Suddenly, a stray detail scampers across the beginning paragraph of chapter five, and your story begins to think for itself. ‘No!’ you cry in desperation. ‘Kristoffe Giovanni de Falone is supposed to settle down and have kids with Arianna Raven Nightshade! Not start a violent blood feud with the evil Count Philippe von Vonvon Rochevffort!’ But it’s too late. He’s just killed off Phil’s cousin, consequently been abducted by said Phil, and there’s no way in the sam heck you can get him outta there now…

Understandably, you’re not very happy with that. I wouldn’t be, either.

Well, never fear, the doctor is IN. Just call me Lucy.

[sets up cardboard stand]

Now, Charlie Brown, let’s analyse this as a rather detailed cause-and-effect discussion. Not all of the methods are personally tried and tested by moi, as some are conflicting, and some aren’t my style. They may, however, be yours. This is why I offer them.

By the way, there is also no tl;dr version. Just thought I’d better warn you.

So, here we go.

Symptoms: You wanted to write a medieval romance, and it’s started to turn into a political power struggle. Your girl’s ended up being a far better match for the unassuming childhood sweetheart than for the jerk with a heart of gold. Your main character is stuck in a gigantic pit in the middle of a desert, ditched by his so-called friends. And you didn’t want any of this, because you already have a fantastic plot that you really want to write. This is really not going the way you want it to. Sound familiar?

Diagnosis: Your story has behavioural problems.

Root Cause: Bad parenting. It’s always bad parenting.

——

Prescription #1: Let the child choose.

Okay, so despite the negative connotations of that metaphor to any parents out there, this can be a good thing. Write it the way it’s going. Just get it out of your system. Or change your plan of the story to include this happening. Or even just let all thought of plot go, and write to see what happens.

To Be Taken With: An open mind. If you want your story to go the way you want it to go, and no other way (which is probably why you’re reading this), this option is not for you.

Advantages of this method:
1. You’re not forcing the story, so it will flow better
2. It will come out wonderfully character-driven.
3. You will develop your characters and get to know them that much more.
4. As SlyShy says, a surprise for the writer = surprise for the reader.
5. Most writers swear by it.

Disadvantages of this method:
1. You may end up being bored to death by your subject matter, and abandoning it. Such a shame, too, as
2. It may get far too dark or, to the opposite extreme, fluffy, for your taste.
3. Your characters may end up saying or doing things you do not approve of.
4. The themes and issues tackled here may get too deep or uncomfortable for you. (e.g. try abortion for a hot topic.)
4a. A side effect of this is that you may start getting preachy, which is really not something you want to do.
5. Your character may choose the evil guy/girl, leaving the sweet, sensitive meant-to-be hero/ine on the sidelines, and you with a guilt trip.
5a. You may subsequently try to fix this guilt trip. But most of the time, you’ll just end up inserting an unbelievable character into the story and/or changing the flow of the story from a classic love triangle to an ‘I already know she’s going to end up with him, and he’ll end up with her, so why am I reading this, exactly?’ situation.

——

So, what if this option = not you? Well. Most people tend to say, tough cookies; you should just give the story free reign, and there’s nothing else you can do. I, however, have always been of the opinion that the author should at least have some say-so in the writing process. (I’m kind of a control freak. It’s why I wrote this article.) Which brings me to…

——

Prescription #2: Psychoanalysis.

No, not for you, even though I happen to know you, Charlie Brown, have no self-worth; for your story. This takes a lot more work than Prescription #1. But, hey, if it gives you more control over your story, and you get to write what YOU want, it’s worth it, right? This involves going over and over your story, because rewrites take time.

The Finer Points of this Method:

1. What character traits have gotten your characters into this mess? For example, if your knight in shining armour is both perceptive and curious, with a strong patriotic urge, instead of settling into a quiet life with your heroine, of course he’s going to end up listening at doors, dragging said heroine into all kinds of danger so he can discover if there’s a plot afoot to kill the king! Can these character traits be tweaked or fixed, and other traits given to them that will still allow the plot to go the way you want it?

2. What about the finer points of the setting you have created/dumped your characters into? If the country is in the middle of a war, there is no such thing as a sweet romance. Don’t kid yourself; your hero will get drafted. There will be no happy ending until he comes home. Wars are long and complicated things. The only way he’s coming home before the end is on sick leave. And no hero comes home on sick leave with the measles. He has to be missing an eye or a leg or something. Messy. In any case, when he does get home, you’ll have to write the psychologically-focused scenes where he is still being affected by what he saw happen in conflict. Much simpler never to create the war in the first place.

2a. Of course, if you needed the war in the first place, e.g. to explain why there’s a crucial shortage of certain goods… then, you have a problem. Think harder, cause I got nothing. Hey, you’re the writer! I’m just the doctor.

3. This goes hand in hand with 2. Is there a plot event that can be ditched? If the city gets regularly invaded by pirate slavers, either move it away from the coastline (setting), OR, and this is so much simpler, don’t make the hero walk along the beach at that certain time and place, ergo, he won’t end up getting kidnapped. It’s not a big thing to change.

4. Little bits of a character’s/world’s backstory (or lack thereof!) can sometimes ease their way into a starring role. For example, my friend was writing a story as an exploration of a created culture. She briefly mentions an unfulfilled prophecy. (Here, I will kindly but firmly state that that was not a smart move.) BAM! Suddenly the prophesied child takes centre stage, and culture is the least of her worries.

I had the same type of thing happen to me the day after she told me this. My heroine was a gang member. Her house exploded in a mysterious fire, leaving her homeless. I made the mistake of not explaining the fire away as a bomb falling on it because it was the middle of wartime, or something simple like that. Instead I said that it was a mysterious fire. Now a whole rival gang has grown up from that one missing point of information. In this case, I didn’t really mind, but need I say more?

If your heroine has a random hobby that isn’t important, or is totally out of place (e.g. textiles when she’s also a warrior), what are the chances that your subconscious is going to remember that and say, ‘Okay, we need a reason for that hobby, let me create a conflict that isn’t anything to do with what I was planning to write about’? I’ll tell you what they are: 9 out of 10, People! There is a ninety percent chance of your story developing behavioural problems! And it’s not cause of red cordial.

This should be a good enough reason for you to make sure you can account for your characters and world’s backstories, and make sure there’s nothing that will detract from or overshadow what you’re trying to write unless you’re planning to go back there for a sequel someday.

3a. If you haven’t done this, what are you waiting for? Prevention is better than the cure.

4. What plot points can you alter to get this back on track? The fact that your hero is a brash leader means there’s no way he’s going to stay on guard back at the fortress unless he’s got a broken spine or something. So you may have to break his spine (or something a little less drastic) as part of the plot.

5. Do you just need a new character in this situation? Sure, you can save your old one. File him away. But it may be time to consider a different person in this role. It’s like casting for a movie, in a way. Obviously, Julia Roberts is going to be a better ‘Pretty Woman’ than Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.

To be taken with: A pedantic, dedicated mind and character, as well as a lot of time and some modicum of skill and energy. This method isn’t for the faint-hearted who tire easy.

Advantages of this method:

1. Control!
2. You get to see how your characters could be different. This allows you to write second drafts of characters, and explore them a little more fully, albeit in a different way to option #1. It helps you to craft and refine your characters.
3. Interesting plot twists can result with the deus ex machina method.
4. Gives you a second look at what’s going on with your plot, and whether you really want to do that particular sequence of events at all.
5. You won’t be bored stiff writing about something you don’t care about. If you’re bored when you’re writing the story, your readers are going to pick up on that.

Disadvantages of this method:

1. It is EXTREMELY HARD (and sometimes traumatic) to either erase an aspect of a character from your mind once you’ve written it in, or even write an entirely new character altogether. You have to slot everything in properly, make sure the characters aren’t forced to advance the plot, but rather drive the plot to your chosen destination instead of their own. Make no mistake, it is exhausting. I’ve given up on this several times. You have to ask yourself searching questions, and revise minor plot details over and over again. Revisions like this take time and care. It is harder the second third fourth fifth sixth time around.

