciate such a play as Oedipus King, it is necessary to imagine the theatre of Dionysus; and in order to understand thoroughly the dramaturgy of Shakespeare and Molière, it is necessary to reconstruct in retrospect the altered inn-yard and the converted tennis-court for which they planned their plays. It may seriously be doubted that the works of these earlier masters gain more than they lose from being produced with the elaborate scenic accessories of the modern stage; and, on the other hand, a modern play by Ibsen or Pinero would lose three-fourths of its effect if it were acted in the Elizabethan manner, or produced without scenery (let us say) in the Roman theatre at Orange.

Since, in all ages, the size and shape and physical appointments of the theatre have determined for the playwright the form and structure of his plays, we may always explain the stock conventions of any period of the drama by referring to the physical aspect of the theatre in that period. Let us consider briefly, for purposes of illustration, certain obvious ways in which the art of the great Greek tragic dramatists was affected by the nature of the Attic stage. The theatre of Dionysus was an enormous edifice carved out of a hillside. It was so large that the dramatists were obliged to deal only with subjects that were traditional,—stories which had long been familiar to the entire theatre-going public, including the poorer and less educated spectators who sat farthest from the actors. Since most of the audience was grouped above the stage and at a considerable distance, the actors, in order not to appear dwarfed, were obliged to walk on stilted boots. A performer so accoutred could not move impetuously or enact a scene of violence; and this practical limitation is sufficient to account for the measured and majestic movement of Greek tragedy, and the convention that murders and other violent deeds must always be imagined off the stage and be merely recounted to the audience by messengers. Facial expression could not be seen in so large a theatre; and the actors therefore wore masks, conventionalised to represent the dominant mood of a character during a scene. This limitation forced the performer to depend for his effect mainly on his voice; and Greek tragedy was therefore necessarily more lyrical than later types of drama.

The few points which we have briefly touched upon are usually explained, by academic critics, on literary grounds; but it is surely more sane to explain them on grounds of common sense, in the light of what we know of the conditions of the Attic stage. Similarly, it would be easy to show how Terence and Calderon, Shakespeare and Molière, adapted the form of their plays to the form of their theatres; but enough has already been said to indicate the principle which underlies this particular phase of the theory of the theatre. The successive changes in the physical aspect of the English theatre during the last three centuries have all tended toward greater naturalness, intimacy, and subtlety, in the drama itself and in the physical aids to its presentment. This progress, with its constant illustration of the interdependence of the drama and the stage, may most conveniently be studied in historical review; and to such a review we shall devote a special chapter, entitled Stage Conventions in Modern Times.

We may now observe that, in the third place, the essential nature of the drama is affected greatly by the fact that it is destined to be set before an audience. The dramatist must appeal at once to a heterogeneous multitude of people; and the full effect of this condition will be investigated in a special chapter on The Psychology of Theatre Audiences. In an important sense, the audience is a party to the play, and collaborates with the actors in the presentation. This fact, which remains often unappreciated by academic critics, is familiar to everyone who has had any practical association with the theatre. It is almost never possible, even for trained dramatic critics, to tell from a final dress-rehearsal in an empty house which scenes of a new play are fully effective and which are not; and the reason why, in America, new plays are tried out on the road is not so much to give the actors practice in their parts, as to determine, from the effect of the piece upon provincial audiences, whether it is worthy of a metropolitan presentation. The point is, as we shall notice in the next chapter, that since a play is devised for a crowd it cannot finally be judged by individuals.

The dependence of the dramatist upon his audience may be illustrated by the history of many important plays, which, though effective in their own age, have become ineffective for later generations, solely because they were founded on certain general principles of conduct in which the world has subsequently ceased to believe. From the point of view of its own period, The Maid's Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher is undoubtedly one of the very greatest of Elizabethan plays; but it would be ineffective in the modern theatre, because it presupposes a principle which a contemporary audience would not accept. It was devised for an audience of aristocrats in the reign of James I, and the dramatic struggle is founded upon the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Amintor, in the play, has suffered a profound personal injury at the hands of his sovereign; but he cannot avenge this individual disgrace, because he is a subject of the royal malefactor. The crisis and turning-point of the entire drama is a scene in which Amintor, with the king at his mercy, lowers his sword with the words:—

But there is Divinity about you, that strikes dead My rising passions: as you are my king, I fall before you, and present my sword To cut mine own flesh, if it be your will.

We may imagine the applause of the courtiers of James Stuart, the Presumptuous; but never since the Cromwellian revolution has that scene been really effective on the English stage. In order fully to appreciate a dramatic struggle, an audience must sympathise with the motives that occasion it.

It should now be evident, as was suggested at the outset, that all the leading principles of the theory of the theatre may be deduced logically from the axiom which was stated in the first sentence of this chapter; and that axiom should constantly be borne in mind as the basis of all our subsequent discussions. But in view of several important points which have already come up for consideration, it may be profitable, before relinquishing our initial question, to redefine a play more fully in the following terms:—

A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of a struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action.

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rayofspades · 6 years ago

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Everyone in the World Forgot How Remakes and Sequels Work and I Have to Talk About It Because I’m Losing My Mind

I tried very, very hard to make this a coherent and somewhat organized post, but it’s still gonna sound like the ravings of a mad woman, so...prepare yourself.

Also, this isn’t gonna be an analysis of why remakes and sequels are so popular, because it’s exactly as simple as it seems: people like things that make them feel nostalgic and creators have caught on to this and realized that by remaking a familiar property, their new product has a built in fan base.

Great.

What I want to talk about is how the concept of remakes/reboots/sequels/whatever has been kind of destroyed. Both audiences and Hollywood have created these weird perceptions that are flooding the market in a way that is exhausting to audiences and confusing to creators.

So, I’m here to discuss all the different types of remakes and why they work or don’t work and how this culture has been conditioned to support them regardless of quality.

Alright,

let’s do this.

Part 1: Cross-Media Remakes:

I find it somewhat impossible to criticize the existence to book--> movie remakes too much because they’re a vehicle for both creativity and audience expansion, even in cases where they’re motivated by money. Harry Potter and The Hunger Games made for some pretty solid movies, and that’s largely because those books just translated well to film. Obviously some changes had to be made to account for time constraints and visual storytelling, but they can get away with having a similar structure and still feeling entirely new based on the hard shift in presentation from book to film.

I would make a similar argument for Marvel movies. From what I understand, those movies change more from their source material, and there are a lot of them, but it makes perfect sense to adapt comic books to reach a wider audience. I feel like the main reason people are becoming tired of Marvel movies is their overwhelming quantity, not so much the fact that they’re remakes.

I would also love to talk about the popularity of GoT and LotR, but I don’t think I’m familiar enough with those franchises to properly discuss them, so I’ll leave that to someone else.

But there is something else I want to talk about.

While Harry Potter and The Hunger Games translated really well to film, the same isn’t true for some other cross media adaptations.

Part 2: Adapt or Die:

In the late 70s, Stephen King wrote The Shining. I’ve read the book and I really enjoyed it, largely due to King’s writing style (the prose, the internal monologues, etc.)

The thing is, The Shining doesn’t really translate well into the film format; it’s really long and a lot of what makes it good is tied to its presentation.

So when Stanley Kubrick adapted The Shining into a film in the early 80s, he changed a lot.

a lot.

The setting and characters remain pretty much the same, and the story follows similar beats, but certain events and themes have been drastically altered to the point where I would consider it a different story.

(Brief aside; the three most famous/iconic scenes from the film (”Here’s Johnny!” “All work and no play”, and Jack frozen in the snow) are ALL exclusive to the film.)

Regardless, both the movie and the book have maintained their own popularity with their own audiences. Both are considered good and both are considered classics.

Although, from what I’ve heard, The Shining film did receive criticism back in the day for being needlessly unpleasant. Interesting.

It’s a somewhat similar story with John Carpenter. If you ask people to list good remakes, 90% of the time people will list The Thing (1982). It’s practically the poster child for “hey, not all remakes are bad, guys.”

In this case, Carpenter was working from both a previous movie (The Thing From Another World) and the prior novella (”Who Goes There?”). Carpenter’s film definitely borrows more from the novella, but it was obviously going to be compared more to the previous film, and it is v e r y different from the previous film. Carpenter’s film (like The Shining) received criticism for how gross and unpleasant it was, but became the definitive version of The Thing and stood the test of time to become a horror classic.

Basically, if you need to change the original product when remaking it, do it. That is the best thing you could possibly do. It gives the creator a chance to actually create their own unique product that just happens to be based on or inspired by an existing property. This is actually a legitimately cool phenomenon; taking preexisting stories and altering them to fit a new cultural context or simply expanding and improving on ideas. It’s a similar concept to “old wives tales” and fairy tales, and how those stories are constantly changed and retold and in doing so become timeless. Gee I wonder if fairy tales are going to come up later in this post.

