tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54231444346578842952024-02-08T05:41:38.172-08:00Story on the BrainEmma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.comBlogger92125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-37506566983760920332023-02-14T14:18:00.002-08:002023-02-14T14:18:37.476-08:00Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt<p>You know how her books usually are: tightly plotted, lots of action, interesting characters. None of those things happened in this book. The characters had no depth whatsoever. The plot was nonsense and did not hang together. I don't think I could even tell you what it was supposed to be, never mind what it was. The main characters vanished for large portions of the book. And everyone, absolutely everyone, went on long rambling speeches about NOTHING, like about how the Youth of Today Are Budding Fascists, based on, again, nothing.<br /><br />It also went into some kind of weird and vague alternate future where Things Are Otherwise. Worldwide riots by The Youth.<br /><br />And there was a bizarre fixation on Hitler youth and Siegfried and actual Hitler getting exported to South America. Plus Big Charlotte, one of the most hateful depictions of a fat person I've ever seen, and that includes J.K. Rowling, who hates them a whole lot.<br /><br />There was nothing you wondered about or wanted to know, other than "What the hell is going on?" and "Will this person ever shut up?" Seriously, everyone just had meetings and infodumped. It was exposition 24/7. People tried to hit the main character with cars twice, but then he went into their stronghold or whatever and nobody cared? At the end he and the other main character decided over telegram to get married, despite no chemistry and no relationship to speak of--and he is obsessed with how she looks just like his sister. They were off screen traveling the world for ages but for no clear reason and accomplished nothing. Literally he wanted to know what his goal was on this trip and was told he wasn't allowed to know. And still went.<br /><br />Also there was a magic science thing to make everyone benevolent permanently, called Benvo, which we must not use! We can't let you use it! The formula has been destroyed! Plus scientist is dying! Then he gets magically returned to health from someone getting shot in front of him. It was the shock! So did they use it? Unclear. Nothing was clear. It didn't even end properly. And there's the weirdest epilogue mainly about this little girl who has never been in the book up to this point.<br /><br />They should not have published this book, if she was as far gone as it seems she was. That's unkind to an excellent author, though maybe it reveals that even authors we admire have depths of weird obsessions that we'd rather not know about. Everyone is human, racists and every kind of -phobe included. It was a bit like having Thanksgiving dinner with that ancient and witty great-aunt you always liked and discovering she gets really racist when she has two glasses of wine.<br /><br />Truly the worst published novel I've ever read, even worse than <i>The Goldfinch</i>, which is really saying something. Also it made me wonder if I was making accidental references to terrible racist material when I named my old cat Siegfried. No! I just read the medieval text! Medieval texts were there first. Aw, man. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-66623711909521292792023-02-11T15:10:00.000-08:002023-02-11T15:10:09.515-08:00Agatha Christie: Sleeping Murder<p>This was a fascinating read for me, partly because it solved a story problem I've been having with a work in progress that's been stuck in draft form for ages. I don't even want to think about how long. A decade? Brrrr.</p><p>That novel is <i>Summerlands</i>, which anyone who reads anything I write will know keeps cropping up regularly as I get all excited to tackle it again, then get discouraged by the way it never quite works.</p><p>I wrote it when I didn't know how to write novels yet. It's strange how completely dysfunctional it is as a draft, while having two absolutely amazing characters. </p><p><i>Sleeping Murder</i> is about Gwen and Giles, two New Zealanders who are moving to England for no clear reason. (It doesn't matter.) Gwen picks a town and buys a house and then has repeated eerie experiences about the house, things she knows that she could not possibly know, including a sudden terrifying memory of seeing a murder. She thinks she's going insane until Miss Marple (yay!) talks her through it and Gwen finds out she actually did live in that house as a small child. </p><p>The book was so spooky up to this point that I was afraid it would be supernatural in nature. That's not my cup of tea. But 70s Agatha Christie novels often incorporate this type of absolutely terrifying suspense (at least, to me) that seems like it includes supernatural elements. It's never supernatural! Spoiler alert! This happens in several novels of hers that I can think of and gets me every time. But I am a known chicken. </p><p>Gwen and Miss Marple and then Giles embark on research to find out who Helen was--the murder victim, as Gwen remembers her name--and what actually happened to her. </p><p>They follow all sorts of trails and track down her family and the sad end that came to Gwen's father, which she didn't even know about, as she was raised by family members back in New Zealand. They line up a crew of possible suspects, all of whom I suspected equally in turn, as I'm terrible at figuring out who committed the crime. This time I actually did figure it out before it was explained, purely because of one particular clue about the brandy.</p><p>The way Christie lays out clues and covers them up with confusion and misdirection is obviously brilliant. I'm easy to misdirect, it seems. The clues are all there and everything is watertight, thank goodness, unlike some recent things I've read and watched. It's an incredibly satisfying ending as it all comes clear at once. </p><p>I realized I need to line up some suspects myself. Well, last year I realized the novel lacked a plot entirely. It was these two main characters coming to grips with their major damage and their ways of acting out that only hurt themselves. That's great and all, but it's not a plot. The mystery I added last year added a plot. But now, as I apparently need to get hit on the head with a coconut, two by four, or other large object, I need to line up suspects for the mystery.</p><p>That novel's mystery is: what happened to the two girls' mother? Again, I picked <i>Sleeping Murder</i> more or less at random in the library. I just thought it was one I hadn't read, which turned out to be true. But it's about Gwen's stepmother's murder and finding out what actually happened to her. And if she was actually murdered, who did it? </p><p>My story should be equally mystifying about what happened to their mother. And if she was murdered, who did it? Their father is bizarrely cold and distant and alarming so it would be easy to think of him as a suspect, if they decide she was murdered. They've been raised far away by two different aunts, so they don't know him or each other or anything about their mother. In at least one draft, they thought those aunts were their mothers. Then only one sister did. I can't even remember where it stands now.</p><p>I need to rewrite that novel entirely. From scratch, from the ground up. I'm tempted to include all those fun things like letters and texts and email and historical documents like marriage licenses and whatnot. What does a coroner's report look like when someone disappears boating and is never found? I have no idea if you even need or get one in that case. Look at all the things I don't know. What happens in that case? Do I want to include that in the story as something someone says happened to her? Maybe. My search history is going to look pretty sketchy, but writing always causes that. </p><p>I really like building up the character of a missing person who disappeared long ago through various records and artifacts and accounts from various people. Actually Maureen Johnson did this very well in <i>The Box in the Woods</i>. Even if that was outrageously convenient and deus ex machina in about seventeen different ways and I hated the long rambly assemble the audience and explain everything part. Okay, that book had serious problems I could explore at another time. But I liked how we learned about the one girl through all the materials from the past and what people said in the present. <br /></p><p>Look, if people say all these different things, which is true? "She ran off and left you as babies." "She disappeared, all right. That's all I'm saying." "I heard she moved to Switzerland. Is that not true?" "Why don't you ask Artledge down at the bait shop. He rents boats. He always said there was something about their relationship that was, well, I don't want to say fishy, that's hack. Something off."</p><p>So give those girls this mystery to solve WHILE they're dealing with sixteen years of emotional damage from evil aunts (not enough evil aunts in fiction, seriously--why is it always uncles?--aunt power!) and coping with this weird icicle father they don't know and being in a strange place and getting talked about by everyone AND trying to figure out how they even begin to relate to each other.</p><p>It's fun, that's the main thing. And we are constantly asking questions as readers, going, "That guy is definitely lying," or "This person is holding back," or "My goodness, people will tell Miss Marple anything." </p><p>One thing that gets a tiny bit tedious is how Miss Marple always knows the answer but won't tell anyone. She's always doing that thing where she looks from one to the other and says, "Oh, well, it seems perfectly clear to me," and they all get baffled and annoyed and blunder around nearly getting murdered because she wouldn't come out and say it. Stop it, Miss Marple!</p><p>Ooh, another thing that completely freaked me out in <i>Sleeping Murder</i> is that they went to the same nursing home that Tommy and Tuppence went to in the extremely creepy book where they're older and Tuppence researches a painting and gets into this bizarre divided house by a canal and on and on. That book is so upsetting. <i>By the Pricking of my Thumbs</i> is the name of it. The same truly weird old lady says the same thing to Gwen that she says in that book. How bizarre and fun! It's a cameo from another book entirely. </p><p>I can just picture the author laughing to herself as she did that, knowing how people would react. </p><p>There's a character in my novel <i>The Last Word</i> who's loosely based on Agatha Christie, or at least she's not in the book but it's all about her and her series of books. The main character, Ceci, is just arriving back in America after being abroad for two years, living on a shoestring, searching for evidence about the Agatha Christie character's mysterious life. I kind of love that book, even if it's not the best thing I ever wrote. Maybe I'll read it again and see if it's worth putting out on KDP. There's so much I adore about that character and that story. Gothic houses! An amazing great-aunt! A wonderful boy! A best friend who's an insecure but astonishing artist! And of course a massive mystery that unfolds throughout the book. </p><p>That's the first novel that I ever bashed into shape as a completed piece. I seem to remember it has some issues, but generally I remember the negatives more than the positives, so maybe I fixed them or they're not as bad as I think. Who knows?</p>Agatha Christie! So good! So strangely formative for me, even though I didn't read most of her books until last year, or was it the year before? I spent one whole summer reading through almost all of them. What I ought to do is reread each one the minute I finish it, so I can really learn how she structures things, since I'm generally baffled the whole way through. The Agatha Christie Writing Program. Make it so. Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-28116190551714071222023-02-01T12:32:00.002-08:002023-02-01T12:32:50.478-08:00Rian Johnson: Glass Onion<p>I really wanted to see this. In fact, I watched Knives Out purely so I could see it fully educated in the ways of this series. Knives Out was fantastic, so tightly plotted that even my picky brain never found a single hole in the story. I loved it. I should watch it again.</p><p>Instead, I watched Glass Onion, then the next day kept thinking, "Wait..." and watched it again. And it has holes, alas. </p><p>Spoilers going forward for both movies, probably, but definitely for Glass Onion. <br /></p><p>There were a lot of things I adored about the movie. I loved that we though we knew what was going on, then learned that we were seeing everything wrong. That was similar to Knives Out and was something I loved there, too. I loved the way we saw Whiskey very differently once Andi talked to her and got past the surface appearance. I loved all the various things that seemed completely different once we saw them from multiple angles. That's something Johnson does brilliantly. </p><p>But there were plot holes. </p><p>There was some hand-waving about how Miles cut Andi out of the company. That is just not how anything works. Two people who have equal partnership in a company, right? One can't just suddenly cut the other one out. And the stupid napkin is meaningless. It's set up as this PROOF that one or the other had the idea first, as if any court would be like, "Well, the napkin proves this or that." There has to be massive paperwork and legal protections and on and on. That's such a fundamental fatal flaw that the rest of the movie falls apart because of it.</p><p>The second major flaw is connected: it's that Miles would have any reason to kill Andi. Why? What does that accomplish? He already won the court case. In this world, another napkin suddenly proves that he's not the originator of the company? But he took it all away from her regardless of any napkins.</p><p>I cannot get over how idiotic the napkin thing is. It's just terrible. It's maybe a first draft idea, but should have been replaced with something from our reality that makes actual sense. </p><p>I do love that Miles is extremely stupid and steals everyone else's ideas. That I buy 100%. </p><p>I don't buy that Andi would let him in after he destroyed her life and took her company away, the company that she started. </p><p>It makes no sense that he would kill her, as again it accomplishes nothing, and he takes her (fucking) napkin anyway. He has it, and he won already, so there is literally no reason to kill the person. He's also not a killer, in any way that we've seen so far. Maybe if he was seriously threatened, pushed to the absolute edge, but he wasn't. I could have imagined Duke, a violent person who carries a gun everywhere, pushed to murder by immense frustration or anger, but there was nothing to show Miles was like that. Poor characterization. </p><p>He also had zero reason to kill Duke, especially in front of everyone. Look at the purported reasoning: Duke gets a Google alert on his phone that says Andi is dead. So, what does that mean? Miles looks super happy about it. Duke looks super happy about it. Now--inexplicably--it means Duke gets whatever [thing] that he's been wanting from Miles but Miles was holding back on. Why??? So Miles agrees to give him whatever the thing is (seriously, what is it?) and then instantly kills him. </p><p>WHAT FOR?</p><p>To hide that Andi is dead? Everyone will get that information soon anyway.</p><p>Also, and this is the biggest plot hole: Miles killed, or tried to kill Andi, but then she walks up the dock and is there on his private island. He has an interesting reaction, a complex expression. He looks sad and moved and hopeful and I don't know what all else. He's a good actor to pull that off. I can't stand that actor, Edward Norton, but that's kind of why he's cast in this role, I think. He's so good at that smarmy self-aggrandizing sleazy smug bastard character. </p><p>If I had tried to kill someone and they walked onto my private island, I would be highly on guard. I would imagine I'd be super tense. Right? I'd know that person knew a terrible thing about me. I'd know they were probably there for revenge or at minimum to tell everyone about that crime. But he never seems worried at all. Granted, he's dumb as a rock, but even he should be able to figure out that someone you tried to kill would be MAD AT YOU. Especially when it's Andi, who was already enraged at him for the whole stealing all her money thing. (It still makes no sense. What, she didn't have any money in the bank? She didn't own shares? There's just no way to make that work.)</p><p>This leads to the biggest twist, one that I don't even know is true. I mean, I believe it. I watched it twice to see whether my idea could be right. I'm sure it is. But I haven't seen it anywhere else. I tried reading the Reddit thread on the movie but since I deleted the app, reading it on a browser is (deliberately) so difficult and annoying that I bailed after a while. </p><p>I don't think that's Helen. I don't think Andi died. Maybe she has a twin sister, sure, but I don't think that's her. I think it's Andi pretending to be Helen pretending to be Andi. </p><p>They both have that down home accent, but Andi covers it up with her "dog ate the caviar" voice. They both can do that, as Helen proves. </p><p>The person who receives and opens the box is the key clue here. Her hair is up in a towel wrap. I remembered it being Andi's short blond bob, but when I watched it a second time, her hair was covered. That's not accidental. That means it's obscuring which one of them it is. </p><p>It's Helen who brings the smashed box to Benoit, but it makes no sense that Helen would even care about that box enough to smash it up, or would know Miles well enough to know what was in it. Helen believes her sister was murdered, but again there's no evidence for that and she had just lost everything. Suicide wouldn't be unheard of in that kind of situation. Helen's evidence is that the red envelope was nowhere in the house, but so what? It could be destroyed, or hidden really well. Andi lost it herself in her house until she was knocking over bookcases and it reappeared. </p><p>I'm not even sure Benoit believes Helen is Helen. She has the long hair, but you can get around that easily. Frumpy clothes and different hair and a different accent and manner, sure. He could be going along with it to solve the attempted murder, even if he doesn't believe a real murder occurred. The thing about releasing a statement isn't a thing. If someone dies, that's public record. So when he says he can pull some strings and keep it from coming out--what? That's not a thing either. What strings? Where? Wait, so it would just come out anyway, based on that, but she needed to release a statement? That's contradictory.</p><p>Helen does not know these people well enough to interact with them the way she does throughout the whole movie. Just acting mad and aloof wouldn't do it. Granted they're all drunk the whole time. But when she gets into it with Duke, he says, "There she is. That's the Andi I know." That's because it is Andi the whole time. </p><p>I'm also going by her vast rage at Miles and destruction of his company. That's Andi's kind of revenge, not Helen's. Helen is a third grade teacher, so smashing everything makes sense for her character, but Andi knows what will really hurt Miles and save lives all over the world and does that. Her actions show someone with a deep understanding of the Klear product that we only know as an audience because we've overheard people talking in the pool and elsewhere. </p><p>She slips back into Helen's down home accent, but it's also Andi's original accent. <br /></p><p>Her Mona Lisa smile at the end seems to me enigmatic enough to imply there is a lot more going on than is on the surface. That's Andi. Helen is a character created by Andi who is scared of boats and terrified of the whole weekend among these rich fancy assholes. Andi is not.</p><p>Anyway, a friend and I are always saying that audiences these days are always looking for multiple levels beyond what are even there, so maybe I'm doing that, but given the contradictions about Andi/Helen throughout, I'm sure this is the case. And I like it that Benoit Blanc either doesn't know or doesn't care because he's interested in figuring out the case itself. He keeps saying he's very bad at stupid things--it's a running theme. One person pretending to be another seems like a stupid thing he'd be bad at. What other stupid things are there in the story for him to be bad at figuring out? There's a whole set-up with Among Us and crosswords and all these lesser puzzles that are not complex enough for him to be good at. </p><p>There, solved it. </p><p>But I'm mad about all the plot holes. Take second, third, and fourth passes at those things, seriously. You can call me. I'll read your thing and point out what parts don't actually work. (This is literally my job.) Mysteries are super hard. I know it. But a story can't only make sense when we don't know what's going on. This is exactly the same problem as with Nine Liars. It only hangs together when we don't know the ending. Once we know the ending, everyone including the police has to be outrageously stupid and incompetent for things to go the way they go. </p><p>Speaking of which, wouldn't Helen go to the police? Wouldn't there be an investigation if she believes her sister was murdered? That gets into the news. Why does she think it's Miles or any of the shitheads at all? Again, she would have no reason to think that unless she was actually Andi and knew perfectly well who it was, just couldn't prove it and wanted her ridiculous plot point napkin back. </p><p>I can buy a lot of nonsense in fiction. I watch shows over and over with enormous buys in them. Leverage! Agents of SHIELD! Community! I can suspend my disbelief! But I'm not okay with massive plot holes and things that make no logical sense that are supposed to be part of the actual way the world works. The ungodly stupid napkin thing and the corporate "legal thing" and two utterly unmotivated murders? That's quite a lot too much for me to buy. </p><p>That movie was a lot of fun the first time around, though. Yo-Yo Ma was there! Serena Williams showed up! The setting was amazing! Miles is a great terrible villain, straight out of Despicable Me! These selfish, lazy people who are hanging around Miles for personal profit and gain are wonderful. Whiskey was a terrific character, as was Duke's mom. I liked how the shitheads were all full of self-loathing and had no spines at all, so they'd switch sides as soon as it was expedient. I liked how dumb and easy it was for Miles to hide Duke's phone (though again--WHY) by sticking it in his pocket. (Why not just turn it off and shove it in the couch? I swear, nothing makes any sense in this movie.) I loved how clueless Kate Hudson's character was. Perfectly believable to me. I've met so many of those people. I met a guy once who didn't believe in expertise and told me he thought he could do brain surgery. I met a recovering heroin addict who said she didn't want the Covid vaccine because she didn't know what was in it. But you'll shoot up things you buy from a guy under a bridge? Okay! People are full of misplaced confidence and ignorance and wildly inaccurate knowledge and super flexible ethics. I liked that about all the characters. </p><p>I definitely want to watch Knives Out again, though. That was a great movie. The check to make as a writer is not: can I fool someone first time through, but once they know what's really going on, will they still think this makes sense? Doing it the first time only way is cheap and sketchy and honestly lazy writing. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-9147272560959960042023-01-24T13:22:00.003-08:002023-01-24T13:22:50.893-08:00Connie Willis: Crosstalk<p>It's almost painful to write criticism of any of Willis's work, since she's one of my top three favorite authors. I've been reading her books lately as I'm thinking a lot about close third person in my own work. She does it so well!</p><p>First I read <i>Blackout</i> and <i>All Clear</i> over the weekend. Then I read <i>Crosstalk</i> because I got so stressed out from all the panic and fear and everyone being cold and wet and starving and frightened and the falling bombs and so on. And the time travel terrifies me, since it's been going wrong ever since <i>Doomsday Book</i>. How would anyone ever be brave enough to get into that machine after that?</p><p>Well, okay, that's not fair. But to say why would give away the plot. </p><p>I have a lot of thoughts about <i>Blackout </i>and <i>All Clear</i> but that's for another post.</p><p><i>Crosstalk</i> is an interesting idea. It bothers me a lot of ways, though. </p><p>First big issue is that the heroine and main character, Briddey, does not drive the story in any way whatsoever. She is pushed around and manipulated and lied to and tricked by absolutely everyone in her life. The plot happens to her. She does not drive the plot. </p><p>This is an issue I had in the first book I wrote, an issue that rendered that book absolutely useless. Though I seem to remember the prose was excellent. Not helpful when my plot was atrocious, though. </p><p>Sometimes it feels like life just happens to people, but that's a lie called "learned helplessness" that tells us we're not in charge of our own lives. And sorry if I've told this story before, but one day I mentioned to a class that we're in charge of our own lives--that even opting not to take control is our choice and means we're in control--and this girl said out loud: "Oh no!" She had an abusive husband. She had fallen deep into learned helplessness.</p><p>I shouldn't make it sound like learned helplessness is something that just happens. It's nearly always TAUGHT helplessness. Someone has a vested interest in making someone else feel helpless and like they're not in control of their life. That's what happened to that girl. </p><p>There's no sense that Briddey has been abused by someone, though her family is terrible to her, completely overbearing, refusing to respect any boundary whatsoever. They show up at her job and barge in, interrupting her work and her conversations. They show up at her apartment and barge in there. Stop giving people keys, Briddey!</p><p>Everyone she works with treats her the same way, though, so it's not just the family. Everyone walks all over Briddey. </p><p>It's odd that this isn't set up as something this character needs to work on and fix in her life, since it clearly is a major problem for her. She can't complete a single thought or phone call or anything without someone taking over and making her do what they want.</p><p>Add to this the absolutely heinous boyfriend, Trent. He's supposed to be a real catch because he has a Porsche, but he's an unmitigated asshole from the beginning. So Briddey reads as either someone who is clueless (or stupid) about how she's being treated, or likes being walked all over. Neither one is particularly appealing to me as a reader. Unless that's the arc: doormat grows a spine.</p><p>She does not grow a spine. Not to give that away or anything. </p><p>No, she lets the boyfriend bully her into this procedure intended to bring about emotional connection, only instead she gets telepathy. It starts out scary and confusing, then gradually becomes completely overwhelming and terrifying. Enter C.B.