movies

The Wonka World

A few weeks ago, I watched the recent Wonka movie that’s a prequel to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (if you’re talking movies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in book form, unless you’re talking about the Tim Burton version, which I kind of try to ignore).

I really enjoyed the movie and found it utterly delightful. My face hurt from smiling by the end of it, and there were a few moments that brought tears to my eyes. They did a good job of making it look like it took place in the same world as the 1970s movie, where it was ambiguously sort of European, but also with American touches, and no firm European setting. And I could see this Wonka as a younger version of Gene Wilder’s character. I could see this becoming a comfort movie (I need to get the DVD) because it definitely made me feel good, and there were parts that made my heart soar.

I have an odd history with this story world. The original Willie Wonka film remains the only movie I ever had to be carried out of because it scared me too much. I made it through all the Disney films fine, but when I was about 4, the scene where the girl turned into a blueberry freaked me out to the point my parents had to carry me out of the theater (ironically, I now eat blueberries just about every day). I didn’t see the whole movie until I was in my 30s. I wasn’t avoiding it or afraid of it. It had just never occurred to me to watch it until I was visiting my parents and it came on cable, and we all watched it (since my parents hadn’t seen the rest of it, either).

I had, however, read the books. My fourth-grade teacher had a routine of reading a chapter of a book to us every day after recess as a way of getting us settled down, and I think she must have been a fantasy fan because most of what she read us would fall into the fantasy category. She really must have liked Roald Dahl because she read a lot of those to us, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I did my usual thing of getting impatient with the one chapter a day pace and checked the books out of the library to read for myself. I don’t think I knew there was a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory until she started reading that one.

So by the time I finally saw the movie all the way through, I knew the story and had my own mental images based on adding the parts I’d seen of the movie (and clips I’d seen over the years) to the imagery in the books, which made the movie weirdly familiar.

I’ve seen the Tim Burton one, but found it unsettling and not very much fun.

Now I kind of want to watch Wonka and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a double feature and see how they fit together, but I have to admit that I still find the original movie a bit unsettling. It might be even more unsettling with the whiplash from the much sweeter and less freaky prequel.

Life

My D&D Adventure

The Dungeons and Dragons game was a lot of fun, though not entirely what I expected. Some of that may have been because some of us were pretty new, we were playing characters we weren’t familiar with, and we were all strangers. There was a woman about my age, her teenage niece, a couple of women right out of college (including one who just moved from the Dallas area after graduating from the University of Oklahoma—I swear, I run into someone from either Texas or Oklahoma at every event I go to around here), and the person running it was probably in her 30s.

I think part of my issue was that it’s essentially a storytelling game, so my writer brain kicked in, but it is a game that involves players taking turns and rolling dice, so an action event that takes a few minutes in story time can take an hour to play, and sometimes the play means we’re spending that much time in dealing with a secondary issue. Our group had to fight our way through a series of rooms, and we really struggled with the first one, with it taking a few rounds of turns before we got through. We got through the second one fast (mostly because I managed to roll a 20 on my turn, and I was the first to go, so my turn got us straight into the next room). And then it seemed to take us nearly an hour in the next room because nothing we tried worked.

I was playing a bard character (I used a pre-made character rather than trying to create one), and the time I rolled a 20, I was playing a lute to lull some monsters to sleep, so I had a vivid mental image of the Chris Pine character from Honor Among Thieves when he walked into a situation playing the lute as a diversion. My song worked so well that we just walked through the room.

I think the people who wrote some of the instructions of how the spells work also write IRS tax forms, and that was what took us a while, having to read and decipher what our characters might be capable of and how we might be able to use that in this situation. Aside from being able to put things to sleep, nothing I could do was all that useful for this campaign. Again, my writer brain kicked in and thought this character was a poor choice for the story.

But I think to some extent those kind of constraints could be interesting to work with in writing — identify exactly what your characters can do up front, then stick with that through a story. It would be a fun exercise that would force some creative solutions.

