#you know what? the writing ISN'T that fucking awful. its not perfect because no movie is ever fucking perfect and sometimes you

[bl00dh0rs3]

God. God. God. Holy fucking shit i love Avatar so fucking much

[bedlamsbard]

i will say—the whole "reaction shot roundup" thing that post is mentioning also just comes off as...relatively bad cinema. like, something you could make work if you were GOOD at it, but also something that a lot of people attempt to do without a lot of skill when they have too many cast members to effectively balance. YOU, on the other hand, do write in a cinematic fashion but you are so fucking good at it. the way you paint pictures in scenes and the way you build and release tension is just pitch perfect. it's tv/movie magic translated into a different medium at its finest

Aw, thank you. I mean, part of my reaction was definitely the bog-standard "this person is saying a thing that I COULD relate to so DOES it relate to me?" which I'm as susceptible to as the next "I am uncomfortable when we are not about me?" birb.

but also I genuinely think that this writer is talking about several different (though related) things and falling back on "it's television's fault!!!" instead of actually like. thinking about them. now I don't know what's going on in creative writing classrooms, I'm a history teacher (though I'm teaching 'how to write research papers' this semester and next semester), but I think these are just...normal "how to write fiction" problems. like the fact that OP isn't using any actual examples from published fiction makes it just sound like they have just noticed something so therefore it's A Problem And Those Darn Televisions And/Or Video Games Are At Fault.

there are very, very good pro writers who are very visual and very cinematic in multiple ways, which is not just about balancing reaction shots or pacing or stunning visuals. John Jackson Miller, who writes primarily tie-in novels, is really good at it. part of that is because he's also a comics writer, so he's used to thinking about things visually and how that translates to prose. (I know everyone thinks about Kenobi and A New Dawn with JJM, but the Knight Errant book and comics are interesting because he did both prose and comics for the same character. Also if you like JJM's stuff, go read his "behind the scenes," there's stuff he said about writing the KOTOR comics that I think about to this day.) Martha Wells is also great at it, so is S.M. Stirling; so are many others, those are just the first three that come to mind because I think they're three of the most visual writers I read regularly. And all three are tie-in writers and very good tie-in writers and good tie-in writers, like good fic writers, have to think about translating between media. (One sign of a bad tie-in writer -- who may otherwise be a very good writer -- is that they struggle with translating between media. Tie-ins are a very specific genre and even medium which I think many people don't realize until you read a terrible Star Wars novel written by an author who writes really great non-IP novels and then can't figure out why it feels Wrong.)

I do think writers (and readers and viewers) should think about how to translate something that's natural in one medium (film, video games, prose, comics, whatever) to another medium, because it's not as straightforward as "you just can't do it because they're different media." You can! You may have to think about it differently, but you can still do it! Some of the best writing advice I've ever read has not come from prose writing, it's come from comics writers about writing comics. Depending on your genre or your medium, advice for writing novels may not apply -- I don't structure my fanfic the way I would structure a novel, because I write serial fiction. My scene beats and chapter breaks are not necessarily translatable to a novel, because that's not what I'm writing and that's not how I expect people to read it. (I mean, for one, if I was writing novels, I would not be writing 10K chapters, because for a novel, that's insane.)

anyway, that was about like. six different vaguely related things, the tl;dr of which is something I don't usually say but which comes down to "perhaps OP, as a creative writing instructor, should think about what they're doing in THEIR classroom instead of blaming the television." (this is based on the whole article and not just that bit that's excerpted.)

[machinesonix]

Hello Tumblr, it's been a while. Once again I find the specters of literary analysis haunting my blood screaming for release, and you are my favorite void in which to scream. Today we're taking a departure from Dune to talk about some thoughts regarding the horror genre and why I think It really knocks it out of the park.

Famous racist H.P. Lovecraft in his essay Supernatural horror in fiction asserts that the earliest human emotion is fear and the oldest fear is that of the unknown.

I largely agree with what Lovecraft is getting at here that the unknown is the key to eliciting a feeling of fear, even if the primacy of an emotion having to do with age feels weird. Please, Tumblr, understand that I do not share his opinions regarding the Chinese, but the guy was among the first to pick apart the horror genre to find out what made it tick.

Lovecraft's expression of fear of the unknown is decidedly dated, even aside from the bigotry. His writing is famously full of 'Dear reader I dare not describe what I beheld' sort of stuff. It's even more diminished in the public eye by the fact anyone with internet access has a very clear image of Cthulhu as being like a squid dragon as depicted in the sculptures in its eponymous story despite once they actually find the thing and run a boat into it it's like some geometry violating cloud thing.

The thing I do appreciate about Lovecraft is that he's never actually under any compunction to explain anything. Polaris starts with the line 'I am a scholar of the Pnakotic Manuscripts' and that's all we really get. There's an economy of words here in letting us know the narrator is an academic and the subject of his studies is something with an unholy assembly of consonants suggesting it is very strange. In Call of Cthulhu everything we know about the cult and its intentions is communicated by the phenomenally unreliable character of Cesar, who shines a light on the global scale of the operation, fleshing out the worldbuilding while only leaving us with more questions.

Now I'm not breaking any new ground by singing the praises of Stephen King. Dude's far from perfect, and his idiosyncratic style makes all sorts of people just bounce right off, but I think It is probably the best example in the public eye of this 'fear of the unknown' thing in practice. See, for King 'nightmare' is not just a word you use to describe a scary situation. In a nightmare, you feel like there's some hidden logic to the world you can't quite understand. There's a terrible sense of foreboding that preceeds the terror because our brains are familiar with that script. Even if something isn't implicitly awful, there is a pervasive wrongness that our subconscious latches onto.

So lemme just take a second to underline the fact that a clown in a sewer is really fucking bizarre. Like yeah, we're 40 years out from the Tim Curry movie and it's ingrained into the public concious, but please do your best to imagine your response to a sewer clown in an Itless universe. It is important to dispell the whole 'Oh yeah, that old chestnut, the sewer clown' to establish how totally surreal this famous scene actually is.

The thing I think is the real masterstroke is the line 'We all float down here. You'll float too!' Nowhere in the book do we have any inclination of what the fuck that means. There is a threat implicit to it; whatever future Pennywise has planned is not gonna be good, but it's not like there's anything implicitly wrong with floating. The story prominently involves a toy boat, several sinister balloons, a semi-aquatic clown monster, and moments of disconnectedness from reality. If you're a ginormous nerd, you'll know that in the Stephen King Multiverse, the nightmare that manifests as Pennywise is trapped between realities, 'floating' in a gloaming space. There are many floating things, but there's no real explanation. Rather than being point blank 'The thing is impossible' like Lovecraft does, we're given a box of puzzle pieces that seem like they make a complete picture and the slowly dawning realization none of them actually fit together.