Part 3: Bad Changes are Bad

*Strums guitar* This one goes out to all audience members out there who have convinced themselves that bad remakes are bad because they’re too different from the original. *Strums guitar*

Stop.

Please stop.

Look, comparing a remake to an original to showcase how bad the remake is is perfectly valid criticism. It can highlight how an idea can be botched when it’s not handled properly. Sure. That’s fine. I highly encourage people to compare the dialogue, characters, and world building of Avatar: The Last Airbender and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. It’s important to recognize how one story is an utter fucking masterpiece and one is a poorly told train wreck.

Here’s the thing:

people seem to criticize the film on the basis of “it’s different” and, I mean, sure. But it’s not just that it’s different, it’s that it’s different and....um....

bad?

Like, one of the “complaints” I saw about the movie was that firebenders now need actual fire in front of them in order to bend it, and I consider that to be just a neutral change. It’s not really better or worse, it’s just different. And please don’t comment on this post with “skflsfjsf NO it’s because in the original firebenders used the SUN as their source of fire” like yeah I know I get it it’s still an inconsequential change.

Now, saying that the earthbenders being held on land as opposed to the sea is a bad change? Yes, that is valid criticism because it makes no goddamn sense within the movie’s universe and just makes everyone look dumb.

That movie is an utter fucking disaster. It’s poorly directed, it’s poorly written, the casting decisions are baffling, the acting is horrible, it’s poorly paced, and it’s bad.

It’s a bad movie.

I would apply the same logic to the new Death Note live action movie (the American one). Putting aside the racial controversy for a minute, I’m fine with changing things about the plot and structure to properly adapt it into a movie. But...yeah. The plot is bad. It just comes across as really dumb and weird.

So yeah, bad remakes are bad, but it’s not as simple as just being “different.”

If y’all keep complaining about remakes making changes, then you’re only encouraging the products I’m about to talk about in the next few Parts.

Arguably the worst and most prolific products of them all...

Part 4: Sometimes, Things That Are the Same.......Are Worse

Alright, I’m gonna start with a really extreme example, but it perfectly captures the essence of what I’m trying to say.

In 1998, Gus Van Sant made the incredibly confusing and brave(?) decision to remake Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. And I do mean “remake,” as in, it is shot for shot the same movie. It’s some sort of bizarre cinematic experiment.

I really like the original movie, so you would assume that, since this movie is literally the same movie, I would like it too.

I don’t.

No one does.

It’s the same movie but with worse performances.

It’s pointless.

Its existence is both unnecessary and confusing. Watching it was a bizarre experience that just made me wish I was watching the original.

(The best part about this is that 15 years after this remake came out, Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin solved remakes forever by making Bates Motel; a contemporary prequel/reimagining of Psycho (1960). This show takes the characters and key events from the Hitchcock film and puts them in a different setting with an altered version of plot points. The creators openly and repeatedly state that they did not want to just remake Psycho and instead wanted to tell a tragedy/thriller using the framework of Psycho. To me, this perfectly encapsulates what remakes are supposed to be. It’s a good show and it’s severely underrated. Please go watch it, just ignore like half of season 3 and you’re gold.)

Unfortunately, the most common and (arguably) the most frustrating type of remake/sequel/reboot/whatever is the “let’s do the same thing...but different” type. They can be a retread of the original plot or just take the title and elements of the original and use them while adding nothing substantially new.

Independence Day: Resurgence, Alien Covenant, The Thing (2011), and proooobably most direct sequels in any popular franchise (like the Transformers movies) fall under this category.

The most notable ones in recent years are D i s n e y r e m a k e s, but those get their own section.

Also, I’m hesitant to talk about these because it might just be a cultural difference, but it deeply bothers me when I see Japanese live action films that are based on anime and they just...keep everything the same?

Like, in a live action remake of FMA, why the fuck wouldn’t you make up some grotesque and upsetting monster thing for the Nina Tucker scene? Why would you just use the design from the manga/anime??? WHY WOULDN’T YOU ADAPT IT TO MAKE IT WORK FOR LIVE ACTION?????????????????????????????????????

But hey, what do I know. It might just be a culture thing.

From what I’ve gathered and experienced, people have the following problems with these types of overly-faithful and/or pointless remakes:

1) They’re boring because it’s just a retread that feels inferior.

2) They try to replicate elements of the original without understanding the actual appeal (aka the tangible details are addressed while the underlying ideas get sidelined or misunderstood).

3) They just...don’t adapt well.

Even if we were to take The Last Airbender and give it to a competent director who has a decently written script, that’s a case where you probably should have changed a lot more to properly make the jump from animated show to live action movie. Obviously, a lot of things would need to be cut or moved around in order to properly pace it.

I’m gonna talk more about this type of movie in a different section so for now let’s move on to the most recent remake craze that’s driving me up the wall.

Part 5: “I’ve got the power of remakes and anime on my side”

Fuck.

So part of the appeal of anime for me has always been its creativity. While some of it is pretty derivative when looking at specific genres, I’ve always found there to be a significantly wider range of creative ideas and concepts in anime than in any other medium.

But now the industry’s running on fumes and someone let it slip that you can make a quick buck by just remaking a popular IP.

Fuck.

And I don’t wanna rag on the new-ish trend of readapting old anime for the sake of following the recently completed manga. This has had unbelievably successful results with FMA:B and Hunter x Hunter (2011) becoming massive critical hits (and two of my favourite shows).

(Although it hasn’t escaped my attention that studios have, in fact, used this gimmick to make half-baked and poorly crafted products with the knowledge that the existing fan base will buy that shit anyways. I’m looking directly at Berserk (2016) and Book of the Atlantic.)

But now they’re also adapting/sequel-ing shows purely for the sake of cashing in on the original (or adapting pre-made sequel products that were already made with that mindset in the first place).

Clear Card was boring as fuck and transparently existed to sell toys.

I dropped Steins;Gate 0 after around 8 episodes when it become abundantly clear that it took the “let’s take elements of the old plot and just....do stuff” route without keeping any of what made the original cool and unique.

The Evangelion movies seem really antithetical to the original show, and the third one feels like it was made by someone who thought they understood Evangelion and hated it. (But luckily the original is coming to Netflix next year so who even cares. Give me that 10/10 show.)

Although I will admit, Devilman Crybaby’s existence kind of falls under what I was saying earlier in this post. It’s one of many adaptations of an old manga that is changed substantially to fit the current cultural climate, with some unique aesthetic changes thrown in there for good measure.

It’s pretty okay.

But um...

Oh boy...

We’re about to get into it lads.

Part 6: Production IG Broke My Whole Brain. Brain Broken. Dead. No Brain.

Hooooooooo boy.

So, FLCL (also known as Fooly Cooly) is one of my favourite shows. In fact, it’s the only show I’ve ever watched that I have absolutely no problems with. None. Not even nitpicks.

I’ve watched it 6 times, including with director’s commentary. It has an utterly perfect and unique/fluid aesthetic and I wish its visuals were just playing in my brain all of the time. It’s an arthouse comedy, which is a...rare (nonexistent?) genre, and it pulls it off perfectly. Its cool, its beautiful, its silly, its poetic, its creative, it has great themes that can reach both teenagers and adults, and there is literally nothing else on the planet like it.

So when it was announced that they were making a sequel 18 years later with a different cast of characters, I was...weirdly excited. Like a pavlovian happy response. I got even more excited after seeing the trailer.

Only a short while before the show aired did it dawn on me.

Wh...what are they doing?

From the trailer, I could see that they were taking some familiar plot elements (Medical Mechanica, Haruko, N.O., Atomsk, etc.) and adding some different protagonists.

who gives a single fuck about the plot of Fooly Cooly?

The plot elements...don’t matter. It’s just a vehicle for cool and amazing things to happen.

So the show came out, and I saw more clips on youtube. While it is cool that they’re using different episode directors with some different art styles, the difference in quality between the directing and overall visual presentation is shockingly noticeable. I partially blame the fact that the anime industry isn’t as financially stable as it used to be, but this is also a Production IG show that’s based on an extremely popular property, so that’s barely an excuse.

It mostly just looks like an anime with some cool stylistic elements, whereas the original looks stunningly perfect, dynamic, unique, and beautiful in every single solitary shot.

I’ve read and watched many reviews of the sequel, both positive and negative, and from what I can tell it’s a textbook example of a “lets take components of the original and just...use them...while kind of missing the point and appeal of the original show.” Fooly Cooly is made of 100% intangible details. That thing is lightning in a bottle, and by taking the tangible details (plot elements and callbacks) and putting them in your show, you’ve already proven that you’ve completely and 100% missed the point.

Also:

this is the new show’s MAL score. While I consider anything between a 6 and a 7 to be “okay,” MAL scores tend to be higher since people rate on separate components of the show.