The main thing was the getting together with other people to do something fun. Once we got warmed up and into the spirit of it, we all loosened up a bit. I need to learn a bit more about it to understand how the game really works, but I’ll probably go the next time there’s an afternoon game. There’s now a big group chat of women in the area, so they’re organizing games at various times on different days. It’s a good way to meet people and spend time interacting.

I can also see how all the moral panic over this in the 80s obviously involved people who’d only vaguely heard of the game. From what I saw, it’s a lot of math and statistics. There’s nothing about how you do spells that you could take away from the game to try to use to do magic, just a description of what they might do in the game, and you roll dice to see how effective your spell is based on the statistics of the creature you’re using it on. I can’t see how you could go from this to summoning demons or worshipping Satan. I guess it might look like an obsession just because of how long it can take to get through a game and how much you need to learn to be able to play well, but it probably takes less time than playing golf. It all comes back to the geeks vs. jocks thing, where dressing up like a player on your favorite team to go to watch a sports game is cool, but dressing up like a character to go see a movie is weird. Spending an afternoon with friends hitting a little ball around is “normal,” but spending the afternoon playing D&D is geeky.

D&D, Finally

I’m going to do something new this weekend that I hope will be fun. I’m going to play Dungeons & Dragons for the very first time. A group of women in town are meeting at the library Sunday afternoon for a one-shot campaign (so a short one that can finish in one sitting instead of an extended adventure that requires multiple sessions).

I’ve wanted to do this since I was in 8th grade and first learned about D&D. It sounded like what my friends used to do in elementary school when we ran around the neighborhood acting out various scenarios — we’re pioneers, space explorers, detectives, etc. — only more organized and set up so you couldn’t just claim you defeated someone else. I think the idea of sitting around a table with friends, doing something cooperative, also appealed to me. I tried playing regular board games but I don’t like competition. Something similar, but where it’s more about making up a story together, and it’s the whole group winning together rather than competing against each other seemed like a good compromise. Unfortunately, the friends I had at school who played lived in a different part of town.

Then we moved to a farm outside a small town in a very conservative area during the Satanic Panic when I was in high school. They had seminars about how all rock music was satanic and would lead you to the devil at churches in town, and they were convinced that D&D was worshipping satan and would lead to demonic possession. (These same people thought that yoga was satanic, said meditation was leaving yourself open for demons to take over, and later thought reading Harry Potter books would lead to kids practicing witchcraft.) If anyone in that town played D&D, I wouldn’t have heard of it, and I still would have had a transportation issue in meeting up with anyone.

In college, a lot of my friends played, but they were all pretty hardcore and weren’t at all open to dealing with a newbie. There was an ongoing game in the study lounge every weekend, but these guys had been playing the same characters since high school, and they were doing a really involved campaign. Some of them were into it enough that they wore costumes. They didn’t even like spectators. I got kicked out of the study lounge when I tried to watch.

As an adult, I ran into similar issues. There was a group at my old church that played regularly, but they’d been playing together since high school and didn’t have room for anyone else. Most people I hung out with either had enough scheduling issues that they didn’t want to try to get anything started, or they had a longstanding group. At conventions they sometimes did intro one-shot campaigns, but since I was at conventions as a speaker, I didn’t have time in my schedule to do anything like that. I seldom had more than an hour free at a time.

I get a bit jealous when I read about people’s gaming groups—the food they make, the funny things that come out of their games. Sometimes it sounds kind of like a lot of book groups I’ve known, so the game is secondary to getting together with friends to eat and talk, and I think maybe that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. In a way, writing fantasy novels is a kind of solo D&D, but without rules or dice to govern how things should go.

