My latest CL blog entry is live. This time out: the CMA's, lolcats, Birthers, and texting soda cans. Link follows:

Word's Worth: Forget-meme-not

Older crazy by clickinghere.

Tags: commentary, hype, writing

New post on the Creative Loafing blog. Hit the link below for ramblings on South Park, GLAAD, and Professor X:

Word's Worth: Sacred cows and coddling sheep

As before, older posts at this link

Tags: hype, lgbt, television, writing

I talked my way into getting a slot at Creative Loafing's blog a few weeks ago. The basic subject matter is language, though as you'll notice, I'm not especially strict in how I apply my "beat." This is the most recent entry:

Word's Worth: Traditional definitions

There's an 'author archive' with the first blurbs from all the others and links to the full entries by clicking here.

Tags: hype, lgbt, writing

It's not often I find myself possessed of the need to write something specific. I often have the urge to write, mind you, or have an idea bouncing around, but most of the time I can shunt that aside to a point in time when I can indulge it. But sometimes, my brain gets a little insistent. Such was the case with the following, where the opening sentence was threatening to pound its way out of my forehead from the inside if I didn't put it down. And once I sat down with it, I discovered there were all sorts of other sentences lined up and just as insistent.

Mind you, I make absolutely no pretense of literary merit here. But since my brain insisted this needed to be written, and stotangirl

suggested it might make a nice little Valentine for folks, I am sharing.

In Which

1: In which we begin

It’s possibly pedantic to begin with one (plus potentially alliterative, apparently), but if that’s the only reason you have not to, it’s only contrary to do otherwise. So, one happens to be where things begin, though it crops up more than once. One was the number of the apartment, the number of human occupants (Aaron), the number of avian occupants (his parrot, Bastian), and also—though clearly it strains credibility to have so very many ones cluttered together—the number of words that Aaron had taught Bastian in the year since he got him.

“Shit!”

Honestly, it wasn’t that Bastian was stupid. In point of fact, Bastian was quite bright (and we really need to stop alliterating, so we’ll be done with that now, shall we?). He learned rather quickly, after all, how to open his cage door with some contorting and simultaneous beak / claw work. He learned where Aaron kept the food. Then he learned where Aaron moved the food to once Aaron caught Bastian in said food. He even managed to figure out how to turn on the faucet when he was thirsty, though Aaron had yet to see him do it, so he wasn’t quite sure how that one worked.

“Shit!”

“Now, that’s plenty, don’t you think?”

It was for all these reasons that Aaron knew Bastian wasn’t failing to learn new words, but that he was simply happy with the one he had. Quite happy. In fact, nearly every time the bird piped it up, he sounded like he was celebrating. He probably was. Though whether he was celebrating some secret bird-happiness or merely the look of consternation on Aaron’s face was anyone’s guess.

( In which the story continues... )

Tags: fiction, writing

Am I the only one not understanding the logic in this statement (from this week's Lying in the Gutters comic gossip column)?:

Of course, any creator willing to rise up against a lack of royalties for digital download sales would also have to be the kind of person who'd never illegally downloaded a single piece of content in their lives - or look like a hypocrite.

I can understand hypocrisy when folks who illegally download complain about the money out of their own pockets from other illegal downloads. I'm missing somewhere, though, how wanting to be paid for electronic distribution rights--instead of being subjected to Magical Accounting that always shows no profit--from what should be a legitimate publisher has anything to do with one's download habits.

Oddly enough, isn't this the primary issue in the current WGA strike? Is there a widespread counterargument I've missed where WGA members who have BitTorrent have been derided as hypocrites? Or is it just comic book writers who are supposed to be paragons of virtue in order to be paid fairly?

Tags: comics, commentary, writing

I've hit one of those moments where a topic seems to be cropping up all over the place, which probably means it's stuck in my brain and I want to ramble about it. So suck it up, 'cause I'm about to do just that.

Did it start with the Sweeney Todd trailer? Maybe. As others have already noted, it's decidedly odd that the trailer manages to cherry pick most of the rare moments of dialogue from a show which is almost entirely sung (I think there are maybe 20 pages worth of dialogue in the entire show -- and that's being generous). How does a two-and-a-half minute Sweeney Todd trailer only net 10 seconds of actual singing? Dorian's got a point that there's a sense that whoever made the trailer didn't really want to admit that this macabre tale of revenge and cannibalism is actually ... a musical.

