You're writing epic poetry?
anonymous
September 26 2006, 00:03:00 UTC
You remind me of another author who doesn't like "those cardboard-cut-out-characters" where the good guys are admirable and the bad guys are not as cuddly. OK - I concede real life has complicated people. If I wanted to read real life, with epic, spawling, all-knowing characters "as big as all outdoors," I'd read blogs exclusively. But I know about structure and symbols and layers of complexity and motifs and emotion. I like playing that game. So do a lot of readers. I have a set of expectations for fiction, just as I do for amusement park rides. Mysteries give me a funhouse of perception with the reader two steps behind. Suspense gives me a rollercoaster with the reader two steps in front. I expect certain POV to drag me along or push me ahead. If you're writing Menelaus's marital problems, third person won't do the job. Big stories can have more remote narrators and bigger action. Smaller, tighter focus for smaller characters and less heroic stories. You're setting yourself up for a fall if you try to write fanfic like Homer. (He's had a few centuries of beta's to help him and make sure his teens aren't annoying.) You read lots of essays. You write excellent essays. But you don't need a reader's sympathy in essays - you catch them with 'honeyd logic.' Fanfic readers are there for the characters - that's the ride they bought tickets for. They need the ride to fullfill an expectation. JKR writes in Harry's POV (up until the last book exclusively in unreliable limited third). Her readers expect a certain intimacy with the characters. (Maybe Illiad fanfic is more a style you like?.) If I sip a lemonade and get a coffee taste, my expectations are not satisfied, no matter how much I love coffee. Write a Romance with a female lead, who cheats on her husband and ends the story divorced and alone, and my expectations are not met. It's not high art - it's fanfic. Genres have a certain structure, just like epics. If you write your story with your prefered style, it sounds like a half-serious lecture. I don't think that's a style you want to mimic - it's more a parody of yourself than the truth. *rfachir*
Re: You're writing epic poetry?izhilzhaSeptember 26 2006, 00:48:54 UTC
It's not high art - it's fanfic. Genres have a certain structure, just like epics.
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate, exactly, here...but one thing I love about fanfic is the proliferation and variety of genres. I am a "gen" reader and writer, so the romance is not something I seek out. Action/adveture, mystery, myth or fairy tale, pseduohistory, narrative poetry (or really amazing filks--someone wrote a Harry Potter version/parody of T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland" and it's completely brilliant), pretty much whatever you write.
And it needn't match the genre of the source, either.
Approach it from a different genre and reveal new things about the source, or take a new tack with it.
I guess what I'm saying is that fic isn't exactly a genre, in the typical sense of the word. It's more like a form--and it's broader even than those catagories.
Re: You're writing epic poetry?
anonymous
September 26 2006, 02:27:03 UTC
There is an exception to every rule, but I still stand by the idea that there is an appropriate POV for a story, and intimate POV's work better for more intimate scenes. Having an omnicient character in a small, imperfect world doesn't fit. It's like that law in physics - the act of observation changes the thing observed. Large actions - great battles, epic struggles - deserve a larger POV, but two characters bickering can't - omnicient POV smothers the dynamics of the two. It turns into a dull lecture instead of a small heated battle.
Re: You're writing epic poetry?izhilzhaSeptember 26 2006, 21:54:52 UTC
There is an exception to every rule, but I still stand by the idea that there is an appropriate POV for a story, and intimate POV's work better for more intimate scenes.
Well, I never said that wasn't true. It's just that I have occasionally seen fic done from an outsider's or an omniscient pov, when the source itself uses a tight pov, and the fic has worked both as a storytelling and as an addition to the source.
I agree, two characters bickering is hardly the subject of epic (unless they are gods, and the bickering involves sending their human pawns against each other in open war--then you have the Illiad). Nor is a narrow pov entirely appropriate to epic (though I would say it's very appropriate to scenes within the epic--Tolkien tells his battles magnificently, but it's from right inside Samwise the hobbit's head that we see the destruction of the Ring, that final struggle).
Re: You're writing epic poetry?fpbSeptember 26 2006, 21:59:56 UTC
Two characters bickering is hardly a subject for an epic? So the Iliad is not an epic? It all starts with Achilles and Agamemnon quarrelling, remember.