Someone started a Facebook group for women in this town who are looking to make friends, and most of the activities people have come up with haven’t appealed to me. It seems to be younger women who want to go to wineries or concerts. But then someone mentioned this, and I thought it would be fun. They do a D&D night once a month at a local brewpub, and there’s a gaming store downtown, so I figured there would be people in town who played, but I didn’t know how to find them, and I didn’t know if they’d be newbie-friendly. This group is mostly newcomers. I’ll probably be the grandma of the group, but at least I’ll have a chance to see what I think about it. It may be weird to me as a fantasy writer, dealing with someone else’s world and someone else steering the plot. At the very least, I’ll get to meet several other women in town, and maybe I’ll get even more of the jokes in that Dungeons & Dragons movie. Maybe I should rewatch that episode of Community to prepare myself. I also need to come up with a character. I wonder if I could base it on a character I’m brainstorming now and see if I come up with any ideas I can use.

movies

The Fantasy/SF Specturm

Last weekend I watched the new version of Dune, both parts 1 and 2. I read the book when I was a teenager, and I saw the 80s movie, but I didn’t get into the series. I never read any of the other books. I didn’t remember much, just the litany against fear, the stillsuits, and the hand in the box test. I don’t recall being too impressed by the 80s movie, but I rather liked this new one, especially part 2 (mostly the stuff about riding the sandworms).

I did feel like we were getting a circle of influences, though. It’s pretty obvious that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Dune when he created Star Wars. We had that corrupt galactic empire, the desert planet, the quasi-religious mystical order, the bad guy on life support, and the drug called spice. But these movies also seemed to be influenced by Star Wars in some of the imagery, especially the way the empire looked.

I think both Dune and Star Wars also fall into the category of epic fantasy in a science fiction setting. Although both stories take place in futuristic worlds with spaceships and high technology, the plots are more fantasy-oriented. You could move these stories to a more typical fantasy world without changing much about the plots. The stories revolve around things like prophecies, destiny, a chosen one, and that quasi-religious order with mystical powers. In Dune, one of the things that makes “spice” valuable is that it’s what allows faster-than-light navigation, but it mostly seems to be a McGuffin, a reason why people are in conflict on this planet, which opens the door for the prophesied Chosen One to show up. The story isn’t about faster-than-light navigation, it’s about the prophesies, visions, and a reluctant Chosen One coming into his power, which is more a fantasy story than a science fiction story.

It’s similar in Star Wars. The original movie is about a farmboy learning about his heritage and finding he has a supernatural power, then going to rescue a princess and using his power to defeat the bad guys — a classic fantasy plot. There’s never really much science fiction in Star Wars, and their attempts at doing science, like finding a scientific explanation for why some people are extra powerful in the Force, didn’t work. Even the entries in the saga that are less fantasy (the plot doesn’t depend on the Force) aren’t science fiction. Rogue One and Andor are more spy thriller in a science fiction setting, so would be space opera.

If you’re looking at it on a spectrum with fantasy at one end and science fiction at the other, you’d have something like Star Wars close to the fantasy end, then Dune pretty close to it. We move into space opera when it’s more about the society, the adventure, or the characters than about the science, but there aren’t any mystical or magical elements. That’s where things like Star Trek would fall. There’s no supernatural stuff or mysticism, like in space fantasy, but the actual science stuff is often pretty sketchy. You could move a lot of their core stories to a different setting and they might still work — make it about explorers on earth during the age of exploration. Then there’s science fiction that’s really about the science and technology where you can’t remove the science from the story and still have the plot work. These would be stories about exploring other worlds where they really have to deal with alien life forms and environments, not just humans with odd cultures or funny noses. Or stories about how the use of robots changes human society.

At least, that’s my classification method. I thought I liked science fiction when I became a Star Wars fan, and I do like some of it, but after years in a science fiction book group, I realized that what I like is more space-set fantasy and space opera. Hard science fiction mostly bores me, though I do like books that get into how an alien environment might work, especially if I like the characters.