1a. As a result of these ‘new-and-improved’ characters, you may find that they take you in some slightly different directions. This is a side effect of suppression, and it’s like squashing your fat stomach so you can fit into that eensie little top: it just pops out in a different place. Your characters will want some things that you You really really cannot fight this. Keep revising if you hate it. But eventually, when

2. You may have to revise a whole lot of stuff (aspects of plot, characterisation, even setting) before this fits in again.

3. If done wrong, your characters may seem ill-structured, illogical, forced and fake. Big risk to take.

4. Sometimes letting the characters do what they want is just as, or more interesting. Then again, if you’re redrafting the characters because they’ve lead you someplace boring/fluffy/dark/morally questionable, etc, this probably isn’t the case.

5. I will say it again, this is much, much harder than Prescription #1, and is almost always botched up.

Tips for adjustment:

1. Grab an extremely honest friend and get them to read the before-and-after work. They can give you tips on whether it’s working or not.

2. When refining, make sure you don’t refine all the flaws out of your characters. That’s not the sort of refinement that’s needed here. Or anywhere, really.

3. Always keep a note of what your first-draft characters were doing/about to do. They could come in handy later, especially if you want to write both versions.

4. Drop most of your plot and stick with the vaguest structure possible. If you want to write your main characters coming to blows in a dungeon, okay, fine. All well and good. But don’t plot every little detail out, because then you’ll end up with nothing.

5. Save copies of stuff every time you change a plot point or a character.

6. You will get frustrated. You can leave it for months at a time (heck, I’ve got one novel that has been on hold for four years now) and come back to it. Leaving your writing is not like leaving school for the summer holidays and coming back to find that dorky guy who always had food stuck in his teeth transformed into Arnold Schwarzenegger (a la Boris Pelkowski). It won’t change in the meantime. This sounds sad—I mean, who wouldn’t want to leave a disgusting draft and come back to find it edited into the best thing you’ve ever read? (Well, you can get this, but sadly, folks, it costs money.) But look on the bright side: you won’t come back to find that the cute guy who asked you out has gotten really, really fat during the holidays. Yes, this is a shallow analogy.

8. Deus ex machinas may also work when getting characters out of a no-way. The trick is to go back through your story and incorporate the elements of the deus ex machina into the story in an un-blatantly obvious way so that it becomes less of a D.E.M and more of an awesome plot twist.

7. Don’t be surprised when your final product comes out totally different to what you thought you’d write anyway. The difference is, this time it will be something you actually like.

7a. If you don’t like the result, rinse and repeat. Just remember, Margaret Mitchell spent ten years on Gone With The Wind. Dodie Smith painstakingly revised every single sentence for I Capture The Castle, and then revised it all over again. Whilst not well-known to the extreme, this is a beautifully-written book and is a [insert publisher’s name here] modern classic.

——

Alternative Treatments:

Incorporation:

Incorporate elements of both prescriptions by twisting the plot as your characters veer away from your structure, and alternate sub-methods. I don’t really think anything else needs to be said on this subject; you can probably guess the consequences, mindset needed, advantages, disadvantages, etc from reading Prescriptions #1 and #2. I recommend having a little look into this option.

Holistic Method:

Wipe the drawingboard clear (keep a copy of the old one, though) and dive into your story with just a pen and paper, a cast of characters, a setting, a knowledge of what you DON’T want, and an even vaguer knowledge of what you do. It’s still character-driven, but you’ve got some modicum of control over it this time, but without having any idea of where the story WILL go; you just know where it won’t. Your subconscious has control this time. And we all know that it does a better job of a story than you do.

——

Preventative measures:

1. Think ahead before you write something major about a character or event. What’s going to happen if you put these two characters together, mix in that particular character trait, and add some events? Yeah, that’s right. A big mess, or a plot you couldn’t care less about. So develop it a different way. Thinking things through often helps, added to which, when you’re only thinking about it as a draft idea, it’s a lot easier to re-write your characters.

2. Never think of a plot beforehand. Just let your pen carry you wherever you go. (Not so good for homework essays, by the way.)

3. Go over your characters, plot ideas, and setting. RIGHT NOW. Make sure you haven’t set yourself up for something truly drastic that you will regret later.

Pharmaceutical Disclaimer:
Some of the examples may not be overly watertight. This is because they are just examples, and not matters of life and death. The principle of the thing is still there.

——

[dismantles cardboard stand]

That’ll be 50 bucks, thanks. No, don’t look at me like that; prices have gone up since the 1960s, you know. Cash, cheque or credit?

Comment [12]

Set in the 1930s in England, I Capture the Castle (1948) is Dodie Smith’s best-loved (though little-known) book, with the power to leave even twenty-five-year-old guys with a mild case of the warm fuzzies.

Be that as it may, it’s the furthest thing from sentimental. What it is, is funny, observant, quick-witted, and touching. I Capture the Castle is the journal of Cassandra Mortmain, a seventeen-year-old girl who lives with her impoverished and decidedly unconventional family: her reclusive father (who was once a very famous and groundbreaking author until he was sent to prison for three months for threatening his wife with a cake-knife), her eccentric and glamorous stepmother Topaz (who was once a nude model and still believes in “communing with nature”), her flawed but beautiful elder sister Rose (who is desperately sick of being poor), her younger brother Thomas (who is smart and doesn’t appear much in the book until the second half), and the hired hand Stephen Colly (who is extremely handsome and desperately in love with Cassandra), in a rented castle in the depths of Suffolk.

And that’s only the premise.

The plot begins when the young American heirs to the castle and its property, Simon and Neil Cotton, plus various sophisticated relations, come to England to look it over. In doing so, they run smack-bang into Cassandra having a bath. Thank goodness for screens, right? After the initial awkwardness is over, they get along swimmingly. Before long, Simon and Rose become engaged. Then Cassandra falls in love with Simon, which messes things up for her a bit. But even though she’s lovesick, she still manages to hatch a plot with her brother to get their father writing again—possibly one of the funniest scenes in the whole book.

Even when she’s in the midst of lovesickness, family rows, and a couple of embarrassing mishaps, Cassandra still manages to be level-headed and adventurous. She is sometimes naïve, sometimes astonishingly wise, but always intelligent, funny, optimistic, and unexpectedly honest.

For example, my favourite quote:

“And I regret to say that there were moments when my deep and loving pity for her merged into a desire to kick her fairly hard.”

It’s full of stuff like that.

I Capture the Castle is often billed as a romance, but trust me, it ain’t just another love story. For one thing… aurgh, I can’t spoil the ending for you, but the ending isn’t a typical love-story ending. For another thing, it’s about so much more than that: society, sisterhood, family, growing up, being honest to yourself, and even a little bit about God.

It’s full of life, good sense and a love of England—it was written whilst Smith was waiting out the war in America, and painstakingly revised over and over again. And it shows: this is good writing. Scene after scene just leaps off the page, brought to life with characters, setting, introspection, and little gems of unconventional wisdom. Cassandra’s voice alone makes I Capture the Castle worth a read: both as a reader and as a writer. I grew so much in both these areas after reading this book.

J.K. Rowling hailed Cassandra Mortmain as “the most charismatic narrator I’ve ever met”. And trust me, when you read her story, you’ll see why. This is one of those books you’ve got to drop everything to read.

My rating: 5 stars.
Average internet rating: 4 ½ stars.

Comment [9]

This article is my response to Virgil’s The Plots and then a tangent into characters and premises and Stephen King, so I’ve split it up into two parts.

Part One: Definitions

After much discussion with myself, I have come to a conclusion. I like most of what Virgil said in “The Plots”, I just don’t like how he said it. My nitpicky side has a couple of definition issues.

(By the way, CD is short for ‘character-driven’ and SD is short for ‘story-driven’ or ‘plot-driven’. Virgil’s)

CD plots are where characters are well built, functioning people with motives and personalities. They react realistically to situations and feel like real people. SD plots are where characters become slaves to a plot, doing and feeling whatever the author thinks is appropriate. These characters are one dimensional exposition-spouting robots, who can only display emotion or reason at the author’s command.

I have a couple of issues with definition here. Let’s go over this. Character-driven is when the characters, their feelings, and actions, drive the story. Story-driven is when the plot drives the story. Well-written is when the characters, plot, and world make sense. Badly-written is when it just does NOT come together. ‘Story-driven’ and ‘badly-written’ often go hand in hand, but they are not synonymous.

…most story elements are ultimately results of the characters actions, which I reduce to CD actions.