Re: You're writing epic poetry?izhilzhaSeptember 26 2006, 22:43:08 UTC
You did *read* my comment, didn't you? I actually mentioned the Illiad. Perhaps this comment was meant for the person I replied to?
[btw, indeed, the Illiad begins with a quarrel, but it grows into something on a much grander scale. I would say that only rarely (which means it does happen) is a simple quarrel worthy of epic treatment; what happens as a consequence of said quarrel, though, is what most epics are made of.]
Re: You're writing epic poetry?fpbSeptember 26 2006, 03:43:20 UTC
Fanfic is not a genre. If it was, it would not need the dozen or more of genre descriptions to be found in FA and elsewhere. And I said before that I will personally have a punch-up with anyone who does not accept that kennahijja at least is an artist of genius. In the case of her best work, it fucking well is high art.
I had this nonsense in comics: people running around with stupid inferiority complexes, talking about "comics" as opposed to "real life". To which I told them, real life is TV and tabloid readers. You are following some of the greatest artists who will ever live - beginning with the two giants, Kirby and Miyazaki - so stop being apologetic and start treating ignorant outsiders as ignorant outsiders. Great writing comes from any kind of side, from private letters (Madame de Sevigne'), from hackwork done for cash down (Poe), from the forgotten work of a poetic hobbyist (Emily Dickinson), from a lecherous adventurer sitting down to recall a dissolute life (Casanova de Seingalt), from odious political propaganda for a corrupt leadership (Burke), from journalistic piecework (Orwell, Mencken, Chesterton), from a bankrupt adventurer having to pay his debts (Cervantes), from amateur publications exactly like modern fanzines (Lovecraft), from antrhopological research (the Brothers Grimm) and so on and so forth and so following... Not only is there no reason why fanfics should not be "high art" any more than any of these things certainly were, but there is evidence, which only a closed mind will not accept, that certain fanfics certainly are "high art".
Re: You're writing epic poetry?
anonymous
September 26 2006, 02:14:44 UTC
It's not "who done it?" it's "how did they cover up who done it?" - same as any other mystery. Columbo is the Superman with the answers - if you figured out the mystery before he did, the mystery is a bust. There would be no entertainment. The reader must not figure it out before Columbo does. Remember the one with Donald Pleasance as the wine dealer? The zinger was not when the killer was captured, its when he realized he'd ruined all his wine to kill his brother. An omnicient POV would have known that. A limited POV was more entertaining by witholding that info until the end.
Re: You're writing epic poetry?fpbSeptember 26 2006, 03:45:35 UTC
You seem to be forgetting one small matter - I had told you that I intended to write a huge continuity featuring no less than three chaptered fics running alongside each other, and with more than half a dozen fics as preludes. My model for this was Jack Kirby's Fourth World quadrilogy - again, a comic-book model - and that both was and was intended as a modern epic to match the great ancient poems. And practically everything else that influenced me, from Thomas Mann to Virgil, has been epic in scale and conception. So yes, I was intending to write an epic. Like JKR, like Philip Pullman (whether or not I detest him), like the vast majority of fantasy writers going back to Tolkien and Eddison.
Re: You're writing epic poetry?
anonymous
September 26 2006, 09:56:03 UTC
Then you can't let an omnicient chorus in on the action. You have to lose the bickering and make him God - an Obi Wan or Gandalf might fill the role, but not the amoral character you wrote. The chorus is there to fill in the holes, not to give their opinion of the relative goodness or stupidity of the characters or the action. You created a chorus character, and you made him by virtue of POV into a lead. That is boring. The character who knows everything, has super-powers, and whose opinion can't be argued with drains tension from the story. I can't invest myself in a story where I don't trust an all-knowing narrator. A smaller POV I might try, but if I'm looking at it as a reader, it's too sad to have an amoral chorus acting like a jerk. The higher the POV goes, the more removed from the sweeping action the story gets, the less chance a narrator has to talk. Editorial comments are nescessarily a limited POV.
I have a set of expectations for fiction, just as I do for amusement park rides. Mysteries give me a funhouse of perception with the reader two steps behind. Suspense gives me a rollercoaster with the reader two steps in front. I expect certain POV to drag me along or push me ahead.