Some people even distinguish between hard and soft fantasy, with hard fantasy having a more codified magical system with clear rules — magic as science — and soft fantasy being more about the mystical, with magical things just happening and no one’s entirely sure how it works. With soft fantasy, the magic is more part of the setting (like the futuristic world being the setting for space fantasy) while in hard fantasy the magic is a crucial element of the plot. I’m not entirely certain I buy that, but then I haven’t read a lot of the stuff that people call “hard” fantasy. For me it all comes down to whether I like the characters and enjoy spending time in that world. I don’t care about knowing the various rules of magic, other than that I do feel like some limitations are necessary to make the story interesting.

As for Dune, it may be time for a reread. I’m basing this assessment mostly on the recent movies since I don’t remember much about the book. I liked the book but didn’t get too into it. Maybe it’ll hit differently if I’m thinking of it as fantasy. And I’m sure I’ll have a different perspective on the book now than I did at sixteen.

writing

Idea Time

My newest Shiny New Idea is really taking off. I seem to spend about half an hour in bed every morning after waking up, just thinking and processing all the ideas that are coming at me furiously. So far, I have an opening scene, a good sense of the two main characters, and lots of background for the world and the setup for the current situation.

I’m still devoting most of my working time to the proofreading I need to do, but having something more creative to work on helps keep me from burning out from doing the tedious work. The brainstorming and idea generating is pure creativity. I’m not worrying about putting things into words or pacing or plotting. I’m just playing what if. It’s like when I was a kid running around the neighborhood with my friends, declaring what characters we were and what we were doing as we did a sort of extended improv. Or acting out stories with my dolls or those little Fisher Price people. It’s daydreaming, only I write down the good stuff I come up with. This is my favorite part of the writing process, and it’s a good kind of work to do alongside something more tedious and less creative because it balances it all out.

The trick is getting out of bed, since that time between waking up and actually getting up seems to be the maximum creative time. Some of it is thinking about and processing things that came to me during the night, but then as I’m more conscious I start building on those ideas, and the more I think about it, the more I come up with. I had somewhere to be this morning, and I woke up well before my alarm, but that was when my brain kicked into high gear and I was afraid to get up until I’d processed all the thoughts and ideas well enough that I wouldn’t lose them as soon as I got up. I ended up lying there for about half an hour after I woke up, then I had to hurry and get ready to be at a morning meeting.

On the way back from the meeting, I stopped by the library to pick up some books for researching this idea. But first I need to do some proofreading. The new idea isn’t anywhere near ready to be written. I’ve learned from long experience that the longer I let an idea marinate, the better the book ends up being.

writing

Another Shiny New Idea

I’ve mentioned the perils of Shiny New Idea Syndrome before. That’s when you’re slogging away at a book, often in a phase that’s less than fun, like the middle of a first draft or proofreading, and then a brilliant new idea strikes you. This idea is a guaranteed bestseller that will make your career, and it’s a fully formed book. You need to drop everything to write it.

And then once you start writing it and you get past the beginning, it becomes hard, and another Shiny New Idea strikes, so you abandon the project and start on that.

This is why a lot of writers who have great ideas and spend a lot of time writing never manage to sell a book. They never actually finish one because they’re always chasing that Shiny New Idea. I started trying to write novels early in my teens, but I didn’t finish one until I was in my 20s because of this. Not only is the Shiny New Idea a distraction, but it’s usually not fully formed, so if you drop what you’re working on to write the Shiny New Idea, you’ll quickly run out of steam so that you’re tempted by the next idea that comes along.

I’ve learned over the years that the Shiny New Ideas are a good sign. Creativity breeds more creativity. The more you write, the more ideas you’ll have. If Shiny New Ideas are coming to you, that means you’re in a good creative space. But that doesn’t mean you should abandon your current project to pursue them. It also doesn’t mean ignoring them.

When I get struck by a new idea, I do a brain dump and write down everything I know about it. Sometimes in this process I’ll find myself making up even more. I just keep writing until I’ve got it all captured. Generally, even in ideas I think are fully formed, I’ll only end up with a page or two of information. That brilliant, fully formed book is really just a situation and a character, maybe an inciting incident. Once all that’s out of my head, I can get back to the current project and finish it. I can add to the new idea as things come to me, and by the time I finish the current project, that new idea may be developed enough that I can start doing serious work on it, like fleshing out the characters and working on a plot.