My problem with this is that this is only ‘most’ story elements and that the story-driven elements have been completely neglected. Gigantic meteors falling to earth and crushing people, man-eating butterflies escaping their cages, or deadly computer virii are not covered here. And all three are potential story elements.

Plots become SD when characters make decisions that don’t fit with what seems normal (for them), because the writer has a specific plot point to happen later.

No. Plots become badly-written when characters make decisions to fit with the plot. Plots become SD when the story drives it rather than the characters. For example, David Baldacci (who has some very interesting characters, by the way).

Like I said, just some definition issues.

Part Two: An Elaboration on Virgil’s Idea

This is the part where I stop being all smart-alecky and start bowing my head in shame so that you cannot see the egg on my face. After much discussion with myself about playing devil’s advocate for story-driven plot and complaining self-righteously about the fact that you can reduce everything to a character-driven plot via Virgil’s method, I just can’t do it because it doesn’t make sense. Let’s move on before my blush fills the computer screen to such an extent that you can’t see the words for the read. (Geddit?)

But bad, awful, terrible jokes aside, as I was pondering this I realised that there was a little bit more I wanted to add to this discussion, which isn’t particularly on any side of it.

What really triggered me to write this part was finding a quote from Stephen King. Yeah, I don’t even read Stephen King, but I think he’s pretty much on the mark here.¹

I’m going to paraphrase him (because I’m just too lazy to go and Google it):

“Every story should start off plot-driven and end up character-driven.”

In other words, if you want to have a dynamic, rip-roaring story, your focus should be on how your different, individual characters react to a certain event and bring it to life, rather than have characters who are just there so that you have an excuse to write about a premise or an adventure.

Sure, drop some external events on them through the course of the story, and have a gigantic smackdown at the end of it if you like, but make sure your characters react believably, and make sure your characters’ decisions contribute fairly to the plot of the story.

This is kind of similar but kind of different to what Virgil was saying in that it allows for some plot-driven elements rather than a purely character-based story. Not that there is anything wrong with a purely character-driven story. After all, Melina Marchetta made it big with Looking For Alibrandi. I’m just exploring some options.

¹ And now that I have given my blessing, he has become completely legit.

Part Three: An Afterthought

(You’re not alone: this part snuck up on me, too.)

Ultimately, I really hate the boxing-in of the ideas of character-driven and story-driven. The danger being that people twist them to mean something they’re not, and use them in elaborate theories. Hey, I’ve probably just done that by writing this article.

But seriously, folks, we shouldn’t get too caught up in what to call things. We should be more focused on how to use them. After all, what really matters is the writing.

This inspirational message brought to you courtesy of Steph (what is left).

Comment [3]

Your story is boring, right? You are so sick of it. The writing sucks, the plot is boring, with no subplot whatsoever, or even a big, bad amount of holes, and you could go on. The only glimmer of hope is that you have characters you want to tell a story about, a plot you want to build on, or maybe even some ideas and themes that you want to come through.

Minus the themes thing, does this remind you of any particular story? Bad writing, plotholes, boringness? Huuuuuuuge fandom that goes nuts for taking only the characters and plonking them in the middle of ‘get them together stories’ in a thousand different ways.

No, I’m definitely not talking about Twilight.
Okay, that’s a lie. I am talking about Twilight.

Now that we’ve established this fact in about twice the wordage needed, let’s get to the nitty gritty of it: your story sucks, you’re all too aware of this fact, and for whatever reason, you want to save it.

You know what the fanficcers do? By definition, fanfiction is simply writing one’s own story about characters or concepts that have already been created. So they take Bella and Edward and they transplant them to Mexico, or an all-human high school, or a travelling circus, or a medical drama.

In the process of changing the setting, they end up with a related subplot, like a drug heist gone wrong, an oncoming pep rally, or a lion tamer that wants to take over the world, or Bella losing her life and actually staying dead. (Oh, please, I beg of you, Jurisfiction!—make this canon!)

And in some of the really good ones, these Mary Sues we’ve come to know and hate (or love, in my case, as you all know how Edward is destined for me someday), well, they’re a tiny bit more fleshed-out. Suddenly, Edward has more to worry about than keeping Bella isolated from anybody she wants to be friends with, and begins to care a bit about the drugs not making it to the general populace of Miami, or wherever you Northern Hemispherians source your drugs. Suddenly, Bella has to worry about seducing Edward without ending up married (!), and has to deal with maybe losing her life for real.

As a side note, you’ll notice that the treatment of this in even the middle-grade Twilight fanfics is a lot more in-depth and angsty than the series itself. I have a theory that this is because they don’t want to be called out on being ‘unrealistic’. Oh, the irony.

Such is the power of the revamp. (Now that I’ve noticed the pun, pun totally intended. I’m going to start capitalising it.) And I’m not talkin’ no wishy-washy reVamp where you start from a slightly different aspect or talk from a different character’s point of view. Most of those with sucky stories they want to save have already tried that. I’m talking about uprooting these characters, and letting the fresh air of a new setting mellow both you and them out, so they can speak for themselves, explore the things they want to do, flesh themselves out.

You see, a change in setting presents so many possibilities. For one thing, your corporate espionage/romance plot may just not work during World War Two. This is where your characters come into their own. The unexpected setting stimulates your brain and gives you ideas galore: New York becomes tourist-gets-lost, urban fantasy faerie Court wars, starting a new business, alien invasion, anything you like, that you can now transplant your characters into and make an amazing story.

News flash: writing is meant to be fun! It’s why we do it! And if you’re sticking with something you hate, it’s no longer fun. So let me repeat what I said in my last paragraph:

ANYTHING YOU LIKE, YOU CAN DO.

If you want to do it, do it. It doesn’t matter. You are free to mess around with this plot as much as you like.

And that is the charm of fanfiction, most clearly seen in the Twilight fandom. Fanficcers don’t worry about the original plot of Twilight: that’s already been exhausted, and it’s time for something they can play with. Something they can have fun writing. Hey—the original is still there for them to pore over and love. Same principle applies here: you’ve still got your original story. You’re just fanficcing for now.

Thinking of what you’re writing as only fanfiction (no offence to any fanficcers out there!) can take the pressure off you as an author. You don’t have to force the plot to twist in a certain direction: it’s only fanfiction. You don’t have to come up with the most original thing ever: it’s only fanfiction. You get the idea. You can do what you want.

Or you could even just switch perspective. Midnight Sun has got to be the prime example of this: although Edward still talks like a middle-aged woman, and is still obsessed with Bella, it’s a much more interesting look into the psyche of a self-justifying stalker who hates himself, and it has a couple of sub plots involving neighbouring vampires who come to visit, the Cullens’ reaction to his newfound love and the like. As opposed to Twilight itself, which is from the point of view of a girl who’s never done anything truly terrible, and the sole plot is EWDaRD!1!Eleven!! Although it’s not perfect, it’s a definite step up.

If your characters are the ones causing you to hate your work, you already know what I’m going to say. Go find some new ones. Maybe it won’t be a boy called Scheherazade with blue hair mystical pixie flying powers, unless this is what you want to do, but the principle is the same. Or just reVamp (ha!) your old ones. Lower-grade (and some higher-grade) fanfic writers do it all the time. You ever heard of OC fics? OOC fics?

(If you seriously haven’t and you’re not just messing with me, which on this site is about 50% likely, have a squiz over here. )

Or you could try writing about a different character in the work. Stop looking at Edward and Bella, bless them, and stick Bree Tanner under the microscope.

Be warned: a few things may have to fall by the wayside in the name of Art. Maybe you’ll have to recycle the original plot you wanted in something else. Maybe a scene you really wanted to write will no longer fit. Don’t worry, just say it with me: It’s only fanfiction.

So just try it. The worst thing that can happen is that you stuff it up completely, and lets face it: you were already in that position anyway. Sometimes, you just have to let go.

Comment [9]

And so without further ado,

because there’s been enough already,

and I’m a terrible, terrible person,

I give you:

THE IMPISH IDEA PODCAST, EPISODE ONE.

NO, REALLY.

You now have the opportunity to hear our beautiful, smexy, swoon-worthy, sparkly, unconditionally and irrevocably lovely voices.

feedburner link here.
livejournal link here.
direct download link to episode one here.