</p><p>C.B. takes over as the bullying controlling boyfriend figure. I know, we're supposed to like him. He's nice. He's a recluse with messy hair. He's actually kind to her and helps her. But he absolutely treats her the same way as Trent, the asshole with the Porsche. He tells her what to do constantly, interrupts her, orders her around, hides enormous secrets from her, and manipulates her. </p><p>I suppose that's how it works in reality. You replicate your patterns. But it's tricky to like even someone as likeable as C.B. when he's constantly engaging in these abusive behaviors. </p><p>What I wanted the whole time was for Briddey to start to stand up for herself. Tell people NO and MEAN IT. Back it up. Do what you want, instead of 100% what other people want. Take control of your life, Briddey, you limp piece of string. </p><p>Is that what people like about her? That she's so weak and malleable? That she will do whatever you want all the time, no question? GROSS. We honestly do not get a sense of what anyone likes about her other than that. Because she has no personality traits other than that. </p><p>Seriously. What's her job? We don't really know. Who are her friends? She doesn't have any. What is her relationship with her family? Yeah, they bowl her over constantly. What are her likes and dislikes? We get no sense of that. What's in her apartment? A whole loaf of French bread, I guess, which her niece takes to feed the ducks. And some cereal she hates. </p><p>I was riding along with this book until I believe page 466, where C.B. uses some app he invented to send a public tweet ONLY TO ONE PERSON then uses some miraculous take-it-back-within-ten-minutes technology to pull it, once it has threatened/tricked that one person enough. What??? That is not how anything works. You can delete your tweets any time. And you can't publicly tweet to just one person. There's a whole fuss about how it's going to get retweeted and spread all around the world, so it's not a DM or anything--it's definitely public. What on earth. <br /></p><p>It's okay not to know things. But you have to ask or find out. Because that was such a ludicrously incorrect representation of a truly commonplace app that it was jaw-dropping. </p><p>That said, imagine the glorious peace of not having Twitter. Never having had Twitter. Oooh. I mean, I've met many wonderful people through it, but at the cost of constant input of stress and ugliness and all the idiotic thoughts of so many truly terrible people worldwide...exactly as Willis imagines telepathy. WHAT A USEFUL METAPHOR THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN.</p><p>So anyway, she reinvents Twitter, only mentally, and you can't shut it off, so Briddey has to learn to build barriers and boundaries and take control of her life, for the first time ever. Another useful metaphor that could have been. </p><p>I'm mad at this book for what it could have been. </p><p>I'm extremely mad about the doormat character who doesn't drive her own narrative. </p><p>I'm mad about boundary issues. </p><p>I'm mad about overbearing, abusive people, even if Briddey apparently loves them. Maybe she's born submissive, I don't know. She doesn't seem to think so. But: oh, you think that's the last time C.B. is going to lie to you, manipulate you, keep secrets, hide things, or pretend he doesn't know what you mean when he absolutely does? She has to CATCH him in the lies before he will admit them, one after the other, near the end. He fakes a phone call right in front of her. He fakes not having telepathy. This is really someone you want to be in a relationship with? Someone who will lie to your face over and over? </p><p>Things I liked: well, the relationship between the two of them, when it's not a constant rescue fantasy, which is most of the time. I liked Maeve, the precocious niece, even if her computer skills are (again) ludicrous. </p><p>I hated the one-dimensional doctor and his behavior. I hated the one-dimensional psychic from Sedona who was reduced to a crying mess on the floor--that's gross. Don't do that to people. Either they're real people or they're caricatures. One is interesting and deserves fair treatment and one isn't worth your time. I hated the dumb Irish culture thing, which a Twitter friend (so there) pointed out died out in the 70s. Though that was just a cover for something else, turns out, so maybe that's okay. But I was dying of embarrassment from it anyway. The fake brogue. It's so awful. Even if the point is that it was awful, it was too awful for that to be the point. Nope. Some things are so awful that using them at all, even as cover, is going too far. I hated Trent constantly. I hated all the people at her job the whole time. They were all one-dimensional and behaved atrociously, again crossing every boundary. Like the Irish thing, it wasn't cute or funny, it was just people being terrible. <br /></p><p>I loved the evocation of panic, which as usual Willis does absolutely beautifully. I swear <i>Blackout</i> and <i>All Clear </i>contributed to an actual panic attack I had Sunday. I loved the library, especially the inner sanctum room, but the whole library was vivid and realistic and true to life as a university library. I loved the moments of peace and comfort they had together. </p><p>Does...how do I phrase this without sounding like an alien observing earthlings...does every relationship have to be one person being so goddamn dominant and one being so goddamn weak and needing help and protection? That to me is just toxic masculinity needing to chop wood and fend off bears and save the damsel in distress, not any way that actual human beings relate to each other. I mean, I can see noticing socialized roles existing that way, but this is fiction. We don't have to do that sort of thing. </p><p>Even here, where Aunt Oona is actually behind the scenes saving the day, we don't get to see any of that--she never comes on the scene again at all after the beginning of the book. <br /></p><p>I'm trying to think whether the helpless damsel thing is thematic throughout her work. Unfortunately it sort of is. Suffering, yes. Suffering and doing incredibly hard work, those are traits of her heroines. They work so incredibly hard. But they don't save themselves. A man does that. </p><p>It's been a while since I read <i>Bellwether </i>or <i>Lincoln's Dreams</i> or <i>Remake</i>. I can't really read <i>Passage</i> again right now due to the state of my dog's health, though I'm going through it anyway, so might as well. I've read <i>Doomsday Book</i> so many times I don't need to reread it. (Spoilers ahoy.) Kivrin works incredibly hard the whole book long to help everyone around her and to save herself, but ultimately she gets rescued by a man at the end. And a child. <i>Blackout</i> and <i>All Clear </i>follow the same pattern. Oh, they fight so very very hard the whole time, Eileen and Polly, but ultimately it's Mike's work that tells Colin where to find them. Well, plus there's the whole self-aware continuum thing that thought the Holocaust was okay as long as Sir Godfrey gets saved (what?) and Colin gets born, but that makes me want to smash things, so let's not talk about that.</p><p>Come to think of it, "doormat grows spine" is the plot of a novel I started then abandoned because the character bothered me too much in her doormat phase. Like I did not want to spend time with her. In real life I hate to see people living like that. I have a friend whose entire life is in service to her husband and kids, who literally won't talk on the phone with me if her husband is IN THE HOUSE because she has to be on duty for them the whole time. To me that feels like if that were my boss, I'd quit, and if that were my life, it wouldn't be. Mutual service, sure. But I bet you any money he doesn't observe the same rules. I bet he does whatever he wants and talks on the phone when she's there. </p><p>Maybe that sort of subservience feeds people somehow? They enjoy it? They like feeling less important than someone else? I don't know. It would make me feel terrible. So would having someone constantly submit to me and serve me that way. Yuck. I'm into this thing called equality. <br /></p><p>This novel tells the story of a woman who acquires supernatural powers and gets rid of an abusive, controlling boyfriend but replaces him with one who lies to her and manipulates her. Better, I guess. At least she actually seems to like the second guy. But oh boy, if someone lied to my face and manipulated me that way, that is seventeen kinds of massive red flag, and if you think they're going to stop just because you're "together" now, you are deluding yourself. </p><p>My own issues aside, it's a distinct narrative issue to have the main character not the one who's driving the story, making the choices, determining what's going to happen. In class I tell them narrative is: character, conflict, choice, consequences. Repeat. So I suppose what I don't like is that the character is just a mere sketch, the conflict is not of her own making, she doesn't make any choices in regards to it, and the consequences are all far beyond her. She literally doesn't even understand what's happening to her except when C.B. explains everything (ad nauseum) throughout the book. He rescues her over and over and over. She can't even make a decision without consulting him, and then most of the time he countermands it. He speaks in the imperative to her most of the time, just like abusive and exploitative Trent. </p><p>I object to the entire premise, now that I think about it.<br /></p><p>Women are not helpless creatures who can't figure things out or solve their own problems, who need to be told what to do all the time. I don't like it when women are written this way, or without their own rich and complex lives. They should have tastes and likes and dislikes, with a shelf full of palak paneer MREs and a bunch of ska records. They should have friends and enemies and racquetball partners and a bowling league and a habit of staring into space then coming out with hilarious haiku, a collection of blue suede shoes and a particular sports team they like and that weird coat they love and won't get rid of no matter what you say. They should have 56 chapsticks but never be able to put their hands on one and buy three more next time they're at the store, even though they do that every time. They should be complex and ambivalent and capable of standing on their own two feet. They should frown and hang up when someone's a jackass on the phone. They should say, "No, I'm driving myself," when the jerk tries to make them get into his car, and then walk away and do it. They should have peanut butter in the cupboard, minimum. They should have clutter and complications and complexity. And they should be their own person, telepathy or no telepathy. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-11638505316947862942023-01-05T18:40:00.002-08:002023-01-05T18:40:51.207-08:00Maureen Johnson: Nine Liars<p>This is going to be all spoilers, so look out. You've been warned.<br /><br />I was excited to read this book and enjoyed it to a certain degree the first time through, as I was wondering who committed the murder, but then I read it again and it all fell apart. The mystery makes no sense at all once you have read the book. <br /><br />Look at all the incredible logic flaws.<br /><br />The country house is set up so that it's essentially impossible that anyone else but the nine were there that night, with the power outage and the road blocked off by a downed wire and a power truck. But nobody from the nine themselves to the police ever suspect or investigate any of the nine. That is completely nonsensical. In a typical country house murder, yes, the situation is closed off so that we know the suspect HAS to be one of the people present. This does half of that and then everyone is inexplicably stricken with severe stupidity and they all go, "I don't know, burglars?" and shrug and just LET IT GO. No. Insane. The police don't even try? They take statements from these obvious liars and let it go?<br /><br />The burglary theory is because people have been stealing tack in the area. Sure. (Does the murderer even know this? No indication of that.) But the murders were in the woodshed. The stables are on the opposite side of the massive house from the woodshed, according to the map in the book. Even supposing you kept tack in the woodshed, because you like having saddles eaten by mice, I guess, you wouldn't keep them all the way on the other side of this extensive building from the stables. You wouldn't keep tack in the woodshed period, obviously, but certainly not in this situation. But somehow everyone just goes, "Oh, sure, someone broke in to steal tack from a building WHERE TACK IS NOT KEPT." Why not. <br /><br />The killer is not set up at all to be the kind of person who violently murders two close friends with an axe. There are no signals or clues whatsoever. The group is set up to be totally laid back about sharing each other's clothes, books, food, and beds. But one of them all of a sudden decides that someone else *just kissing a perfect stranger* is so offensive that he kills not the friend who did it but the girl herself. None of that makes any sense in any psychological universe. And then to kill two more people who have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to accuse him makes even less sense. The murders are completely unmotivated.<br /><br />Killing someone with an axe in cold blood is incredibly violent and far-fetched and outrageously difficult for anyone without a history of violence to do. And there's no earthly reason for this character to use that method when so many others are available. For example, if he's a drowner, he could EASILY have lured those two people to the creek RIGHT NEARBY (where they throw the axe later) and drowned them. Bang on the head with a rock, fall in the creek, they drown with no question of murder and no suspicion of anyone. <br /><br />It's also absurd to lure these two to a woodshed right slap next to the main house, when there's a whole vast landscape available. If he killed them way out in the woods, by any means, they might never even be found.<br /><br />There's also the complete idiocy about the pot plants on the upper level of this woodshed, which everyone somehow lowers out the tiny window (pot plants are gigantic) intact, instead of, oh, cutting them up to make it easy--or taking them down the goddamn ladder/stairs, which they used to bring the grow lights down. There is NO REASON for anyone to do this ridiculous and difficult thing with the window except to provide a clue. <br /><br />Also, the entire group of seven bereaved and hung over people cheerfully destroy all of the evidence in a murder scene. Do they not realize they're making it impossible to catch THE MURDERER??? And committing all sorts of crimes themselves? They're so stupid that they aren't ever aware that one of them has to be the murderer, so presumably they're also so stupid they can't figure out that they're destroying the evidence in the crime. <br /><br />This all ties into the biggest flaw with the murder: smells like writer. Everything was set up to be convenient for the writer, not because it's what any human ever born on planet earth would ever remotely do. None of it makes any logical sense. It's so obviously structured for the writer.<br /><br />Constructing a clue path in a mystery means you have to have plausible reasons for people to do the things they do. They can't all just forget that laws and reason exist en masse. And setting up the completely ludicrous woodshed tack burglary theory makes every single person involved so stupid that they can't possibly find their way out of a wet paper bag. <br /><br />There were things I liked about this book, but all the excruciatingly tedious tourism wasn't one of them. The character of Vi has zero personality and is a waste of space as always, my favorite guy Nate had no role at all in the story, David was a raging asshole as usual, Stevie is an idiot obsessed with this guy who's only ever a complete jerk to her--and it's not cute or funny that she doesn't do school work--and the ridiculous denouement in the London Eye was laughable because the evidence was the flimsiest of circumstantial suppositions. You, a child, are accusing an adult of murder because someone had a toothbrush in her bag. A toothbrush. Imagine going to court with that. You'd be laughed out of the room. <br /><br />Also being an Angophile can apparently reach toxic fetish levels. Gross. Get a room.<br /><br />This is a bad mystery and unforgivably boring to boot. <br /><br />I own all of the author's books and looked forward to this book all year, so I'm beyond disappointed and into the realm of infuriated at the laziness, the atrocious plotting, the utter lack of logic, the endless tedious tourism, the failure to give our beloved characters anything to do, and the complete inability to think through the slightest bit of the murder or the character development to make it make sense. </p><p><br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-14429999315538726102022-12-14T15:07:00.001-08:002022-12-14T15:07:20.556-08:00A.S. King: Glory O'Brien's History of the Future<p>I love this book so much. It's one of my favorite books of all time. (What are the others? Rainbow Rowell's <i>Fangirl</i>, the book <i>Bilgewater </i>whose author I've forgotten for the moment, Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books, and, er, I can't think of the others right now.)</p><p>I usually don't teach books I like since they get fingerprints all over them in the form of other people's wrongheaded ideas about things. But this one is so good for The Youth (aka many semesters of college students) that I keep on teaching it anyway. Usually I alternate with Justine Larbalestier's <i>Liar</i> but it's out of print now so we read this one again this fall. <i>Liar </i>is very fun because it makes the youth bonkers trying to figure it out so they're entirely engaged. But they're always totally engaged with this one also. It starts out with Glory fully in crisis, whether she can admit it or not. <br /></p><p>This is one of A.S. King's books about getting unstuck. <i>Dig</i> is another one. They're kind of all about that, which isn't a criticism but a praise. Everybody needs to get unstuck one way or another. Everything I write is also about getting unstuck. Well, King is my hero! What do you expect?<br /></p><p><i>Glory</i> is also about depression and dread and the always terrible not talking about huge things in our lives. It's the worst. It's so bad for you. As I'm always shouting at classes: "Say the thing! Just say it! Say it even if you're embarrassed and it comes out wrong and you feel like a dork afterward! It's so good to say the thing!"</p><p>For whatever value of "the thing" you need, obviously. Say you like that person and want to hang out. Say you hate it when they touch your french fries. Say you really wanted to like their boyfriend but he creeps you out. Say you borrowed their coat and someone spilled ketchup on it and you'll get it cleaned. Say you're really sorry about that thing you said last week and wish you could take it back. Say you miss them. Say you want to leave. Say you want to stay. SAY THE THING.</p><p>This book moves with fabulous speed from people who say nothing and Glory feeling absolutely certain that she doesn't have a future--which means exactly what it sounds like, that she will die, that suicide will somehow come and GET her, like it got her mother when Glory was four--to people learning to say things and Glory discovering that a) things are not as she thinks they are and b) she very much does have a future, thank you very much.</p><p>All of this comes about because of a desiccated dead bat that Glory and her friend Elly drink mixed with beer one night. The bat gives them visions and the visions show them things that will come to pass.</p><p>This time through the book, we realized as a group that Glory's visions change as she makes changes in her life. That is amazingly cool. And I can't believe I never noticed that before. I've read this book many times. Oh well. Different youth, different insights. </p><p>King does not shy away from any of the dark and difficult material you might expect in a book about a girl finally recovering from her mother's suicide by way of visions of the future. Another reason I love to give this book to the youth is because they need to talk about these things. Guaranteed, they know someone who has died by suicide or it has touched their lives in some way. Talking about it makes your risk plummet. </p><p>But even if that's not a danger to them, not talking about things definitely is. Not living your life definitely is an enormous danger. Someone stayed after class the last day to tell me how this book changed the course of her future plans. It's such a life-altering book. It's a call to arms. There's a line that Glory finds attached to a slip of paper on a tooth her mother hung over the door to her darkroom, a line I put on the exam, a line every single person got right: "Not living your life is just like killing yourself, only it takes longer." <br /></p><p>We tracked some fascinating things through the book. Self-actualization, sure! But also ovens. When I wasn't yelling SAY THE THING I was yelling FOOD IS LOVE. Food is love in this book, where Glory and her father don't have a stove because Glory's mother killed herself by putting her head in the gas oven. There's an empty space in the kitchen where the stove used to be. Hello, you absolutely gorgeous metaphor for life in that house. They don't talk, they don't cook, they don't eat regular food. '</p><p>As Glory gets better, she starts craving different delicious food. There's one scene where she brings home spicy pad thai and eats it at the kitchen table, looking at the space where the stove used to be. When she meets people, they eat together. When she goes to the commune for a party, the food is terrible and Elly takes it and eats it for Glory, knowing she doesn't like it. There are calzones and tacos and microwaved cobbler and finally a glorious cake. Food is love!</p><p>How do you get unstuck in your life? You have to say things, even to yourself, and you have to make some changes. Glory starts telling Elly when Elly annoys her, for the first time in both of their lives. We talked about how Elly is not psychic and nobody is psychic so if someone is doing something that annoys you, YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM. How else are they going to know? Isn't that amazing? But so many people refuse to say those things. Yes, it's awkward and uncomfortable, but it's better than being annoyed all the time by someone who cannot possibly know they're doing anything wrong. </p><p>Another massive theme was taking pictures. Glory's mom, Darla, was a photographer. Glory is a photographer. Darla's darkroom is a locked room in the basement, one of the most beautiful metaphors I've ever seen for a family secret nobody is allowed to talk about. Seriously, nobody has ever talked to Glory about her mother or her suicide. That's so terrible. SAY THE...you know. </p><p>Breaking down one barrier at a time, Glory gets through to the crisis in the past, why her mom did what she did, what was wrong, what happened, and how that affects the present, and gradually makes changes that completely alter the lives of everyone in the book. It's just one small step at a time. Ask for the key to Darla's darkroom. Tell the truth. Speak your mind. </p><p>Watching Glory go from the shut down depressive at the beginning who takes photographs only of empty things (empty jars, empty chairs, empty bus) to the person who has come to life at the end is absolutely satisfying in so many ways. It's all small steps. None of it is easy. It's terrifying in so many ways. But it's so worthwhile to take those small steps. </p><p>It's also incredibly satisfying to see another group of youth connect so well with this book and see it hit home and resonate. I feel like I was given the opportunity to give them a present and this is what I chose. And they loved it. </p><p>Also, look what was outside our building on the last day of class. Not sure if it was dead or just sleeping. But oh, what a great thing to see on my last day. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0aGg7rcJOh0M3Hd71kzrAI6Xki-_--DVkh_oxtFYVAssxp6WKNrWw8_m639hXCTAskpBwyfrsPNtDUEPbM2FMCTxh2MgEx4g8GT5sr6FTteCLDjYTzqG5ZsH-A1fYBbkYmK9qjh6q_wWFqLjl_yjJWZ2Xbo-XDB8rwaS4_CjCfnpd2Sp7-za6eSas/s4032/IMG_2958.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0aGg7rcJOh0M3Hd71kzrAI6Xki-_--DVkh_oxtFYVAssxp6WKNrWw8_m639hXCTAskpBwyfrsPNtDUEPbM2FMCTxh2MgEx4g8GT5sr6FTteCLDjYTzqG5ZsH-A1fYBbkYmK9qjh6q_wWFqLjl_yjJWZ2Xbo-XDB8rwaS4_CjCfnpd2Sp7-za6eSas/s320/IMG_2958.JPG" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p> <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-73346092578014395522022-07-12T13:22:00.004-07:002022-07-12T13:22:51.806-07:00Kira Nerys<p>As I keep thinking about character, I keep coming back to Kira Nerys on Star Trek DS9.</p><p>She wasn't my favorite character. I was in love with Bashir and wanted to BE Dax, obviously! But Kira is one of the greatest examples of how to write a character of all time, so I wanted to talk about her in more depth.</p><p>Kira is a guerilla fighter at the end of a horrific war of occupation. As her enemy finally retreats, a new power steps in to keep the peace. She's understandably a little intense and she doesn't trust these new people, the Federation, any more than she trusted the Cardassians who just left. </p><p>That is A LOT to have preloaded in a character. And we learn it instantly in the first episode, the first minute we meet Kira. We can tell from how she behaves that she's on a hair trigger at all times and has no patience with any softness or nonsense. She gets along with Odo because he was fair and neutral during the occupation. She doesn't like or trust Quark because he's a carpetbagger and war profiteer. </p><p>Every character we write should always come preloaded with things like this. It doesn't have to be negative or painful, but it should be things that do not just define the person but determine how they behave on the day to day.</p><p>Sisko is set up beautifully the same way. The pilot to DS9 is an absolute master class in how to introduce characters and how to build them so that their past and present are fully part of everything they do. That work pays off every second of the show that follows. </p><p>Look, I'm building a character who was completely neglected by absentee parents--not unusual for the time period--and raised by the various staff of the property where she grew up. That's going to inform everything she does. She knows a lot of uncommon things for a ten year old Edwardian girl. But she also DOESN'T know a lot of things that others take for granted. How does she feel when she sees parents with small children, cuddling them and cooing? I feel like she might act out in various ways. There are huge holes in her heart, for all the love and care she got from the cook and the groom and all. </p><p>Her background informs everything she does in these stories. She will notice things I wouldn't. She won't notice things I would. Character HAS to include this kind of specificity or the people are blank slates.</p><p>I'll try to stay calm about Discovery, but the way those characters had NO backstory and NO traits makes me wild. I'd love to see the show bible. </p><p>For example, writing Tilly as someone who's smart but acts ditsy. I want to know what would make someone that way. She lets things drop about how her mom wanted her to become an officer, but she never wanted that herself. Okay, that's interesting, but how does that make you talk too much and say inappropriate things and be ditsy and childish? </p><p>The thing is, ditsy and childish aren't character traits. They're behaviors. All they gave her was behaviors. The same with Stametts being irritable and rude. Just behaviors. Everything I see in those characters with the exception of Burnham is just behaviors. </p><p>A character should be a full and interesting and complex person with experience that formed them, because there is not one single human on earth or off it who isn't like that. The guy being crabby at the Walmart checkout isn't just being crabby. He got fired earlier that day because he was late to work because the medication he takes for the fused disks in his back made him oversleep, but if he doesn't take it, he won't sleep at all. He injured his back in a car accident avoiding a moose and its baby on the highway and went over an embankment. He's still glad he did it. But it has messed up his life. Every time he sees a mother and a baby, he's glad all over again. He sacrificed himself to save them. But he's also in a lot of pain. And now he's out of work. <br /></p><p>Someone who's in pain and crabby about it is INFINITELY more interesting than someone who is just arbitrarily crabby, like Stametts. <br /></p><p>Behaviors with no reason for them come across as nonsense. And it's not actually how people work. Someone who is acting like Tilly probably has profound insecurity and feels like she doesn't deserve to be there. Wouldn't that have been a great story to give her? She's brilliant but insecure? She was always the shy one and so people thought she was dumb, so she doubted herself. Fill out that character in interesting ways. But no, when we meet her, she says she's going to be a captain one day. She sounds ambitious. We have no reason not to believe she IS ambitious since we just met her. So her ditsy thing is just jarring--and profoundly unprofessional. Does she really not know how to act on the bridge? Does she actually not have the ability to control what comes out of her mouth??? Those things don't fit with someone ambitious. Honestly I can't imagine anyone graduating from the Academy without the ability to control herself to that degree. <br /></p><p>Later (three whole seasons later) we find out that she never wanted to be a captain for herself. It was her mother's ambition for her. But instead of being a satisfying cap to make sense of this character, it means at best that she was self-sabotaging all that time. But we had no way to know that. She just came across as an actual idiot who could not shut up. See how none of the pieces fit together? It was just garbled nonsense, in terms of character. Character has to fit together in a sensible way.