I have a current case study for that. I’m proofreading a book, which isn’t the most exciting work. I was chatting with my agent and mentioned this notion I had. It wasn’t even to the level of an idea. It was a kind of story in a kind of setting. She asked what the story would be, where the conflict would be, and I had no idea. That night, the story came to me and I felt like I had a good foundation for a story. When I wrote it all down, I had about three pages in a composition book. A lot of it was backstory and setting, with just a hint of what the plot would be. The plot part was essentially that two-sentence description like you might see about a movie on a streaming service.

Then last night the opening scene came to me. As I lay thinking about it after I woke up this morning, I felt like the whole book was coming together. I got out of bed and wrote down everything — and I had a page and a half in the composition book. I had a good opening line and some things that could happen in the first scene, which contains some of the worldbuilding. It always feels more fleshed out in my head than it is on the page. I do think this is a viable story idea, but it needs a lot more work before I’ll be ready to start writing it. In the meantime, I need to finish that proofreading.

I have had one instance since I started doing this for a living when I did drop the current project for the Shiny New Idea. I was working on the book that became A Fairy Tale and was really struggling with it. It just wasn’t coming together. Then I got the idea for Rebel Mechanics and started writing down what I knew about it — and ended up with a nearly complete synopsis. I decided it was worth putting the struggle book aside and working on the new idea. I did a lot of research to develop the world, then I had a proposal ready to go to my agent within a few months of getting the idea. That book sold to a publisher, and I ended up independently publishing A Fairy Tale, so it was probably a good call.

Now we’ll see how this new idea develops. I have most of March’s work planned, but when I get two projects off my plate I’ll be ready to start something new, and then I’ll see which project in development is closer to being ready to write.

Books, movies, TV, writing

Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.

movies, Books

Out of Order

Last Friday, I figured I should celebrate Valentine’s Day with something somewhat romantic, but I wasn’t in a very romantic mood, so I ended up watching 500 Days of Summer, a somewhat anti-romantic romantic comedy. I’m not super-strict about my definition of “romantic,” so I’m okay with a hopeful ending, even if it doesn’t involve the main couple in the movie.

This is a rather unconventional romcom that questions a lot of the premises common to the genre. It’s told in a non-linear way, starting with a breakup and bouncing back to a first meeting, then ahead to an established relationship, then back to starting to get together, etc. Tom is a hopeless romantic who’s looking for “The One” who’ll complete him. Summer is a free spirit who doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t want to be tied down. Tom meets Summer and is sure she’s The One when he learns she likes his favorite band. They argue over the issue of love, and his hopes are dashed when she tells him she doesn’t believe in it, but then she kisses him, they start dating, and everything is perfect, until it isn’t and he doesn’t know what to do.

I recently saw some online discourse about the movie (which is probably why it caught my eye). Apparently there’s some debate over which of them is in the wrong and the bad guy. Is she bad for telling him she didn’t believe in love, then dating him anyway, or is he bad for expecting her to fall in love with him when she told him she wouldn’t? Is she a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or is he trying to cast her in that role? I would say they’re both at fault. She sent seriously mixed signals, saying one thing and then acting another way, but he was in love with an idea, and she happened to be the person he cast in that role.

But the main thing I like is the nonlinear structure that makes the audience have to piece things together, where we don’t see how it all fits together until toward the end. I love stories that do that sort of thing or that play with narrative structure in fun ways.

In the romantic comedy space, there’s Sliding Doors, which has parallel timelines — we see the heroine miss a train after losing her job, leading to her getting mugged, then because of that she gets home late enough that she doesn’t catch her boyfriend cheating on her, and her life becomes a struggle. But then we also see the heroine barely catch the train, so she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend, which leads to her starting her life over, starting a business, and starting a new romance. We cut back and forth between the timelines. Which one is the “good” one and which is the “bad” one, and how will it work out?