Like, a 6.7 on MAL is probably a 3 for everyone else. Yikes.

But honestly, the quality of the show is completely irrelevant, because that’s not the actual problem.

The only way to make a new FLCL product would be by accident. Have a director make a deeply personal product in which they do whatever the fuck they want. Have it be stylistically wild and make it look amazing. Create some sort of arthouse comedy with resonant themes and then just get Production IG to slap the FLCL brand on it to appeal to people’s nostalgia.

And that’s when it hit me.

That’s when my whole brain broke.

That accidental, spiritual sequel product can never happen.

Because it looks like a huge risk to producers.

Somehow, by remaking one of the most original and generation defining pieces of media ever created, Production IG proved that we do not live in a world where that type of product is allowed to exist. It can’t exist.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Part 7: Disney and the Culture of Hype(rbole)

When I was young, my family owned two versions of Cinderella on film. The 1950 Disney animated version, and the 1997 live-action version with Brandy.

Obviously, they’re the same story. They follow the same beats and have the same characters. However, there are some major differences in scenes, character portrayal and, most notably, the songs. Both are musicals, but with completely different soundtracks.

If we want to go even further, we also owned Ever After, which is a completely different retelling of Cinderella with a whole new plot made for an older audience (and it’s also very good. Check it out)

In other words, I have nothing against live action Disney remakes, In fact, I think Disney movies based on fairy tales have become their own type of fairy tale; classic stories that are being constantly retold and reshaped to remain both relevant and timeless. It’s beautiful.

What the fuck is Disney doing in the 2010s?

Right now, the trend seems to be completely recreating older Disney classics, only making them live action and, um, “fixing” them.

If you want a detailed analysis of this, go watch the Lindsay Ellis video about Beauty and the Beast. I’ll briefly sum up, but you should definitely watch the video.

Look, I personally don’t hate Beauty and the Beast (2017), but once you notice that the Beast’s character arc doesn’t really exist...

and that there are a bunch of plot threads that either don’t go anywhere or are just kind of pointless...

and that there’s a weird trolley problem with Belle and the servants that completely botches the moral of the story....

and that by adding a bunch of logic to a fucking fairy tale you’re stripping it of its appeal and also just creating plot holes...

and that the singing isn’t nearly as good as the original...

and a bunch of other problems with acting and characterization....

you start to notice that “hey, they made the exact same movie....but worse.”

But, people are okay with that.

Most people didn’t even really notice. And that’s fine, like what you like. I enjoyed the movie well enough, even though I definitely prefer the original. But...I would probably also like a different retelling of Beauty and the Beast if it was a good product. Except, then it would also be...new? And potentially better? Or at least a lateral move.

I just watched the trailer for the new Lion King (2019), and it looks...kind of good. But even thinking this...I kind of long for death, because the entire trailer is just “hey, remember THIS from the original.”

I’m just...I’m just done. I’m burnt out. I’ve had it.

When are we gonna stop making the same movie over and over again?

Or when are the changes actually going to make sense? I’ve seen most of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and it just goes in the opposite direction of changing everything, but the changes are just.....uggggh. Not good. Bad changes are bad.

The thing with Disney is that they are also a hype generating machine, especially after purchasing both Marvel and Star Wars. I once heard someone say in a video that, back in the day, people were trying to make the best possible product so it would sell and get popular. People...don’t really need to do that anymore. If you get 304958493093 billion people excited about the next movie in their favourite 80s franchise by promoting and hyping the shit out of it, then you’ve already secured tons of butts in seats before the movie even comes out. Every movie is an event movie if it comes from Disney and is part of one of their big franchises. Every new thing based on an old thing is the new “best thing.”

Even a new sequel that I actually liked, The Incredibles 2, was weirdly hyped up. (Also, even though I liked it, it didn’t escape my notice that there were a bunch of plot problems with the villain and the script proooobably needed another draft. Just saying.)

So, the big questions are, in this current culture, are we ever going to get another original sci-fi property, like the 80s Star Wars trilogy? Are we ever going to see a boom in a genre outside of Disney owned properties? Are we ever going to get another insane, passion-project smash hit like Fooly Cooly?

No. I don’t think so.

Not in the current state of things. 10 years from now? Maybe. 20 years from now? Probably.

Part 8: Concluding Thoughts

I don’t know, man.

People are still making original things, but they’re not as popular and/or creative as they need to be to change where we are right now.

The very existence of Get Out does lend me some hope. It was a creative and original movie and a very large audience of people (including myself) really liked it.

Yay.

More of this please.

So, um, yeah.

I’m going to go watch Fooly Cooly for the 7th time and scream into a void.

Mmmm bye.

#movies #Disney #flcl #the thing 1982 #psycho #the shining #beauty and the beast #cinderella #update:i fixed the video link

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mysticscanlations · 7 years ago

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[Meeting The Author] Interview with Kim Hyun, author of ‘That Summer’!

I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVEN’T SEEN THIS EARLIER thank you so much @namelessfellow for letting me know!

ALSO WE GET TO SEE AUTHOR-NIM’S FACE AND SHE’S BEAUTIFUL I LOVE HER SO MUCH

click here for the original article (AND TO SEE AUTHOR-NIM)! i’m putting the translated interview under the cut, so please check it out! it’s actually interesting and gives a lot more insight into both her as an author and the story!

[Meet The Webtoon Author] Webtoon Author 'Kim Hyun' Who Captured Japan and Taiwan With The Pure Love Genre

[Before the article] Readers, have you recently seen a manhwa? More specifically, a 'pure love' manhwa. Starting now, I'll introduce you to one of them.

This manhwa can be explained with the title 'A Complicated And Strange Love Triangle Between Boys And A Girl', and it illustrates the story of these kids in their final teenage summer that involves 'love' and awful growing pains.

This explanation does not fit with 'Byline Network' at all.

But still, the first reason why I'm introducing the manhwa 'That Summer' is because this 'Meet The Webtoon Author' series continuously focuses only on male authors with action manhwa.

The second reason is because I feel that we should also pass the limit of genres and experience a more diverse range of manhwa.

Pure love manhwas are more interesting that I thought. That Summer. Just by hearing it, that title gives a ticklish feeling in your chest. Whether it's to foster sensitivity, or whether it's for single readers to find a new relationship in their life, let's attempt this manhwa.

When I saw author Kim Hyun (full name Kim Hyun Joo) serializing the webtoon 'That Summer' on Comico, I thought it would be a BL work (BL is short for Boys Love). Before I even met with Author Kim, the questions I'd prepared were centered around “prejudice towards BL works” and “the future of the BL market”.

But, what in the world. I misunderstood the genre. I, myself, was trapped within “prejudice towards BL works”. Author Kim had defined 'That Summer' as 'Academy Growth'. And so as the kids grew up, the person they could love might be a boy or girl, but I'd assumed that due to the webtoon's introduction, this manhwa would be a BL work about two boys that loved each other. This interview started off with a KO for me.

I met Author Kim in a Seoul Hongdae coffee shop this past July. 'That Summer' was Author Kim's debut work. Using the webtoon platform 'Comico' that was managed by NHN Entertainment, she serialized this story in Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese. In Taiwan, it ranked 1st place as the Popular Manhwa of the Week. It's also scheduled to by translated into Spanish so that it can be serialized in Mexico.

Before her debut, she attended a manhwa school in Japan and then worked as an assistant in a manhwa publishing company. Learning manhwa in Japan and then debuting a webtoon in Korea is a unique career. At the end of that month, 3 versions of 'That Summer' began to serialize simultaneously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. I heard more about the Korean and Japanese manhwa marketplace, the recent pure love genre trend, and the webtoon platform from Author Kim.

Q: At first, I thought 'That Summer' was a BL genre.

A: I don't think my manhwa's genre is BL. The main character is a girl. I'm drawing that girl coincidentally meeting a boy and the events that ensue as a result of their lives getting intertwined. But if I restrict the genre by saying whether or not it's BL, this story's ending will already be determined. Rather, this manhwa's composition uses BL as a device. I don't specifically classify this manhwa into a genre, and draw it so that anyone can enjoy it as they read.

Q: I heard that you studied manhwa in Japan.

A: After I majored in History, I went to Japan. I wanted to draw manhwa, but they didn't have that major in Korea. Me going to Japan was also influenced by my parents, who said, “If you're going to draw manhwa, it might be better if you went and studied in a different culture so that you can bring something to life in a way only you can do.”

While studying at a Japanese manhwa school, I helped out various publishing companies, producing short manuscripts and working as an assistant. I worked at an advertisement design company after graduating, and even after returning [to Korea], I continued to help out by outsourcing work.

Q: How did you debut, and what was your reason for choosing Comico as your debut platform?

