I Am A Cruel God

There’s this meta-trope in media (“meta-” in that it relates to the creation of media rather than the media itself. Adding the prefix “meta” to things doesn’t automatically make it super cool, kids) called Creator Backlash, which basically describes the process in which the maker of a thing comes to despise it, sometimes going out of their way to destroy it. For example, Herge, the creator of the Tintin comics, felt he could never surpass Tintin in Tibet, and so the remaining stories either take a silly (and, frankly, unforeshadowed) dive into science-fiction (Flight 714), or were written to deliberately change nothing about the world or its characters (The Castafiore Emerald, Tintin and the Land of the Picaros).

As I’ve started taking writing more seriously, I’ve noticed this trend in certain genres (it’s always the “nerdier” genres, though that’s its own discussion) that’s perhaps a creator’s hatred of their own work starts even earlier than that. I have to wonder what Alan Moore thought of Barbara Gordon before he had The Joker shoot her (though I don’t have to wonder too hard; he wrote DC Comics asking if it was okay to paralyze Batgirl and editorial’s response was apparently “cripple the bitch”). I have to wonder how George R.R. Martin felt when he killed off your favorite character (this one’s a little trickier to find).

I think this is starting to affect me as well. Way back at the beginning of the year, I wrote about Naviim, the continent-and-a-half fantasy setting that I toyed around with from time to time. And in the second of those three posts (“The Video Game that Never Was”), I wrote about the saga of Daniel and Joan.

I hate both of them. I think it has to do with the fact that they make decisions that make sense for them, from their perspective, but as the omniscient god of their universe, I know the longer-term consequences of their actions, and because I’m not as compassionate as, say the Abrahamic God, I hate that they can’t see how this’ll all end.

Saying that the willingness to write bad things happening to well-intentioned people is the mark of good storytelling (or, to be more direct, that I am a good storyteller), is probably too prideful (it’s not Impostor Syndrome if you literally haven’t published anything). But I do find myself taking a sort of sadistic glee in it, in looking at how miserable my characters have become and justifying it to myself by saying, “You did this to yourself.”

-F

The Only Eyes That Matter

I have this fear in me, a fear that I’m sure I share with a bunch of other creative-types, on the nature of “completeness”. Even when I don’t have an outline for a piece, I still find myself making a list of things I want to mention in my head, a mental checklist of everything -- sometimes in order, sometimes not -- that I want to talk about. Another thing about me is that I am terrified of killing my darlings (though, to be fair, the phrase isn’t something easy like, “You have to sweep away your crap”). This means that whenever I put something out into the public eye, whether that be for assignments or this blog or anything else, I’m generally not thinking about how good the piece is as it stands, I’m too busy thinking about what content didn’t make it.

I remember at the beginning of one of my more recent workshops, I was asked: “Is there anything you want us to talk specifically about your piece?” I didn’t really have an answer to that. I remember saying, “No, I’m still in the ‘I hate this’ phase of editing,” but that wasn’t really true. I was thinking about how I didn’t really end the piece, it kind of just drifted off as soon as the main character ran out of people to talk to.

The workshop didn’t notice or at least didn’t say it during the workshop itself. Some people wanted to “know more” in a general sense, but they only really noted that in response letters I read later. They liked it. They really did.

What I forgot was that I was looking at the negative space of the piece, the parts that I had left out thinking everybody else would see them. But the audience never gets to see that part of the piece, just whatever’s on the page in front of them.

There was a time where I would be gently reminded to write more details, to make sure that everything in my head was written down so that the audience could see it. I think this fear comes from that, that feeling of not being able to translate those imaginary images into physical sentences.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, really. Just trying to put words to the knot in my stomach whenever I let other people see what I’m working on. I’ve definitely had to cut anecdotes from this post. I just hope you won’t be able to see where.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Eleven) -- Telltale's The Walking Dead

(trailer)
(purchase link)

The Walking Dead is a comic series that started in 2003 and has continued its singular story for the past fifteen years, chronicling the adventures of Rick Grimes as he wakes up from a coma and has to deal with a zombie apocalypse. Author Robert Kirkman has stated that he never was interested in how zombie media at the time demonstrated its endings. After all, even if the protagonists make it on a boat to some uninhabited island, there’s still a zombie apocalypse going on. Kirkman’s solution was, in essence, to not end the comic, at least until civilization was restored.

Video games don’t really have that luxury. There’s just too much downtime in between releases to hold people’s attention for more than one or two years, and that’s being generous. For a while, though, there was an attempt to match the episodic nature of serials by releasing a bunch of shorter games one after the other. The proven formula still has downtime between seasons (for examples of a failed formula, see this video about Half-Life Two: Episode Three), but it did a decent enough job at mimicking the serial format before the pressure to deliver forced the genre to collapse under its own weight.

But when it was in vogue, the pinnacle of this format was Telltale Game’s adaptation of The Walking Dead. Like Adaptation. from last week, we see an attention to deliver the themes of the piece rather than retell the story (a mistake Telltale themselves performed for their two adaptations of Jeff Smith’s Bone comic series) in its entirety. Instead of retelling Rick Grimes' story, Telltale instead decided to tell the story of Lee Everett.

Lee’s down on his luck. Once a history professor, he discovered his wife sleeping with a state senator and killed the senator for it. But while riding in a police car to his fate, the zombie apocalypse happens, and he gets a new lease on life.