Or there’s The Very Thought of You, which plays with perspective. We see the same events multiple times through the perspectives of three friends who all meet the same woman on the same day, and we only realize what’s really happening when we put them all together and know what’s happening in the background of each of the scenes.

I’m With Lucy starts with the ending — the heroine is on her way to her wedding. She got there after a time when she said yes to every blind date. We go back to these dates and the relationships that came from them, jumping around a bit in time. Which of these guys is she marrying?

Getting away from romcoms, there are movies like Memento, which is told in reverse order, and Inception, with the lines between dream and reality blurred. The first season of Once Upon a Time had dual timelines, with flashbacks going mostly in reverse chronological order gradually showing how the present-day situation came to be, while the characters worked to resolve the situation in the present (the flashback format continued through the series, but it mostly became thematic, showing an incident in a character’s past that reflected the character’s present).

I haven’t seen it done so often in books, but there’s a time travel book by Connie Willis that plays with this, Blackout/All Clear. It’s a story in which time traveling historians from the future go to the time of World War II to study it, but something goes wrong, and they’re stuck there as the Blitz begins. But there were other previous missions involving some of the same people to different times in the war, and since they took on cover identities and the story is told using the cover name, we don’t know which characters are the same people at different times until later. There’s also the mix of what’s happening chronologically within the war era and what the timeline is in the “present,” which can mean that a person from earlier in the present might be later in the war than they are in the current mission that started later in the present. This is a kind of storytelling that would be less effective in a movie because it would be more obvious that they’re the same person. In the book, there are a lot of “ohhhh” moments of realization.

I have ambitions of writing something like this, either out of order or otherwise nonlinear. The closest I’ve come was my Christmas novella, which was similar to Sliding Doors, except the heroine was living both timelines and aware of both of them, so she had to figure out which life she wanted and how to stick with that one instead of living both of them. I have an idea that might fit into the nonlinear category, with flashbacks where you don’t know which present character is the person in the flashback, but the whole idea hasn’t really come together yet, and the concept is more ambitious than I feel up to tackling right now.

movies, TV, Books, writing

Shipper Bait

Happy Valentine’s Day! I should probably talk about something romantic, but I’ve come to realize that both as a reader/audience member and as a writer, I’m more of a shipper than a romantic.

For those who aren’t up on Internet talk, “shipper” is short for “relationshipper.” As far as I can tell, the term originated in the X-Files Usenet newsgroup back in the mid-90s. If you wanted Mulder and Scully to get together, you were a relationshipper, or shipper. (The other faction was the No-Romos, who wanted them to stay friends and partners but not get involved romantically.) From there, the term spread. “Shipping” is wanting two characters to get together, looking for evidence that they might be developing feelings, imagining how they might get together and what it would look like if they did, sometimes even writing fan fiction about the characters being romantically involved. If you say you ship a couple, you want them to be romantically involved.

While some shippers really do want to see the couple get together, the real fun is in looking at the subtext and trying to figure out where things might be going. I think this is why I prefer to get my love stories in genres other than romance (and now romantasy). I have the most fun trying to read between the lines and figure out what the characters feel based on their actions. Romance novels are a lot more up front about the attraction. Even if the characters are denying it, you know where it’s going and it’s still pretty obvious. I think a lot of the “Moonlighting Curse” is due to this. Once the couple is together, you know where things stand and there’s no more room for imagination. (Though there were other things going on with Moonlighting, so it wasn’t just them getting together that killed the show.) This also makes it a lot harder to do in a book than in movies/TV. When you can get inside the characters’ heads, there’s little guessing, unless they’re utterly oblivious.