</p><p>Let alone the incredibly stupid arc where she, an engineering ensign, literally an unqualified person, was made captain for literally no reason at all. I can't even talk about how moronic that was. <br /></p><p>A sensible and coherent backstory that immediately informs their every action is so important that it needs to be a rule for every character written. When a character is faced with a choice, what do they do? We only know because we've build in their past and their conflicts and their goals. If we can't tell, or they could do literally anything, then that's a huge problem. </p><p>You don't even need to box yourself in. You can say, "X person has PTSD from their time in Y," without specifying what happened or where or how long or even how long ago it was. Even that helps tell me which way they will react in a crisis. <br /></p><p>A former Boston police officer and a mid-career history professor are going to have different attitudes to that drunk and distraught but incoherent 20 year old boy asking them for help. So is a mom with two kids waiting for her at home. So is someone whose teen ran away from home years ago and they've never heard from them since. So is Kira Nerys. I have no idea what Tilly would do because she's not a character. There was an actor with some behaviors. She was an appealing actor so we liked the character. But there's no earthly way to know which way she would jump. </p><p>I really love how there's so much complexity and energy tied up in Kira Nerys and her character. She's angry, she's energetic, she'll tell you to your face if she thinks you're an idiot. She's short-tempered, she's kind, she's religious and devoted to her beliefs. She's utterly capable and fierce. Such a great character. And you know all this in the pilot episode!<br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-61242924357192234582022-07-10T14:29:00.000-07:002022-07-10T14:29:55.595-07:00Star Trek: Discovery Season Four<p></p><p>The season started out strong, with Michael Burnham making decisions and doing things, which sounds funny to say, but the season suffered greatly from a whole lot of nothing going on. And by that I mean, entire arcs that were about nothing much at all.</p>Adira, who is a zero as a character anyway, leaves for a while and it doesn't matter and nobody cares. They showed up again and people were like, "Were you gone?" Stametts actually said, "Oh, you're back."<br /><p>Tilly, someone we loved, suddenly leaves the show, everyone is sad for literally thirty seconds, then nothing.<br /></p><p>Dr. Culber gradually realizes he is upset over legitimate things like BEING DEAD and decides to be allowed to be upset. This takes many scenes over many episodes. It reveals nothing. It shows no growth. He was lovely to start with and lovely to end with. Nothing changed in his behavior or choices because of it. </p><p>There is no CHARACTER in any of these characters. Imagine trying to explain one of them to someone: Tilly is, uh, she's funny sometimes and talks too much. That is not a character. Stametts is kind of crabby. THAT is not a character. Saru is...I don't know, tall? An alien fish guy? Culber: sweet guy, used to be dead. Detmer: drives the ship. Even Michael Burnham. Try to explain her character. You can't. She doesn't have one. She's good at getting what she wants? She has a hot boyfriend? People like her? THAT'S NOT A CHARACTER. None of them are actual characters with depth and breadth and issues and enthusiasms and whole entire lives. None of them get beyond a stick figure, in terms of character. </p><p>Book had more character than anyone and he was a late addition, and even then it was almost all in terms of trauma: lost his family, lost his planet. Before that he was interesting because he risked a lot to save endangered species. Hey! A personality trait! That's what I like to see. How come Stamets, Detmer, Saru, Culber, Tilly, and Burnham don't have any of those???<br /></p><p>There were vast endless flashbacks to fill in backstory over the guy with the U on his forehead, an absolutely uninteresting character who was not even part of the regular cast. I cannot express how little anyone cares WHY this boring person did what they did. We sure didn't need to spend literally half of an episode on their reasons for doing the things they do. It DOESN'T MATTER. We had this villain for many episodes before that and accepted them just fine without this backstory. Who cares? It adds nothing to anything.</p><p>Nobody should need this explained to them, but: trauma is not a personality trait. It's terrible and you have to deal with it, but at most HOW YOU DEAL WITH IT could be a personality trait. Those are things you do. Trauma is just what happens to you, which is never interesting. "I won the lottery," whoop de do. "I had my inheritance stolen by my aunts so I made a million dollars by cheating at cards at their casino." That's interesting. Add "And their syndicate is after me because of it, so I'm becoming a nun in this remote location in Uruguay." Now you have a character and a story. Take that person and put them on your spaceship and things are going to happen, because we know what that person is like, we know what they do when they're in trouble, and we know there is something coming to catch up with them. <br /></p><p>I kind of liked the season a little, not that you can tell from all that, because it was better than the absolute catastrophe at the end of the previous one, but it was so full of endlessly annoying and pointless BAD DRAMA that a lot of it was something to endure rather than enjoy. Like having a friend you love who tells long boring stories. Sometimes you just have to put up with that. </p><p>But it's a tv show, so it really should understand drama better than this. </p><p>Stakes! There should be stakes. EVER. Yes, the giant space bubble had stakes because it might destroy more planets. But it's a giant space bubble that moves around erratically, so how are we supposed to get a handle on it? One thing it utterly lacks is personality, but another thing it lacks is any kind of story direction. </p><p>Say for example the giant space bubble is plowing a path directly toward Earth from the beginning and we keep trying to stop it or redirect it or whatever but nothing works. Stakes, am I right? </p><p>Say Dr. Culber is becoming unable to do his job because of his post-death PTSD. Stakes!</p><p>Say Adina is the only one who can manage XYZ whatever so when they go off to settle the literally impossible fake robot with the literally impossible Trill personality, everything falls apart. Stakes!</p><p>And Michael Burnham repeatedly--I lost count because it happened so often--does that thing, which I think was supposed to be Kirk-like, maybe, where instead of following all of the advice of everyone with a working brain, she goes off and does this wildly improbable and incredibly dangerous thing while the clock is ticking. And it ALWAYS WORKS OUT. Hi, you just killed all of your stakes, because even I, the queen of suspension of disbelief, get bored with it now. Even I say, "It's going to be fine. It's always fine." NO STAKES.</p><p>I can get stressed out reading books I've read many times before, so this is who you've lost. That takes some doing. <br /></p><p>Let's not even get started on throwing away actual astronomical reality with this incredibly stupid "galactic barrier" thing. It doesn't exist. It can't exist. But they had some kind of stupid bubbles and had to ride them through the blah blah blah. Trying to manufacture stakes doesn't work when the thing you made up is so completely not part of reality. Do you think we're all incredibly stupid and uneducated? That's what it feels like. <br /></p><p>It's like you just said there's a wall of energy at the edge of the ocean that keeps us from walking into it. It's not there. We all know it's not there. Hi, at the edge of the galaxy, there are fewer stars, and then there are no stars, and that's the end of the galaxy. </p><p>I don't know how people sleep at night who can throw away not only all of the established rules of this fictional universe (I will never get over stupid Gray, who wasn't even a STORY and was so completely impossible every kind of way) but all of the actual huge obvious realities of the real universe. Like, making up technological things is fine, do whatever, it's the future, but the galactic barrier thing really was profoundly insulting to anyone with even the slightest working knowledge of the ACTUAL GALAXY, a thing which you can see from MY DRIVEWAY. </p><p>There's also a major pacing problem. You can't start an episode with these OMG ticking clock emergency oh no things and then pause and spend ten literal human minutes on a slow emotion-based scene which again has no stakes at all. This show does that CONSTANTLY. Who cares if Saru and Vulcan Lady are sharing long looks when Earth is about to explode? It's so tone-deaf, I don't know what to say about it. They simply don't understand pacing in a way I've never seen in a tv show before. You can't drop the energy down to nothing and expect us still to be wired up for the end of the world.</p><p>It happens all the time that Michael will be en route to some enormous crisis and stop for a quiet emotional conversation with someone that goes on and on and on. That kills all the energy. Yes, it's a lovely scene, and emotional beats matter, but it's the way they're layered in together that makes for a bewildering and nonsensical sequence of events. </p><p>It's like your meal is a bite of delicious hot lasagna, ten after dinner mints spaced out one per minute, another bite of now warm lasagna, a huge cupcake, two bites of cool lasagna and also a gun is held to your grandmother's head, ten more after dinner mints spaced out one per minute, more stone cold lasagna, some salad, a weird concoction of hot peppers and jello, more cold lasagna, and oh no there's still a gun to your grandmother's head, what will happen??? It's exactly that confusing and chaotic in terms of energy level and stakes and plotting and mixing of things that should not be mixed that way.<br /></p><p>So anyway. I was relieved when I finished the season. And I was so excited to see that Stacey Abrams was the president of Earth and possibly also Titan, not quite sure. Maybe the short crabby traitor woman is still the leader of Titan? Who committed terrible crimes but somehow it's okay? Also they kept doing this weird thing with her lipstick where sometimes they'd cover the pink part of her lower lip and sometimes they wouldn't. So slapdash, this show. </p><p>Ultimately, there were some things I liked, but the characters had no direction or inner conflict and the stories had that fatal lack of stakes problem.</p><p>Just think for a moment about Kira Nerys. From the first minute of DS9, she was a former guerrilla working to reclaim a space station from a hateful and atrocity-filled occupation that was just ousted. That is SO MUCH BACKSTORY. She has a direction and an attitude and love and anger and so much going on. </p><p>There is not one single character on Discovery that has a hundredth of that energy. Nobody has a direction. Nobody even has a backstory, except formerly dead Dr. Culber, and even that is minimized--people literally tell him he's fine now, so be fine. </p><p>The other show that built great backstory into people was Battlestar Galactica. On top of a massive plot conflict between human and Cylon that drove the entire series, it came preloaded with powerful direction and energy for people. That meant that character drove the stories. </p><p>Without character energy like that, you have nothing. Character has to drive story or you have cardboard cutouts. And when you can't even set up reasonable stakes each episode, you have this. </p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-31681187128191597932022-07-05T12:35:00.002-07:002022-07-05T12:35:37.985-07:00The point of characters<p>SPOILERS FOR STAR TREK DISCOVERY</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED</p><p> </p><p> </p><p></p><p>SO BE AWARE</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>I'm nearly to the end of the extant Discovery episodes, oh no! I have
four left. I probably have to catch up on Nanowrimo today but I'll
finish it this week some time. Then on to Strange New Worlds, I guess,
though I just sighed and looked up and to the left in exasperation IN
ADVANCE because I've been seeing gifs and stills of a very stupid
episode on Tumblr in which the ship gets transformed into a children's
book.</p><p>I can't even express how much I hate that kind of premise.
It's not cute. It's not charming. It's stupid and annoying. It's just to
get the cast into fun outfits and out of their comfort zone, from what I
can tell. It feels so utterly condescending and hateful. Like you think
viewers will eat any old garbage, so give them garbage. Or worse, you
think the viewers are such idiots that they will like this. </p><p>It takes me out of suspension of disbelief entirely. Terrible, terrible, terrible.</p><p>So
anyway, I guess that's up next, since this is Star Trek and Star Wars
summer, if I ever get done with the existing Star Trek and go on to Star
Wars. </p><p>I loved the episode I saw of Discovery last night so much,
even though it was a super trite premise: away team has to acquire X
object, must go into some sketchy underworld and fight and play cards to win it. I'm yawning just thinking
about it. There's an episode of every sci-fi show where they do this.
There's a bad one or two in Agents of SHIELD. There's a bad one in
EVERYTHING. So I was scowling and looking around for other things to do
while it rolled on by.</p><p>But then! The writing on it! It was
absolutely hilarious, came at everything from funny and unexpected
angles, turned every expectation upside down, played very fun games with
us and the characters. I was so delighted! I went and found the writer
and followed him on Twitter. I was CHARMED. I was DELIGHTED. That's
especially hard to do when I'm braced for dread that way. </p><p>I
laughed out loud. Do you know how hard it is to make me laugh out loud?
I'm a stoic hermit type person these days. I talk only to the dog, as a
rule. And to Duolingo, in Norwegian. I speak much more Norwegian out
loud than English these days. </p><p>And! It's so great to see actors
like Sonequa Martin-Green and David Ajala given amazing twisty turny
emotional angles to act, mostly during that card game, which could have
been deadly otherwise. There were layers upon layers. Martin-Green in
particular is an absolutely world-class actor given almost nothing to
work with most of the time, so this was hilarious and awesome. Ajala is
also astonishingly good and usually given like three colors to use
instead of a whole palette. </p><p>There was an odd Tig scene where she
was not given anything funny to do, which is so bizarre. Why waste her
on a dumb flat scene? She seemed annoyed too, honestly. I like how Tig
can't hide her emotions. Just like me. <br /></p><p>They're writing out
that super boring (and completely implausible) boyfriend guy. Seriously,
they extracted the memories of a former Trill host from the symbiont
and put them into a synthetic body??? Idiotic. I hope they write out the
super boring and pointless character of Adina, who seriously has no
purpose whatsoever on the show and is an equally idiotic premise, a
human host for a Trill symbiote. Maybe if they get rid of her, we can
have Tig back much more. Stay on Trill! Never come back! </p><p>This all
makes me think of the POINT of characters, their use and role in
storytelling, which is something Discovery does very poorly, to be
frank. They don't seem to know what they're doing in terms of telling a
story using an ensemble. Witness all the useless undeveloped bridge
crew. It feels like someone who thinks nobody else but them has a full
and vivid life. They do! Nobody is actually background in real life!
Everyone is the star of their own show!</p><p>That to me seems like an
emotionally stunted or unsocialized person. And I say that as someone
who only lives with a dog and again, speaks Norwegian much more than
anything else, and that's to my phone. </p><p>Okay, what's the purpose
of characters? They should each play a role in the storytelling. They should each be on the road somewhere. Everyone
should have a story they're working out. But also they should be part of
the LARGER story. So with Discovery, that would be something like: how
do we deal with loss, how do we accomplish our goals in this new world,
how do we make new lives here? Discovery's goal this season should be
finding its place in the new world. They're doing that some? But to make
it work fully, each character should be making new connections.</p><p>Ways
they ARE doing that: stupid Adina, who's from the new era but you'd never know it, lovely Book,
who's from the new era and connects with Burnham and has a whole developed backstory at least, and this Vulcan woman
who is president of the planet or something and likes Saru. That's all
relationshippy stuff, except Adina, who as I mentioned is nothing. The
ship has new technology. Otherwise? It's the same show as before. I
think that's very odd. <br /></p><p>I think things will be different in a
thousand years in so many ways. New food and new media, just for
instance. Hey, have the crew get into those things. Whole new ideas
about life! New philosophies, new religions. </p><p>The one woman with
the breathing tubes, Dahl? I don't know her name. She's not a regular.
She went off and found the descendants of her family, something EVERYONE
should have done. I'd have done it immediately, first thing. I want to
know what happened to everyone! What did they do for work? Did they have
families? What did the families do? Where did they live? How is this
not a huge throughline of this season? Everyone should be trading
stories. Oh yeah, my sister/brother's descendants moved to X planet and
started a freaky new religion entirely based on avocados. Your family
and my family were on opposite sides of a war we're just learning about
and are mortal enemies. I don't know, something! </p><p>Again, it feels
emotionally stunted. How can only one person do that? Did Burnham ever
look up what happened to Spock? We know the end of that story, so she
should, too, depending on which universe this is in, old Trek or new
Trek. (That's a whole thing. And I get why they don't want to get into
it. But she could say: Yeah, it's extremely surprising, or something.
ACKNOWLEDGE it. We JUST left Spock.)</p><p>A thousand years is a whole
lot of generations, I know. But wouldn't you want to know? How long did
so and so live? What ever happened with that show I was watching? Even
if you find out you will never get to see the end of whatever show, that
would be a thing. This is LOSS. This is what matters in life. </p><p>Think
about moving to Norway. What would you miss? What if communications go
down? What would you want to find out? I'd be going nuts trying to find
out about my siblings and niece and nephews. Even if I got Rip Van
Winkled I'd want to find out the answers. </p><p>I don't think they're dealing with that curiosity and grieving process properly. This is a whole show focused on trauma and they're ignoring that major trauma. Essentially everyone lost everyone but each other. That has to be so utterly distressing and we're seeing none of it. <br /></p><p>Give
someone a small child living with their partner back on Earth, my
goodness. Imagine them combing the archives, trying to find ancient
records, coming up with a picture from Ancient Instagram where they were
eating pie on the fourth of July. Try to explain to a modern times
person what those rituals were about way back then and feel that
distance and loss. </p><p>Oh, we all used to listen to these songs at
the winter solstice holidays. No, we didn't like them, but we played them anyway.
We'd have missed them if we didn't play them. Can I sing one? Sure. And
burst into tears singing a Christmas carol. Or a ubiquitous tv ad
everyone knows. </p><p>So much wasted opportunity, while we're just
chasing the not very interesting Big Bad. It's a bubble thing. It's just
a bubble. Not a lot of personality. But then, not boring and stupid
like the Orion lady with the poorly fitting pants and the constantly
shifting accent, so that's a plus.</p><p>Oh, right, the point of characters. Well, they should have a point, is my point. </p><p>As
I'm building the world of my current novel, I'm thinking a lot about
this. Right now I have three main characters, one of whom is nearly
always off-stage, and seven who are in the main character's past, though
I want to bring them over and establish them as part of the team. So
that might solve the problem. You need more than two, even if it's a
mystery solving duo.</p><p>Consider the Lord Peter books. Early on you
had Lord Peter, Bunter, and Charles Parker, then added Gerald and Mary
and the Dowager Duchess, then of course added Harriet Vane. But that's
pretty much the only recurring characters. Young Gerald, later. And some
of Peter's friends, like the Honorable Freddy. I think the Chief
Inspector, right?<br /></p><p>But in any given book, there are only a small handful of important recurring characters. </p><p>This
is helping me see who I need to add. The aunt should have young but
connected friends from university. Her best friend and roommate. The boy
she likes or liked. And her mentor. That's plenty right there, but she
can have a million friends all over the country she can call on when
she's in a pickle. <br /></p><p>This is all making me rise up above my story and think about the point of the stories I'm telling. Solving a mystery seems so straightforward, but you're always making SOME point when you do it. Every character has a meaning even if you don't want them to--especially if you don't want them to. How do you think we feel about Rhys and Bryce, two utterly generic characters who don't even talk most of the time, one Asian and one black, getting pushed to the background and not even given any personality traits? That tells us something, even if you don't want it to. </p><p>I want everyone in my stories to have their own agendas and journeys they're on. Nobody is fully formed unless they do. Even if we just get a glimpse of it, it's there and it makes them pop into 3D. </p><p>Here's how terrible I am. I used to drive ride share so I'd meet a LOT of people briefly. They are not always good at showing you the depth and breadth of their rich and complex lives in ten minutes of small talk, but that doesn't mean it's not there. But I have vivid memories of people saying they were madly in love with someone they met online, then showing me a picture of someone. This is why I'm terrible: I was always like, how did you two even pick each other out of all the other people, when there's nothing to make you stand out? </p><p>But that's because I didn't get the full picture, see what I mean? (I still think it's a terrible thing to think even in passing and I'm really not proud of myself.) But THAT is exactly what you're doing with fiction if you don't give them full lives and backstories and character traits. You're making people generic, when NOBODY is generic. </p><p>Give someone a passion for growing yellow tulips, jeez. Give them homebrewing such that they're always trying to get you to try their terrible or interesting or delicious beer or wine. How do they feel about puzzles and word games? Think of Riker and his trombone. That's such a funny character trait to give someone! Or someone had a leg replaced after a shark attack when they were a boneheaded youth and it aches when the weather changes. (Not really relevant on a spaceship.) But don't you want to know how they got into that situation? Were they being reckless? Were they saving a child or dog? Were they not listening to the warnings? Were they entranced by angel fish? Were they arguing with their brother while the warnings were given out? Every one of those options is character and gives us insight into which way they'll jump when things get rough. </p><p>I just watched a video of someone making fancy lampshades by hand. I love that! Give someone that trait. I think I'm going to, actually. Or making complicated birdcages by twisting and curling copper wire. Amazing. Also tricky to give away, or else in great demand and bringing in a lot of money. Maybe they want to collect a spoon from every planet they visit. It's becoming a problem, so they have to store crates of them in other people's quarters. (Nobody on spaceships has enough stuff, if you ask me. Humans have pack rat tendencies. Surely other species as well.) We're also by nature fiddlers, so we knit or tinker or carve or build ships in bottles. </p><p>I met a guy who was finishing a cross-country bike trip who was also editor of a poetry journal. </p><p>Ugh, people are so complicated. I like sci-fi tv but have to knit while I watch it. I study Norwegian and have a weird collection of cobalt blue glass. (And cobalt blue everything.) Why are their three statues of the Virgin Mary on my desk, when I'm not religious? Wait, one is St. Clare of Assisi, patron saint of television. What's with all the bunnies? What's with the obsession with metamorphic migmatites? Give your character a fascination with certain geological formations. Everything enriches a character. They hate spiders! They love bees! They love spiders and hate ants! They memorize poetry and put it to music!</p><p>Even Spock played that Vulcan harp thing and 3D chess. Bashir played tennis growing up. Sisko loves baseball and cooking. I wish I knew even one thing Michael Burnham liked to do in her down time. We caught a glimpse of Owosekun doing pullups in the gym and suddenly knew infinitely more about her than in nearly four seasons of sitting there on the bridge. </p><p>Owosekun's purpose thus far was to fill a spot on a standard Starfleet bridge. What I'm saying is that is NOT ENOUGH. A character isn't there just to do a literal job. They should be doing a job IN THE STORY. Supposing this is Michael Burnham's story, sure, okay, but then Owosekun is her best friend, or her workout partner, or they each try to solve Redactle before the other one.</p><p>Being the person who says "No, do it the other way" is not enough, either. Ugh, I hate that Dahl has more of a backstory than Owosekun. I'm mad on Owosekun's behalf. And we do know little bits of things about her, that she grew up in a Luddite community, that she was a pearl diver, but she needs a PURPOSE in the narrative and a GOAL of her own, as well as being part of the ongoing story, which she isn't--she's just there for it. </p><p>By the way, they replaced Bryce (I think--the black guy) with a
different but very similar looking man. It made your face-blind
correspondent quite agitated because I wasn't sure if I was just not
recognizing him. But no, it was a whole different guy. WHY MAKE HIM LOOK
SO SIMILAR? That's not just cruel to the face-blind, it makes it seem
like he's interchangeable. The way he's written, he totally is, but
that's not how we treat people, not in fiction or in reality. Come on! <br /></p><p>It's a type of storytelling that really bothers me. And it bothers me on the level of thinking that people you meet for ten minutes are boring. (Still mad at myself, yep.) It's reductive and simplistic and cheap and even cruel. Because if you think people you don't know aren't interesting, you're guilty of thinking you're the only main character in this narrative, which is selfish and egotistical and even narcissistic. That's not a good way to tell stories--or run a society. It's the root of a lot of what's wrong with our culture today. It's a bigger problem than how Owosekun and Bryce and Rhys are written. <br /></p><p>Maybe the purpose of characters is not just to fill in space, but to be facets of a full and well-developed life. To bring other elements to the table. To remind all of us that we don't exist in a vacuum, that other points of view exist and are valid and important, that everyone is equally important. </p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-73515419869594454912022-07-04T12:50:00.002-07:002022-07-04T12:50:23.885-07:00Character<p>What makes a character interesting and memorable to begin with? It's
worthwhile to take time to think about our own favorite characters and
what worked so well with them. What makes Elizabeth Bennet so memorable?