In the comic, the focus is more on the relationships Rick develops with his group (the more cynical among the fanbase would say this is so it hurts more when they die (no that’s not a spoiler, it’s a zombie comic)), and the game takes a similar tack. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, sure, but more often than not the pointing and clicking is used to select dialog choices -- or other ways of responding (do you crush a man’s head with a cinder block or nah?) -- than solving obtuse puzzles. In fact, the most difficult puzzle is probably “use axe on zombie” so there’s a little hint for you.

More specifically than developing relationships with a group, though, is developing Lee’s relationship with Clementine. Clementine is an eight-year-old girl separated from her parents, and Lee takes it upon himself to find them. Now, conventional wisdom would say that child characters in video games are useless and terrible (in fact another character, Duck, is whiny and useless and generally very hateable), but strong writing and vocal performances from both Dave Fennoy and Melissa Hutchison make their relationship throughout the five episodes quite possibly the best thing to come out of video gaming’s trend of “Dad escapism” (see The Last of Us, God of War 4, and Bioshock Infinite for more examples of this trend).

The problem these dialog driven style though is that the replayability is terrible in the same way that Choose Your Own Adventure books are exciting. Playing The Walking Dead more than once reveals the cracks in the system; the places where your choices don’t really matter even if you think they did at the time. But for that one first, perfect playthrough, it’s all worth it.

-F

Next time: Possibly the space book.

Also if you didn’t know already my brother blog, Secret Asian Man has migrated over to Wordpress. You can now find him here.

Raindrops on Roses (Part Ten) -- Adaptation.

(trailer)

One of the biggest criticisms I’ve seen of Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is how much disconnect there is between Watchmen’s meditative breakdown of each character’s philosophies and longing for a past that was just as broken as their present against Snyder’s melodramatic, hyperviolent style of filmmaking. Here’s a quote from one review I found:

“As a comic book, Watchmen is an extraordinary thing. As a movie, it's just another movie, awash with sound and fury.”
-Nick Dent, writing for Time Out Sydney

I mention this not because I’m going to toss my own opinion in on either the comic or the movie, but to talk about the difficulty of even trying to change a story’s medium. For example, what happens when you’re a screenwriter, fresh off the success of a surreal script about being inside John Malkovich’s head, and your next project is a script based off of a New Yorker writer’s encounters with an eccentric botanist with a flair for loophole exploitation? Seems simple enough. But Charlie Kaufman’s a writer with principles! He doesn’t want any of those Hollywood cliches infecting his art, he wants to write about the universe and everything in it, condensing it all into a story about flowers.

More specifically, he wants to write about orchids. The book is called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, after all. But as Charlie experiences bout after bout of writer’s block, he discovers that The Orchid Thief is less of a story about orchids and more of a peek into someone’s life, somebody who has a clear passion that the author lacks. And the most important thing about these sorts of peeks is that they don’t follow a clear structure. They just end when the book does.

Let’s take all of this and wrap it into a single question: Books and films are wholly different mediums, so when presented with the impossible challenge of translating the two, like, how do you even do that?

There are people who say that you don’t. That you shouldn’t. That there are very thick walls between books, films, games, comics, etcetera that should never be broken, and they get upset when someone dares try. The Shining (film), for example turned Jack Torrance from a recovering alcoholic trying to make right with his family to, well, Jack Nicholson in every role he’s ever played (dude has serious eyebrows is all I’m saying). Even Stephen King at one point disowned the film (“It’s the only adaptation of one of my novels I remember hating”).

On the other hand, adaptation is practically its own industry. Once a thing is made, culture twists around it (see “No Accounting for Taste”), tacking on its own details and insights, replacing or editing out details to better suit its audience’s tastes (removing Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings movies, for example). Even from pre-written word times, people have wanted to retell stories.

Charlie Kaufman’s solution for adapting the meditative Orchid Thief was to insert himself into the book’s narrative. By creating a fictional world only slightly unlike our own (one big difference is that Charlie has a twin brother in this universe), he gives himself ownership. Diversions from the narrative the book presents are allowed because he, as the sole author of this universe, permits it.

But remember, back in real life he’s still adapting someone else’s work. So these additions still deal with the same themes the book presents, that being the difference between a passion and an obsession. So let’s break it down:

• (The fictional) Charlie Kaufman is trying to get his own insecurities and his grand ambitions to meet halfway, trying to be true to himself but also continue to find work. For example, he believes himself superior to standard storytelling techniques, but still attends a Robert Mckee seminar about those techniques, and when he’s criticised for making a mess of his script, he immediately sets about trying to make things right.
• Donald Kaufman’s introduction is him finding a new money making venture (“This isn’t another one of my get-rich-quick schemes.”) in screenwriting, where he creates a film seemingly counter to every screenwriting value Charlie holds, but throughout the film he’s constantly seeking his brother’s approval. Notice that Charlie is the only person Donald returns to with his screenplay. Some might say that’s because they live together, but I say they live together so that (real-life) Charlie could have Donald constantly return to his brother.
• And (the fictional) Susan Orlean finds herself regretting her own life where she has everything she could ever want, so when she meets (the fictional) John Laroche, who himself has gone through so many obsessions, finally landing on botany and closing legal loopholes associated with them, Susan jumps at the chance.

Adaptation. is one part a retelling of the events surrounding Fakahatchee State Preserve in 1994, one part an observation of the facades we put up to hide from our own insecurities, and one part answer to the impossible differences between mediums.

What it’s not is a story about flowers.

-F

Next time: Zombies! Parenthood! Button-Mashing!