Archives for November 2011

WIG&TSSIP: The “Moved” Character and POV

November 30, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

It is a premise of Hills’ book that movement of character is synonymous with story. The degree of demonstrated movement may be momentous or barely a whisper, but through this change we perceive that something has happened in a work of fiction. It stands to reason, then, that if authors want to generate as much artistic and emotional power as possible from movement of character, they will probably give the genesis and resolution of that movement considerable authorial attention.

Of all the attention-focusing techniques available to you as a storyteller, none is greater than point of view. Scene selection, setting, tone and any other aspect of story — including even characterization itself — can be emphasized or minimized in service of your authorial goals, but point of view is global. Where all other aspects of story, in proportion, affect the unity and effectiveness of a work, point of view determines how we perceive that unity and effectiveness. Choose the wrong setting and you may dampen the effect of your story. Choose the wrong point of view and you may destroy it completely.

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Publishing is for Professionals

November 18, 2011 By Mark 3 Comments

When we last checked in on the tattered integrity of the publishing industry, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Review of Books, was reminding us that good writers will never need to self-publish:

Our thinking, which may be old-fashioned, is that with so great a volume of books being published each year by traditional publishers, and with so many imprints available, every book of merit is almost certain to find a home at one or another of those presses.

It would be a fallacy to suggest that all books published by mainstream publishers are works of merit, and someone with Sam Tanenhaus’s privileged industry access would never suggest otherwise. Rather, he’s simply asserting that there are no self-published works of merit anywhere in the known universe, and never will be.

I was reminded of this bit of expert analysis recently while reading about the first novel written by the Kardashian sisters, apparently in tag-team fashion:

“As wild as our real lives may seem on TV, just wait to read what we’ve dreamed up to deliver between the covers of our first novel,” Kourtney, Kim and Khloé said in a statement last week, announcing that William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, would publish a novel they had written.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s unlikely anyone who wrote a train-wreck sentence like that is capable of writing an entire book. But you might also be thinking it’s a bit unfair that the Kardashian sisters have a book deal with HarperCollins, while Sam Tanenhaus is crapping all over your writing life by summarily defining you as a failure because your mother didn’t pimp you out for a TV series. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: POV and “Involvement”

November 16, 2011 By Mark 2 Comments

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Storytelling as a discipline seems to have a permanence about it. Most people, particularly most authors, would probably agree that stories are inherent in the life experience of human beings. We embrace fiction so completely and effortlessly that suspension of disbelief may someday be defined as a brain state akin to hypnosis or meditation.

This sense of permanence affects how we innately relate to fiction, but it is also possible to advance one’s knowledge as a practitioner. Folk tales spun by people in all cultures around the globe can be shaped, improved and expanded by craft, whether the intended objective is entertainment, education or propaganda. And it’s possible to go even farther.

Painting, music, food, movement, storytelling — all of these things have practical applications, but can also be turned to purely creative ends. If aspiring to art is a bit more vague than aiming for income, or at least harder to quantify, I think most people still understand the impetus. Whatever form means, whatever composition means, whatever context and content mean, all of them (and more) can be treated as ends in themselves, and subsequently explored on that basis alone. Art for art’s sake.

It is the eternal and intrinsic potential for making art that compels Hills (and me, and others) to insist that there are no rules in fiction writing. To many would-be storytellers this seems utterly preposterous: if there are no rules then what can be known? But knowledge is not what rules define. Rules work because they impose order through constraints and controls. When you drive across town you knowingly subject yourself (or not, as the case may be) to dozens if not hundreds of traffic and motor-vehicle laws and customs. But if those rules didn’t exist, or you simply decided to ignore all of them, you wouldn’t suddenly be oblivious to where you were or wanted to go.

What Hills says, what artists say, is that if your goal (art) puts you at odds with a rule or convention, then you ignore the rule and stay true to your artistic pursuit. There are no rules so inviolate that you cannot break them for sufficient cause. And yet we also know that certain methods in fiction (and other mediums) achieve certain effects: that relationships hold despite our aversion to calling them rules. [ Read more ]

Interactive Intransigence

November 4, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

We are now well past two solid decades of creating interactive entertainment for commercial markets. If some hurdles have yet to be surmounted there’s still a great deal we do know about the design and execution of various genre types, and this knowledge should — at least in theory — help us hold down costs and avoid making the same stupid mistakes again and again.

If you don’t know about id Software they’re one of the storied companies in interactive gaming. Led by tech wiz John Carmack, id defined and dominated the first-person shooter genre with games like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and others. If there’s anything to be known about how these games work and don’t work — and how the technology behind these games can most effectively be mated to design — that knowledge should have so permeated the culture at id as to be part of its DNA.

In keeping with its fetish for cuddly titles, id’s latest first-person shooter is called Rage. GameRankings.com pegs the aggregate review score at about 80%, and most review sites are giving it 7 of 10. Not bad as these things go. But what, specifically, are the complaints?

Here’s Jim Rossignol from RPS, prefacing his final take:

What this is really about is how I feel after playing Rage, which is a feeling not uncommon to gaming throughout the ages: the feeling that the options a game presents are actually an illusion.

Now, what you need to know here is that this is A) a problem in all mediums and B) the single biggest problem in interactive entertainment. Every storytelling and entertainment medium must protect itself from outside intrusions, internal inconsistencies, and technical failings. If you’ve ever been engrossed in a movie when the projector fails you know what I mean. If you’ve ever read a novel where the author leaves a critical logical thread unresolved you know what I mean. If you’ve ever had a moron behind you at a concert sing along, off-key, with the performer you paid to hear you know what I mean. In entertainment there is nothing more important than maintaining the illusion of whatever experience you’ve created.

In interactive entertainment this obligation is magnified by the fact that the audience has expectations that literally cannot be fulfilled. What every interactive user wants is full-blown, AI-driven language, plot and character interaction. This is the famous promise of the holodeck, and its academic spawn. Unfortunately, that’s never, ever going to happen. So everything that logically spills from that incapacity — including audience expectation — has to be anticipated and managed from the get-go. And everybody knows this. [ Read more ]