I've also been hearing people talk about musical theatre actors becoming "real actors" when they take on straight plays. And just last night I wound up in a discussion about musical drama vs. "high" drama. The latter title rather clearly points to the qualitative difference at the core of the debate.

Certainly this isn't a new attitude, this idea that musicals are in and of themselves less capable of depth than shows without a soundtrack. When professional critics are calling Kiss of the Spider Woman a musical comedy, it's hard to argue there's no prevalence to the attitude.

I don't think that's true, mind you, any more than I think genre fiction is less capable of exploring the human condition than "literature." And it seems that the criticisms of both have similar structures: adding fantastic elements--whether spontaneous song or alien invaders--distracts from the matter at hand. I.e., the writers aren't creating art so much as flash and dazzle to distract folks from the general lack of appreciable content.

Does that happen? More often than I care to admit. When lyricists and composers get all the good lines, it's easy for book writers to wind up phoning things in, doing little more than setting up the next musical number. It's easy, too, for everyone to focus on making the songs and dances pretty and letting the characters those songs and dances are meant to illuminate fall into shadow. But do these occurrences mean that the form itself is less capable of producing drama?

This just adds up, for me, to musical theatre substituting one set of challenges for another set, and I'm not convinced of an qualitative difference in those challenges. Straight plays can't pick up slack with a rousing dance number, but they also don't have to worry about keeping the audience's attention when the dance number's over. And while plays have the benefit of (generally) greater verisimilitude, there's something to be said for how deeply an audience can sometimes feel a song, how the right notes and lyrics evoke emotions a brilliant line might never hit on its own.

Tags: commentary, theatre, writing

The folks over at sci-fi/fantasy/horror blog Dark, But Shining have been having a few contests of late. I entered the last one, and lo and behold, I runnered up. Kevin Melrose just posted my entry. Per the contest rules, the first two paragraphs aren't mine, but belong to the opening of Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Then I take over and try to creep people out.

Take a look if you're so inclined, and then maybe take a crack at their next contest.

Tags: blogs, hype, writing

In response to nothing in particular, but rather due to the tangents my brain sometimes heads off on: I think we need to ban the non-label that is "semi-autobiographical."

Really, what does that even mean? If the story in question is an event or series of events that actually happened to the author (allowing for the subjectivity of memory, of course), then it's autobiography. If only some of the events happened, or only some of the characters come from real life, or only some of the conversations are meant to reflect actual conversations the author's had, and the rest is artificially constructed for the sake of story, it's not autobiography. Mining characters and conversations and other details from your life isn't kind of sort of doing an autobiography; it's being a writer.

The only thing semi-autobiographical does that I can see is provide some sort of pre-criticism protection. You see, if the writer suggests that some of this really happened, but won't commit to what those segments may or may not be, the fictional elements get a kind of truth by association. Readers are automatically (meant to be) predisposed to believing plot details and characters because they're based on reality. If a character seems stock or cliche, or a setting thin, or a series of events oddly coincidental, well that's not the writer's fault; it's what happened, after all.

I don't tend to call that semi-anything. I mostly call it lazy writing. If your writing is solid, your characters well-rounded, your plotting thorough, you don't need a big ugly crutch like "but it really happened." If you find yourself reaching for it, smack yourself several dozen times and put more effort into the writing and less into the ready-made excuse.

It doesn't help, either, that the existence of the label means readers are sometimes a little too eager to apply it. So if someone reads a story about a protagonist's sexual exploits at a summer camp, and that reader has information that not only is the summer camp real, but the author once attended it ... well, suddenly and without any intent, we've got ourselves a semi-autobiographical sex confession story. Which I'd actually think a bit of an insult if it's not true--not because the author might be embarrassed to have people thinking he had a crazy sexual adventure out on the boat dock, but rather because all of his crafted imagination has suddenly become reporting, and his gift for invention is swept aside in favor of the belief that he happened to live an eventful life (or month at summer camp. Or whatever).

That sounds like I'm dismissing actual autobiography, but I don't think I am. The kind of person who can take the story of her life and tell it honestly and compellingly is someone to be admired. But she, too, suffers from semis. Good autobiographers open themselves up to the world. They expose the good things and the bad things. They write about people they've encountered who may not want their own part in the author's life exposed. They say "all of this happened," and then they offer it up for scrutiny. If something's blown out of proportion, it hurts their credibility. If people discredit elements of the story, the tale of their lives suddenly has holes torn in it. That takes a kind of courage I certainly don't have.