</p><p>Someone (Jacob?) said that the best characters are fundamentally
good people in impossible situations, which might be what makes her
character work so well. She's intelligent and interesting and sarcastic,
but in an impossible position in which she HAS to find a husband from
among these extremely unpromising options, with the added handicap of her embarrassing mother and annoying younger sisters. Look at her choices. Mr. Collins is atrocious! Yet
we see Charlotte accept his proposal, simply because she has to.
Elizabeth also has to, but doesn't. Everything that happens in the novel
makes her situation worse and worse, adding pressure to her already
precarious life. Yet she still rejects Darcy's first proposal. She has
the strength of her convictions even in the face of probable destitution
if her father dies. That's an amazing character!</p><p>Take a person with convictions and put them into an impossible situation where those convictions are challenged. </p><p>Not to fixate on <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>, but it started in the pilot with exactly this type of situation. Michael Burnham was faced with two options and had to make an impossible choice. Commit mutiny and maybe save the Federation from a war with the Klingons, or follow her captain's orders and allow the war to happen. As it turned out, she committed the mutiny but the captain woke up and overruled her and so both bad results took place. Amazing!</p><p>I was so pleased with that beginning. Season Four seems to be back on track with that kind of thing. <br /></p><p>Character is about the choices the person makes. That's it. It's not about what your past or your potential or your future or what you might have done or would do. It's about choices in the here and now. </p><p>Character is the choice a person makes when they face a conflict. I suspect we all have our own patterns because that's what character means, the ways a person tends to jump when there's a crisis.</p><p>In a crisis, do they tend to:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>run away</li><li>panic</li><li>hide</li><li>back the stronger side</li><li>switch sides</li><li>delay a decision</li><li>make a decision then change it</li><li>overthink</li><li>act rashly</li><li>blame others</li><li>blame their past</li><li>blame their current circumstances</li><li>distract themselves</li><li>focus on irrelevancies</li><li>dismiss the concerns of others</li><li>save themselves over all others</li><li>plan ten steps ahead before making a move <br /></li><li>distract others <br /></li><li>try to change the conversation</li><li>make it about the accuser instead</li><li>fight</li><li>worry about others who are weaker or can't defend themselves</li><li>follow the rules</li><li>find a loophole</li><li>jump from one option to another</li><li>sit still and think</li><li>ask for advice</li><li>tell others what to do</li><li>resort to violence</li><li>argue points<br /></li></ul><p></p><p>It's uncomfortable to look at these about ourselves, but it's fascinating to look at them with a fictional character, especially if you're just building one. These patterns determine what kind of person this is, which determines which choice they will make when things get tough. And what do they do after they make that choice?</p><p>I know my move is always to flee a crisis. Flight! Breaking character traits broadly down to fight or flight is a useful place to start, it's true. If there's a bad situation, I want to get out of it. I don't want to talk it out or resolve things or negotiate. I want to run. It's so bad that I pack when I'm extremely stressed. It's like there's a list of options and only one of them is in hundred point font, so I can't even see the others.</p><p>I'm not sure that's a sympathetic trait. Well, I assume I'm a fundamentally good person--who doesn't?--but when I'm in an impossible situation, running away is pretty unsympathetic, as well as being psychologically iffy. </p><p>I've never seen <i>Runaway Bride</i>, as I will avoid anything to do with weddings, but I can't imagine it's a very sympathetic character if she's constantly setting people up for emotional devastation that also embarrasses them in front of everyone they care about and wastes thousands of dollars. Not to mention the catering. Well, I suppose the guests can still eat that. Does she invite her family and friends every time? Who would keep on showing up? Are there bridesmaids? Maybe I should watch this thing, just to answer some questions I have. But I will hate it.</p><p>I might not be a sympathetic character in general, now that I think about it. Independent to the point of it being pathological, self-contained, focused on my own work to the exclusion of all else, impatient with other people's nonsense, full of panic and terror all the time, and of course ready to move three thousand miles away for no apparent reason. I mean, I will joyously come help you move furniture or paint things or do whatever needs doing, especially if it involves power tools or machinery of some kind. Or my cute little 4'x8' trailer. But I almost never ask for help and I assume the answer is no so I don't ask anyone to do anything fun. (In my defense, the answer is always no.) Is that a sympathetic character?</p><p>One way we know how to feel about characters is by how others treat them, which obviously is a self-fulfilling and circular situation. It's ugly, but we assume people are being treated the way they deserve. If nobody hangs out with someone, we assume there's a good reason. In fiction, we take our cues about someone by how others treat them.</p><p>I'm still moved by how characters on <i>Discovery</i> would join someone who was being ostracized and sitting alone in the cafeteria. That is a perfect example of others treating someone the way others are treating them, then someone breaking that pattern. (It's Tilly. Tilly is SUCH a good and kind person.) And then others join them and the person is part of the group again.<br /></p><p>Characters are what they do. That's the tricky part about thinking we're good people, right? Are you a good person if you don't actually do anything good? That's a kite that's not up in the sky. How can we tell? We can't. Imagine it as something more tangible, like DOING good. Have you done anything good lately? <br /></p><p>So characters have to DO in order to BE. </p><p>I get why Elizabeth Bennet is sarcastic and snarky about people. I get why she makes fun of this snooty jerk who said rude things about her at the dance. I find it highly relatable. She's punching up! She has nothing and is mocked by this rich asshole. Who wouldn't want to make fun of him in private? It's not the most sympathetic action, though. Being mean never is. It's understandable but not sympathetic. It almost makes me retroactively think she deserves the mean comments he made. They're both mean! Why would I like them?</p><p>But we do, because we can relate to being unkind out of paralyzing social anxiety, or injured pride, or any of a million reasons that we think are absolutely great reasons for doing the thing we did. </p><p>Character is the choice a person makes when they face a conflict.</p><p>Character, conflict, choice, consequences. That's everything that makes up every story ever. </p><p>Do you pick up the gold ring you find on the floor in the store? And what do you do with it after that? That choice presents a conflict. Which way the character jumps tells us everything about them. And that choice leads to consequences. Do you keep the ring? Do you wear it out and about? Do you give it to someone who was despondent and turn their life around? Do you try to sell the ring? If so, what if it's recognized and now you're wanted for robbery? Or does the money save your house? Do you give it to someone else, who then wears it around, where it gets recognized, so they get accused of stealing it? Do you give it to the store manager, who denies having it when the person who lost it asks, then gets all sorts of trouble from that? Or they get a promotion and move to the big city?</p><p>I had to go back and insert all those positive outcomes. I tend to imagine only terrifying scenarios. It's something I'm working on. See, unsympathetic! Oh no!</p><p>I can't stress enough how much ACTIONS are who a character is and determine how we feel about them. Definitely not what they say they are. In fact, someone who insists on who they are is nearly always wrong. "I'm a good person!" is something someone says when the evidence is stacking up against them to demonstrate that they aren't. Maybe they are, but if it were obvious, they wouldn't need to argue for it. </p><p>Or maybe events are piling up against them, through no fault of their own. I tend to find that extremely sympathetic, but it's not good drama, when things *happen to* someone, versus when they are making choices of their own. Victimhood is not interesting. Choices are interesting. So if bad things happen, how the person tackles that is what makes them a sympathetic character. Complaining and feeling put upon are never, ever sympathetic, even when they're absolutely justified. (Oh no, do I complain too much? This discussion is making me self-conscious, yet another unsympathetic trait.) (It would be hilarious to change my life because I'm afraid I'm an unsympathetic character.)</p><p>Elizabeth Bennet has such a profoundly excellent character situation. She's in a bad situation not of her own making (the family, the desperate need to marry for financial stability, the poverty) and has to accomplish a goal in order to solve it. She has character traits that actively hinder her accomplishment of that goal. She has to overcome both inner traits and external obstacles to get where she needs to be. </p><p>Just being in a bad situation alone is never enough to make someone sympathetic. In fact, as discussed above, we tend to think people deserve what happens to them, so it has to be extremely clear that they didn't get into that situation by themselves or it makes them even less sympathetic. </p><p>To take a totally unfair example, imagine someone with an abusive husband. All we think is: get out of there! People say every time, "Why doesn't she just leave him?" Obviously it's not that easy. Emotional abuse is profoundly damaging and there are often crucial financial reasons and dependents and other factors. That person *could* leave, but they *can't* leave. We tend not to see that as a sympathetic character necessarily because we focus on what we would do to solve it, instead of what that person in that situation can and can't do to get out of the situation. It's not easy (for anyone but me, apparently) to leave their entire life behind. And I take a 26 foot Penske truck when I go. </p><p>There are great stories about abused partners who claim there are bedbugs or say they're having a yard sale and bag up all their stuff and put it in the garage, then flee in the night. Imagine if even looking like you're packing will get you beaten up. How do you leave? Often these people end up with literally just the clothes they're wearing. No money, nothing, and the knowledge that a terrifying monster is out there willing and able to hurt or kill them if they are found. That leaves out going to family or anywhere familiar, too. </p><p>I find that incredibly sympathetic, personally, but I know that situation brings out a lot of "why don't they just" or "they never should have" reactions. Those are tricky when we're writing a character who we want to be sympathetic. It's much better when our reactions are more like, "Yes, go go go!" or "Look out, he's coming home!" </p><p>Incidentally, I just realized how to improve the beginning of my favorite of my novels. Right in the beginning, add a strong choice the character makes that sets her up to be much more sympathetic. </p><p>I always picture someone on the high dive. Have you ever backed away and climbed back down the ladder? I sure have. I couldn't make myself do it. Everyone was cheering me on but I was much too scared. I did eventually get myself to go back up there and jump off. Big steps are scary! We all want you to do the thing! What does it take, though? What's the crucial thing that makes you able to take that step?</p><p>In this novel, in the first sentence, the character *considers* dropping out of college. If I change it to *decides,* it's infinitely stronger. It's a choice, not just a thought. It's something she's doing to do. She just has to figure it out. It's not a coincidence that I keep talking about how people leave controlling situations. This character is in one, rigidly controlled and constantly monitored by phone calls, always put in the wrong no matter what she does, not allowed to work or have any money, and so on. </p><p>Again, we tend to think people deserve the situations they're in. It's unfair, but it's true. We have to see her taking steps to change things if we want to find her sympathetic. Just like Elizabeth Bennet, out there at the dance and trying her best, with her mother being loud and embarrassing and her sisters being terribly pious, excessively flirty, or singing like a cat getting its shots at the vet. She's taking action! She's trying to do the thing! And so we're on her side.</p><p>This character is facing a conflict, but as it stands, isn't making a choice. She has to make that choice and try to do the thing, otherwise we don't find her sympathetic. <br /></p><p>Character, conflict, choice, consequences. <br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-50183451766448668622022-07-04T12:04:00.002-07:002022-07-04T12:04:27.060-07:00Comma plus and<p>I really hate <i>comma plus and</i>.</p><p>It's not a comma splice. A comma splice is two independent clauses joined by a comma, forming a fused sentence. Grammatically incorrect.</p><p><i>Comma plus and</i> is used in grammatically correct but horribly awkward and awful ways. </p><p>I have strong feelings about this. My feelings are that this is very bad writing. So don't do it. Now I will explain why. <br /></p><p>Every time I read my beloved Murderbot, especially beginning of the first novel, I get smacked in the face with so many <i>comma plus and</i> constructions. I really want everyone to stop doing this.</p><p>There are good reasons. Connections between ideas should be more than just a plus sign, primarily. In fiction, the connections between ideas generally range from something like <i>because</i> to something like <i>although</i>. In other words, there are causal connections, not just a plus b plus c.</p><p>Authors Joan Aiken and Ursula K. LeGuin, arguably my fiction parents, both have said versions of this in their works about writing. To paraphrase:<br /></p><p><i>The king died and then the queen died</i> is not a story. </p><p><i>The king died and then the queen died of grief</i> IS a story. Because there's a causal connection between those two things. </p><p>I had to learn this the hard way in a larger plotting sense in my writing. Several entire novels consisted of events happening, with no drive to them. It was only when I started writing the main character making choices that drive the action that I began to have a narrative drive to the stories. </p><p>Elsewhere I will talk about character, conflict, choice, and consequences. But it's the same sense that I'm talking about here on the sentence level. We can't just have a sequence of events. We have to see things driving other things. </p><p>The first sentence of Martha Wells's <i>All Systems Red</i> is a master class in excellent story set-up:</p><p>"I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites."</p><p>I get a little squirmy when sentences tell events out of order, to be honest. I want things to be in order. But it's not a requirement. I just always dislike sentences that go out of time order, like, "Before I went to the car, I fell down the front steps." I want that to be something like: "I fell down the front steps on the way to the car."</p><p>That first sentence goes b then a then c. But I understand wanting to put the quite eye-catching "mass murderer" part up front. Of course, anyone could be a mass murderer any time, so what was holding this person back? What is a governor module? We are instantly engaged and interested and curious. We know a whole lot about Murderbot by the way the sentence ends, with the entertainment feed. </p><p>By the way, if you give me directions out of order that way, I will be completely confused. <i>Before you walk the dog, take the compost to the compost pile and rinse out the bowl, but when you come back make sure you don't spill any lettuce seeds, but first go next door and see if they have the newspaper. </i>These are the ravings of a disordered mind! <br /></p><p>If you keep things in chronological order, then we can drive the narrative forward even on the sentence level, with actions causing consequences, not the other way around. </p><p>The first few pages of <i>All Systems Red</i> are full of <i>comma plus and</i> in a way that drives me wild when I read it. </p><p>First of all, you don't need that comma if you're connecting two things that actually should be connected. Wells leaves it out when the two thoughts go together. On page two, there's a fine example of this: "I was looking at the sky and mentally poking at the feed when the bottom of the crater exploded." Nobody would ever use a comma there because those two things are happening at the same time and belong together. </p><p>Here's where it gets messy: "I dragged Bharadwaj out of its mouth and shoved myself in there instead, and discharged my weapon down its throat and then up toward where I hoped the brain would be." In my ebook on my phone, it's on page three. The first part, before the comma, is terrific. But then why do we have a <i>comma plus and </i>next? It's because this sentence is a string of pearls.</p><p>I dragged</p><p>and shoved</p><p>and discharged</p><p>and then up</p><p>I understand that the point is to create a rapid-fire sequence of events, but it just becomes awkward. That is too many <i>ands</i> in one sentence. To improve it, I'd use other coordinating conjunctions besides just <i>and</i> all the time. Break it into two sentences or connect it with one of those lovely words that drive the motion forward, like <i>then. </i>There are a lot of words called "adverbs of time," a beautiful term. There's a list <a href="https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Adverbs-of-Time.htm">here</a>, but the main point is, PLUS does not drive the action forward. <br /></p><p>It reminds me of how I eat sometimes. My friend has accused me of eating ingredients. I'm sure I gave her a blank look and kept eating plain carrots, then plain bread, then whatever else was in front of me. I can't be hungry and plan simultaneously. <br /></p><p></p><p>A string of pearls doesn't do the job as well as connections that drive the motion forward.</p><p>I like the first part: "I dragged Bharadwaj out of its mouth and shoved myself in there instead," but I would then just break it and make a new sentence. "I discharged my weapon down its throat then up toward where I hoped the brain would be." It's still utilitarian and not fancy, but it's sequential thoughts. </p><p>Notice that those events in the first part do not happen at the same time or as part of the same movement as those in the second part. In that case, I might be okay with it. Like this: "I fell down the chute and tried to brace my legs, but scraped them painfully against the rough surface." You're doing those things simultaneously. </p><p>That's the ultimate point of AND when it joins these things. Those things should be happening at the same time. When <i>comma plus and</i> is used over and over to show <i>sequence</i>, it comes across as severely lacking in forward motion. </p><p>Does one action cause the next? Say so. Does one event require the next? Say that. </p><p>Plenty of times we do multiple things at the same time but it's still super boring. "I sat on the couch and watched tv and ate carrots and drank tea." That might be factually accurate, but it's going NOWHERE. Who cares? You are so boring. You are stuck in an eternal boring present. <br /></p><p>Much more interesting: "I sat on the couch and watched tv while I ate carrots and thought about whether to bake shepherd's pie later." That person has a future. Sure, they're still eating ingredients, but at least there's a shepherd's pie in the future. And there IS a future. That has motion to it. </p><p><i>Comma plus and</i> puts everything into an eternal static present. It's a pile of books. It's a bag of groceries. I was going to say it's that basket of laundry you haven't put away, but even that has motion to it because it nags at you to get it done. </p><p>Every event in fiction should drive you on to the next event. It has to have narrative motion or we're just sitting there. The same holds true on the grammatical sentence level. </p><p>There are more instances of <i>and</i> that I would like to kill in these first few pages, even some without commas, like this one:</p><p>"Another burst of commands from the governor module came through and I backburnered it without bothering to decode them."</p><p>This one is fine:</p><p>"I was far less vulnerable in this situation than he was and I wasn't exactly having a great time either."</p><p>Kill this <i>comma plus and</i> with extreme prejudice. (We could discuss the <i>having managed</i> construction another time.) It should be two sentences:</p><p>"The feed was quiet now, Mensah having managed to use her leadership priority to mute everything but MedSystem and the hopper, and all I could hear on the hopper feed was the others frantically shushing each other."</p><p>This one is fine because what other options do you have? And because it furthers the point instead of just being a pointless plus sign.<br /></p><p>"They don't give murderbots decent education modules on anything except murdering, and even those are the cheap versions."</p><p>Partly you can tell the good ones from the bad ones because NOBODY would ever say the bad ones out loud. We simply don't use <i>comma plus and</i> this way in spoken English. Nobody ever does or ever will. Try saying all the bad examples out loud and you'll see. They don't make sense with how we think or speak. That's the crucial way to tell if you're doing it right or wrong. Say it out loud. <i>Comma plus and</i> will always sound extremely awkward and tacked on. </p><p>In summary, death to <i>comma plus and</i> and any <i>and</i> that is just functioning a plus sign instead of being a sensible connection between two simultaneous or otherwise essentially connected ideas that drive narrative motion forward. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-51126761602444142502022-06-25T14:25:00.003-07:002022-06-25T14:25:35.495-07:00Star Trek: Discovery, Seasons Two and Three<p>Season Two went fine, though the actor playing Ash Tyler developed a bizarre speech effect from bad dialect coaching. It will sound farfetched, but he sounded exactly like Nick Blood did when he suffered from bad dialect coaching on Agents of Shield. British people! Just let them be British! If they're not good at an American accent, don't make them try to do one. Oh boy was that distracting. It was even hard to understand him, which by the way it would not have been in his native accent.</p><p>The character of Ash Tyler was a problem the whole season long. He was thrown here and there like they had no clear plan for him. The guy with severe PTSD and major identity issues who had like two hours of training to join Section 31 ended the season being head of it. More nonsense. This was the beginning of the make it up as you go along problems that became unmanageable in Season Three. </p><p>Also L'Rell had a bizarre CGI face at the beginning that threw me out of the story entirely. And I don't know why everyone immediately forgets how to write drama when Klingons are part of a story. The Klingon scenes are unbearably boring and stupid, just people standing around grunting and yelling and giving speeches and occasionally breaking into another dumb physical fight. Story goes there to die.</p><p>The best thing about Season Two was Spock, because of the actor, who has an incredible voice and presence. He's also good at being Spock, that combination of withdrawn and sarcastic, above it all but judgmental. His relationship with Michael was excellent, especially when he called her out on being exactly who she is, with her self-important messianic complex. Of course, it did turn out that she really was the red angel, so she was right. And she is the main character of the show, the POV character.</p><p>Except then she isn't anymore? In Season Three, truly everything fell apart. </p><p>The show switched to being an ensemble show, which would be fine if any of the bridge crew characters had ANY personality traits or characteristics written in. But they don't. There's an Asian guy, a black guy, a black woman, and a white woman with a facial appliance. I think her name is Detmer? She gets to have some story and personality. The rest don't. I don't even know their names. They are not characters. The black woman suddenly said she was raised in a Luddite community one episode. Interesting. Later she said she was from a family of pearl divers, too. </p><p>These things are just thrown in there. Nobody is developed. Nothing is built up.</p><p>Compare that with even just the pilot episode of DS9, where all of the main characters are introduced and we know their traits and backgrounds immediately. Sisko, Kira, Dax, Bashir, Odo, Quark, O'Brien. You CAN do this. You can introduce characters well and quickly and give them depth and conflict and whole lives and issues and directions. </p><p>Discovery is incomparably bad at this. It gets worse and worse when I'm at the end of Season Three and don't know which one is Rhys and which is Bryce, if those are even their names. I don't know and I don't care, because they're not written as PEOPLE. </p><p>I'm angry at this show. </p><p>Season Three seemed to be setting up a cool thing with the sphere data becoming a sentient being, who I thought was Adira, given that she appeared out of nowhere, nobody saw her come in, and she had ridiculously overblown skills and abilities and knowledge for someone of her age. Impossible. </p><p>But no, they put the sphere data into these dumb little robots we've never seen before. And it decided everyone should watch Buster Keaton and laugh their heads off. You guys, nothing against Buster Keaton, but it's not the kind of thing that makes you laugh until you fall over. </p><p>Instead, Adira is nothing. The character gives a speech about being non-binary, so I should say they. But the speech and that fact have NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. It's not part of the story in any way. Not even part of that episode, or that scene. It's a terrible way to write anything. You don't just shove things in there undigested.</p><p>How you would do that well: have it be part of a story, any story. Do I even have to say more? No. It's the clunkiest kind of writing. I'm all for representation--that's not the problem. The problem is it's just dropped in there and doesn't mean anything in the story.</p><p>Adira also has an imaginary ghost boyfriend who appears then disappears then reappears. That also has nothing to do with any storyline. I can't even express how offended I am by this kind of writing. Because as viewers, as any reader would, we expect things in the story to MEAN SOMETHING. So I'm building theories about what this means, right? There's no earthly sense in putting things into stories that don't mean anything. It's self-indulgent first draft beginning writer nonsense and has no place in a show like this. It's not even a mislead! It's nothing!<br /></p><p>If you want it in there, which is fine, make it MEAN something. Make it part of the story. </p><p>Part of the problem here is the promise and the premise. You made a promise that the pieces would add up, but they don't. The premise of sci-fi and every Star Trek show requires that we do the math with the pieces we're given and figure out what they add up to. </p><p>We can't do that if the pieces are meaningless. </p><p>It's beyond infuriating. It feels like we're being tricked. And that feels like everything I hated about Voyager and Enterprise, where you could see the machinery, like someone wanted this element added so suddenly we have this thing, even though it doesn't make sense in any story. I hate that. </p><p>Tell a good story. Good grief. It's literally your only job. <br /></p><p>So Adira is nothing and her boyfriend is nothing and the show would be exactly the same without them. Fantastic. We already had Tig Notaro to do everything Adira was doing. Adira kind of replaced her. Terrible.</p><p>The shift to ensemble focus meant we lost the drive that was Michael Burnham's story and her need to solve problems. They gave her another beautiful boyfriend, yay, and I love Book like I loved Ash before he developed that speech problem and story problem, but Book again has NO PURPOSE in the storytelling. He has a cool ship and some local connections, fine, but Michael could have developed those in the year she was there alone. That would have been BETTER. Yes, I want her to be happy and have a beautiful boyfriend, but he could have been, oh, I don't know, one of those stupid bridge crew with no personality. </p><p>They don't know how to make anything mean anything.</p><p>Imagine if Michael had been trying to be all Starfleet by herself and save everyone and that's what brought the Orions down on her and caused everything else down the line. That is good storytelling. That's what they did in the first season and to a lesser extent in the second season. A character does a thing out of inner need/conflict and that brings about effects that they then have to cope with. Character, choice, consequences. THAT IS STORYTELLING.