If you want to be really clever, go to iTunes, click ‘Advanced’, choose ‘subscribe to podcast’ and then put the feedburner link in. Should be able to do this within 24 hours of the feed going online.

Or you can click the feedburner link for more options to subscribe.

The livejournal link is there for no reason I can possibly fathom, however I needed it to set up the feedburner link, so I thought everyone else might want to see it too. It’s not that exciting, but what the hey.

Now, for the transcript, kindly typed up by Thea:

——-

Intro music

Various imp sound snippets:

We have you now!
Somebody say something profound, quick
Bloody hell.
I get… questions
I hope so
I think I just lost a couple years off my life
Which is more disturbing
It apparently can’t be real
Wouldn’t you like to know?

I like minions personally—
Muhahaha! …Sorry, that was my evil laugh
Mute your microphone

All right, we’re stopped
Stay on topic
Stay on topic
Stay on topic…

intro music fades

Nate: All right, introductions again?

Steph: Okay, let’s take it from the top.

SlyShy: I’m SlyShy, you can call me Sly, for short.

Nate: This is Nate Winchester.

Rorshach: This is Rorschach, you can call me Rorschach for short.

SWQ: This is Snow White Queen.

Steph: I’m Steph.

Inspector: I’m Inspector Karamazova. But just call me Inspector. Please.

Steph: Nice.

Inspector: Or else.

Steph: Okay, so I suppose we should welcome all the listeners or something.

Welcome.

Inspector: Yeah, all two of them.

Steph: Oh, come on, there’s got to be people who love us more than that.

Nate: Whoever likes us, can we really call them people?

Inspector: (thoughtfully) Probably not.

Steph: Imps— we’re Imps.

Nate: Yes. Hello out there to our fellow Imps.

SWQ: I like “minions”, personally.

Nate: Only Matt can call us that. (with facepalm in his voice) Only S—only Sly can call us that.

Inspector: You’re gonna have to bleep out his name.

Nate: Edit that last part out.

SWQ: You’ve blown his cover!

Steph: I think everyone knows his name is Matt, anyway.

Sly: Yeah, I think it’s pretty safe to say that. And everybody knows my last name too, which is more disturbing.

Steph: I can’t believe you did that. Just like…was like, “Hey this is my name, for reals, guys.”

Unless it’s fake and all this is a lie.

Nate: At least his social security number isn’t well known, which is 405-19-3—

(Laughter)

Steph: So, I guess to start off this podcast we might start with ideas, and how stories grow from ideas, where you get your ideas from and stuff.

Nate: Yeah, it depends upon which story I’m working on.

Rorschach: So, for me, I mean it’s kind of like, well, if you’ve ever, like, talked to a writer, or maybe if you don’t, I mean the question we probably get asked the most is where you get your ideas from. And there’s not a secret place that I get them from; they just randomly pop into my head. Literally, the most inane, boring things can prompt a story. Usually it’s just a germ of an idea. I think of a scene, maybe a character and then I’ll start thinking, well, what could happen here? Who is this character? What are they doing? How did they come to be here? And then I’ll start to think about that I’ll start developing a backstory: what happened directly before this scene? And then of course what happens after.

There’s a series I’ve been working on; it was actually the first story that I ever completed. I ended up writing nine very, very poor books in that series, but it started—I was walking down to a gas station to get a coke, and I saw an RV drive by. And that’s it. I looked at the RV and a story popped into my head of someone trying to climb on top of an RV and go joy riding, and an entire series was born just about that germ of an idea.

So, I mean, they can really come from anywhere, at least for me, but as it’s usually just… I’m not even thinking about stories just going about my normal everyday life and something will pop into my head.

And I think really the difference between normal people, if you will, and writers—because writers are certainly not normal people—is that everyone gets ideas but most people are just like “Huh, that’d be interesting” and they just move on with their life, but because I’m a writer I’ll get an idea and I’ll start thinking, okay, how can this be a story? What are these characters’ motivations? What do they want? Um, you know, what happened before this? You know, who are these people? I start to develop just a little germ of an idea into what will slowly, you know, branch and become larger hopefully an actual short story or a novel or something along those lines.

Steph: That’s kind of similar to me and I like what you said about normal people just discarding the ideas but we go after them.

Nate: I was going to say when ‘Shach was talking about it there, when he said he wrote nine very bad stories, I wanted to say there’s not a very bad story just the unedited story.

SWQ: Well, since he went first he hit a lot of the points that come to me, but I think one of the points that he kind of touched on which was really important to me is asking questions. I normally don’t get an idea of plot; I get questions. Like, if I see a bad marriage, I ask questions about that bad marriage and then I incorporate it.

I don’t really plot all that well. I just have all these little scenarios and then I just put them all together, like a magpie. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it but the results are usually very interesting!

Inspector: I agree a lot with what Rorschach said. I often find ideas from literature, whatever I’m reading, but often it’s something I hate and I try to make it better. And from there what I’ve tried to make better, it just blossoms into its own thing. The current story I’m working on, the longest one started as an attempt to…I don’t know if you guys have heard it, they play this song all the time around Christmas, you know that Christmas shoes song? Where the stupid little kid’s trying to buy shoes for his mother because she’s dying or something like that?

Steph: (gleefully) Oh no, sing it, sing it, I’ve never heard it.

Inspector: Oh, I’m not going to sing it. You’ve got to hear the lyrics; they’re the sappiest thing ever. Anyway, I took them and went “Okay, I want to write my own story and make it better”. And now it’s nothing like that but that’s where I began.

SWQ: Yeah, I like clichés…I like to think about clichés. You know like in Aladdin you would—you would never really think—the Disney part of it doesn’t think about how the socioeconomic difference between Aladdin and Jasmine would cause a whole lot of problems in the future.

That’s the kind of stuff that I think is fun to think about, so I get a lot of inspiration from pop culture.

Steph: Like deconstruction.

SWQ: Yeah, that’s a lot of fun.

Steph: Yeah.

Rorschach: I think that honestly that’s one of the most interesting types of stories for me to read, is the type of story where you take something that’s maybe really, really well-worn, a standard kind of trope and put a very new and unique twist on it. That’s something I’ve tried a few times with stories. I’ve really had good ideas, taking some sort of trope that’s kind of well-known and seeing what can I do with this that will make it completely new and original.

SWQ: Most of the time you don’t really have to change all that much much, you just have to think about it more than it’s usually thought about when people use it.

Nate: I think it’s a requirement to be an Imp, to over-think things.

Steph: Definitely.

Inspector: I do most of my thinking while I’m at work, because my job doesn’t require any thinking. And so I’m sitting for six there for six hours stapling or typing and the entire time I’m re-plotting and reformatting whatever story I’m currently working on.

Steph: Sly, you got anything to add?

Sly: Yeah, well, for me there are two story modes that I think in. So there’s kind of short story mode and there’s longer fiction. So for longer fiction, my ideas usually come in the form of…well, I mostly write in science fiction for longer fiction, so my ideas are based on: what’s a development in human history we could make that would really change the world, and what would those effects have?

Or, what’s a philosophical conundrum that we’re going to deal with in the future. Like what’s the affect that performance-enhancing drugs are going to have in sports—that’s something we’ve been dealing with recently, but even in the future we might have performance—performance enhancing drugs that people take while they’re at work. And there’s a really interesting science fiction novel called Beggars in Spain, where humanity basically turns into two classes of people. These ‘sleepless’ people who are up 24/7 and make all the money in the world because they never sleep and they have all these enhancements, and then you have the people who could never afford these enhancements in the first place and thus never get jobs and just die.

But for short stories, I really go around and I look for a single scene that I think would be a scene that has a big impact on the story and then I figure out what would be the events that lead up to this scene.

Steph: Cool.

I, like what Inspector Karamazova was saying, I see a lot of bad fiction and stuff. You have no idea how many like…how much fiction I’ve written just based on trying to fix Twilight. And I think it’s been an inspiration for a lot of people across the interwebs. I know Artimaeus had that, um, parody or whatever it was and Nate’s got his Nagasaki Moon thing going.

Nate: And I have a quote from a more famous writer along those lines. Hang on a minute, I’ll find it.

Steph: Okay. So I can keep talking? Cool.