As an example, I’ve always said, not entirely jokingly, that Aliens is one of my favorite romantic movies. It’s fun to analyze the way Ripley and Hicks interact and see the way he looks at her and figure that they were falling for each other, and later they’d get together (the third movie Does Not Exist, so there). I was vindicated in this when I heard Michael Biehn say on a convention panel that he played the whole movie as though Hicks had a huge crush on Ripley.

I like to say that I write shipper bait instead of romance because the romantic relationships in my books tend to be fairly subtle and leave the impression of there being a lot more romance than there is because there’s so much material for the reader’s imagination. I’ve even had a book that didn’t have a kiss in it rejected by a fantasy publisher with the recommendation to send it to a romance publisher because it was too much of a romance.

I’ve been trying to think of my favorite fictional romances, or at least some that I think were handled well. I’ve got more from movies and TV than from books. Connie Willis probably does my favorite book romances, though she writes science fiction. Ned and Verity’s relationship in To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite lovely and has a swoonworthy conclusion. There’s also something pretty epic in the Blackout/All Clear duology that involves time travel and an outcome worth cheering out loud for. Lately, she’s been writing all-out science fiction romcoms, and they have just the right mix of romance and action. You want the couple to get together, but it’s not super obvious where things are going.

I think Jim and Pam’s relationship on The Office worked pretty well (aside from some iffy stuff in the final season). It helped there that the mockumentary format meant that we only saw what the camera crews were there to see, so even when they started dating it wasn’t entirely obvious what their status was and there was still room to guess and imagine.

Possibly my favorite TV romance was Nathan and Audrey on Haven, which had all kinds of supernatural stuff going on, plus one of my favorite paranormal tropes, the “in another life” thing in which the same people keep running into each other in different timelines, sometimes not knowing each other, but always falling in love when they meet.

Shipping isn’t limited to couples that actually do end up getting together or who are on that trajectory. I’ve even seen people ship characters from different fictional universes. It’s really common to ship non-canon relationships, sort of an amusing what if. My personal favorite there is that I figure things would have gone very differently for the galaxy if Obi Wan had ever turned to Padme and belted, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.” Seriously, an Obi Wan who looked like Ewan McGregor was right there, and she went for the whiny kid? I’ve seen some unhinged fan theories that this is what happened (well, maybe without him acting out Moulin Rouge), and Obi Wan was Luke and Leia’s real father. Anakin does get really jealous of Obi Wan having anything to do with her toward the end.

Somewhat closer to possibility is Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One. That lost opportunity is even sadder after the Andor series, which makes it look even more like she’s just the person he always needed, and they found each other just a bit too late. There are some pretty loaded looks they exchange. In my mental happy place, the Enterprise flies by and beams them out right before things go boom.

There’s a lot more room for romance in fantasy now that romantasy is the hot thing in the market, but I’m not sure I write enough outright romance for that. My shipper bait is too much for fantasy but not enough for romantasy.

writing

Superman or Underdog

One of the mental rabbit trails I found myself going down recently was considering where characters fall on the Underdog/Everyman/Superman spectrum and how that affects the story being told.

In general, characters — and particularly main characters/protagonists — fall along a spectrum. At one end are Underdogs, those who are weaker or less powerful than your average person. This would be the Cinderella type character in the “rags” stage where they’re essentially powerless. Audiences are encouraged to sympathize with or pity the Underdog and cheer for them as they try to rise above their situation, against all the odds.

In the middle is the Everyman or Average Joe, the person who’s at about the same level of power and ability as the average person. This is the girl/boy next door character, a staple of the romantic comedy. Audiences are encouraged to relate to or identify with this character. If a character is referred to as “relatable,” they’re probably an Everyman.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Superman, the person who’s more powerful than the average person. Most superheroes would be considered Superman characters (in one case, literally), but it’s not just about superpowers. The power could also be political or social status or great wealth, or it could involve high-level skills from intense training or experience. James Bond is a Superman character, along with kings and presidents. This is an aspirational character audiences are encouraged to admire and look up to.