</p><p>Instead we have this atrocious mishmash of random elements. I hate it.</p><p>By halfway through the third season, it was clear something was terrible wrong at the helm. We had three or four episodes that included very long extended sequences of alternate reality or dream world situations, which classically stop the action in its tracks because it could be anything and doesn't mean anything. What happens in a dream never matters. There are no stakes and no consequences. The final few episodes also focused on this kid who grew up alone in a holosuite kind of environment.</p><p>It almost makes me sick even to say it, but the plot revolved around getting him to face his biggest fear. This is a character who's not even on the main cast! And they made him talk like a damaged child, as though he grew up alone, when he grew up with a full set of advisors and teachers and a holo-grandfather. He would have spoken like them! The fate of the whole galaxy rests on this adult child opening a door. We don't know him or care about him and he's deeply unappealing so we never start. <br /></p><p>Nothing is ever thought through by the last five or so episodes. </p><p>The utterly boring and pointless mirror universe/dream/holosuite portions aside, with the leader of the Orions we also had ANOTHER atrocious case of a British actress who could not keep her American accent on, who even slipped between them seven times in one sentence. How is this happening in a tv show? How did they not make her dub her dialogue? Was nobody listening? People dub dialogue all the time. It was so bad.</p><p>She was also a boring cruel tyrant who saved one guy in a wheelchair, so we were supposed to be conflicted about her, but that doesn't work. She was obviously a cartoon villain. Ugh. She had no motivation and no reason to be doing what she was doing. And the shenanigans they used to get her into the heart of Starfleet headquarters were just ridiculous. Every single thing about her stretched suspension of disbelief far beyond the breaking point. Her PANTS didn't even fit. Nobody was driving the ship at this point.</p><p>The last episode was so far beyond any sense that I can hardly wrap my head around it. It was all after the fact logic. Like: we want Michael to save the day, so back up and make this happen. </p><p>As an example, they had the villain open the vents so Discovery's air was getting sucked out...but slowly. WHY? Because they wanted the bridge crew to have to struggle to accomplish [whatever it was] by making their way to the nacelles through an empty ship. It was transparently a convenient obstacle placed there to give them something to do. And they did it, boy howdy, lots of acting class falling and gasping for air and the heroic pearl diver making her way there, only to fail at the last second. Oh she also shouted "I LOVE YOU ALL" to everyone, like Michael usually does, only it was so awkward and not set up in any way and so cringeworthy I may have had an out of body experience. Then she got rescued by the idiotic robot who saved the day. It sacrificed itself! But they fixed it so it was fine! NOTHING MATTERS.<br /></p><p>It all feels so slapped together and profoundly tone deaf and stupid and it's just such fundamentally poor storytelling on every level. It's hard to believe it's the same show. But I suppose it isn't. Apparently they had a major meltdown at the highest levels and lost Bryan Fuller, who must have been bringing an awful lot to the table, because this was abysmal dreck.</p><p>Look, at the end they theorize that Book can use his magical empathy powers to communicate with the spore drive, because Stametts is where again? I DON'T KNOW. Because nothing made sense. It was like an improvised skit at this point. And so Michael sends him down there and ejects the warp core FOR NO REASON before they even know if Book can do this thing nobody in the universe but Stametts can do. And then it explodes, which the warp core doesn't do just on its own. Who cares about following the rules of an established universe, though, am I right? Why shouldn't a human get a Trill host, when that's completely impossible? Why not let magic empathy man control the spore drive?</p><p>Oh, and the one character who was sort of developed, Tilly, who is an engineering ENSIGN, gets made acting captain. There is no way this makes any sense at all. She's not qualified or capable. And of course she's a disaster at it and everything goes to hell. Why do something so terrible to this character who didn't deserve it? Make fun of the fat lady is what I see. They treat her like a joke. Someone can be funny without being a joke and that's how it should be, not this cruelty and mockery. The point of this is to try her out, make her fail, and make everyone glad when Michael is made captain. UGH.<br /></p><p>There's another whole stupid thing about how the holosuite changed everyone's species randomly, which was transparently so we could get the luminous Doug Jones out of his horrible prosthetic makeup for once and see how lovely and wonderful he is, which I am all for, but again this is a ridiculous thing to do and it makes no story sense and kicks us out of the episode entirely. </p><p>I was awake half the night, I was so angry about what this show devolved into by the end of season three.</p><p>Will I watch Season Four? I don't know if there's any coming back from this. Maybe it was a terrible period of transition and everyone dropped the ball and production had to march on with whatever they had. I imagine the people making the show were given impossible jobs to do, when there's no continuity or natural story drive. I did complain about this even with Season One. When someone wants something, or people have a goal, that should drive things, not this backwards reverse engineering of a story and shoehorning characters and scenes in to achieve some non-story goal. Nothing feels organic or sensible when you do that. </p><p>Of course you CAN start with those elements that you want to have in there, but you have to build them in sensibly, not just slap them on afterward. <br /></p><p>My goal here is always to learn more about how to (and how not to) tell a story, so in that sense, good job, Discovery! I really am here to learn. And lower my blood pressure and get more sleep by getting all this off my chest, because wow, it sure kept me agitated and awake last night. </p><p>At this point, I am really not enjoying the show at all, though, so we'll see whether my compulsion to finish things overcomes my aversion to terrible slapdash storytelling. </p><p>What a disservice to a show that had so much promise and actors that can and do give us so much more. <br /></p><p><br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-82714431015582646412022-06-20T15:38:00.004-07:002022-06-20T15:38:30.540-07:00Star Trek: Discovery, Season One<p>I'm just starting to catch up to the modern iterations of Star Trek. After all of those, I'll catch up on Star Wars. The last Star Trek I saw, not counting the movies, was when I tried to watch Enterprise (hated it) and before that Voyager (hated it) and before that DS9 (loved it, lived it, breathed it, obsessed about it). So I am relieved but also I suppose a little disappointed that I neither hate nor love Discovery. I like it! I like it just fine. </p><p>And I have many things to say about it, because when I watch something, I think about it constantly, to the point where I can't sleep after watching. This is sort of a problem, actually. I mean I was up most of the night. I was confused about why it was so bright outside my windows, until I realized that was morning starting to happen. </p><p>Not sure what the solution to that is. "Don't think about it" has never worked with me.</p><p>SPOILERS ABOUND. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. <br /></p><p>Discovery! It's fascinating to me that it's very much a first person show, focused on Michael Burnham and her story. We get side stories but they are all connected to her. I don't think Star Trek has ever done that before, since even the original and the recent movies are all definitely ensemble storytelling. This has an ensemble but they're very much back seat to Michael.</p><p>She's a very interesting character to me, partly because of her constant code switching, and I don't just mean Sonequa Martin-Green's dialect code switching, which deserves whole entire academic papers written about it. She goes from a sort of standardized American voice to a much more Alabama accent and speech pattern when she's being informal or funny. It's absolutely wonderful. I wish Avery Brooks had been allowed to do that, or maybe had felt comfortable doing it. If you watch the DS9 episode "Far Beyond the Stars" he speaks much more naturally there, as opposed to his usual careful speech. </p><p>Martin-Green deserves every accolade for her astonishing acting all throughout. She can destroy you with a glance or an unspoken word. She has so much heart and empathy and energy in every performance. What a gift!</p><p>Her character is complicated on purpose, set up with inner conflicts one after the other. I'm not sure I'm always a fan of the "conflicted" character whose energy comes from an interior clash. I like to see storytelling come from character, but is inner conflict from past actions the only way to get that? Surely not. She's torn up over her mutiny, then over losing her captain, then over everyone hating her for her mutiny and losing the captain, then over what happened with Ash Tyler, then as I'm going into season two, over what she did to Spock back in the day, which we haven't found out about yet where I am. </p><p>Building character on regrets and pain is one way to go. I would also love to see her built on goals and conflicts over ways to achieve them. That's where we started, after all. She committed her mutiny because she knew, based on information no one else had access to, what the best course of action would be, and knew the horrific results that would follow not doing it. Her choice to mutiny was for the best possible reasons and was not made lightly. </p><p>That makes her an excellent but dangerous character, so I hope we see more of that. A person who will do terrible things for the best possible reasons is a very interesting person to me. And she suffered terrible consequences personally. </p><p>I liked her relationship with Tyler very much. I have to admit I figured out he was the same actor as Vok because both of them did the exact same things with their facial mannerisms. I have face blindness, so I focus on things like that probably much more than others. I don't know, maybe everyone picked it up. He had a way of flicking his eyes to the left and leaving his mouth hanging open that was obvious in both characters, even through the heavy prosthetic makeup and the contacts and so on. </p><p>I liked Ash Tyler very much as a character. He came with layers! He was known to have survived torture in a Klingon prison, so that carried a lot of weight. Then we learned he had been treated as a sexual object by the Klingon torturer, and that he had encouraged it because it kept him alive. That is a super complicated and dark thing to have in someone's past. Of course, we learn later that the two were in a fully consensual relationship before he was transformed into a human, so it's not as ugly as it seemed, but then again, it kind of was, because he wasn't Vok anymore.</p><p>I liked how he was supposed to be triggered with a Klingon prayer to return to himself as Vok, but that he didn't, or didn't quite, because of his relationship with Michael. That's cool! Tyler is a very interesting character so I hope he's coming back onto the ship to stay. Where I am now, they gave him and L'Rell a baby and he left the Klingons and sent the baby to be raised by monks. I was sure we'd have Tyler as dad with a Klingon baby on the ship for a minute there and I was not up for it at all, though presumably Discovery has daycare? Or is this before the time of families on ships as in Next Generation?</p><p>That's a gigantic flaw in the show, one I can't actually understand. They showed pictures of the Defiant and talked about how it traveled to the mirror universe, but that happened on DS9 literal centuries after this time, so how can they know about it? They're still using flip communicators and old-fashioned phasers. That future hasn't happened yet! Was that a colossal mistake on the part of the writers or did they just shrug and say, we do what we want? I am not sure. Why refer to it at all if you have to go so far outside the realm of the possible? Are they counting on viewers not having detailed knowledge of DS9 from the 90s? That's probably reasonable, come to think of it. But we are SUCH NERDS. How can you assume at least a bunch of us weren't going, "UM!!!"</p><p>They are very much playing on our previous knowledge, to the point where Pike and Amanda and Sarek are specifically cast to resemble the actors we're familiar with from earlier appearances. Amanda is based on the actress from the recent movies, while Sarek is based on the actor from Next Generation. Regardless, that familiarity is definitely something they're counting on, so why make such a fundamental time mistake? I'm truly baffled by it.</p><p>I was also baffled by the logic (sorry) behind some of the storylines, which don't make any sense at all in retrospect, but I suppose can slide by as you're watching, since you don't have all the information yet. Take Mirror Lorca, who presumably came through from the mirror universe, found his way to a Federation starship, learned all of the command codes and behaviors and information he'd need to impersonate Real Lorca, took command of the Discovery for how long? Ages? Was enough like him to get into bed with a former lover, but not enough like him for her to think he hadn't fundamentally changed. All for the purpose of what, going back through to the mirror universe and getting aboard the Emperor's ship, which he did as a PRISONER, something he surely could have accomplished very easily any day of the week without all those shenanigans. He was a prisoner along with all of his team. He didn't need Michael or anyone else to make any of that happen. It's nonsensical in retrospect.</p><p>Maybe someone more versed in the show can explain why any of that was needed, but I don't think it holds up. I don't see any reason at all for Mirror Lorca to be part of the story except that it yanks the rug out from under Michael Burnham again.</p><p>Season one seems to be all about this, taking away her family over and over. She loses her mother figure, then she loses her shipmates and that family, then she loses her father figure as Sarek leaves and she thinks she'll never see him again, then she loses her father figure as Lorca defects and then fights against her and the Emperor in one of those really small shootouts that's supposed to stand for a whole massive army battling another, then he gets killed in front of her.</p><p>In other words, these things were set up as ways to torture Michael Burnham and don't always stand up to narrative logic at all. I hope that this changes in future seasons. This was one of the things that put me off Voyager and Enterprise so very much, this after the fact logic in storytelling. You don't tell stories this way. You don't go, I want X character to suffer Y way, so we'll do ABC. It has to be organic to the present. Even laying in past trauma as a reason or justification or cause of present action feels weak to me. A lot of television writing leans on that heavily, to its detriment. </p><p>That's why the pilot episode felt so strong to me. Burnham made her choice because of knowledge she gained right then and there, from asking Sarek. She had knowledge no one else could get, because of her past, but the knowledge was learned in the moment. Asking was a thing she did. She tried to do things the right way at first. But then she made a choice because of her knowledge and understanding of the situation that was beyond what others had.</p><p>And yes, that was based in her childhood trauma, but that's not why she did it. I would have felt extremely cheated if she had just KNOWN that thing about the Klingons and that's why she mutinied all of a sudden. It's essential in my mind that she went and asked a question and acquired information about strategy and that's what informed her actions. That's an ACTIVE character.</p><p>Hiding that Tyler was Vok (and a Klingon...sort of) also felt a bit like a way to spring this on Burnham for maximum pain. Once we know that she had a history of family trauma from her parents being killed by Klingons within her hearing, we can figure that finding out her boyfriend was actually Klingon (sort of...) would be especially distressing. She does a great thing where she turns aside in disgust when he speaks Klingon. But before that, she is horrified not because of what he is, but what he DOES. He turns on her and tries to kill her. She is only saved because he is interrupted. </p><p>That's a fascinating distinction. What you are and what you do are two different things. We can't help what we are. Another fascinating question: what ARE we? Star Trek plays heavily on these various species and cultures being so visibly different and culturally divergent. It's shorthand for differences among humans, of course. But it also gets into weird essentialism territory, as it always does. What you ARE is not what you DO. Star Trek always focuses on this interesting disconnect. <br /></p><p>Burnham was human but raised on Vulcan, but her adoptive mother was human. She has very different modes, where she's stiff and emotionless, versus when she's soft and empathetic. Again, code switching, both physically and behaviorally. Anyone who has to cross cultures in their daily life does this. You speak a different way with friends than at work, or with one group versus another group. I'm sure I do it. It's a very natural thing.</p><p>To turn it around, what you have done is also not who you are. I think we've already seen Tyler get turned around from the violent attacker he was, with that explained away by the incomplete personality change, supposedly reversed by L'Rell surgically. (A lot of hand waving there. Is he Klingon or not? Surely there's a way to tell. They were so insistent. No way to tell! Obviously you can tell which person's body this is, though maybe not which person's mind.) We've seen Burnham rehabilitated after her mutiny that made everyone hate her. Even the woman with the facial scarring and cheekbone appliance stopped giving her the hate face. </p><p>That points you to a major flaw right there. I don't know that character's name and she's been in it since the beginning. Here are the names I know: Burnham, Saru, Stametts, Tilley, Lorca, Cornwall maybe? The admiral? Georgiou, which may be misspelled. Tyler, Pike, L'Rell. I would probably recognize the various main bridge crew members, and definitely the cute doctor who died, and the other black doctor woman, and Tig Notaro. The Klingons are hopelessly unrecognizable, even before they went to some blurry CGI face for L'Rell and made her impossible to look at, not to mention nothing like her previous face. </p><p>Saru is a tricky situation. He's another Doug Jones long tall gangly heavily masked character. It gives me a panic attack to think of that guy's days. He has bizarro hoof shoes on and big rubbery glove hands and his entire face is covered in a heavy prosthetic, plus thick contacts. I can't imagine he can see or hear anything. My back hurts just looking at him. I don't see the character, I just see Doug Jones in major discomfort for no reason. His alienness isn't even a plot point 98% of the time, so WHY. I don't think this show knows how to think creatively about alienness or otherness or any of that. </p><p>Saru is a joke or comic relief most of the time, as is Tilley, though it's nice to see a woman who's not bone thin, and she's a great actress. I just don't like that those two are treated as slightly ridiculous. Look at the people who are different from all of us, how funny they are. Oh and it's an outside the norm man and a fatter lady, what a coincidence. I kind of hate that. But I love Tilley and I'm sort of coming to tolerate Saru. I mean, I stopped calling him the fish. That's progress. </p><p>Tilley is a cool character because she's wicked smart, insecure, ambitious, nervous, and having a rough time fitting in. She's a nerd! My people! She didn't really have anything going on in the whole first season, though, like the whole rest of the bridge crew. Captain Pike had to ask them to say all their names, and I still don't know any of them. Someone is named Rhys? I think? </p><p>It's not an ensemble show and that doesn't seem like it's going to change. Maybe someone wrote interesting backstories for the ops and comm and whatever people, but we certainly don't know it. If they weren't all visually different, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Like if they were all one race and shape they'd be interchangeable. They're essentially background actors. I'm not even sure if they're in the credits, actually. I think this is an enormous waste of an incredible storytelling engine. I mean, give two of them history, not to do the thing I complained about earlier. Give two of them chemistry! Give two of them a secret they know about a third but the third doesn't know. Anything to make them pop out of two dimensions.</p><p>I wish Michael Burnham *wanted* something so very badly and wasn't able to get it immediately because of whatever character thing of her own. That to me is a character with a drive. It's a serialized show anyway, so why not? Characters who *want* are so much more interesting to me than those who are always fighting back against their past. </p><p>I'm not super comfortable with only building story out of characters' past and trauma and pain. "I want a thing but can't get it" is in the present. The storytelling with Stametts and his bizarre mycelium network thing was cool because he was making present choices about what he wanted in the future, even though we could see he wasn't making the best choices. </p><p>A funny thing going into season two is that I've listened to a million podcasts where Tig Notaro was a guest, so I've heard her stories about her appearances multiple times. That made the episode I just watched very strange because I knew for instance that she had trouble remembering the nonsense science lines and so someone stood there off camera feeding her each line. I couldn't stop thinking about how upsetting that must have been, not to be able to do the thing you're trying so hard to do. I can't memorize myself so maybe I related a little too well to that, not that I'm any kind of actor. Also I had to laugh because of the cocoon joke. Listen to her episodes of the podcast Do You Need a Ride? and you'll hear the stories. I listen to that podcast constantly as my go-to, as for example when I'm hoping to come down from watching the show and know I'll be unable to sleep. It doesn't work! Oh well.</p><p>A good question to ask about any narrative is: what do you want, as a viewer/reader? </p><p>Right now I want Michael Burnham to succeed and be happy. I want Tilley to be okay and grow and develop. I want Stametts to get that cute doctor back from death, but I don't think that's going to happen. Is it? I want Tyler to come back from the Klingons and join the crew again as a regular. Don't join section whatever! They're unethical! I want the Klingons to shut up and go away, as they are incredibly boring, standing around smoky halls and fires and shouting exposition at each other. Oh my lord in heaven, the Klingons are just unbearably terrible in this show. If I could figure out how to fast forward on AppleTV, I would do it, because they're excruciating. I don't care about L'Rell and want her to go away, too. I want the rest of the bridge crew at least to get personalities and stories and lives, so we learn their names, maybe even what job they do, sheesh. A whole season already! And I could do with Saru being less of an arch jokey uptight character and more of a full personality, if we have to keep him, which I guess we do. </p><p>Look at Saru as an example of what's not great. He has no arc at all. He doesn't want anything. He's an obstacle or an annoyance. He's only persnickety and fussy. And this is one of the top main characters, someone with absolutely nothing going on, a walking joke. </p><p>But many other things are terrific and Michael Burnham herself is amazing, though I still want to know why her name is Michael. Nobody ever explained it. Anyway the actress herself is just brilliant and makes the whole thing work. At least, I'll keep watching for her, and because I have to know how things work out for her character. Get that tall cute sort of Klingon confused boyfriend back! You guys had excellent chemistry! Mainly because of all the undercurrents pushing against each other, something I wish the show would have EVERYWHERE, because that's amazing storytelling in the here and now.</p><p>Someone recently released from a terrible ordeal and dealing with active PTSD is a great example of here and now storytelling because it's actually happening to them here and now. It's not some nebulous event from the distant past that's still causing pain, it's a constantly daily experience. That right there is the difference between making a character dwell on past trauma versus writing someone who is in a situation here in the present time. That is how you do this thing. </p><p>But Michael Burnham is a great example of a character who is very likable because she's generous and kind to her goofy cadet roommate (after an initial bump) and befriends Saru even though he's super annoying and is loyal and determined to do a great job for her captains and tries her hardest to do the right thing, even at great personal cost. That's a terrific character. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-46469821312934324852022-06-08T09:32:00.000-07:002022-06-08T09:32:09.165-07:00Noel Streatfeild: Thursday's Child<p>This was one of my very favorite books growing up. I'm rereading comfort food books because I don't sleep when I read upsetting books, whee! And for your own writing it's essential to read things you love and think about what makes them so important to you. <br /></p><p>The heroine, Margaret Thursday, is an orphan who lives with the maid who raised her, but this year the money to support her did not show up, so her beloved Hannah and the vicar can't afford to keep her and have to send her away. </p><p>That's a terrific story beginning right there. Margaret is very proud of the fact that she was left on the church steps as a baby with three of everything of the very best quality, so that even though she has the most precarious existence and no family, she has an inner pride and strength that gets her through everything.</p><p>It's fascinating to me that this is the very opposite of the Harry Potter books. Harry is abused and neglected in a cruel wealthy household. Margaret is loved and cared for in a kind poor household. And when Harry gets sent away at the same age as Margaret, he discovers not just wealth but a proud heritage. Margaret never finds out who her family is and gets sent to a horribly abusive orphanage where she and the others are starved and terrorized.</p><p>Even en route to the orphanage, though, Margaret makes friends with three other orphans traveling there too, Lavinia, Peter, and Horatio Beresford. Lavinia is going into service as a maid and asks Margaret to take care of the boys, as Horatio is little and Peter quite dreamy.</p><p></p><p>I definitely prefer this out of the frying pan, into the fire type of narrative. It's a constant race between Margaret and the forces that are making her life difficult. She's on the run the whole time. <br /></p><p>The evil Matron immediately picks out Margaret as someone whose spirit isn't broken yet and decides to make an example of her, so she's locked in cupboards and sent to bed without supper and so on. Even their first evening there, the Matron opens the basket of clothes Hannah lovingly sewed and packed for Margaret and mocks them, causing Margaret to talk back and tell her that same story: that she was left with three of everything of the very best quality and money was left for her each year.</p><p>It's very funny to track this story throughout the novel as its retold, since Margaret changes the details and improves it each time. But that's part of what makes her such an excellent character. She insists that she has value, even while everyone is trying to stomp her into the mud. <br /></p><p>The orphanage is outrageously awful, but she's managing, making friends