Consider, then, what semis do here. They scrape off the respectability of tales of true life, then they make shit up. It provides for a kind opposite protection to what I mention in regards to fiction, though the effects here are more localized: anyone who happens to be one of the subjects of the story hasn't much in the way objection to what they may see as inaccurate portrayals. After all, whatever deviates from their memory of events is obviously the part the author made up, and he said "semi," so readers know it's only partly true. Except that they have no idea which part that is. In the end, the story acts like a raw exposure, but without the genuine laying bare of the full-fledged autobiographer.

Enough. Give us fiction, and let its believability stand or fall on the strength of your writing. Give us autobio, and leave your life open to the full scrutiny that implies. Stop letting a label take the big hits and start bleeding on the page already. Or are you only a semi-writer?

Tags: commentary, writing

I think I'm still on the same subject I started with my Morrison / Doom Patrol post, I just keep shifting the focus. I'm seeing lots of little posts about Morrison's JLA Classified run, and remembering a lot of talk when the first isssue hit about how slick and over the top it is, and how it's wonderful that it is these things*. I'm seeing, say, Couriers 3 reviews that say much the same thing about Brain Wood's writing. I saw it before with critiques of Morrison's run on New X-Men. I've seen it (and used it) in critiques of blogosphere darling Street Angel. I keep running across posts where some writers are praised for piling genre tropes into their work, while others are raked over the coals for, on the surface, much the same reason.

This isn't a bitter defense of one or more of those coal-raked victims. Rather, it's an honest curiosity. When is the writing "taking advantage of" cliches and when is it "relying on" them? I do, in fact, think there's a difference. I think the lazy writing of the latter is certainly less commendable than the cleverness of the former. I think, too, (probably because I'm just a self-important ass) that I can tell the difference. I think readers in general should be able to tell the difference. The thing is, for the life of me I can't quite articulate how.

I don't know that I'm looking for some kind of definitive answer. I'm not sure there is--or should be--one. I guess I'm just casting about for how others perceive / discern this. What makes it great writing sometimes and hack writing others?


*I'm remembering them, but I can't for the life of me find those posts. If someone has some handy links to a few, I'll be glad to edit them in here. Ditto if you want to go digging for some NXM or SA review links like I'm mentioning above. My google-fu is weak and my attention span small.

Tags: comics, criticism, writing

Dave Carter at Yet Another Comics Blog, having read the reportedly painful decompression in the origin story of Araña, thinks origin stories are boring:

The origin is not the interesting story; it's background information. If the information in the origin is important to the story you're telling, then you can go back later and fill in for the reader. But don't start with an issues-long origin.

It is, perhaps, a teneble position, but his examples don't quite make the argument. Specifically, his citation that Runaways quickly skips its way through the origin falls flat for me. By way of explaining that Amazing Fantasy was all origin, he points out that Araña "doesn't even appear in her super-heroine outfit until the final page of the collection." By origin, then, I'm assuming that Dave means the events leading up to the super-heroic status quo of a character, and by that standard, Runaways is just as long an origin. The status quo isn't simply the running away. No, the Runaways are a group of children using the tools of (powers, technology, and knowledge either inherited or stolen from) their evil parents to try to undo said evil. Sure, the kids flee early on, but it takes six issues for them to amass the powers, technology, and knowledge. Molly's abilities don't show up until the sixth issue, and they haven't the "decoder ring" to unlock their parents' secrets until just after that. And while the kids never have costumes (okay, Molly does, but I'm not sure if it exactly counts), their super-heroic names likewise don't show up until the final few pages of the sixth issue.

If the Amazing Fantasy run and the opening arc of Runaways are both origins, but one meets Dave's requirements for an interesting, well-told story while the other doesn't, I daresay he's not objecting to origin stories so much as poorly told, glacially paced origins. There, I'm sure I'd agree. You can make any story interesting, or make it a formulaic bore. Origins--like all the other kind of story--require finesse to make them engaging.

I think Johanna at Cognitive Dissonance nails it: "[S]how us why we should care about this character before getting into the details of how they got their powers." Really, that's where the story is. If you're giving us engaging characters, characters who mean something to us, then you can start the story wherever the hell you want, and we'll just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Tags: comics, commentary, criticism, writing