A: I studied while preparing my webtoon. During that time, someone I knew was serializing a work on Comico. That friend introduced me to Comico. They said to submit something. When I tried, I found that it fit well with me. Because Comico was based in Japan, I thought it would be easier for me expand globally while I serialized on this platform. The site itself also gave off a stable feeling for all ages, and I thought that the target demographic for my manhwa—middle school and high school students—would be able to read the story well.

Q: Do people who are preparing a webtoon all gather and study together? If so, I'm curious to know if you all evaluate each other's manhwa.

A: We all gather in a sort of study room in a place like an Internet cafe. If you're preparing a webtoon by yourself, it's hard to get motivation, so we meet up and exchange information. However, we don't give evaluations on each other's manhwa. We all have different styles so we're careful on that aspect. The important thing about these study sessions is that since new candidates don't have a lot of information, we share what we know and show them our drawings.

Q: Is there something about Comico that differentiates them from other platforms?

A: The author also plays the role of PD. The editors that work with the platform don't touch the manuscript. They're different in that they leave 100% of the writing to the author.

Q: What does if mean when you say the author also becomes the PD (editor)?

A: Personally, I think that it's a relief. It's right for me. With other platforms, they have meetings about the content, and if it feels lacking to them, they even suggest guidelines. They might even modify the manuscript. But there are also people prefer this. Even though I occasionally think that maybe I do need that kind of guidance, I still believe that having no one touch it [the manuscript] gives me more freedom and lets me tell the story I want to tell. I think that's a strength that only Comico has.

Q: I originally thought your manhwa was a BL. Even more so because recently, BL has been very popular. What do you think is a main factor for BL's popularity?

A: Who knows, it's usually been very popular. I personally think that because people can't see it (BL) much in reality, they pay money to see it instead. I wonder if maybe it's a sort of fantasy.

Q: So, what is the message of 'That Summer'?

A: I don't know yet. I think I'll know once they story's complete. Starting this month, I'll resume serializing Season 3. I had Season 2 focus on the story of the male character's past. In Season 3, we'll go back to the female character's story in the present time. It's the climax. It's the stage where you still don't know who's going to connect with who. I have to develop the story again.

Q: Out of all the genres, is there a reason why you tagged this manhwa as 'pure love'?

A: Maybe because of the part of me that wants a relationship (laughs). I don’t know if female middle and high schoolers are like me, but ever since I was young, I've had many illusions about it (dating and relationships). Back then, I wrote a lot of novels. I think that has been the foundation. If you look at my manhwa, I write a lot using the distance in a female middle schooler/high schooler's life and the background of places like alleys.

Q: Personally, I have lots of memories of 'pure love' manhwa during the 1990's and 2000's. Hwang Mi Na, Lee Mi Ra, Lee Eun Hye, and Won Soo Young were all in their prime. Is there any difference between today's 'pure love' manhwa and those from the past?

A: The style between the 1990's 'pure love' manhwa and today's are very different. Personally, those 'pure love' manhwa felt like reading a novel. One page will have long words like a prose poem. That was its charm. Maybe I should say that method was poetic.

Q: What do you think the trends are lately?

A: Right now, not with just 'pure love' manhwa but overall, it's working to convey emotions deeply. In the past, there were stories on a large scale, but lately—even though it's on a more integrated scale—there are many ways to deeply convey emotions. This also works well with webtoons and gets a good response from the readers.

Q: What are some ways to deeply convey emotions?

A: Rather than the character description, there's more focus on the emotion. If webtoons were an example, I might say it has 'visual beauty'. And also, it's colored. Compared to older manhwa, it's possible to direct a more dynamic feeling. You can even give off the feeling of an animation still cut. In the past, it wasn't possible because you were limited to paper, but scrolling is infinite in a way. So it's possible to focus more on conveying emotion. The methods to find a direction has become more diverse, and if we use those tools to properly convey those emotions, it's easier (for the readers) to understand the character.

Q: Let's talk about Japan. What do you think about the Japanese market?

A: (Coming from the position of a rookie manhwa artist), I like it. There are many paths. I think that depending on your effort, if you have the skill/capacity, then it's definitely possible to debut.

Q: But then why did you debut in Korea?

A: While drawing 'pure love' manhwa, I realized there are lots of subtle emotions that need to be conveyed. If I hadn't lived in that country [Japan], it would've been difficult for me to touch upon that kind of stuff. If I were to serialize in Japan, I'd have to think in terms of Japanese, and I thought it would be better for me to work in Korea in terms of that aspect.

Q: Seeing as how 'That Summer' is popular in Japan, doesn't that mean Japanese people are also getting that emotion from the story?

A: Comico has a specialized Japanese editing department. So they translate it properly so that it fits with the emotions of Japanese readers. (*According to Comico's explanation, NHN Entertainment has local teams that are in charge of translating. These teams are 'specialized local teams' that have been working with 'Hangame' [a popular South Korean online game portal operated by NHN] since they've started to spread globally. In order to better suit the country it's being translated in, they will sometimes change the color or background a bit as well.)

Q: Was there an opportunity that had you switching from preparing a manhwa publication to webtoons instead?

A: There's a manhwa producing program called '*Clip Studio'. If I didn't have that, I wouldn't have been able to do webtoons. Clip Studio's a computer program, but it's similar to Photoshop. Lately, I think all authors are using this program. It's an optimal program for drawing manhwa, and since you don't need a lot of assistants to help, it's also optimized for one person. It also lets me create works quickly.

(*Clip Studio was originally a program designed for works in animation and games. Recently, as more webtoons began to appear on the market, it has been modified to be used for them. In Japan, it's been so acknowledged that it even has its own Clip Studio page on Comico.)

Q: Do you read a lot of the comments [on your story]?

A: I do. I try hard to read only the good comments so that I don't get my feelings hurt (laughs). I even think about the comments before I go to sleep. When things get difficult while drawing the manhwa, thinking about the comments really help me.

Q: Does that mean you like it more when there are comments?

A: I definitely think it's good when there are comments. From a reader's standpoint, I think it's a way for me to sympathize/identify with how they view the story.

Q: Is there another manhwa that you want to draw in the future?

A: The genre will continue to be Romance. 'Pure love' is a pillar that cannot be shaken by me. It's brighter than the serious stories that are told in a long breath, and I think that even while drawing, telling a light story fits well with me. Even if I were to draw a period [historical] work (with 'pure love' as the groundwork), it would still be a period work.

#'telling a light story'#you really saying TS is 'telling a light story'#author-nim i have emotional PTSD #i'm shook #that summer #interview

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outercrasis · 3 years ago

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Fic Writer Review Thank you for the tag @moonlight-prose 🥰️

1. How many works do you have on Tumblr?

I counted based on my masterlist, so 14. But there's a couple series in there and there's drabbles, etc. So idk the real count lol

2. What are your top 5 fics by notes?

Interruption (Frankie Morales x Reader x Max Phillips)

Maybe It's a Sign (Modern!Din Djarin x Reader)

On His Knees (Max Phillips x Reader)

Sessions (College!Din Djarin x Reader)

Bonded (Max Phillips x OFC Prudence Walker)

3. What’s your total Tumblr word count?

How would I even count that?? My A03 count is 90,902 though

4. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Absolutely!! I love love love seeing people's reactions to my fics, so the chance to thank people for not only reading but taking the time to comment? I'm not passing that up. Plus sometimes you can throw in a little tease for the future and it's always fun seeing who catches those.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Most of my fics have happy endings, so I'll just choose what I think of as The Happiest and that's either Maybe It's a Sign or Moonlit Kisses

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

That award goes straight to Transfixed

7. Do you write crossovers?

Like what level of crossover? Because characters, yes, and complete fandoms I would if it was the right fit

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not that I know of...

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Hahaha yes. And as far as the kind.... uuuhhh whatever I find hot I guess? Idk we've got a lot of repression packed into this lil baby *taps my own head* so writing smut has actually helped me relieve a lot of feelings of guilt that I can attach to sex.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Also not that I know of.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope!

12. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

My classic go-tos are James & Lily or Harry & Ginny from Harry Potter, but ya know anything involving myself and a hot dude (or maybe lady) works too

13. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Ooof too many to count? Idk I feel like I have a thousand google docs with like just an idea or like, two sentences written in them. Oops

14. What are your writing strengths?

I think my writing is really clear. I never want to leave a reader guessing about what's going on (unless that's intentional) so managing that without being obtuse is something I've worked hard at. I also really like my dialogue.

15. What are your writing weaknesses?

I struggle with descriptions. Know that at any point in my fics where a location or a person is being described that I have agonized over every last word.

16. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I don't see a problem with it. I think some things can be figured out through context, but if you start writing whole sentences in another language when you know your target audience reads in another providing translations somewhere (in the fic or at the end) can be nice. Also if you don't know a language very well please do your homework and make sure you've written it correctly, there are many many resources out there.

17. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Harry Potter bb

18. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I literally cannot choose between my babies Sessions and Bonded. Both of them mean the world to me for entirely different reasons, but I'm very proud of them both!!

No pressure tags: @radiowallet @honestly-shite @castleamc @wordsnwhiskey @just-here-for-the-moment @beskarberry

Fic Writer Review

Thank you for the tags @captn-andor & @queenofthefaceless!

No pressure tags at all!: @mandocrasis @luxurybeskar @caesaryoulater @honeyloverogers @samwilsons-pillowpecs @fromthedeskoftheraven @keeper0fthestars @rae-gar-targaryen @agirllovespancakes

1. How many works do you have on Tumblr?

Total?? Uh.... 26 for the star wars blog and I'm going to say like higher than 50 maybe for the main. (i have too many masterlists to count).

2. What are your top 5 fics by notes?

Innocent Kissing (Bucky Barnes x fem!reader)

Dirty Little Secret (Bucky Barnes x fem!reader)

Pleasure Is A Kind Of Pain (President Loki x fem!reader)

Trouble (Bucky Barnes x fem!reader)

Black Velvet (1980s!Din Djarin x fem!reader)

3. What’s your total Tumblr word count?

I have no idea but my ao3 one is 267,017. Since not everything is there I'm going to say Tumblr is a lot higher.

4. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Absolutely!! I love seeing people's thoughts on what I write and especially love to interact with them. They make my whole year honestly and I re-read them often when I need something to cheer me up. I do my best to get to all of them, but some I don't see.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

This one I honestly don't know. I'd have to say either Winter Lover which was a Loki fic I wrote for the holiday season last year or my Shattered series from last year with Poe. I'm sure there's others, but I can't remember.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Pull up a chair cause this will take awhile. There's the 40s Steve Rogers fic Muse which has a heart wrenching ending. Siempre with Joaquín Torres that is still fluffy but doesn't end happily. When I Grow Too Old To Dream with 40s Bucky (another painful story) as well as Lover's Sighs with Bucky too. I'm also not being so nice lately with my Black Velvet series. I am unable to not write angst honestly.

7. Do you write crossovers?

Once. A short drabble with Javi and Ezra called Find Me In The Meadow. My Black Velvet series is also a crossover of some of the different eras of star wars.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

1000000000%. My blog is filth based with some heartbreak thrown in for spice. If I'm doing smut it's as dirty as I can get without feeling uncomfortable. Kinks are added, but again it's based on my comfort level as the writer so I don't go into dark themes and such.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope.

12. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

I'm a big lover of SamBucky (they are hero husbands in my mind), Jamie and Claire, Finn and Poe (it was a romance). There's so many more that I forgot.

13. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

So many sadly. A series called Champagne Tears with Steve Rogers. Another series with The Thief from Pedro's commercial called Wicked Games and a Sam Wilson series Storm Of Love And War. All lost inspo and motivation for them sadly.

14. What are your writing strengths?

Feelings and description. I could write about them all day long which is probably why some of my works reach past 10k.

15. What are your writing weaknesses?

Dialogue maybe. I find it difficult to throw in, especially during a smut scene. Don't exactly know what you're supposed to say in that situation so I improvise to the best of my ability.

16. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I think it's great if you want to include it! But make sure to triple check and see if what you want to say is actually what you're saying and that it makes sense. Translators are okay (not always accurate), but if you know someone who speaks the language and can help then definitely ask them.

17. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Marvel and I'm still here.

18. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Without a doubt Black Velvet. I've put so much into that series that it's my baby. The fact that people choose to read it still shocks me to this day. I also have tons of love for Siempre. It's a fic that's extremely near and dear to my heart, because I didn't originally write it to be posted, I just wrote it for myself.

#tag game #long post #i love witch aunt

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years ago

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SWAT SIGHT: An Interview with Nasim Luczaj

In this interview, Glasgow-based writer, dj and multidisciplinary artist Nasim Luczaj talks to SPAM editor Maria Sledmere about her recent publication, SWAT SIGHT: a hybrid essay and artist’s book that weaves modalities of lyric, photography and online dialogue to explore Luczaj’s experience of aphantasia and its implications for aesthetics, perception and philosophical enquiry.

Can you explain what aphantasia is, and how did you discover this was something you experienced?

Aphantasia is the inability to form mental imagery. To have aphantasia is to not be able to ‘see in your head’ – not the characters of a book you are reading, not the faces of your loved ones, not a random object you’ve been asked to visualise, not the sheep you may or may not be counting. It seems there is a spectrum in people’s ability to do any of these things. Roughly, those without it have aphantasia, while those who are extremely good at visualising have hyperphantasia. Most people fall somewhere in between. I get something imagelike appear when I’m falling asleep or really really tired, and once in my life I visualised while reading (about the Quidditch World Cup – I saw Viktor Krum flying about the stadium!) – but I had a fever at the time and as soon as I noticed what was going on and got excited about it, I was unable to keep the imaging up. I think I mentioned my imageless way of reading to a friend, probably one of the times we were watching a film (again, probably Harry Potter) and she complained that the character doesn’t look like they’re ‘supposed to’. What did they mean, supposed to? I remember talking to them, shocked at how they claimed to have something like a film unfolding in their head. They were as shocked as I was to find that I didn’t have one, especially since I was a full-on bookworm, and they didn’t understand why I’d ever want to read if it wasn’t a filmlike experience (guess what: I was reading for the words!). I accepted these differences and didn’t think too much about which of us was normal, or whether either of us were not. Then, a couple of years ago, another friend discovered the term and asked me whether I have it – reading my work gave her the feeling I might. I started reading and found out what I have is a rare disorder. I’m still not so sure it is. I don’t think the samples studied so far are big enough for us to come to that kind of conclusion.

Maybe a cheeky question, but what does the SWAT in the title stand for?

Swatting sight is partly a play on catching sight. I can’t do justice to what sight is but trust that I’ve caught something, an angle, a thing among many. It’s also a bit like ‘shot’ in ‘screenshot’ (at first the title was actually going to be SIGHT SWAT), but ‘swat’ is more organic, and invokes a kind of slaughtering of something that’s necessary in order to study it. I wanted a title that sounded nice, compact, yet violent nevertheless, because as I wrote I became aware I was feeling angry at the misjustice being done to people who are called abnormal or disordered without careful consideration. Only writing fully enabled the sensation to emerge out of a plethora of ambivalent strands to my experience. And then the insect-connotations of swatting work nicely with one of the central metaphors I consider in the work, that is, Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box. I guess all of the above considerations, the rational reasons, were hovering somewhere in the background of my choice, but here’s a short and honest answer: it just came to me once I got to the I-need-a-title-stage. And I felt it fit, although – bad pun – I hadn’t seen it coming.

I’m interested in the mode of address that opens SWAT SIGHT, which features a sequence of questions. It’s unclear whether the speaker is speaking to the reader, or having a dialogue with herself. So many times in your poetry I get to a point where I think I know what’s happening, but then a few lines come and totally throw me off my assumptions. It’s poetry that keeps you dancing through metaphysics, for sure. Can you talk a bit about how asking questions of yourself, of the world, of the reader, is a process or form of poetics for you—and perhaps to what end?

I guess I’ve always been inquisitive but have felt increasingly answerless. I love the questioning stage, and the addressal that it often entails, for its own sake. I’ve kind of given up on answers, I don’t trust them, don’t feel as comfortable in them as I do in the mode of questioning. What I want to be expressing, in perhaps every piece I ever write, is roughly: wow, all this exists and we don’t really know anything, or if we do we can’t confirm whether we do or fit it into a whole that would really be the whole thing. Answering has never seemed as doable, as satisfying to me, as asking. The best poems distil the poise of a question. It’s a shame questions are often rashly associated with despair.

You recently graduated with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy (congrats!), which I know included elements of creative writing. What do you see as the relation between the two, and how has each fed or diverged from the other?

I used both to access a kind of metaphysical vertigo of not knowing what the hell’s going on, as explained above. At first I approached the ‘content’ of this vertigo as a philosophical one. I think I’ve been able to address similar things to myself in a ‘creative’ way and in a ‘philosophical’ way, but I no longer believe that the hard work of philosophical answers is worth anything to me personally. I’m chasing a connection with a feeling partly composed of not accepting answers. I believe in attentiveness and possibilities for elaborate playfulness that do arise in philosophy and always appreciate willingness to take on difficult and deep questions. But I cannot feel devoted to this field, while I can be attentive, elaborately playful, and ‘deep’ through writing, I hope. It’s easier to find works of literature of this kind than philosophy that is honest about its inability to actually answer as much as it claims to.