Usually, this is all relative based on context. In a world where few people have magical powers, even an inept wizard would be a Superman, but in a setting where everyone’s magical, the inept wizard would be an Underdog. In superhero team-up movies, the scale may shift so that among people with superhuman powers there are some farther to the “Superman” end and some that count as Underdogs within that group. A character may also shift position as the context around him changes. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is an Everyman while he’s in the Shire. He doesn’t have special skills, power, or authority, but he’s also not at the bottom of society and needing to rise up. But once his quest begins, he becomes an Underdog. He’s smaller than most of the people around him, he doesn’t have the kind of training or special skills that others around him have, he’s mostly ignorant of the world he’s dealing with, and he’s up against an enemy with great power and resources.

Characters can move around on the spectrum. In fact, the story’s more interesting if the character does move around a bit. In a lot of superhero origin stories, the hero may start as an Underdog—like Peter Parker or Steve Rogers—until something happens to give them superpowers so they become a Superman. A character like Peter Parker may have a slower move toward Superman status because it takes him so long to adjust to having powers, figuring out what to do with them, and learning to use them without causing a disaster, so they may be an Underdog or Everyman who can do cool stuff. Or a character like Steve Rogers can simultaneously be both a Superman and an Underdog. Pre-Captain America Steve may be an asthmatic 90-pound weakling, but he’s already a Superman inside—smarter, nobler, and braver than the average person. He’s an Underdog because no one takes him seriously, but when he gets superpowers he doesn’t really change. He just gets a body to match his spirit.

Characters can move down, too. Whenever Superman is exposed to kryptonite, he temporarily becomes an Everyman or even an Underdog as he has to struggle to deal with situations without his usual strengths. Or there’s the common sports story arc, starting with the athlete at the top of his game until he gets injured and becomes an Underdog and has to fight to rise again.

I started thinking about all this when I started my rewatch of the Star Wars movies and shows and found myself analyzing yet again the issues with The Phantom Menace. One thing I realized is that all the main characters are clustered around the Superman end of the spectrum, without a lot of movement. As a Jedi Master, Qui Gon is at the far Superman end. Obi Wan is just a bit behind him, as an apprentice. Padme is a queen with political power, so she’s well past everyman, even if she’s not as far down as the Jedi with their powers. Anakin may be a kid and a slave when he’s introduced, but we don’t see the slavery affecting him that much onscreen. Instead, we hear all about how he’s more powerful with the Force than even Yoda, he’s the best at building and fixing things, and he’s the only human who can compete and win at pod racing. He’s definitely in the Superman area and doesn’t have much room to level up. The only Underdog in the main cast is Jar-Jar, the comic relief. You end up with a not very interesting story if everyone’s a Superman and they’re mostly static. It doesn’t even feel like they shift the curve so that within the Superman area there are Underdogs and Everymen. Anakin is constantly presented as too awesome to be an Underdog, even if he whines about not getting his due.

Contrast that with the original movie. Luke Skywalker is introduced at the Underdog side of Everyman. We don’t yet know that he might have any special powers or abilities. He’s young, inexperienced, and naive, and he’s entirely unprepared for the adventure he finds himself on. During the course of the movie, he learns enough and does enough to gradually move to the Superman side of Everyman, then during the course of the rest of the trilogy he levels up toward Superman. Meanwhile, we have Leia on the Superman end of the spectrum (as a princess and rebel leader), though she becomes something of an Underdog for a while when she’s a prisoner where her status doesn’t help her and she loses everything. Han starts just on the Superman side of Everyman, since he has great skills as a pilot and owns a spaceship, then he moves up a bit when he learns to be less selfish and becomes a hero.

Now I find myself looking at my own casts to see how they stack up, though it’s complicated by context in a lot of my books. The wizards in the Enchanted, Inc. series may have magical powers, but they exist in different parts of the scale compared to each other, and things may change when they’re away from work. Katie’s an Underdog in some ways but is considered a Superman by some of the wizards because she can do things they can’t.