So yeah, I like to see stuff in books or in real life or I see the typical tropes or clichés or whatever and I’m like “Ooh, okay. I want to try and subvert this, or it would be really interesting to subvert this”. Like you know how, for example, in the chick flicks/teen chick flicks, you have the popular girl always going out with this really nice goy—nice guy, and she’s like, really snobby and all of that. And then the plucky underdog that we’re supposed to root for during the movie ends up with the really nice guy because she’s completely embarrassed the popular girl into like never appearing again. And I thought what if that really nice guy just stayed with the popular girl because he’s just that nice and if they really had something…to subvert the typical, you know, expectations of the movie audience.

And sometimes I get ideas on like I have a couple of scenes in my head and I’m like, whoa, it would be so cool if I write that and then I sort of build the story around the scene.

I think… the basic thing about getting ideas and being a writer is you need like this constant… you need to be constantly asking “what if?” and then try and turn it on its head as much as possible.

And that’s it—oh, I have the phrase “fantastic conceits” in my notes, which I just wanted to throw in there. And that’s me.

Nate: And I found that quote: “One of the spurs on the heel of the boot of the muse that jabs us in the butt and gets us to spend long hours hunched over a typewriter is this: we read a book and think we can do it better.”

Steph: Aye, aye.

Nate: “Not that we can do any old book better, we read some particular book and we say, ‘I can write a better version of that’.”

Rorschach: I think that’s the—

Steph: I definitely agree.

Rorschach: I think that’s the inherent arrogance that all writers have, because writers are, of course, incredibly arrogant. We all believe that, for some reason, the words that we think up and write on paper are going to be so interesting and entertaining that other people are going to want to read them. I think that’s the absolute epitome of arrogance.

Nate: I’m not arrogant; I’m more humble than anyone.

(Laughter)

SWQ: As far as ‘wanting to be better than what you consider to be a bad writer’ motivation…I was inspired by Tolkien (and this is an opinion of course), but I think that he is one of the best fantasy writers—definitely one of the most influential, so I don’t think I’m necessarily arrogant enough to think I could write better than him—I mean obviously he’s not perfect—but he inspired me to try and do better than I was already doing. If that makes any sense at all.

Nate: Oh it’s not opinion. It’s a fact that’s he’s the best, and an inspiration to us all.

SWQ: Yeah, my first thing I ever tried to write, I was twelve—sixty page fan fiction, Lord of the Rings. You can imagine how well that turned out. I’m kind of sad I don’t still have a copy, ‘cause I’m sure it was really funny!

Rorschach: I have this, technically it’s a bit of fan fiction but it’s really just kind of a comedy piece set in Lord of the Rings that I wrote, oh, probably about 2002 and the funny thing is that it’s actually still on fanfiction.net and about every six months or so I’ll get an email or a comment on saying oh this is really funny and reminding me, oh yes, I wrote that, way, way back in the day.

SWQ: Actually the computer I used to write that fan fiction—still the one I’m using, but I think wiped the hard drive after I lost everything to a virus some time ago, so unfortunately I don’t think I have any of my old stuff anymore. Sad.

Nate: (smugly) See, all my old stuff is on floppy drives, so nobody will ever be able to read it.

Steph: Bahaha, you’re so old.

SWQ: I guess the general rule is: don’t delete stuff. Store it in the corner, but don’t delete it.

Inspector: I keep, like, everything I’ve ever written ever since I was, like, twelve—like with a few exceptions that got corrupted or deleted—so sometimes I go back and look at my old stuff and feel better about what I’m writing now.

Steph: Oh, I really do regret deleting some of my old stuff. Like I wrote this thing, like a vampire thing and I was like, “Oh my gosh, have I really written this? I’m going to delete this now!” I think, you know, I was just so shocked I’d written something vampiric, and now I really wish I hadn’t deleted it, ‘cause I could have cannibalized it and used it for something else. Of course, I was probably proud of really bad writing. So maybe it’s a relief.

Rorschach: Well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with vampire books. I mean, it’s just that every single one that is coming out now days is just a rehash of Twilight. It’s getting ridiculous to the point of walking through, like, the urban fantasy section of most bookstores and libraries

Steph: Yeah, the thing is, though, I’m Christian? So I was really, really surprised that I wrote it, you know? I was like, “oh, this would be really cool” and then I’m like “wait a second, what have I done?”

My dream is to write a vampire story that incorporates some Christians as well, because I think that would be really interesting. I think one lady’s already done it, I think her name is Sue Dent and she wrote this book called Never Ceese, which I haven’t read yet, but I really want to. And she found it really hard to get a market because, a) it was Christian, so it didn’t appeal to a broad audience, but it had vampires in it so pretty much every Christian was like, “No, we’re not going to touch this.”

(obvious edit is obvious)

Anyway, did I just break the no religion talking rule?

Nate: No, we all had a Stephanie Meyer joke pop up in our heads.

Inspector: When I was young I would always be shocked because I come up with these stories where everyone would always die in the end pretty much. So I would show them to my family and they’d all be like at me for writing such depressing things. I was a terrible person.

SWQ: Ha ha, I used to have a Mary Sue problem, especially with female protagonists. I don’t know, I guess it was just vicarious wish fulfillment or something. I hope I’ve gotten beyond that, though, but it’s always good to acknowledge the problem.

Inspector: I don’t know, I think a lot of people’s first character is a Mary Sue because when you start writing young you haven’t really read all that much and so basically you’re basing everything on yourself.

Sly: Yes, we all happen to be perfect people.

SWQ: Yeah, yourself as you wanna be, right?

Steph: I think when we start up writing we all start writing self-inserts and we identify with our characters like really heaps, and then, as we get better at writing, we start to put less of ourselves into the characters.

Nate: Yeah I think also part of it comes from the fact that when you’re younger you only really know yourself. But as you get older then you start understanding how to look from other people’s perspectives and you become more aware of things that are around you. So that’s why I think Mary Sues tend to decrease as people get older.

Although you tend to see them occur more often with authors that get a little more insular as they get more famous and don’t spend as much time around others and probably regress back to that youth mode where everything’s focused around them and they forget about things beyond themselves.

Steph: Could you also say it was—if they hadn’t really written much before and weren’t used to thinking about things from other people’s perspectives. Like I’m thinking of Stephanie Meyer ‘cause Twilight was like…you know, she said that was her first thing.

Nate: Oh, undoubtedly yeah. You can tell she was definitely much inside her own worldview and the perspectives of the world she’s more comfortable with. Like I can tell, even when I was growing up, I was around a lot of different people, I still didn’t I think become as aware of other perspectives and outside methods ways of looking at things until I really started getting on the internet and going other places around the country and started talking and socializing with other people and how they looked at things.

**

Steph: Has anyone read or watched anything good lately that they reckon everyone else on ImpishIdea should see? And also, if anyone wants to pimp out their own sites, go ahead.

Sly: Well, I’m running a website called ImpishIdea. It’s pretty cool.

Inspector: Well, I’ve never heard of it. I guess I’ll have to check it out.

Nate: It’s a little overrated; don’t get your hopes too high.

Sly: That’s ImpishIdea.com.

Inspector: How do you spell “idea”? Is that with the ‘r’ or not?

Sly: Yes, it’s Impish Idearrrr, it’s the British version.

SWQ: I’ve already talked about this book on the main site, but I would really recommend, if you like reading or like writing, read Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. Yes, that is her actual name, it’s the best name ever for her chosen profession. But it’s a book where basically she takes passages out of really well written books and short stories and she breaks everything down and tells you what’s good about it. And she starts from the ground up—with word choice, then she goes to sentences and paragraphs. It’s one of those books that you really want to read and reread because it just teaches you so much

Sly: Yes, basically reading like a writer is the best book on writing that I know of. I always recommend it first when people ask me because the approach is just so great because people read all the time and so if you’re becoming a better writer every time you read a book, that’s extremely valuable.

Steph: I read this thing once, I’ve got the link somewhere, I’ll put it in the notes of the podcast, and it was that when you read a book you shouldn’t say, okay, was that good or bad, but should try to evaluate whether the author did what they set out to do. Like Stephanie Meyer did what she set out to do even though her books pretty much stink, she still wrote this romance that connected with heaps of people and yeah, made s-loads of money.