and telling stories to everyone while on potato peeling punishment, until Peter "borrows" some expensive books and Margaret decides the police will be after him. She makes plans for a great escape, even dictating the note for Peter to leave for their teacher. </p><p>But she refuses to leave without the clothes Hannah made her--and she needs her original street clothes, since the orphans wear absurd uniforms. There is a harrowing sequence where Margaret has to sneak out of her bed at night and make her way to the top of the building, to the room where Matron has stored all the orphans' clothing so she can sell it. (There is really no end to how believably awful Matron is. She even eats a huge steak after overseeing the orphans' skimpy meal.) This sequence shows great bravery, but it's also terrifying, as we know, even if Margaret doesn't, that climbing out a window onto a ladder at night in a giant nightgown is incredibly dangerous. The narrator even points out how easily she could have been killed, presumably so no young readers take this escape as life advice. </p><p>I adore the entire escape, as it's full of perfectly minimal connections and specifics. For example, Margaret and the boys have met the stable boy Jem when he drove them to visit Lavinia, and Jem jokingly told Margaret how to find his room in the stable if they ever needed to run away from the orphanage. She does exactly that, though. Jem takes them to his parents, who run a canal boat, and the next stage of the adventure is on.</p><p>Each stage requires quick thinking, physical challenges, determination, and that reliance on her inner sense of self-worth. I love how every character takes on all sorts of different jobs, even the hardest, dirtiest jobs, with no sense of fastidiousness, even though they weren't raised to do them. You wouldn't find Harry Potter scrubbing floors or leading a canal boat horse through a week of rain. </p><p>Something that has always bothered me about Harry Potter is his utter laziness and lack of application, which somehow doesn't keep him from getting everything he wants. Terrible student, but passes all his classes. He's treated like a star without having done anything. That part isn't his fault, but it gives him this absurd and unconsidered privilege that is extremely distasteful to me. </p><p>That's in part what this book is about. I would much rather see Margaret Thursday opening canal locks and Lavinia doing the hard work of a scullery maid and even six year old Horatio leading the canal horse, walking miles each day. At one point Lavinia's boss, Lady Corkberry (what a great name!) tries to get Lavinia to stay with them as a guest, since they've discovered that Lavinia and the boys are the grandchildren of an earl, but Lavinia refuses and laughs and says she couldn't do that since everyone knows her as the scullery maid.</p><p>There's a running theme about this and even overt references to the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote multiple books in which children work hard and then discover they're from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. It's so much a narrative expectation that it's a surprise when Margaret turns down the Beresford siblings' grandfather's invitation to come live with all of them in his castle in Ireland. She's found something she's great at, acting, and intends to make her own name for herself. </p><p>That's some independence and strength of character I'm not sure I'd have. Certainly Harry Potter wouldn't. He never works for anything up until the last book in the series. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher, but the way that kid never does his school work and cheats and so on drives me crazy. </p><p>In a narrative as in real life, we want to feel like people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. It seems the Harry Potter stories posit that because Harry has had a rough time of it with the Dursleys, he deserves to have things come easy after that. But narratively speaking, that doesn't work. We don't like people or want good things for them because they've had a hard time. We like them and want good things for them because they are fighting for that goal themselves, even if it's impossible for them to achieve it. </p><p>This is getting dangerously close to the nightmarish prosperity gospel nonsense, but that's not what I mean. Look at Margaret, Peter, and Horatio at the end of this book, before Lavinia and the grandfather ex machina show up, planning to have their own little house together. They don't realize how impossible it is that three children will earn enough money to survive, let alone rent or buy a little house. It's an impractical fantasy, but they're too young to understand that. They literally can't do it. But they've worked so hard on the canal boat and in the theater that we're hoping for good things for them anyway. </p><p>I'm getting very good insight into some characters I'm writing. Children who have to fend for themselves in life are put into impossible situations, so the choices they make are never going to be great ones. Say they're not properly fed. Do they steal food? Do they go to neighbors and try to eat there? Do they eat windfall apples? Do they try to cadge food from friends at school lunches? There is no good solution here because children are supposed to be fed by their family. If they aren't, that's not the child's fault, but it ends up being the child's problem to solve, with none of the resources or experience necessary to solve it. So on top of neglect and suffering, there is the weight of breaking rules and crossing lines, social or legal. Then those children carry the extra weight of guilt and consequences from crossing those lines. Children always blame themselves for what happens to them. </p><p>Except Margaret Thursday! Such a great heroine. I even like that her flair for the dramatic is what makes her get the children to run away from the orphanage, since it's unlikely the police would be called over a couple of missing books that could easily be returned. </p><p>I'm also fascinated by the downfall of the villain, the Matron, because she gets shamed by the villagers and deposed by the committee and then just sort of disappears. It's a lot like Marla in <i>Dig. </i>We don't see a great comeuppance for either one, not like we often see in Joan Aiken's excellent books, which feature some truly dire consequences for terrible villains, especially those who torment and neglect children. <br /></p><p></p><p>I wrote five books in a row with terrible, abusive, neglectful parents. In the first one, the parent dies to set the child free. In the second, she gets deposed and ousted from the clinical and antiseptic family McMansion and both parent and child get set free. In the last three, a series, the parents and child get set free when the home is destroyed, but then the child works very hard and buys back the land, saving it from development, and there's an amazing rapprochement between them with ultimate understanding, at least from the child's side. <br /></p><p>I think we're getting somewhere. </p><p>There's a sequel to this novel, but I seem to remember it's terrible. Maybe I'll read it again and see. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-87592431847993765822022-06-07T16:19:00.004-07:002022-06-07T16:19:46.020-07:00A.S. King: Dig<p>After I read this yesterday, I also read <i>Still Life With Tornado</i>, one of the most upsetting books for someone with a history of a severely dysfunctional family. Without getting into it too much, <i>Still Life</i> echoed a whole lot of bad things about my past.</p><p><i>Dig </i>is quintessential A.S. King in that it features a cast of characters who are terribly stuck in their lives. Other than The Freak, who is the least stuck person on the planet, we meet five characters, all teens, who are in terrible situations. Jake is being abused by his older brother and made to join in actual felonies, not to mention white supremacy nonsense and recruitment. Loretta is living in a trailer with a violent and sexually abusive father and her abused mother. The Shoveler is starting his eighteenth new school (some atrocious number like that) and has decided that shoveling snow solves his problems, though carrying a shovel everywhere with him certainly complicates his social life. Malcolm's father is dying but he's being pushed off on his grandparents and not allowed to be there with him. Katie works fast food and sells drugs at the drivethrough window, and comes to realize how unfair she's being to her black best friend when her own mother is a vicious racist and a terrible person a lot of other ways. </p><p>That's a huge simplification. Each one of those characters is so full and complex and conflicted that I can't begin to sum up everything going on in their lives. This is something King does extremely well. Even her awful characters--and there are a bunch--are complicated and you can see how they ended up where they are. They've nearly always boxed themselves into a corner and can't see a way out. Stuck, again, just like the sympathetic main characters. </p><p>I'm so curious why one stuck person is sympathetic when another one isn't. But it seems to come down to whether they have empathy for others and care for others.</p><p>By far the least sympathetic of the major characters is Marla, the grandmother (we find out eventually) of all five kids. If you've counted, you know there are six, but Jake isn't part of the family. I'm not exactly sure why Jake is in this story, except that (I'm just going to spoil everything, so buckle up) he and his brother kidnapped, raped, and murdered the girl we know as The Freak. The Freak can jump from place to place around the world, something that seems like magical realism at first, but then we discover she's actually dead. The Freak, the Shoveler (aka David), Katie, Malcolm, and Loretta are all cousins, children of Marla and Gottfried's five estranged children. </p><p>One scene that showed just how different these kids are, and explains why we like them so much more than any of the adults, is that they were set to do an Easter egg hunt, but instead of competing to see who could find more or could find them faster, they worked together, to the outrage of their grandparents, who wanted them to work against each other. That says it all, really. </p><p>Marla is horrible to Gottfried and all of her children. Marla is a real piece of work, an absolute villain disguised as a homey grandma who just wants to make a good Easter dinner for her family. What makes someone with this kind of seemingly altruistic goal into a monster? She only cares about herself. She doesn't care about any of her kids, even though she hasn't seen or talked to several of them in years. She is constantly cruel and dismissive to Gottfried.</p><p>Neither Gottfried nor Marla learn the Shoveler's name. Granted, it can be embarrassing when you miss someone's name early on and don't want to ask it, but the Shoveler has been coming to their house for months and they never get past their own embarrassment to be courteous to him by using his name. They don't find it out until Easter, the same day he finds out they're his grandparents.</p><p>Classic A.S. King character moves that get you good and stuck: don't talk about things, don't say things, don't address the elephant in the room no matter what. Cut people off, don't mend bridges, don't reach out. </p><p>I really feel like these books are blueprints for how to have a wonderful or a terrible life.</p><p>Marla cut off one of her daughters when she got pregnant in high school, just kicked her out and never spoke to her again. That's the act of someone who cares more about her own pride and shame than her daughter's actual life, not to mention her grandchild's life. </p><p>She denies that her son who is dying of cancer is actually dying of cancer. </p><p>She refuses to help her daughter who is stuck in a trailer with an abusive husband, on the grounds her daughter made bad choices and should have to live with them.</p><p>All of the cruel, spiteful, judgmental, prideful, hateful choices that Marla makes should come back and bite her at the end of the story, but no, she just sort of fades away, because once the kids have found each other and have gone off to locate The Freak's body, Marla disappears from the narrative. The last thing she does is say something to Gottfried that he doesn't even hear, because he's stopped listening to her. </p><p>A lot of people let go of others in this story. The Shoveler made friends with a neighbor who lent him the original shovel, spent a lot of time with him, treated him like a de facto dad, but then discovers a white supremacist tattoo on the man's shoulder and essentially silently breaks up with him. Katie has to let her best friend, Ian, go, because she realizes she's been using him in a way to get back at her racist mom, and realizes just how awful it must be for Ian to be friends with someone whose mom thinks so little of him. Malcolm has to let go of his impractical plan of running away to Jamaica and being with a girl he met on the beach there, when he realizes how imperialist and exploitative he's being.</p><p>There's a constant theme running through the book of racism and how we have to deal with it in complicated real world ways. Really there's about one eighth too much plot and that's mostly the racism material, but also the flea circus. (Don't ask.) It's very interesting to see the ways it plays out for Katie and Jake, and the Shoveler breaking up with his pseudo-dad is actually an extremely cool plot line, but it's awkwardly juxtaposed with all of the dysfunctional family storylines. </p><p>It's about family not treating each other as family, so how does the racism theme work with that? Should we read it as: race is family? No, that doesn't work either. It doesn't all quite fit together. It's a bit like five eighths of one book and four eighths of another book pressed together. <br /></p><p>I loved that I had forgotten that The Freak was dead the whole time. You give me magical realism, I figure people are magical and can do magical things. We don't actually know right up until nearly the end that the kids are all connected by family and that terrible crime. We don't know that The Freak was their cousin, even though I can't imagine how anyone would not know that, if her name was in the news, right? Even these awful dysfunctional families like Katie's would tell her that that was her cousin, wouldn't they? Her father would have had the same last name as Marla and Gottfried, the same as Malcolm. And wouldn't the girls know their mothers' maiden names, assuming they changed them at all, which the Shoveler's mother would not, as she was never married? </p><p>I don't like a "buy" like that, when it unravels the whole plot, especially when it's so easy just to make her dad a mom and avoid the whole question of last names. <br /></p><p>This book completely wrecks me every time I read it. These kids are so vulnerable and so dependent, but blamed for everything that happens. </p><p>My niece a few weeks ago told me that her dad was furious that she had marked up a clipboard with a box cutter doing an art project. I said: "You're more important than any clipboard." Doesn't that sound obvious? It was never true in our family and it's not obvious in any of these families either. These kids are treated like absolutely everything is more important than they are. Money, work, school, status, everything. It's heartbreaking. </p><p>I feel like A.S. King's collected works should be required reading for all teens, but also for anyone who's stuck. Any time I reread them, I think again: Say the thing. Take the steps. Do the next thing. You don't have to stay stuck. You have the tools to dig out of your weird mind prison and escape. </p><p>It always reminds me of a therapist friend who said, in response to a conversation we were having about how people keep everything bottled up: You're going to have consequences either way. You're already suffering the consequences of not saying the thing. Why not try the consequences of saying the thing? Say the thing!<br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-36680062159383315102022-06-04T12:55:00.000-07:002022-06-04T12:55:10.392-07:00It's bigger than you know (More on Naomi Novik: Uprooted)<p>I recently reread<i> </i>Naomi Novik's <i>Uprooted</i> for maybe the tenth time. I was struck again by something brilliant she does that I've rarely seen elsewhere, though I think it happens in an Alan Dean Foster novel called <i>Glory Road</i>. I need to reread that one. And there's something related in <i>A Mote in God's Eye</i> by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which I also need to reread. It happens in one of my favorite movies (despite the disempowered heroine), <i>Jupiter Ascending</i>. <br /></p><p>I'll come back and write more about this when I've reread those. </p><p>What Novik does is start out with a character with an extremely limited view of the world she inhabits, then move that character into a larger and more complicated world, over and over and over, almost every single chapter. </p><p>Agnieszka starts out as a village girl who gets yanked unwillingly into the Dragon's tower to serve him as a cook and cleaner, though also she has the power of magic, though she doesn't know that. Just going to this new place enlarges her world in ways she could not have foreseen or understood ahead of time.</p><p>That keeps happening. I can't stress enough how little she grasps about the world she's in. She knows the Wood is scary and dangerous, yes, but she doesn't understand that there's a malevolent intelligence behind it. She knows the Dragon takes a girl from their valley every ten years, but doesn't understand that there's something special about their valley and the girls' connection to it fades after that time, so he pays them well and lets them go and replaces them with a new, untrained, and extremely annoying clueless girl. </p><p>Agnieszka takes steps for humanitarian reasons that end up drawing the attention of larger political forces within the kingdom. Again, she has not the slightest clue that such things exist. She is vulnerable to being manipulated by everyone she meets because she doesn't (and can't) know about the power struggles or the rivalries or any of it.</p><p>And every time she gets her feet on the ground and starts to feel a little secure about things, the world expands again and suddenly it's all strange and scary and unfamiliar again. </p><p>It's like Novik has bottled that baffling and alarming expanding world feeling of adolescence and applies it over and over. </p><p>One possibly less enjoyable effect is that Agnieszka is always a clueless rube no matter how much she learns. I found it implausible that she would not recognize that Lady whoever it was in the big city, who pretended to be her friend, was actually being really mean and making fun of her. That's not a country/city thing. That's a human nature thing. But most authors are impossibly bad at writing inexperience (or being from the sticks) and nearly always conflate it with stupidity this way. </p><p>The brilliant thing here is that since Agnieszka doesn't know the ins and outs of any of these new worlds she enters, she can do things that she doesn't know are impossible. She has all sorts of insights and abilities that the much more experienced people are unable to access. That's a wonderful side of this constantly expanding world phenomenon.</p><p>In my experience, people navigate new worlds by using the rules they already know. Agnieszka does this somewhat, but more often she just follows her instincts and figures things out, or does things because she simply doesn't know that she can't, which gives her an amazing ability to achieve the impossible. </p><p>I really liked the way she had no idea that there was an intelligence behind the Wood. She treated it like a natural phenomenon and was brought up short by learning there was a mind behind it, that this mind would do things like let someone be freed because then it could use them as a channel or puppet in areas it could not otherwise reach. That's terrifying. Imagine discovering that a natural force you're dealing with, the wind or the ocean, is actually operating with intelligence. </p><p>There's a whole underlying metaphor throughout the novel that troubles me because of this constant reiteration of innocence. That's "corruption." I wished constantly that the novel had used a different metaphor or image for this. And ultimately it's just something like bitterness or hatred that lies behind the corruption anyway. I get it, but corruption carries such deliberately venial associations. It's politicians cheating the system out of greed. In the novel, it's more like some kind of grotesque moldy rot or something. </p><p>I was never quite comfortable with "corruption" as the metaphor because it implies a state of purity and innocence that then is marred and defiled by what, experience? Evil? So is Agnieszka corrupted as she learns more and more about the world , as she does every chapter? Is she corrupted when she and the Dragon get into a sexual relationship? The weirdly judgmental or even Biblical view of corruption as the opposite of innocence means that the city people should be the most corrupted, but they're not. It carries echoes of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. No coming back from that. It's a deeply flawed metaphor. That's specifically why I don't like it. </p><p>However, I don't really have a better idea. Supposing hate causes this vile thick green evil to grow in you, what would we call that? But it has to come from the source, from contact with an infected source. It's definitely MUCH more like an infection than anything else. We're more in the realm of <i>The Thing</i> or some other more moralistic zombie type horror story, where you only get infected when you make mistakes, so you deserve it. But since there's a moral element to this "corruption" as well as a contagious element, it feels like it teeters on the edge of saying innocence is good and knowledge is evil, even though obviously it never quite goes there. Corruption is such a fraught word to choose. <br /></p><p>Anyway, I deeply admire the thing Novik does where the world expands and expands and expands again, becomes more complex and nuanced and vast with each passing chapter. It's absolutely brilliant. </p><p><br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-21964790057494585802022-05-27T10:55:00.003-07:002022-05-27T10:55:32.477-07:00Robin McKinley: Chalice<p>I don't read much fantasy. I find a lot of it poorly thought out and derivative to the point of absurdity. You know, smiths who make swords, but nobody is mining anything, that sort of thing. Huge armies with no way to support them. Impractical romanticizing and fetishizing of a particular pre-industrial moment in human history, but without all of the negatives that would imply. </p><p>Point being, this is one of the rare fantasy books I've read over and over. </p><p>Mirasol gets the role of Chalice because some rods (???) divined that she's the one. And she definitely is. Her bees suddenly make enormous quantities of honey, her goats are producing prodigious quantities of milk, and some mead in the cellar overflows and fills the whole space and smells up her house so much that she has to sleep outside.</p><p>This is why I love Robin McKinley for fantasy. She's practical and grounded and knows how things actually work. So maybe that's what I dislike about most fantasy. It's full of farming and beekeeping and soldiering and so on written by people with zero idea what they're talking about. That's so irritating no matter what the topic is. Luckily we can all learn! We can get on YouTube and get an education even if we're the laziest writers who ever wrote.</p><p>So Mirasol becomes Chalice, one of the essential circle of roles that run the demesne. That's another thing that tends to irritate me about fantasy, as long as we're looking into that. Oddly inappropriate medieval terminology. But in this case, it's fine. It's out of place because it's a French word and would be used post-1066 and not before, but there's no sense that this is a world in which 1066 happened. But unless you're a medieval linguist, this probably won't bother you. </p><p>(She also uses sennight for a week, which does bother me. What's wrong with week? It's a perfectly good old Germanic word. It's almost identical in German and Norwegian as in English. So if it's a prejudice against Latinate words sounding too French and post-1066, this makes no sense.)</p><p>ANYWAY.</p><p>Mirasol doesn't know how to do the job, never got trained, but figures her way through it by instinct and trial and error. She's doing great, but feels highly insecure about it. And then she makes a big mistake because she was never trained and accidentally shows support for this awful Heir brought in to supplant the actual Master.</p><p>There isn't really magic in this book so much as things working the way they do in a somewhat mystical or supernatural way that is perfectly normal and part of life. I like that very much. I get extremely annoyed at most uses of magic in fantasy, like it's a get out of jail free card. If it can do absolutely anything any time, it utterly ruins the narrative. Where's the tension? Where's the agency of the characters? Most of the time it's a disaster for narrative tension. Then you end up with artificial limitations put on it because suddenly the writer realizes there's no tension. So it can do anything except when it's convenient for it not to do anything. Annoying, again.</p><p>Mirasol's Master is the sort of lord of the country/county/state. It's not a huge area but it's not small either. He's not so much a political leader as an integral part of the land, which I like very much. And because he was sent away to become an adept of Fire, when he's suddenly brought back, he's not quite human. The first thing he does is burn Marisol's hand to the bone. But then later when he realizes, he takes some fire and squeezes it down to a drop of honey and puts it on the burn that has stubbornly refused to heal, curing it immediately. </p><p>This I like. I like that he's absolutely devoted to fire and became part of the fire to the point where he can hardly walk and can't touch anyone without burning them. Marisol is all about bees and honey all the time, to the point where they follow her around and cover her with a warm bee blanket when she's cold. It's not control. It's becoming part of the thing. This is something I adore about this book.</p><p>There are the usual rituals that make no sense in any way, as always with anything having to do with magic. I don't ever get those. You have to say these words and drink this thing and then something happens. I don't ever like it because it's nonsensical and it's just reenacting our regular Earth experience of religion, where it also seems nonsensical to me. I understand the psychological power of ritual, but I don't see that it actually does a thing in the world. </p><p>And so when Mirasol has to spend a whole week racing around the entire demesne sprinkling specific drops of this or that mixed with this special water to wake up or align the earthlines (???) I just roll my eyes and skip ahead. I understand the narrative point of it. She has to Do a Thing to make everything all right. But dripping special honey water on a rock does what how? Burning a certain candle does a thing how? None of it works for me. And it goes against the earlier sense of how these things work. <br /></p><p>It works in the story, though. She manages to line up all the earthlines or whatever with the Master's help and unify the demesne and help him fight off the stupid hateful Heir, who gets blasted into a burned up cinder because somehow Marisol's power and millions of bees take all the fire out of the Master and put it into the Heir.</p><p>See. If I feel stupid saying it, there's an issue. It's a weaker ending than the book deserves. Because ultimately Marisol is a fantastic character who is in over her head and trying her hardest to do the right thing, something I always adore in any fiction. And the Master is likewise pulled away from what he was devoted to and is trying to do the right thing despite his obvious red-eyed situation and the burning touch and all. </p><p>You have to work super hard to write magic in a way that won't set off my alarms. I wrote earlier that magic should be like another skill we have in the world. Snowboarding, or playing piano, or using computer languages, or whatever. I think we do best with a good analogy. Here we do great with the analogies she uses, up until suddenly we're in do the thing and say the special words world, ugh. </p><p>What else do we have to show this narratively besides doing the thing and saying the special words, though? This is the pickle that <i>Chalice </i>always leaves me with. What else is there? Most amazing things in the world are done either by practicing over and over, boring to watch, or sitting quietly and working with a pen and paper or computer, also boring to watch. So I'm not sure what I would like to see. Yo-Yo Ma's magic comes from many years of practice and innate talent. He performs as a RESULT of that. He doesn't do the magical thing right then. <br /></p><p>I'm about to read Naomi Novik's <i>Uprooted</i>, so we'll see how that measures up to <i>Chalice</i>. </p><p>And if anyone knows what happened to Robin McKinley, please let me know! She disappeared off the internet in about 2018. I hope she's okay! I want to read <i>The Blue Sword</i> soon also. When she's good, she's incredibly good. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-69430450177727246372022-05-22T13:07:00.002-07:002022-05-22T13:09:24.640-07:00Susan Cooper: Silver on the Tree<p>I remember loving these books as a child but I had forgotten how much I
skipped over. Re-reading childhood favorites is dangerous, but in the
case of the <i>Dark Is Rising</i> books, you really should not do it.<br /><br />What
I loved was the Drew children, because <i>Stone Over Sea</i> is a wonderful
book and I kept reading to get more of them. But everything having to do
with Will Stanton was so outrageously irritating, I nearly didn't
finish the fifth book, <i>Silver on the Tree</i>. Good lord. He magically gets
all these outrageous powers with no effort, then is a rarefied Old One
and crucial to the survival of the world.<br /><br />First, I hate it
when people get superpowers without any cost. Second, Will is boring. He doesn't have to fight for anything. Third, his powers are
awfully convenient, or inconvenient, and that's just annoying. Every E.