Poetry seems a totally embodied thing for you, ‘a pinch in relation to the tongue’. Where do you see the body in your poems? Does poetry need more body?

I don’t see it anywhere, ha! But I try to be in the moment, and poetry can very much be the art of the moment, the linguistic equivalent of some alarming glimpse. I like how you can – though maybe not always should – read a poem in a short unit of time, one in which you have not yet disconnected from the physical motions that brought you to this page, because you haven’t and will not repeat it in quite the same way as when reading gripping prose. If something odd happens in the language, as I like it to, I want to be there to feel it ‘oddening’ the body, for it to all amount to a flash, an enacting of the gut that leaves space for me to feel all of these effects.

It strikes me that a lot of this book is about the possibilities of attunement, for instance: ‘a sense of the circuit run through / worldly activity’. What poets for you manage to supplement, enhance, expose or skew particular senses?

This is hard for me to answer. I read in quite a scattered way and try not to distinguish much between the senses, to read in undistinguished frenzy and love for what’s going on in the words without categorising what’s happening on a ‘sensual’ level. Without having any synesthetic tendencies whatsoever, I still struggle with things that are grouped into categories: 5 senses and then their subdomains, such as types of taste. I’m more than a little obsessed with how anything is partly something else, how things affect one another in a way that makes it unhelpful to present things as belonging to clear-cut types. So I don’t seem to fall into noticing what’s going on on the level of the 5 separate senses, but yes, some poetry and some work in other art forms have indeed enhanced and skewed and supplemented my perception, I think increasingly. They make me notice a word, an object, an emotion I may have neglected. I’ve recently been excited by Nasser Hussain’s airport poems. Hussain wrote a whole collection (SKY WRI TEI NGS) of poems written using only existing airport codes. I’m pretty sure I’m going to see the airport world through them for years to come. More than for a synesthetic image, that’s what I’m looking out for: works that change the structuring of my experience, that alter noticing, that leave me interested in some phenomenon.

This is probably the first poetry book I’ve seen (outside of SPAM!) that replicates the architectures of Facebook discussion, including groups, comment threads and private messages. Without quibbling over the term ‘post-internet’, what do you think happens when these kinds of archives are translated onto the printed page? I’m interested in your decision to reproduce the discussions as screenshots rather than, say, collage select quotes in a more traditional poem. What’s the importance of including the context, the avatars, the reactions?

The only one? That’s surprising! I remember wanting to write a detective novel in chatroom form as a child, and the reader would only have these online conversations to go by and figure the truth out (one of the messagers was guilty). Now I’m quite dedicated to my phone notes, in which I mainly write down dreams, funny things people say, and passing thoughts (without ever making note of which category a note belongs or who is its author). I proudly show them to people when we’re killing time. As they are one of the ways in which I feedback loop with my surroundings, one of the things that shape my cognition, I always wanted to use them in my work, and knew they belonged in SWAT SIGHT as soon as I decided to write it. Then I started messaging people about the fact I’m writing something and wanted to engage them somehow, so I ended up embedding what they say in their own words, partly because of how seriously I treat the beetle in the box problem. I thought that maybe you’ll understand what they’re telling me better than what I tell you they told me, even if you don’t know these people as the reader, and I (think!) I do. I’ll give you exactly what they said and what the context of the words were (by context I mean, in large part, the interface that always affects the way they say it), and you can have fun figuring it out or leave it if it’s not your thing. The chats, forums, websites are a habitat I’m in, the form of communication I am immersed in as I do my thinking, the way I arrive at knowledge, arrangements, humour. They have a massive effect on the way my mind and, I presume, your mind works, for better or for worse, and I want to convey that, even if the craft lies in what the disembodied, timeless-y voice has to say and how. As for screenshotting rather than quoting, I’m also really interested in signs I see in the streets and how they operate linguistically, but that’s also something I’d take a picture of and think of including in a text – something I’m rarely tempted to take out and play with without its context, the pole it’s fitted to, the road it’s next to, the weeds that grow at the bottom of it. The way things are framed is partly responsible for their juice. I really want people to communicate about this in whatever way that is natural to them – so giving this much space to the discussion is a way of counterbalancing the strength of the ‘literary’ voice, of saying: it’s equally important to use language in all sorts of other ways and places.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered within the aphantasia ‘community’ online?

Nothing, really. There’s a divide between people who are genuinely upset about not being able to visualise and those who are extremely affirmative of the way they are, but I expected as much.

I’d love to hear more about your decisions around the book’s design. What’s especially unique, of course, is the palimpsest effect whereby text printed on clear acetate is layered over content printed on white pages. As readers, we can lift the acetate with all its textual clutter to ‘cleaner’ pages underneath. I’m struck in particular with the page of Aphantasia Awareness Group content, lifted to reveal a short passage underneath: ‘research on aphantasia is sparse. my looking into it decorated with a pang. […] what keeps me out and makes me look like this is apparently a lack’. Can you talk a bit more about this lack and how it relates to the play between white space, acetate, page and text?

The lack I’m mostly on about here is a lack of seeing – and then of course there’s a play there. On another page, one full of messages, thanks to the lack in the acetate page I can see the text on paper (as ‘i hope for darkness’ in the passage itself). I can tell myself that I’m missing something, that I don’t have an ability, but it’s not like someone cutting the content of a text box – it’s a reshuffling and change of the relationship of everything else that is giving me this different outcome, and to think of myself as ‘deficient’ is not to think about my cognition as play. Quirks are, to an extent, enabling. The form mimics this. Also emptiness can be good, so I wanted places where a condition for arriving at some sentence is the empty space that allows it to be seen. Sometimes I imagine daydreaming as if it were a film, which apparently people do, and I wonder how that would affect my peace of mind, my mental clutter, my voice. You know the truism: less is more. It’s unverifiable what I’d be up to if my mental processes were different, but I have a feeling that I am gifted with a space that could have been cluttered beyond my control.

I’m also interested in how the book’s design goes some way to dramatising Marshall McLuhan’s point about us directing towards acoustic civilisation, as you put it, civilisation ‘infused with simultaneity’. Lifting a page is a bit like opening or closing a window, and the size of the book replicates that sense of screen. Sometimes light catches the plastic acetate and I’m tricked into thinking someone’s left their iPad on my desk. I also think of screening as in brain-scan. What is the work of ‘screening’ in poetry?

I’ve mentioned this already, but what I like about poetry is containment. I often encounter longer poems with confusion and laziness, at first, which ceases if the work is still at the pitch/intensity of a shorter poem, except, hurrah, longer (as is the work of Anne Carson). Good poetry brings me straight into a space of simultaneity. It gets at something that’s both a detail and sort of everything at once. It makes you look at everything like that. Screening is also a kind of framing. You need something brisk to catch and then place just right on the screen, let it replay.

In a message you include to your mum, you write ‘aphantasia is horizontal again but with a margin that makes it a different kind of rectangle’. For me this speaks, quite beautifully, to the book as a whole. What or where is your sense of geometry in writing, and how does this relate to aphantasia and maybe even the structure of the book?

I love flippability. And maybe it’s in poetry that I get to have a sense of order I’m probably lacking elsewhere. But then most poems are like something that intended to be rectangular and then persists in trailing off. Of course there are all sorts of ways of trailing, many of them elegant. Here I wasn’t really writing poems, but a piece that was self-consciously scattered. Intuitively I picked up the shapes, the widths for each part. Maybe I use a similar intuition to drive and park my car – if you asked me, I’m not actually sure how much or what sort of space I have, I can’t see it, but I can do what I have to do just right. The shapes make or dictate themselves in a similar way.

In being orientated landscape, SWAT SIGHT also has the satisfying feel of a guestbook or ledger. Which feels appropriate, given that you include song lyrics, text conversations, comments, quotes and cross-references from philosophy, poetry (even William Blake is in there!) and what looks like Yahoo! Answers. I see SWAT SIGHT as a kind of experimental archive, or revisionist provocation of the-archive-as-such in the time of social media alongside the ‘traditional’ book. I think within this what you’ve done is quite remarkable: established a vernacular compendium of feedback, testimony and reflection on a condition that is not only rarely heard of but seems (at least until very recently) also to lack research or medical recognition. Do you see SWAT SIGHT as a counter-text to this discursive absence? Who should be reading this book?

Yeah, I guess it’s a form of affirmation – I want to encourage conversation about aphantasia in any way possible, and all sorts seem fit. But I need fun. I need to draw attention in some other way than linking to a BBC article on Facebook, which really doesn’t feel like engagement. I guess I’m also implying: I’m engaged with my environment and its diversity of mediums/registers, even of matter (different kinds of pages, B/W and colour images, shots from classic cinema, scans of my clothes and of plants, memes), as I seek to be engaged with people and their diverse ways of functioning. People work in mysterious ways, like poems – they might ‘work’ for you and one could assume that means there’s something similar about you, you could be part of one book. But it turns out you’re doing (even similar) things really really differently. I want to get some kind of rush from that. As for who should read it – whoever also might get a rush from what I give them.