Rorschach: I wouldn’t necessarily agree that she set out what she wanted to do because as I recall I think she was setting out to create the most epic and amazing and wonderful romance that has ever been in any literature in the history of the universe and she did not really succeed in that, as popular as it was.

Steph: She created the illusion for a lot people; does that count?

Rorschach: The illusion is going to lead to battered women syndrome? I don’t know about that.

Nate: Yeah, illusions don’t really count ‘cause they’re not real.

Steph: Oh, shut up.

(Laughter)

Rorschach: I recently finished reading George R.R. Martin’s Dance with Dragons, which I’ll be writing a review and posting it on ImpishIdea soon. But it was a very good novel. There were some problems to it, it didn’t move the plot as forward as much as I would have like. But Martin is an incredibly gifted writer and is an absolute master of characterization, so even when he’s a little bit off of his mark which I think this book was, it’s better than the vast majority of novels you’ll read out there. And I mean you can teach classes in terms of the writing quality in there.

Steph: Okay, so I’ve been reading this really awesome webcomic lately: it’s called Red Moon Rising. So its redmoonrising.com, and it’s like this steampunk, urban-fantasy adventure thing. It’s pretty slow to start off with, and the main character kind of a grouch—but the author’s really aware of it, and the art is amazing. So I highly recommend it. Check it out. Redmoonrising.com. ‘S’awesome.

SWQ: I know this is really belated but actually a couple days ago I actually read Limyaael’s rants on fantasy. If you like writing, and especially if you write fantasy and if you’ve never heard of them before or never checked them out, I would definitely recommend that you do it. They’re really insightful—really angry, but really helpful. They make you think about things that you might not have thought about otherwise, and that’s always a good thing if you’re a writer.

Rorschach: I will actually second that. I’ve also read Limyaael’s rants. They’re very informative. They do tend to be very fantasy focused, so if you’re a fantasy or science fiction writer they’re very, very good, but a lot of the points she makes are very relevant for literally any kind of story that you’d be writing.

Inspector: The one writing book that I’ve read many, many times is How Not to Write a Novel and it’s pretty well known, but if you haven’t read it you definitely should. It was written by these two editors who see the same mistakes over and over again. And they post fake excerpts of what can go wrong and then explain why it’s wrong, and they’re hilarious and awesome.

Sly: Everybody should read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf has… kind of bad reputation, almost, as a really florid writer, but her writing style is just amazing. It’s probably one of the most unique books I’ve ever read, and it’s really inspirational how well she’s able to flow between every single character in the scene and give you each character’s perspective during that scene. It’s really mind blowing. And the depth of her psychological observations are really, really impressive.

SWQ: So I guess Virginia Woolf is going on the list: the infamous list of like a hundred books now that I have to read. Too many good books, not enough time.

**

Steph: Okay so the second topic that we wanted to discuss on this podcast was the ethics of sporking. And is it okay to tear down another writer’s work. Rorschach, do you want to start us off?

Rorschach: Sure, okay. So first of all, to kind of expand on the question, one thing that a lot of people level as a criticism against us here at Impish, and also back in earlier incarnations as when some of us were on Anti-Shur’tugal. They basically kept asking why are you so focused on negativity. Why do have to keep talking about things are bad if they’re bad why don’t you just ignore them, and not spend any time analyzing them? Why do you—why don’t you just read books that you like?

It’s a fair point but honestly I think that…I don’t think you need to make an ethical case for sporking something. I think that if, as an individual, you truly enjoy complaining and tearing something apart and if you actually enjoy doing that, who are we to say that you’re wrong? But I don’t think that really for the most that Impish or Anti-Shur’tugal, um, I don’t think that’s what we’re about, that’s certainly not what I’m about.

(obvious edit is again obvious)

Now that Impish Idea has branched out to people who are interested mostly focused on Stephenie Meyer, Gloria Tesch, as well as having articles on how to write and things like that. I don’t think that even though we spend a lot of time focusing on the bad that we’re really a negative community at all. That’s certainly not what I attempt to do with my sporks.

When I spork something I really have two intentions. The first one of course is to entertain my audience and hopefully to amuse them and to make them laugh, but also the second part of that and what is equally important in my eyes is I actually want to critically analyze the writing that I’m sporking. I want to delve into it to kind of expose what’s wrong it, to analyze why it doesn’t work. And hopefully by doing that it’s actually going to provide helpful writing advice if you read it by explaining and illustrating, you know, what not to do when you’re writing; what mistakes to avoid. And I actually got an email from my site: someone thanking me for sporking them. And this is probably my favorite piece of feedback that I’ve ever gotten from anybody, but basically this is just a quote from the email they wrote me:

“Your genuinely insightful commentary as to how a book should be written has actually inspired me to take up writing again after about five years’ absence.”

And that’s kind of an example of how basically critically analyzing though even though the basis of sporking is just going over in detail a poorly written book, it actually is informative to a writer and it can help writers develop skills and learn how to be a better writer.

Steph: Whoa, okay, that’s cool.

I’m not sure where I stand on sporking still. I mean sometimes it feels a bit like the sporking is gossiping about the author? Because you wouldn’t want them to actually see what you were writing about their stuff, but you’re happy to like talk and laugh and talk about it. I’m saying ‘you’ generally, not pointing out specific sporkers. But that’s sometimes how I feel. But then again, if okay with the author seeing it, I guess then it’s okay to do it. I guess it’s just about honesty? I’m not sure, I’m really not sure.

Rorschach: Well, I mean. Let’s be honest here. If we’re gossiping, let’s say for example, I had a friend who wrote a book and I found it and got it off the computer and we just sat down and ripped it apart, I think that would be absolutely inappropriate. But the thing is, if you publish a book you are essentially putting it out there for the world to read and analyze. When you publish a book you know people are going to buy it, you know they’re going to talk about it, you know they’re going to write reviews, both positive and very negative reviews of it and you’re also aware that people are going to sit down and absolutely shred your book. That happens to virtually any book, I think, that’s published or self-published. And I think that’s part of being a writer. You put your work out there and people are going to respond to it. If an individual—and basically any of the people that we spork, Stephenie Meyer published her books, Christopher Paolini did, Gloria Tesch, even though she isn’t really published, I mean—they self-published their books, they put them out there for people to read, and that kind of feedback is a part of it.

Now to say that, would I be slightly embarrassed if someone read the things I’ve written about them? I might be a little bit, but honestly, I stand behind the things that I’ve written and the things that I’ve sporked. If Gloria Tesch were to read it I honestly think she’d probably improve her books if she decided to rewrite them.

Steph: I see where you’re coming from. I really want to agree with you, but I’m also playing devil’s advocate here, so yeah. But no, I like what you said. I think you should have gone last and summed everything up because, yeah, that was pretty good.

Inspector: When I decide whether or not I’m going to spork a book, I generally take the author’s attitude into account, too. If the book is bad, but the author is humble about it and isn’t snotty, then I’m not going to rip it to shreds. But if the author has written this mediocre to bad book, and has just an attitude about it, I feel I have it coming. But that’s just me.

Steph: And, as we all know, you’re a really evil person.

That was a joke, I’m sorry!

Everyone’s going to think if they listen to this that I’m just going to rip you to shreds.

Inspector: I—

Steph: But you deserve it.

Nate: Yes, when Steph makes a joke, everyone unmute and begin laughing.

Steph: Or you know, I could laugh at my own jokes—that could work, too.

Nate: Just get a recording of your laugh and then just insert it when you edit.

Sly: (providing much-needed direction to off-topic conversation) I agree that once a book is published, it’s basically fair game for being sporked—because if you think about it, the editor should have been sporking the novel so to speak. So if the editor failed to do that, and we’re noticing things that are easy to make fun of, than the book deserved that. The one thing I didn’t spork intentionally was Midnight Sun. I thought it would be slightly unfair to Stephenie Meyer if we were to spork her unedited, pre-draft kind of book. But, definitely, her Twilight Saga has enough to spork to begin with.

Nate: I was just going to say when I been sporking stuff like the Twilight and Philosophy series, there’s a reason I try not to bring up what the author’s name is: both for myself and for the reader, to let people know that it’s not personal or anything.

Steph: Yeah, you’re really more about attacking the arguments and stuff in that one, aren’t you? And having fits of rage over their justifications.