Nesbit book is infinitely more careful about powers and rules and costs
than these books.<br /><br /><i>Silver On the Tree</i> was the worst offender,
followed closely by <i>The Dark Is Rising</i>, for being full of convoluted and
nonsensical challenges and mysterious labyrinths of guesswork. About
fifty pages of <i>Silver on the Tree</i>, the part in the Lost Lands, could
have been cut out with no discernible loss. <br /><br />I went back to read
these because of my own writing in YA, and I did learn a lot, but I
never expected so much of it to be what not to do! I learned a
tremendous amount about writing terror in children. <i>Stone Over Sea</i> is
completely terrifying, Barney and Jane and Simon constantly in
situations far beyond their understanding or capabilities. But that is
nearly always human danger, danger from recognizable human sources, even
when those are driven by the Dark. <br /><br />When the danger is oversized
and silly, it's impossible to grasp, like the absurd Tethys and the
bellowing Greenwitch, who just become bizarre and almost laughable in
<i>Greenwitch</i>, after a promising beginning with an extremely
frightening figure made of branches and leaves. Whereas by far the most
terrifying thing to me in the whole series was the farmer who shot
Bran's beautiful dog. I'm still in shock from that. <br /><br />So when I
write YA with supernatural elements, I want to be sure to keep my evil
and my danger located firmly in the human. The supernatural is always a
metaphor, somehow, isn't it? The supernatural Dark should stand for the
darkness within us, not the other way around.
</p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-14301467582595585762022-05-22T13:02:00.004-07:002022-05-22T13:09:40.957-07:00Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch<p>This is a shorter analysis because I truly despised this awful book. Don't read this if you liked the novel. You have been warned. </p><p>*****<br /></p><p>If you think
smoking, drinking, drugs, vomit, crime, and cruelty are cool, this is
the book for you. The writing is gorgeous, if exhausting and overblown, but it's in the
service of the most atrocious characters. The plot is strong but
inflated to easily triple the size it needed to be, maybe
quadruple. The narrative dribbles along in slow motion and is full of
pointlessly baroque scenes and entire massive chapters that go nowhere. Pace your work, writers of the world. <br /><br />The main character is by far the worst thing about the
book, after all the vomit. Have I mentioned the endless vomit scenes? He
has no spine and makes no decisions and in no way drives the story. All
he does is lie around being squalid, very nearly ruins the life of the
kind man who took him in when he was homeless, and follows others around
doing whatever they want him to do. For the denouement, he gets shut into a hotel for weeks
a country away. I'd do the same. But
even then, he does nothing. He never looks at his phone, then mysteriously destroys it by plugging it in. (This is only one of many dozens of examples of impossible things shoehorned into the story purely for narrative convenience.) He never calls
home to explain where he is or what's going on. He even fails to flee
because his crime boss best buddy has his passport and he can't figure out
how to replace it. He writes suicide notes then can't do that either. <br /><br />This terrible useless character makes two active
choices the whole novel long: one, he saves a dog, very good--there's a whole book called
<i>Save the Cat</i> that explains why this is a good thing for a writer to do
for an otherwise irredeemable character. Two, he shoots a guy.
Everything else, he sort of falls into it accidentally or acts like he's being pushed
into it, including the actual stealing of the painting that drives the
entire novel. He has a pointless adolescent crush on a manic
pixie dream girl but he never speaks of it or or acts on it in any way except by giving little gifts.
He steals from his friend and business partner and very nearly ruins the
man's entire life. He's the most useless character I've ever seen in fiction. I even wondered
whether Tartt was somehow playing off Dostoyevsky's <i>The Idiot</i>, because
nobody ever shuts up about it, but no! The novel has no connection to
it. <br /><br />This is an overblown, self-indulgent, beautifully written,
well plotted, vastly over-inflated paean to a worthless lump of a
character and descriptions of vomit in infinite loving ways. The buffalo
chicken vomited onto a white carpet springs to mind. Or the time when
the main character feels like he vomited a quart of lemon juice. Nobody
ever needs to hear this much about that and I can't think what would
induce someone to write it. Lusting after squalor is not worthy of time or energy. <br /><br />That said, the plot about the painting drove the story and made me stick with the novel to the point where I read the entire thing in one day because I had to find out what happened. I did not see a good way out for this terrible character, though of course anyone else could think up great ways to get the painting returned. Mail it to the museum, just as the first example that leaps to mind. It's just more evidence that he can't think his way out of any situation at all. It's an artificial obstacle and that is extremely annoying. How can a story that leans so hard on plot as one of its own redeeming features have so many enormous plot holes? <br /></p><p>I read for character, generally. I despised this character. I found him lazy, weak, and worthless. I did not see anything sympathetic about him at all. What makes a character good to read about is CHOICE. Choices, consequences, choices, consequences. Who you are is what you choose to do. He neither chooses his situations nor gets himself out of them, right up until the very last few pages, when he goes around making amends for the harm he has done.</p><p>Lots of people adore this novel. I think they must be reading for the writing and not the character or the story. Or they're in love with bleakness and alcoholism and drug use and vomit as some kind of gritty realism, maybe? It bothers me because of the utter cheapness and weakness, the way these things so often seem to get checked off as though a list is issued at the beginning of a literary novel. Here's your list: put in drugs, alcoholism, death, neglect, body horror, pain, isolation, cruelty, weakness, infidelity, crime, guns, on and on. </p><p>I have things to say about these choices in literary fiction and the damning things they say about our literary culture, but that's probably for another day. Or never, realistically. I simply can't figure out why anyone would recommend this book to me when it is everything I hate in the world and in fiction. And I can't imagine anyone who has actually suffered through these kinds of behaviors in real life wanting to read about them either. I would never spend a moment I didn't have to with someone so self-pitying and self-indulgent and self-destructive, especially if the person doesn't really exist and therefore is entirely optional in our lives. I'm feeling nauseous even writing about this book for this long. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-22452548300495399152022-05-22T12:35:00.005-07:002022-05-22T13:09:56.877-07:00Meg Cabot: The Boy Next Door<p>I have a whole row of candy-colored Meg Cabot books on my shelf, but the three "Boy" books are my favorites. <i>The Boy Next Door</i>, <i>Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy's Got One. </i>They're epistolary in the sense that they're built out of journal entries, email, messaging, voicemail, letters, notes, even documents from office work. </p><p><i>The Boy Next Door </i>tells its story through conversations between Mel Fuller, a newspaper columnist, and her friends and co-workers, as she works through finding her neighbor unconscious, the victim of an assault, and tries to take care of the neighbor's Great Dane and two cats with the help of a man she thinks is the neighbor's relative. He isn't--and they fall in love--which is the twist that drives much of the drama of the book. </p><p>I'm interested in the epistolary format for something I'm writing myself, so I wanted to dig into these three books and see what works and what doesn't. </p><p>Epistolary is brilliant for lies and for contrasting points of view. Lies are evident when one person tells a second person something but a third person something else. I don't know why this is so much more fun in an epistolary format, but probably it's because of the very limited access to multiple points of view in traditional narrative. In epistolary, we can just see that John is lying to Mel because we've seen his email to Max where Max asks him to lie. In traditional narrative, everything is limited to the point of view character in first person or the variously biased limited omniscient narrators. </p><p>This makes me think of Agatha Christie more than anything, because she is so good at giving you the information but not telegraphing what you're supposed to think about it. The Tommy and Tuppence books are leaping to mind, possibly because there's a common element of youthful zaniness. We meet multiple characters in the first Tommy and Tuppence book whom they and therefore we misread, or trust in error, or don't quite grasp for various reasons. </p><p>Trust seems to be an important element here. Trusting the wrong person. The main character not trusting his or her instincts. This is a fascinating thing for me in any narrative, truly. Why do we trust someone? Why don't we? </p><p>Our main character, Mel, is right to trust the person she does and right to mistrust the person she does. That seems crucial in this type of story, where our heroine can be tricked but can't be an idiot. We don't lose affection for Tommy and Tuppence because they're far outclassed by these various international spies and so on. But it would be completely wrong if Mel liked the villain and didn't like the hero. We have to know we can accept her point of view as truthful because we're right there in her email with her. That surprises me, in retrospect. I wonder whether epistolary can succeed when the main character is full of lies? </p><p>The other comparable novel I adore is Rainbow Rowell's <i>Attachments</i>, but half of it isn't epistolary. And it involves one person reading messages between two others, but not communicating with them. It's not really epistolary, strictly speaking. </p><p>The conceit of the epistolary format combined with these particular twists seems to be: it's a lot easier to for someone to lie to someone else (and not have us judge the one getting lied to) when the whole thing is via written communication. </p><p>In other words, it's easier for us to accept dramatic irony via written communication. We all think we can spot a liar when they lie to our faces, even though that's evidently not true, so we judge those who get lied to and tricked more when they are told lies to their faces, too. </p><p>We know that John is not Max. Mel does not, partly because he's being such a good guy and taking good care of the animals, and even her when she gets sick. However, John is lying to her. He does beat himself up a lot about it, especially in email to his sister-in-law, which she crucially forwards to Mel to prove to her how good a person John is. Evidence! Written evidence matters.</p><p>Also we as readers know from evidence that John is a good guy, so we don't mind so much that he's lying to Mel about his identity. This is crucial to this format, I suspect. <br /></p><p>There are some extremely funny strings of emails in which Mel divulges a little bit of personal information and it gets passed around and discussed by her whole office. There are excellent emails from John's young nieces, Mel's mother, Mel's best friend's husband, and so on. </p><p>The emails from Aaron Spender were delightful because he's a pompous jackass all full of his own wounded self-importance. He uses language in a way that shows how overly dramatic he is about himself. </p><p>Cabot does this extremely well, maybe even better, in <i>Boy Meets Girl</i> with the character of Stuart Hertzog, who goes into an amazing false elevated style to try to sound high-flown and serious, then turns around and makes crass, childish threats to his siblings. Amy Jenkins does the same thing, uses false elevated style with him, then makes ugly and crass racist and homophobic cracks about him and his family to other friends. I think it's the dual voices there from one person that make this so brilliant. There's even an amazing failure to respond from one of her friends that shows exactly what the friend things of her after this.</p><p>My conclusion is that people who have dual agendas and dual voices that showcase them are perfect for the epistolary genre. Liars, people with something to hide, people who talk behind other people's backs. We love to see those people get taken down by their own words and actions. The entire plot of <i>Boy Meets Girl</i> hinges on that. The plot of <i>The Boy Next Door</i> hinges on an actually harmless lie that turns out not to be harmless because of the relationship that begins because of it. </p><p>Does epistolary narrative have to turn on lies? I keep thinking about <i>Dracula</i>, probably the most famous epistolary novel of all time. It's not so much a lie as more dramatic irony, as we definitely know that Dracula is a vampire, while everyone else is confused or figuring it out. Maybe the first readers were as confused as the characters, but I don't think anyone reading it now could possibly be unaware. So maybe like with all dramatic irony, the pleasure is knowing what the characters don't and watching how it all plays out. <br /></p><p>The project I'm working on has two characters going through experiences together but hiding very different ugly histories. I'm not sure the dramatic irony holds up, since revealing the truth won't cause a disruption between them. It's more about hiding an unfortunate past. But then, children blame themselves for what happens to them and believe others will blame them as well. Getting past that self-blame is a huge step for a child who has undergone terrible things. </p><p>I'm not sure epistolary will be the best route for this, but I'm still thinking about it. </p><p>My MFA was adamant that first person is only interesting and worth doing when it diverges from plain reality, when there is an attitude or twist or confusion or lies or something else going on. I am coming to think that epistolary is the same way. Currently I have a whole draft of two dueling points of view and interpretations of the same events. Would epistolary add something to that? It could add a lot of levels of lying, but the lies have to be essential, like one person planning to leave on X date and not telling the other fragile person about it, so only we know. <br /></p><p>Though I also really enjoy someone muddling through life and presenting one face to the world and another to their private journal and their communications. Saying, "I'm super great" to the people around them and "This is horrible, get me out of here" in a text. We're back to dramatic irony again, though. And again, I'm not sure that's enough to justify epistolary. It might be if I were starting this from scratch, but it's a major rewrite, so it needs to be eminently worthwhile. </p><p>Writing <i>The Boy Next Door </i>without the epistolary format would render it less interesting, less compelling, less fun, because we would lose all those various points of view and inputs on everything. We would lose the amazing Vivica and her twenty-five life-sized driftwood sculptures of dolphins, as well as her painful realization about Mel's article at the end. We would lose a lot of what makes the whole story fun. Nobody writes omniscient narrators who jump around from person to person anymore, do they? So that is a big part of the point of the epistolary format. Lots of points of view and attitudes. Lots of ways to know someone is lying. Lots of fallout from those lies.</p><p>My own book definitely needs to be enriched by all of those extra points of view and complex lives the characters left behind them and all of their contacts and friends and families. I'm instantly seeing how much better it would be to SEE the terrible things their aunts say than to have them just talk about all of it. Think about how enraged you'd get upon seeing a mean text someone sent your friend, versus just hearing about it. </p><p>And it is so important to me to see the private journal and text and messaging versions of reality versus public-facing versions of reality. I love that contrast so much. That's worthwhile. I'm going to do it. <br /></p>Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-34913239137274266782018-05-29T13:28:00.004-07:002022-05-22T13:10:13.760-07:00Chuck Wendig: BlackbirdsBlackbirds, by Chuck Wendig<br />
<br />
Fair warning, I disliked everything about this novel except for the original premise, which could have been written into a wonderful story if the author hadn't been obsessed with violence and grime and sadism and filth and blood and pain. But now I'll explain why.<br />
<br />
None of those things are inherently interesting in themselves. Obsession with all of them together turned what could have been a fascinating Cassandra story into a boring and incredibly repetitive recitation of signifiers. I'm not even sure what he thinks these things signify, but I'm going to suggest that the idea is reality, grit, truth, being down to earth. Maybe that's not it. I honestly don't get why someone thinks being filthy (actual dirt, actual old dried blood and crust) makes a person more interesting than being clean. I do know this is a guy thing generally. They can keep it.<br />
<br />
The core of the story itself really is fascinating. Miriam can tell with a touch when and how someone is going to die. Cool, right? But what does she do with that? Nothing. She is busy suffering, bouncing from place to place, stealing from people whose deaths she predicts then witnesses, tormented by this knowledge and by how helpless she is to do anything to change it, right up until the end of the book, where she discovers she can actually save someone if she's willing to kill someone else in their place.<br />
<br />
It's a fantasy novel because there is no explanation for these rules. In science fiction, there would be something given to explain this, even if it's pseudoscience or futuristic to the point of magic. Here we get nothing. The closest we get is learning through backstory that Miriam had a rough life growing up with an awful controlling mother, rebelled by having sex with a boy, got pregnant, then suffered even more from that because he committed suicide when she rebuffed him, and then when his mother beat her with a snow shovel, she lost the baby. Okay. All bad things, but that still doesn't explain why she got this Cassandra death power.<br />
<br />
Miriam's meaningless wanderings lead her to hitchhiking and filthy dive bars, where she can get beat up and risk her life and show off her impossible fighting skills, until she gets tangled up with an abusive asshole thief who stole from drug dealers. Great. This sort of thing is stock for a certain kind of men's fantasy novels and I don't know why. Is this what they would do in her place? Do they like imagining a woman being tough and getting beat up? Do they imagine this is the coolest, toughest thing in the world, because if a man did this, he'd just be another guy, but a woman doing it makes it even more dangerous and more intense?<br />
<br />
Again, I really don't know. All I know is that reading this endless repetition of dirt, blood, bruises, alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, pain, bodily functions, and the occasional cheeseburger, feels like the book was written by an AI loaded with a specific set of fetishes. The story could have been wonderful if it hadn't been buried under all this obsessive nonsense.<br />
<br />
It's not just men who write this sort of thing. I remembered some truly terrible novels that play on some of the same things, about a vampire hunter. I can't think of the name off hand but there's this same sense of a particular set of fetishes getting dragged out over and over and over. When you don't share those fetishes, they are boring and embarrassing. I suppose if you do share them, they at least distract from the lack of storytelling.<br />
<br />
One of my old favorite books is C.J. Cherryh's <u>Rimrunners</u>, which features a down on her luck space Marine stranded on a space station. She keeps very clean on space station restroom soap, unlike Miriam Black, and she's in this situation for a vital story reason, not because she thinks it's fun. Things get violent and scary and Cherryh tends to hit all of the same black eye, broken rib, tough guy notes, but the difference is: it's for a specific plot-driven reason, not because it's fun for the author. That comes through very clearly. And Yeager turns things around on her own timetable, for her own purposes, while Black has no purpose in anything she does, which makes all the violence feel completely gratuitous.<br />
<br />
Here's another genre comparison: all those terrible books on "faerie." The same problem happens there as in <u>Blackbirds</u>. Instead of telling a good story, a surprising number of authors (and therefore presumably readers) just hit a prescribed set of indicators about these faerie courts. They never actually tell a good story about this material, and since those signifiers mean nothing to me, it feels like a cardboard recitation. Maybe there's some ur-faerie text that you have to read to be interested in this stuff, but I can't imagine being motivated to find it when every single faerie book is so unrelentingly bad.<br />
<br />
This is what it's like. Sit in a restaurant with two friends who have a long shared experience that you don't have. Get them to tell you about that one time when they went on a trip to Kansas together. They're always referring to it, so now you can get the whole story. They will devolve into just saying single words or phrases to each other and then dissolving into laughter. "The pool!" Gales of laughter. "The slide!" More laughter. Then they'll say together: "The buffet!" And they'll laugh until they cry, while you sit there with a polite half smile and alphabetize the sugar packets until you can pay the check and leave.<br />
<br />
Did you get anything out of that Kansas story they told? No? They did. They had a blast. You probably just felt alienated. But that's because they didn't actually tell a story. They just hit a bunch of signifiers that mean a lot to them and nothing to anyone else.<br />
<br />
That's how all that seelie and unseelie court nonsense reads in faerie books, like one person signaling another and saying, "This is our stuff." That's how this book felt. All I can think when I read yet another meaningless chapter about yet another disgusting motel room and coffee and whiskey and sudden violence is: "I guess that's what he thinks is cool." None of that repetitive nonsense tells a story AT ALL. It adds nothing about character, since she was established on page one. It doesn't even further the plot. The entire book was like this, with a few scraps of story here and there that could have been condensed into a literal short story without losing anything.<br />
<br />
This is not to say the same thing doesn't happen with literary fiction, because it absolutely does, which is one reason I'm not a big fan of a lot of literary fiction. Miserable well-off people making each other miserable. Hurray. One more sighing unfaithful pre-divorce miserable white couple in one more great big exhausting house in the suburbs with one more broken down lawn mower/car/child/line of communication that signifies the banal repetition and aging of what was once young and exciting. WE GET IT. Or worse, another literary novel about an aging professor who falls for a young female student, oh lord. No.<br />
<br />
What I love to see is someone telling a cracking good story and putting their own misery or fetishes off to the side. Don't just indicate to your audience or wave flags they will recognize, but live through the characters in their worlds. Otherwise it all feels like cheap button-pushing.<br />
<br />
There was someone who used to read her autobiographical work to an audience and always included a passage where a beloved housepet died. It made me so angry to the point of walking out (I did) because it was so cheap and manipulative. And that's exactly the point. When your own animals die, it's the very worst thing in the entire world. But using that to yank your audience's chain should be beneath all of us. That's how I feel about all of this whiskey and cigarettes and black eyes and truck stops and coffee kind of writing. It's all cheap signifiers when that space could have been used for so much more.<br />
<br />
I really hope I the next book I read doesn't do this sort of thing!<br />
<br />Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-3056405483445890472018-05-28T20:23:00.003-07:002022-05-22T13:10:30.922-07:00Jay Asher: 13 Reasons WhyThis is an odd book structurally because of the dual storylines. It's not so much flashback as paired narrative, as we follow Clay in the present listening to Hannah in the past narrating stories about events in the even further past, all of them about people who hurt her in ways that led to her suicide.<br />
<br />