In this discussion around the book’s holding together of analogue and digital, I was reminded of visual snow: a neurological ‘disorder’ characterised by continuous visual disturbance, often described as miniscule dots that flicker like the noise of a detuned analogue telly. It’s interesting how these conditions ‘glitch’ or interrupt the representations of visual perfection or clarity which culture and technology pushes towards with retina displays, Blu-ray etc. I wonder if you’d come across any other under-studied neurological conditions (especially those of the senses) in your research? Are there any famous poets or musicians who’ve ‘come out’ as aphantasic?

No - I guess that’s the problem with the under-studied! There’s Aldous Huxley, whom I quote in the book. My mum is also an aphantasiac poet. It’s more of a thing that visual artists tend to ‘come out’ with, because it can be counterintuitive and shocking. The conversation comes more naturally than in the case of writing, which doesn’t seem necessarily tied to any traditional sense (one kind of archetypical writer is cut off from the sensual world in a dusty study with just enough lamplight to keep to their lines). An interesting example in the visual domain has resurfaced recently, via the BBC. One of Disney’s most important animators had aphantasia, while his collaborator who worked the identical job was on the opposite end of the visualising spectrum.

Is neurodivergent poetics a term you recognise or identify with? Do you think we’re moving towards recognising the role of neuroscience more in understanding poetry as also a kind of cognitive manifestation or aesthetics?

I’ve never looked into it much. What I’ve been coming to terms with is how much of what I’d consider normal might be identified as ‘divergent’ – it’s interesting that different people might have differing tendencies here, some to distinguish differences and others to widen what the norm might be. I am interested in making people pay attention to difference and to question whether there is not so much of it that it collapses back into a kind of sameness. I guess that’s my poetics. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘cognitive aesthetics’, but the term sparked a thought in me: people find very different kinds of poetry (if any) pleasing, and I wonder about the neurological basis of this. How does a combination of words ‘hit the spot’? If language can get to our emotions even when it’s not someone we are closed to addressing themselves to us specifically, it must do so on the basis of connections that will vary from person to person, and are to do with a multitude of factors, maybe even a kind of genetic memory for the ways their ancestors used language. There’s certainly a lot to investigate and, at the same time, a lot that will resist investigation.

I’m struck by the book’s illumined confusion of paratextual, marginalia, annotation, footnotes or poetic content. At the same time, there’s often a lyric voice weaving through, synthesising things, moving between exemplary media, linking anecdote with theory. There’s a drive towards turning the page, even as each page is also a ‘field’ in its own right. So in a sense I’d say SWAT SIGHT is maybe actually a lyric essay remixed with its paratextual materials. An essay that stages its own research process? What’s the value in this ‘transparency’, did any particular text inspire you to take that risk of reflexivity and assemblage?

Yeah, that’s what I’d say it is. I wanted to write a lyric essay and wasn’t sure how to start. As soon as I did, the voice started pushing me. It had a lot to say and I think it still does. To me of course the voice is the most important part, it’s most akin to my ‘core’ that all the rest branches from, is light that my leaves pick up and comes back to the trunk. But as for all the staging – my voice does that. Another thing I wanted to stage was my need for props, my love for images, designs, the ways of working of different websites, which I find inextricable from my lack of ‘invention’. I look at things out there, I get excited about things out there, and what’s going on in my head is either a tic, or something not quite surfaced, or, at best, that voice of the lyric essay. So the book ends up being my mental process and the world that it takes from, that it reacts to, that it is shocked and moved by and tries, in turn, to shock and move (more feedback loop!).

The whole book, of course, is about ‘vision’. I found that line, ‘to have a song stuck in your head, for some reason, is harder to treat as a metaphor than an image being stuck. […] rain on the trees as jewels. I couldn’t, I can’t’, really emotional. Throughout SWAT SIGHT, you recalibrate what ‘imagination’ is -- in both form and content. How can poetry intervene in what we consider ‘sight’, to be less ocular-centric? Do we need new tropes and metaphors, or more a kind of visual refusal?

I love the phrase ‘visual refusal’! It’s right up my street and I don’t think it’s occurred to me before. Poetry brings awareness to language, and so an awareness of the baggage, the loadedness of any word. If sight has to be visual, and we have words like ‘foresight’, that does subtly hint at how we imagine the future. So maybe we can work on other terms. But I think what is best to do is to remind yourself of your other senses and how much it means to you to smell/taste/hear/feel/pull something sensual from the world, categorised or not. If you pay attention to that, you’ll write differently, thus enhancing others’ attention to those things.

But as you put it, ‘no-one’s looked in anyone else’s box. language doesn’t quite do inner life’. We can’t expect SWAT SIGHT to provide an actual snapshot of the aphantasic experience, any more than we can expect reading Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to somehow allow us to comprehensively ‘enter’ an autistic mind. I think the fact that you weave personal perspective alongside many other voices and representations (including an art exhibition) makes that clear. I’m interested, then, in what you might want readers to take away from this book in terms of empathy, awareness but also potentially recalibrating their own neurological sensitivities?

I would like us all to be aware of unnamed, unsaid, unprovable diversity. To approach it as a gift, with childish glee, and to know that it cannot be unwrapped. To ask each other questions and listen in to the way we describe each other’s mental processes, and to be aware of the fact that even when we think we agree or disagree there aren’t ‘samples’ of experience we can put next to each other to confirm or disconfirm anything. Also to be aware of the fact that our culture is skewed towards the visual, that it privileges it partly arbitrarily.

Can you talk about the images you chose for SWAT SIGHT, which include a lovely full-colour photo of you lying on a bed of coastal heather, as well as many representations of abstracted or glitched scenes/textures which must’ve taken a toll on your printer’s black ink cartridge. How do you see the relationship between image and text in this work, and are there any other writers who use images in an interesting way who you might’ve taken inspiration from?

The glitchy toner-heavy images are scanned objects from around my room – a top, a leaf, a headline, a daffodil. I really enjoyed their textures, the kind of nightscape of a piece of fabric that barely stands out of the uniform black. I’d achieve the glitches by moving the objects around while they were being scanned just the right amount, at the right time. I was intentionally confusing the printer but not quite in control either. It was both a hectic and repetitive process. It had in it excitement and tediousness – like writing. The images show the world as processed by a kind of system – a printer – thus running parallel to my verbal processing.

In SWAT SIGHT, the relationship between image and text is of course crucial. At first, I was tempted to completely do away with seeing, adornment – to have a kind of unity between sign and signified. Then I started adding the black scanned images as something along the lines of, but never really, illustrations. As soon as I did that, I started craving contrast and thought, to hell with that, I love the visual world and don’t want to be misunderstood as someone who doesn’t, just because I’m making a kind of cultural critique of vision-centricity. I am engaged in the visual world, and this lack of ‘inner’ will not take it away from me, and it does work for my way of perceiving the world, too. The images dispel inner and outer.

I really like W. G. Sebald’s use of photographs as strange hinges on oneiric texts. They complicate the voice by putting pressure on the distance we make for speaker from author, without ever allowing us to identify that voice with the author.

You also run a radio show for subcity, [underthunder]. Can you talk about the ethos behind the show. How important is music to your writing process, and do you think your experience of music has changed or intensified since you recognise your (visual) aphantasia?

At some point I realised that I love contrasting interactions between tones, mediums, textures. I like profound-grumpy-metaphysical things being read out loud and I also like ‘tribal’ energy. I was once editing a poem while listening to some Detroit techno and it struck me that these two things really fit together, that the words are energised, driven, dipped in densely and magnetically. I became increasingly curious about how best to combine these and whether others do it. I started paying attention to uses of language in electronic music, where words have diverse but recognisable, categorisable roles, but are not what you’d call ‘lyrics’. Now my experience of music is changing and intensifying by the day. This happened partly through that discovery, and so through poetry. I felt that it gave me an entry point into music, because I knew I was good at words and started copy-pasting them into other people’s tracks – otherwise I would never have felt entitled to ‘touch’ music. I always feel a bit guilty when I do that copy-pasting, a tad unsatisfied, hungry for something I’ve made from scratch. I’ve not got there at all yet, but it’s poetry that got me to focus on music in its own right. And my being drawn to poetry must stand in some relationship to aphantasia. I think I’m more at ease with oddness, a kind of casual surrealism, because of it, and that’s what often keeps my work going. When I feel I’ve written something good, it’s always because I’ve flexed the world without some specific message or thing in mind.

You write that ‘bliss’ is ‘a current […] i obsess over’. Your website says you are ‘here to make bliss’. What does bliss mean to you, or better still, what’s giving you bliss right now?