Nate: Yeah trying to let them know it’s nothing toward them as a person. Of course that’s tough for writers because we put so much of ourselves into our work that almost any criticism of our work comes off as just a little bit personal.

Steph: Chorus of yeses, please. That’s how I feel anyway, because it does feel pretty personal.

SWQ: I don’t know about anybody else. But I do put a lot of thoughts and ideas and sometimes even situations from my own life into my book. I don’t necessarily deal with it in the way that I wish things would be dealt with or anything like that—or it’s not even necessarily an honest representation, but yeah, a lot of myself goes into those books.

Inspector: And sometimes it’s like subconscious. You know, I once I wrote this story and someone in my life read it and recognized something that happened between us and he got really offended. He was like, “how could you write that kind of thing about me?” and I’m like “I… didn’t… It just kind of happened.”

SWQ: That’s why I’m nervous about showing my family and other people like that what I write, I’m afraid that they’ll see themselves in it. It happened once; it was not fun.

Nate: Also, my parents and I are just different enough that they are not the audience that I really write for. Even if they wanted to be my biggest fans.

Inspector: Oh, same here.

Steph: My sister’s, like, my biggest fan. I keep finding her on my computer just reading everything I write, and I’m like, okay, this is weird. But actually the first story I ever wrote and submitted to a competition, it was, you know those comedy articles, it was like Dave Barry? You know how he writes about his life? And I stuck my sister in there and she was Not Happy that I put her in there. Although, you know, in this case it was very obvious it was her, since I used her name and everything.

She was upset about that.

Inspector: Did you ask her permission, or did you just put her in?

Steph: (sheepishly) I just… put her in.

Nate: Yeah, you shouldn’t have used her name.

Steph: I just—yeah, well it was only a throw away one liner thing, so I thought she would be really happy. Because if mentioned me in a novel—ha ha—I would just be like oh—

Nate: As they have.

Steph: I still can’t get over that. Thanks Nate. Love you forever.

Nate: It’s how you get the ladies.

Inspector: How many things are you sporking at a time, Rorschach?

Rorschach: Well,

Nate: (interrupting merrily) As many as his sanity will allow.

Rorschach: I usually try only to do two. Like at the moment I’m doing Maradonia, and I’m slowly working through Stanek’s books, which are just so insane they take forever to do. But I’m thinking of just doing a smaller, like not nearly as in-depth as I do Maradonia, but just a little paperback that my friend got for me because he knows I spork things. And it’s intensely bad.

Inspector: I know, I can only focus on one bad book at a time. What I hate is when I run up a library fine on something I’m sporking, that’s even worse.

Nate: Yeah, nobody should have to pay a library fine for something like DLT.

SWQ: Ha ha! Oh my God, I remember that.

Steph: I do too. I think Australia has 11 copies of that sitting in public libraries around the place. I need to get one.

Rorschach: I actually just got a copy of the Dragon’s Lexicon Triumvirate. In the mail a couple weeks ago and I’m planning on sporking that again at some point.

Sly: That would make you a personal hero of mine.

Nate: I was going to say, actually, TheDrunkFox and I may just forcefully assimilate you into our efforts. Because we got about half-way through, and then we started have technical problems with our grand plan, and you may be just what we need to bring it all together.

Rorschach: That’s a possibility.

Steph: Oh, I remember those sporkings: that was how I found ImpishIdea, actually.

Nate: It was a gateway drug.

Inspector: I don’t know, I lurked around the main page a lot before I actually joined the forum.

Rorschach: Wait, there’s a forum on Impish?

(Laughter)

Nate: You’d think somebody would have told us about it.

SWQ: Yeah, I know, right? I think I found the site about two weeks after it came up, which is kind of weird to think about.

**

Rorschach: I’m interested in sporking Dragon’s Lexicon Triumvirate because I actually do have something against the author. Most authors that I spork, I don’t really have anything against. I think that Gloria Tesch is mostly just naïve and Chris Paolini about the same…Stephenie Meyer.

Sly: Kenneth Eng is straight up racist. And crazy.

Rorschach: Yes, yes. I do actively dislike Robert Stanek, though.

Nate: Kenneth is the only author that I really feel like… he made it personal. Every paragraph of his work was him just rising out of the pages and slapping me in the face.

SWQ: That’s an interesting image, actually.

Nate: Yeah, they call those pop up books.

SWQ: It would be really funny if books and movies or whatever it is, if you have books and they’re mistreated for any reason or if they just don’t like you for whatever reason? Yeah, the authors or the spirits or whatever, or the characters even, rise up and slap you if they don’t like you.

Steph: I love that.

(We think this is Sly): I think that already happens in the Harry Potter universe.

SWQ: Yeah, I mean they scream, but they don’t really do anything.

(Then again, maybe it’s Rorschach): Well the one book tries to kill you…

SWQ: Oh, right, right!

Steph: Oh, no! No spoilers, please, no spoilers. I still haven’t read all of it yet.

Sly: You haven’t read Harry. Potter.

SWQ: It’s the first book!

Steph: No, I’m a bad, bad imp.

Nate: She hasn’t even read Lord of the Rings, she’s very slow.

Inspector: I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.

Rorschach: Yeah, this podcast is over.

dead silence

crickets

outro music

——

As a side note, I’ve noticed that the words I speak sound a lot more intelligent when you’re hearing them, not reading them. Gonna have to work on that.

[and this text is just here to remind me to insert a link to the next episode when that one goes up, because navigation would otherwise be a nightmare]

Hope you enjoyed!

Comment [26]

Because even though Eclipse has now been out for about eight months, everyone knows I can’t leave Twilight alone. So I’m catapulting back into your lives with a bunch of run on sentences and content all wrapped up in a nice long article. By the way, for those of you who have been living under the sole non-sentient rock in the II castle, there will be spoilers. On your own head be it if you move forward.

…

…

…

If you’re still reading this, I’m guessing your head’s willing to take the risk. Let’s go.

Eclipse is a movie that is, ostensibly, about Bella’s choice between having a full human life, or getting vamped. That’s what it’s been marketed as, it’s what David Slade, Wyck Godfrey, Stephenie Meyer, and presumably Melissa Rosenberg say it is, and it’s a premise I’m going to rip apart for this essay.

Along the way, there’s a lot of Edward vs Jacob drama, a minor amount of vampires vs werewolves drama, and an action-driven plot about Victoria coming back from the first movie to get her (now with bonus newborn vampire army! Just add venom!).¹

So, Eclipse’s plot threads have now been established.

The Choosing Vampirism plot consists of a lot of people telling Bella that it’s not a good idea to become a vampire—Rosalie and Edward directly; and Renee, Charlie, and her human friends by showing/telling her what would happen if she disappeared or wasn’t there or what human things she’d be missing out on as a vampire.

None of this seems to affect Bella one jot. Her main response to Rosalie and Edward is ‘But I’m different! I want to be a vampire! Therefore, I should be one!’. Her main response to her parents and other humans is an uncomfortable, vaguely agonised look, possibly with a couple of tears in the corner of her eyes. At no point does she consider their arguments in enough depth to affect the choices she makes. These things give her pause at the time, but she never says or does anything to make us believe that she may have internalised some of these arguments. The very storyline does nothing to make us believe that she has two conflicting goals in her head.

I mean think about it: Edward and Bella get engaged halfway through the movie. She made this choice in New Moon. Really, Bella’s choice in Eclipse was about getting married, and it only lasted about half-way through the movie. The rest of it was just her agonising about the best way to placate Jacob. The idea that she wouldn’t be with Edward forever never entered her head. It was just a question of who would convince whom that their stance on marriage was right. (Riveting stuff.)²

Again, choice is meant to be the defining theme of the movie/book. I’ll leave the force of the facepalm you apply to yourself up to you.

When it comes to vampirism, everyone but Bella in this movie has the idea that being a vampire is a course of action you should research thoroughly and only take when all your other options have been exhausted. But Bella, as the protagonist, has an entirely different idea. And since it’s her choices that move the plot forward, and despite the desperate attempts of the characters around her, none of those choices are actually based on input from other people, the majority of the events in the movie are wasted and ineffectual. What should be 2 hours of a gut-wrenching decision process is instead 2 hours of something neither gut-wrenching nor decision-like.