If you're writing Menelaus's marital problems, third person won't do the job. Big stories can have more remote narrators and bigger action. Smaller, tighter focus for smaller characters and less heroic stories. You're setting yourself up for a fall if you try to write fanfic like Homer. (He's had a few centuries of beta's to help him and make sure his teens aren't annoying.)
You read lots of essays. You write excellent essays. But you don't need a reader's sympathy in essays - you catch them with 'honeyd logic.' Fanfic readers are there for the characters - that's the ride they bought tickets for. They need the ride to fullfill an expectation. JKR writes in Harry's POV (up until the last book exclusively in unreliable limited third). Her readers expect a certain intimacy with the characters. (Maybe Illiad fanfic is more a style you like?.)
If I sip a lemonade and get a coffee taste, my expectations are not satisfied, no matter how much I love coffee. Write a Romance with a female lead, who cheats on her husband and ends the story divorced and alone, and my expectations are not met. It's not high art - it's fanfic. Genres have a certain structure, just like epics. If you write your story with your prefered style, it sounds like a half-serious lecture. I don't think that's a style you want to mimic - it's more a parody of yourself than the truth. *rfachir*
Reply
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate, exactly, here...but one thing I love about fanfic is the proliferation and variety of genres. I am a "gen" reader and writer, so the romance is not something I seek out. Action/adveture, mystery, myth or fairy tale, pseduohistory, narrative poetry (or really amazing filks--someone wrote a Harry Potter version/parody of T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland" and it's completely brilliant), pretty much whatever you write.
And it needn't match the genre of the source, either.
Approach it from a different genre and reveal new things about the source, or take a new tack with it.
I guess what I'm saying is that fic isn't exactly a genre, in the typical sense of the word. It's more like a form--and it's broader even than those catagories.
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Well, I never said that wasn't true. It's just that I have occasionally seen fic done from an outsider's or an omniscient pov, when the source itself uses a tight pov, and the fic has worked both as a storytelling and as an addition to the source.
I agree, two characters bickering is hardly the subject of epic (unless they are gods, and the bickering involves sending their human pawns against each other in open war--then you have the Illiad). Nor is a narrow pov entirely appropriate to epic (though I would say it's very appropriate to scenes within the epic--Tolkien tells his battles magnificently, but it's from right inside Samwise the hobbit's head that we see the destruction of the Ring, that final struggle).
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[btw, indeed, the Illiad begins with a quarrel, but it grows into something on a much grander scale. I would say that only rarely (which means it does happen) is a simple quarrel worthy of epic treatment; what happens as a consequence of said quarrel, though, is what most epics are made of.]
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I had this nonsense in comics: people running around with stupid inferiority complexes, talking about "comics" as opposed to "real life". To which I told them, real life is TV and tabloid readers. You are following some of the greatest artists who will ever live - beginning with the two giants, Kirby and Miyazaki - so stop being apologetic and start treating ignorant outsiders as ignorant outsiders. Great writing comes from any kind of side, from private letters (Madame de Sevigne'), from hackwork done for cash down (Poe), from the forgotten work of a poetic hobbyist (Emily Dickinson), from a lecherous adventurer sitting down to recall a dissolute life (Casanova de Seingalt), from odious political propaganda for a corrupt leadership (Burke), from journalistic piecework (Orwell, Mencken, Chesterton), from a bankrupt adventurer having to pay his debts (Cervantes), from amateur publications exactly like modern fanzines (Lovecraft), from antrhopological research (the Brothers Grimm) and so on and so forth and so following... Not only is there no reason why fanfics should not be "high art" any more than any of these things certainly were, but there is evidence, which only a closed mind will not accept, that certain fanfics certainly are "high art".
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Not always. Think Columbo.
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You created a chorus character, and you made him by virtue of POV into a lead. That is boring. The character who knows everything, has super-powers, and whose opinion can't be argued with drains tension from the story. I can't invest myself in a story where I don't trust an all-knowing narrator. A smaller POV I might try, but if I'm looking at it as a reader, it's too sad to have an amoral chorus acting like a jerk. The higher the POV goes, the more removed from the sweeping action the story gets, the less chance a narrator has to talk. Editorial comments are nescessarily a limited POV.
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