I just love the word. I think I fell in love about two years ago, and I’m not sure how, but it happened to me and my mum more or less simultaneously. She also puts that word everywhere; although I don’t know what’s in anyone’s box, including I think the most similar box to mine in this world, it does feel like a shared entity. Bliss is a short word that echoes out, like most poems – present, compact, extending its arm to everyone. A really small thing giving everything else a hug. And it seems like a half-place, a spacious state, not something like ‘joy’ which is much more identifiable with the springing up of some happy hormone, much more bound up with a person and nothing else. ‘Bliss’ is halfway between ‘joy’ and ‘paradise’. It’s something you can have next to you, or visit, or, as my mum says, ‘plug into’.

What’s giving me bliss now? Apricots, speeding tracks up as I DJ, ferry red.

Anything else you’d like to say about the publication, or what you’re currently working on?

I’m working on how to have a lot of time + space. Then full-blown bliss is gonna move in and we’ll split the bills.

SWAT SIGHT is out now. To order a copy, drop an email to nasimluczaj[at]gmail.com.

Images by Nasim Luczaj and Maria Sledmere, all taken from the publication.

Published 8/9/19

#interview #poetry #poetry interview #Nasim Luczaj #Maria Sledmere #SPAM poetry #bliss #poetry conversations #dj #music #aphantasia #neurodivergent #poetics #lyric essay #SWAT SIGHT

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academiablogs · 8 years ago

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Book Reviews as Blind Dates—Not Diary Entries

(Image source) The great (but largely forgotten) composer Max Reger (1873-1916) received more than his share of bad reviews. After reading a nasty review of his Sinfonietta, he wrote the following response to the critic in question: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me!” This little witticism reflects the pose that many artists adopt—a pose that is only skin deep. For even if you toss the review behind you, or into a convenient trash can, the words don’t go away. A bad review is a bad review forever, haunting the writer, or composer, or artist with the thought that he/she simply isn’t good enough; that he/she really doesn’t have any talent, and that the critic has seen through his/her facade to the ‘real’ man or woman beneath the mask. We’ve all heard the saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Clearly these words were not written by an author—or anyone remotely involved with the creative arts. Reger, or someone much closer to their art, might have revised this to read, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will cut my throat!”

If reviews were bad in the early 20th century, imagine what Reger and his contemporaries would have thought of our modern review culture, where anyone, qualified or not, can dash off a review and publish it for all to see. Indeed, Reger only had to face a handful of critics who were carefully cultivated to pass judgment on the arts. For all their flaws—and they were just as biased as the rest of us—they at least understood the history, traditions, and genres in question. They were, in a word, experts. But the 21st century review isn’t necessarily an expert; while some are aficionados of a given author or field, most are just casual readers, haphazardly encountering a book and all-too-often disappointed. The most common one or two-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads often reveal this kind or reader, complaining that a book is “too slow,” or “not the kind of book I like reading!” Even worse are the reviews that read “Seller shipped me the wrong book” or “came later than expected!” Not the kind of review Reger had to deal with, I imagine.

So what is the purpose of a review by the common reader, one who isn’t necessarily an expert, but wants to share his or her impressions of a just-read book? For most readers, reviews are like traffic signs: they tell you whether to proceed, or to proceed with caution; whether to yield or to stop altogether. Seeing a book with 500+ positive reviews might be the very thing that gets you to click the ‘buy’ button. Likewise, a book with word-of-mouth but only a handful of reviews, and some of them negative, could drop it in a wish list but little else. In short, reviews are designed on the internet to be skimmable or—ironically for books—not even read at all. Often, the title says it all: “Great Debut!” or “Great Plot, Disappointing Characters” or even “How Did This Get Published?” On Goodreads, many readers simply award the book in question a handful of stars and race to the next book. Simple as that.

(They are busy readers, after all, judging from memes like this.) However, books are rarely that simple. Most people who write reviews do so for a specific reason: either the book pissed them off, or they loved it so desperately that they want to start a new religion. Books then become extremely personal diatribes that are so wrapped up in the reader’s experience that it can be hard to discern the actual book. This is the problem I find in my own literature classes in college: students place themselves before the book; that is, they try to imagine themselves as the main character, and failing that, they often reject the book entirely. While it’s always exciting when a student finds themselves in a book—and much less so when they don’t—this isn’t the best place to start a review. Why? For the simple reason that it becomes almost impossible to write an objective, analytical review when you begin with yourself.

Uh-oh, analytical! Sounds like the early 20th century critic that trashed Reger. However, even though today’s reviews tend to be more off-the-cuff, anyone can be analytical without much effort. After all, a review, by it’s very definition, suggests an analysis. Not a personal response, and not a diary entry, but a slight unpacking of how the book affects readers—the very mechanics of the prose (or poetry) itself. The great failing of most reviews is that the reviewer never gets to why the book is great or terrible, but simply states that it is. Take, for example, an excerpt from a typical 2-star review of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine on Goodreads:

“ It was sooooooooooooooooo long and drawn out, with so many descriptions and so many needless details that my advanced future brain just wandered off in search of shiny things. “

Is this a review of the book or a review of the reviewer’s attention span? It’s hard to imagine a book that is barely 100 pages being “sooooooooooooooooo long and drawn out,” and full of “needless details.” Couldn’t the same be said of the average Brandon Sanderson novel (clocking in at 1,000+ pages)? Does this reviewer even enjoy reading books—or does he/she prefer playing with “shiny things?” After reading it, I know next to nothing about The Time Machine other than the reader didn’t like it and found it a tiresome read. But the question remains, why? Why were the details “needless”? Would I find it long and drawn out, or is the reviewer simply new to late 19th century novels or British literature in general? Maybe he/she hates science fiction and would respond the same way to a novelization of Rogue One?

In my classes, I encourage students to practice the art of close reading. This means training yourself to avoid saying what you feel before you explain why it made you feel this way. A literary scholar has to analyze the actual words to understand how an author creates plot and characterization. Novels don’t write themselves, after all, and each word, each sentence, and each paragraph is a wrestling match between the author and the English language (and if a translation, the wrestling becomes even more furious!). While a casual reviewer on Goodreads certainly doesn’t have to see him or herself as a literary scholar, they should consider what it means to read a book. For a book isn’t the same for each reader, and in essence, we all read a different book (which is what makes literature live beyond the moment of publication—and in some cases, over a thousand years).

Consider it like a blind date: some go smashingly, and you’re up all night talking and flirting. Others don’t even make it past appetizers. But if you went home and explained this date to your best friend, he/she would want details: why was it so wonderful or boring? What did your date say? What jokes? What details about his or her personal life? And what did you say in return? For example, a play I enjoy teaching to undergraduates is Shakespeare’s early, gory, and completely ludicrous play, Titus Andronicus. For those readers expecting a prim and proper masterpiece, step aside; the play is quite messy and borderline disgusting, though it still betrays Shakespeare’s trademark wit and language. To help students see the irreverent humor in the piece, which is always making fun of itself, I might point out the following passage spoken by the “villain” of the piece, Aaron the Moor:

“Then, Aaron, arm thy heart and fit thy thoughts

To mount aloft with thy imperial mistress,

And mount her pitch whom thou in triumph long

Hast prisoner held, fettered in amorous chains.”

Here, the meaning is less in what he is saying than how he says it. Note how he uses the word “mount” in this passage: he wants to “mount” the tops of power and love with his “imperial mistress” (Tamora, the captive Queen of the Goths), while at the same time “mounting her.” Yes, that means exactly what it sounds like: he wants to become powerful by shagging her. And he even says it foully: he wants to “mount her pitch,” meaning her field of play, her nether regions, her darkness. He’s also bragging here, noting that she has been a “prisoner” of his love, in “amorous chains” even longer than she’s been a prisoner of the Romans. What a guy, this Aaron!

While this kind of analysis might be exhaustive in a Goodreads or Amazon review, a little bit goes a long way. Help the reader learn something about how you read or experienced the book. Quote the language, let us ‘hear’ a specific passage and understand how the book plays into our ideas of language, or genre, or storytelling. Otherwise, we simply learn that you didn’t like a book and that it was “sooooooooooooo long.” And yet, I bet The Time Machine reads much quicker than such an uninspired and thoughtless review.

And one final note: in the case of living authors, thinking of him or her wanting to hear from living readers. What made you stay up into all hours of the night reading the book? Or what made you hurl it across the room? Have a conversation with the writer as if he or she is actually in the room with you. Tell them what worked, what might not have, and why you would—or wouldn’t—read this book again. Books continue to live for one reason alone: we keep talking about them. So continue the conversation in your review...the less you say, the less chance someone else might add their two cents to the discussion, and fall in love on their next ‘blind date.’

#amreading #amwriting #reviews #books #booklr #reviewers #bookish

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