A small amount of lip service is paid at the very end of the movie to ‘I choose me’ and a rejection of human life, but that really is no excuse. It doesn’t tie the movie off, it just tries to harmonise two wildly different plot objectives: Bella’s (VAMP ME NAO!) and the filmmakers’ (‘a heartwrenching choice for a strong and independent… um, whiny teenage girl’). The contrast is rather amusing. Or, alternatively, infuriating. We’re going to come back to this in a little bit.

Aside from Bella’s character wilfully ignoring the complexities of the vampirism plot line, it also suffers from the amount of dramatic tension not devoted to a whole side of the debate: Bella’s relationship with humanity. Time and time again in the movie, we see passive people standing by as they do their very dialogue-heavy scenes about why Bella choosing vampirism isn’t a good idea: Charlie sitting down discussing a hypothetical disappearance of his daughter, Renee giving Bella a quilt made of old camp t-shirts, Rosalie having flashbacks. And each time, Bella has a couple of thoughtful closeups where she’s a little shaken about it. There’s some slight emotional tension not apparent for the first couple of watch-throughs.³

In contrast, the action, all the really gritty dramatic tension of the movie, is given to the werewolves vs vampires story, the Edward-Bella-Jacob love triangle, and the Victoria conflict.

So these plots get all the action and all the dramatic tension, while the Flip a Coin: Does Your Heart Continue Beating Or Not? subplot has practically zilch. Going further, all of them except for Flip a Coin are combined in the climax: we have werewolves and vampires joining together to battle it out against Victoria’s newborn vampire army whilst Jacob, Edward and Bella angst it out on top of a mountain, and Jacob gets Bella to admit that she likes him (like, like-likes him) but that she likes Edward more. The only time Bella having a human life is brought up is when Jacob uses it as ammunition against Edward—hardly a portrayal of this choice as an issue in its own right.

Meanwhile, no aspect or representation of Bella’s human life gets a look-in for this part of the movie, unless you count Bella and Jacob’s romantic interaction, (because Jacob wants Bella and he wants her to stay human). And never mind that the filmmakers are trying to pass off Jacob as the ‘full human life’ choice; that’s a flimsy argument. The girl does not have to choose either one of them if she doesn’t want to. She can go have a full human life without choosing Jacob, whom she’s not in love with anyway. He’s in love with her. There’s a difference. For Pete’s sake.

The only actual direct references to choice that we get in the movie is between Edward and Jacob rather than between vampirism and a human life. This is a consistent problem throughout the movie. It’s not objective and it’s not fair on Bella—not that she realises it, but still. Note to filmmakers: When it’s a choice between two guys, which involves making a choice between two ways of life, please don’t confuse this with the straight issue of choosing between two ways of life.

Another thing: Bella’s choice in this case does not in any way affect the main plot. I mean, vamps coming to get Bella! With a main plot like that, it should be pretty easy to make her human life and her supernatural life collide and force her to come to some kind of realisation or make a choice or, I don’t know, do something. But no.

In short, not enough dramatic tension is devoted to actual humanity, so why does it matter? Why should we as the moviegoers care? We never buy that there’s a choice between humanity and vampirism, because Bella never really seems to be attached to any humans around her, and the movie never really seems to be concerned with humans, either.

Besides, she wants to be a vampire for the whole movie, anyway. If that’s not detachment from your own species, I don’t know what is.

At the end of the movie, Bella’s ‘my whole life I’ve never fitted in anywhere.’ speech is so logically inaccurate, I just want to hurl.

Frankly, it’s bull. Here’s why.

Dear Bella,

As shown by you still sitting with Jessica (who still seems to like you in the movie version) and Mike and the others, you fit in fine with humanity. If I remember correctly, soon after you came to Forks High School, you fitted right in, making jokes about speedo padding on the swim team, getting asked out by several guys, and generally being well-received. Your Mary Sue aura makes sure you will be well-received wherever you go. Your mother and father would miss you sorely were you gone.

As a human in a vampire’s world? That is where you didn’t fit in. Patrol details, vampires coming after you to eat your face, the possibility of outliving everyone you know by a large margin, not being able to sexx0r your boyfriend for fear of him either eating your face himself or ripping you in half… Staying out of a world like that is the smart thing to do when you don’t have any supernatural powers, because you don’t fit in there. The only reason you were in that world in the first place is because you got a crush on some boy—and even he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for you two to be together.

I’m sorry to be so harsh on you, honey, but there it is. I suggest you go and have a good long think for once.

Yours sincerely,
Steph (what is left).

I mean, really. You should be able to see where any movie with this setup would be going. I’m talking dead love interests and regretful sparkly vampires and angry, angsty broken hearts. But because it’s Twilight, because Bella Swan is at her core all about making stupid decisions, because Stephenie Meyer is Stephenie Meyer, and finally because alienating your fanbase is a stupid thing to do for any franchise (the only excuse I’ll accept), Bella ignores every single chance to learn from her previous mistakes (and from others’ mistakes) and does what she wants with no real consequences at the end of it all. She’s still exactly the same Bella who was trying to get into Edward’s pants Edward to change her at the end of Twilight. Just slightly more sexually frustrated.

The movie undermines what it thinks is its own premise on so many different levels.

¹ And then also something about the Volturi that basically amounted to ‘hey, don’t forget us! We’ll be semi-important to the plot of the fifth movie!’ and I’m not even going to bother talking about it from now on. At least until Breaking Dawn comes out. We’re almost definitely going to go to town on that one, kids.

² If I can digress for a moment, which I can because—hey! footnotes!—I’m going to put forth a theory:

The main reason this didn’t occur to Meyer was because she’s a Mormon, and in that culture if you don’t get married, you’ve basically said you’re not spending forever with each other. There’s no living together before marriage, anything like that. So to Meyer, if Bella’s not ready to get married, that subtextually means that she hasn’t fully committed to Edward yet and she’s still got a choice to make.

However, Bella’s not written as a Mormon or a Christian or anything like that. Her values are quite different to Meyer’s (remember, she’s the one pushing sex, not Edward). Her dilemma should not be portrayed by the author as ‘having commitment issues’, because clearly that’s the last thing she’s got a problem with. And it’s going to be hard for an audience to take; or even recognise and understand, the portayal that Meyer is giving it. I mean, I’m a firm Christian, I believe in not having sex until marriage, and this idea didn’t even occur to me until just now. Why? Because I’m so used to people around me living together or sleeping together outside of marriage and seeing nothing wrong with it in terms of commitment. The general thinking in Western society today is that people who don’t marry can still be committed to one another and can still love each other. It’s incredibly hard for people who are used to this way of thinking to see why hesitating over marriage but still wanting to be with the other person could be seen as ‘still having to make a definite choice’. Because they’ve already gone and taken a third option, so why can’t Bella?

Meyer should have distanced herself and her values from her character and story a little more, and gotten in touch with where popular culture is at.

Yes, I am aware of what I just said.

³ Okay, so I’ve seen this movie more than twice. Shut up.

—-

To end this, I’m going to point out the things I think we can take away from this rather than merely get frustrated at it. I’m a firm believer in learning what not to do; that’s what this whole essay has been building up to.

1. Dramatic tension. Use the damn thing properly. Allocate enough tension to the stuff that is major and that you’ve said is the main point of your story.

2. Make sure your important plot threads collide in some way. This is not a sitcom show in which, every so often, you’re allowed to have A and B plots that don’t collide at the end, if each are funny enough. You’re not here for humour alone. You’re here for a memorable story, which it won’t be if everything gets resolved in bits and pieces instead of at least 75% of it coming together with a bang.

3. Don’t do what Meyer did and make a Mormon issue out of a story that clearly had nothing to do with Mormonism and no Mormon characters (substitute your word of choice for ‘Mormon’). If she’d wanted to do this successfully, she should’ve devoted a bit more time to why Edward’s morals are the way they are and explored the ramifications of them as they affected other parts of the story, not just brought in to say no to sex. But I don’t think she does anything consciously, so the point is moot.

4. Make sure your characters are saying sensible things. I refer you to the ‘I choose me’ speech at the end of the movie for how not to go about this.

5. Similarly, make sure your movie is logical. I refer you to the entirety of the franchise.

Here endeth the lesson.

Comment [6]