It's also an odd book because Clay makes Hannah's story all about himself in a way that he's not made aware of at all. I was struck by this all throughout the novel, that both halves of the story make everything that happens to Hannah all about Clay, but Clay never wakes up or grows up enough to realize that this story is NOT about him. It's really not. In fact, I would say Hannah's message to Clay is to stop making everything about himself, but he doesn't get that, either, and at the end decides he's going to be the savior for another disaffected girl and save her from herself. That's the message he gets: this other girl's story is also all about him.<br />
<br />
Everyone is self-centered, but this takes things to the next level. It's so unselfconscious all throughout that I wonder whether it's a meta-commentary on selfishness, but I don't think so. It's possible the author perfectly replicated teenage self-absorption without commenting on it. Hannah certainly comments on it all throughout, pointing out all of the people who couldn't be bothered stepping outside themselves to treat her as a person, but Clay misses that point every time.<br />
<br />
Hannah: Nobody thinks of me as a person.<br />
Clay: Did I do that? Oh God, I did, didn't I. I'm so guilty of that. I feel terrible. If only I had done xyz to save poor Hannah, whom I loved, from those other jerks. I'm such a jerk too. How could I be such a jerk? [beats self up for six more pages]<br />
<br />
I would like to see a more evolved Clay think instead: That must have been terrible for Hannah.<br />
<br />
He did get there to a certain extent eventually, but made that about himself as well, since he decided to save Skye more or less to prevent ever feeling that guilty again. As a character arc, this was pretty non-existent and covers the distance from 100% self-absorption to 97% self-absorption. I was not impressed with Clay from beginning to end and found him to be a navel-gazer almost entirely without empathy for others to the point where he's almost a sociopath.<br />
<br />
Hannah suffers from a lot of awful treatment, as well as severe depression, but her character more than anything is about long term solutions to short term problems. The bullying and slandering she endures would slide off the back of anyone without severe depression. She actually lists things like a boy stealing her poem, and someone spreading a rumor about her. They are very small events, I think deliberately on the part of the author, because the point is that these events do not in any way merit suicide. Hanna would not decide it's the end of the world if she had any support structure or healthy coping mechanisms. So Hannah is also a character without much of an arc. She seems to put all of her self-worth in the hands of a lot of juvenile assholes, a terrible decision, obviously, and then accepts their treatment of her as a fair representation of the world. I'm also not sure what pure sparkling bubble she was living in before where nobody was ever a jerk, such that it's a complete shock to her here. <br />
<br />
Hannah's character was written mainly to argue against suicide, so in a lot of ways she makes all these mistakes for the benefit of readers who can then see what not to do. Reach out to others, don't take the short term for the long term, ask for help explicitly, talk to parents, call the hotlines, and so on. Hannah models what not to do. I wish I could feel like Clay also models what not to do, but he's not presented that way, even though his thought processes are absurdly self-involved. Instead, he's presented as normal, even good, innocent, justified, and explicable.<br />
<br />
Neither character felt fully realized to me. Neither followed much of an arc. The book itself hung on the tension of Clay finding out who had done what to Hannah, which also felt strange to me since their school was such a hotbed of gossip. How did all of these things stay secret? But for the audience, it was incredibly tense.<br />
<br />
I really liked the way that Clay had to use an old-fashioned Walkman to listen, and had to follow the map around town to see all of the different locations. That gave the novel an excellent structure and raised the stakes for Clay as he was on a timetable not of his own making. It also gave us a good reason to explore all of these different locations and gave each one of them intense meaning.<br />
<br />
I can't think of a better term than manpain for putting Clay through all of these emotionally wrenching moments. It bothered me a lot that this story about a young woman's extreme emotional and physical suffering was told through transmuting it into a young man's emotional suffering.<br />
<br />
This reminded me of a horrible habit I've seen in some shows, notable Battlestar Galactica and its prequel Caprica, of setting up women being raped offscreen but showing us the suffering of the men who love them, prioritizing and literally foreground that suffering. The women's pain is used as a secondary source for the men's pain, which is set up to be much more interesting or important. I truly hate that and so when this whole book followed that same pattern, it was infuriating and felt like a betrayal of Hannah's own story. This book is all about Clay taking Hannah's pain and making it about himself.<br />
<br />
The ending especially undercut the value of Hannah herself as it was set up as Clay learning something from Hannah's death and going out to save another girl from herself. That also gives Clay too much credit. Was there anything he could have done to save Hannah? Maybe he could have gone after those assholes who were tormenting her. Maybe he could have stood up for her in public. He thinks his biggest fault was leaving her alone at a party when she asked to be left alone, but that's absurd. Again, he makes it all about his own experience.<br />
<br />
In the end I hated Clay for being a self-absorbed clueless dope who hijacked Hannah's suffering for himself and never got the message at all that the secret to life and friends and keeping others from suicide, if possible, is to stop being so goddamn self-absorbed. Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-3267086546622972512017-02-21T16:16:00.002-08:002023-02-11T14:23:41.954-08:00Shannon Hale: Book of a Thousand Days<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
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<![endif]--><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
this young adult novel, Shannon Hale tells the classic princess in a tower
story first by setting it in a version of medieval Mongolia, and then by inverting
everything about it. The princess, Saren, is a beautiful but terrified,
traumatized, and probably mentally ill daughter of gentry, completely unable
even to comb her own hair. The real star of the story is Dashti, a “mucker”
girl, a nomadic herder who was put out of her clan along with her mother when
times got tough, who then after her mother died, gave up her freedom to get a
place working for the gentry, Saren’s father. In other words, the story is
about one character who has everything except capability, and one who has
nothing but capability. The two get bricked into a tower together for seven
years by Saren’s father when Saren refuses to marry a nightmarish and
animalistic lord, Lord Khasar, having formed an attachment to another lord,
Khan Tegus, whom she met when they were both children and, crucially, has not
seen since.</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Our
heroine, Dashti, is appealing from the very beginning because when she is
bricked into the tower, she is delighted to be practically on vacation, with
all the food in the world provided, and only one spoiled and helpless girl to
look after. She has led an incredibly hard life so far, going hungry, working
to exhaustion, living on practically nothing, but she had the benefit Saren did
not of a mother who loved her. Dashti’s mother also taught her the healing
songs that get Dashti her job with the gentry in the first place. Unlike Saren,
who does not know what to do with herself, Dashti is able to fill her days with
cooking, cleaning, caring for the princess, singing, drawing, and writing in
her diary. When Khan Tegus comes to visit, Saren insists that Dashti pretend to
be her and speak with him through their tiny window, such that Tegus and Dashti
actually end up falling in love without ever seeing each other. </span></p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I was
interested in reading this novel as part of the series of books about
transformative spaces that I’ve been covering this semester. Getting bricked
into the tower does not really transform either girl, however. I’m reminded of
Joss Whedon’s complaint about the lack of character arc with many heroes, which
I can’t find online (it was in a <u>Firefly</u> DVD commentary track, if I
remember correctly) but I would paraphrase it this way: “He’s a brave and
heroic man who under pressure is…brave and heroic!” Dashti remains the
pragmatic one who eventually figures a way out of the tower, when the monstrous
lord threatens to burn them out of it. Saren remains terrified and hopeless and
incapable, even afraid of leaving the tower and facing the blue sky when she is
freed. I find it very interesting that Saren’s one piece of strength lies in
refusing Lord Khasar and making Dashti take her place in speaking with Khan
Tegus. In other words, she adamantly opposes any interaction with these
potential suitors, even when she does nothing else. </span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is major character development, but it doesn’t come from the tower. The two
girls make their way to the city where Khan Tegus is the lord and get work in
the kitchens there. Saren eventually gets some sense smacked into her by the no
nonsense kitchen staff and learns to do some work, earning herself some self-respect,
while Dashti’s healing skills take her to Khan Tegus himself when he is injured.
Although Dashti tells Khan Tegus she is a mucker maid, he soon realizes from
her voice that she is the person he fell in love with in the tower, upon which
Saren insists that Dashti lie and say she is actually Saren.</span></p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Complications
ensue, but finally Dashti manages to defeat the evil Lord Khasar, takes her own
identity again, and marries Khan Tegus. It’s a fairy tale ending but Dashti
gets there through extreme physical danger, personal bravery, and a tremendous
life-threatening conflict between her duty to obedience to Saren as gentry
versus her obedience to the laws. Ultimately the two girls exchange their places
in the world, a deeply satisfying conclusion given Dashti’s constant fight for
survival and Saren’s weedy, spineless nature that made me want to slap her for
about nine tenths of the novel.</span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
wondered throughout: could this novel have played out purely in the tower? Once
someone is locked in a tower, escape looms pretty large on the narrative
landscape. I don’t think there’s a way to tell a compelling tower story without
escape being on the horizon somewhere, any more than you can tell a good
generation ship story without having the ship land somewhere eventually. I keep
coming back to <u>The Count of Monte Cristo</u> and his imprisonment, and of
course <u>The Shawshank Redemption</u>, another terrific story of unjust
imprisonment and escape. It’s an archetypal story, really, one which must
always end in true justice being served, like in <u>The Walls Around Us</u>. Again
and again I keep trying to think of ways for the story to play out just inside
the tower. It’s nagging at me! Shouldn’t escape be the end of the story? Shouldn’t
the people locked in the tower only be able to escape by overcoming whatever
internal obstacles are embodied by their external obstacles? </span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
is the connection between the gothic novel’s scary houses and these stories of
imprisonment and escape? I will have to explore this much more in my essay
semester. I wrote my dissertation on the stories written as inspiration for
medieval anchoresses who walled themselves into tiny cells, come to think of
it. As a committed claustrophobe who can get a panic attack from a sports bra,
I might be opening a disturbing can of worms here. Is there any other kind,
though? Who puts worms in cans? Speaking of claustrophobic situations.</span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ultimately,
<u>Book of a Thousand Days</u> is about transformation through sympathy and
empathy with another. Dashti can’t escape her own caste upbringing without
learning to see the gentry as real people, not the exalted magical beings she
imagines them to be at the beginning. Saren can’t escape her own learned
helplessness until she sees the work of regular people as something that anyone
can do, instead of something that is part of the workers’ nature. Both girls
have to come to grips with Lord Khasar’s actual animal nature, as well as Khan
Tegus’s real responsibilities to the laws of the land. In the end it’s Dashti
who saves them physically, but it’s Saren who figures out a loophole in the
laws and customs that allows Dashti to escape execution for presumption of
rank. </span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
find this an incredibly satisfying novel, but it’s not really about the two
girls being locked into a tower. It’s about two girls who are locked into their
strict social roles and have to free themselves from those. </span></p></div>
Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-53181093500726312992017-02-21T16:15:00.000-08:002017-02-21T16:15:28.525-08:00Terry Pratchett: The Shepherd's Crown<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is the final novel in a shorter
series set within Pratchett’s larger Discworld fantasy series. These novels
focus on a young witch named Tiffany Aching who starts out as a child, just
discovering her magical power, and end with Tiffany finally taking full control
of her power and owning her place in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
wanted to study this novel despite its weaknesses because Tiffany’s story is
built on houses. Her story really begins with the death of her grandmother, a
shepherd and unacknowledged witch who lived up on the downs in a shepherd’s
hut. Granny Aching’s hut is burned after her death, leaving only the axles and
wheels and a pot-belled iron stove. For her education, Tiffany leaves her
parents’ home and goes to study with other witches, living in their houses and
working for them. But this novel begins with Tiffany’s mentor, Granny
Weatherwax, also dying, and leaving her house—and the associated work of taking
care of the villagers around it—to Tiffany.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Splitting
her time between Granny Weatherwax’s workload and Tiffany’s home workload
overwhelms and exhausts Tiffany, so a great deal of the novel involves her
running back and forth and trying to be everywhere at once. The ending has
Tiffany finally choosing and deciding to give away Granny Weatherwax’s house
and going back up to the downs where her own Granny Aching lived, building
herself a new shepherd’s hut using Granny Aching’s old hut’s wheels, and
settling down there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
is a house? In this world, a witch’s house isn’t just a place to live. It
carries a weight of obligation to all the people around it. It’s a job and a
responsibility. Granny Weatherwax’s house includes her bees, her garden, and
even her old boots, so that someone stepping into Granny’s place really is
trying to fill her shoes. Granny’s place is also a tremendous honor, since
she’s the de facto leader of all the witches. By willing her house and her
position to Tiffany, Granny Weatherwax also gives Tiffany a tremendous
compliment. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
book is the last chapter we’re ever going to get in the Discworld series, since
the author died even before its publication. The conclusion feels especially
portentous because of it. Tiffany unites her two divergent strands of history
by coming back home and taking over the location that has always belonged to
her grandmother, who is actually buried right there. By building her own
shepherd’s hut, Tiffany refuses to live in anyone else’s house, even the house
of the most powerful witch, even when that house comes with great respect. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I’m
still thinking a lot about houses in fiction, houses that make us into who we
are, houses that confine, protect, express, and tie down. I can’t think of
another instance in fiction where someone rejects a house they were given. I’m
sure my own circumstances, and the book I’m working on right now, are affecting
how I see houses in general, but it’s interesting to think about how difficult
it must be to look a gift house in the mouth. We don’t inherit houses as a
rule, these days. People die and their houses are sold, so that we aren’t
pulled into that cycle of tradition and obligation. Instead, we go out and
choose the house we want to live in. Houses are choices embodied. As a renter,
it’s easy (and extremely fun) to look at an available house and imagine myself
living there, mentally arrange all of my furniture around the place, consider
the direction of sunlight and the logistics of groceries and snow plowing. But
it’s almost like trying on clothes in a store. If it doesn’t fit, no big deal.
A renter isn’t committed. Apartments are the same, a space that by definition
is impermanent. A motel room can be perfectly suitable for overnight, but it
would be impossible to imagine living there happily long term. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
someone slightly obsessed with houses, I’ve read a lot lately about the “tiny
house” movement: hand made mobile, self-contained homes on wheels. What a
bizarre but fascinating movement! The aesthetic appeal is clear, with the
custom woodwork and design features, and of course Tiffany’s shepherd hut is
well represented in the tiny house movement, where actual shepherd’s huts like
hers appear. The other main point of appeal is that these houses are on wheels
and movable. Someone can own a house, but without the dictates of land and the
limitations of location. These houses are built on trailers to get around local
ordinances about minimum size for permanent housing, but also so that the
owners can take them on the road. Looking at the interiors is an exercise in
mentally getting rid of accumulated stuff, something that always leads me to
think: “This would be great if it were ten times the size and built on an
actual foundation, with bookshelves, storage space, plumbing, electricity,
cable internet, a washer, a dryer, and a yard.” In other words, an actual
house. I admire these exquisitely designed and compact living spaces, and then
remember a) I moved in a 26 foot truck the last time (though I asked for 22—they
were out), which is much bigger than any tiny house, an insuperable
mathematical difficulty to be sure, and b) I’m incredibly claustrophobic. Tiny
houses sell the dream of having only the essentials, living a compact and low
impact life, being frugal and careful and minimalist. Nothing makes me more
aware of my maximalist tendencies. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Tiny
houses are dollhouses for people. They’re miniaturized and idealized versions
of real places to live, and as such, more of a way of thinking about our lives
than realistic places to live. Fiction works the same way, especially this kind
of fiction, set in a fantasy world. And within fiction, fictional houses
express the shape of the world as it fits around us. The gothic novel sees the
world fitting around us in terrifying ways, constricting, endangering, or
confining us. These fantasy novels see the world fitting around us in ways that
express obligation and responsibility, as well as history and tradition. What
is a house? For this novel, a house carries all of that, including expectation
and plans for the future. I’m very glad that Tiffany Aching finally got a house
of her own, after bouncing from place to place for six novels, but I’m also
glad that it’s on wheels.</span></div>
Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5423144434657884295.post-87265956020452251602017-02-21T16:14:00.002-08:002023-02-11T14:27:10.988-08:00Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
a gorgeous novel! But structurally, it was a bowl of pudding. Worse, the novel
starts with a completely unnecessary rape scene. Honestly, we don’t see the
murder and dismemberment and we are plenty horrified by that, so why do we need
to see the rape? We absolutely don’t. People need to stop writing gratuitous
rape scenes, I am serious. Cut it out! The point of Susie’s character is that
she’s dead, not that she was raped. In fact, her grieving family *has no idea
that she was raped,* nobody ever knows, nobody ever finds her body--so why is
that even part of the story? Writers really need to get a grip on this and only
write rape when it’s actually part of the story. Jeebus. Reader rage!</span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
only thing that ever ties back to the rape is the unintentionally horrifying
scene near the end when Susie somehow comes down from heaven and takes over the
body of her lesbian friend in order to have sex with the boy she used to like
when she was alive. Her lesbian friend! What on earth is going on here? That
reads like rape all over again to me. I get that it’s supposed to be nice good
loving sex to make up for the rape, but did she ask her friend if she could
borrow her body for sex with a man? Does her friend know about it? What the
hell is going on in this book? Who would think that is okay? Why write Ruth’s
character as a lesbian if not to make this invasion double extra awful and
rapey?</span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Otherwise,
it’s a lovely story about a family and their friends putting their lives back
together after Susie gets murdered at the age of fourteen. They found only her
elbow, which did not make sense to me just on an anatomical level, unless the
murderer diced her up randomly. Not to be graphic, but arms bend, and bodies
come apart best at the joints. I realize that the elbow sounds funniest, and
carries the least burden of imagery (less than a foot, or a hand, for example)
but there’s just something impractical about the whole thing. The police found
all the blood, so they knew Susie was dead, but did not find the underground
lair? Where did she get carved up, then? I’m not squeamish about this at
all—I’m halfway through rewatching eleven seasons of <u>Bones</u>, which
positively relishes blood and goop and dismemberment—so maybe that’s why the
practicalities are bothering me so much. Why on earth wouldn’t the murderer
just leave Susie’s body in the underground lair and fill it in? It’s already a
grave. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
author really lost me with the gratuitous rape, and then lost me even more with
the whimsical elbow. But the book was gorgeous otherwise, full of wonderful
character development. As far as the structure that drives the story, we have
both something we want, in that we want the family to be okay, and something we
don’t want, in that we really don’t want the murderer, George Harvey, to hurt
anyone else, particularly not Lindsey or Ruth or any of the other characters we
come to know. As I’m studying structure, the things we push for and push
against seem to be tremendously powerful, like the accelerator and the brake
pedal in a car. I wouldn’t want to go without either. (Maybe transitions are
the clutch, in that case.) When we care about a character, we want them to get
what they want, and we dread seeing bad things happen to them, specific bad
things, the very bad things that are in the air around them.</span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
frustrating thing about the novel is that these things we hope for and hope against
are a broken promise. Susie says early on, “I could not have what I wanted
most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn’t perfect. But I came to
believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of
those I loved on Earth” (20). The thing is, though, she can’t. She doesn’t
change a thing. She simply watches. I wonder whether the author intended this
but then did not carry it out, or simply set up this impossibility that mirrors
the way we read, where we can hope and want things for the characters, but can
never change what’s written on the pages to come. Susie feels like someone
written out of a story, and in fact the story is really not about her at all,
but about her murder, her loss, her absence. Susie is nowhere in the story once
she’s dead, can’t even tell anyone where to look or move a leaf. The best she
can do is appear as a wisp of a figure to those who choose to believe she’s
there. Even her appearance changes nothing, though. Susie is pure observer,
until she takes over Ruth for a night with Ray.</span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sebold’s
genius lies in evoking all of the moments of life. She got every detail of 1970s
Pennsylvania exactly right, jolting me with each new mention of Wanamaker’s or
a cornfield that of course would be named for a Stoltzfus, because central and
southeastern Pennsylvania is solid with Amish Stoltzfus families. I must know
three or four dozen Stoltzfeet myself. Sebold takes me right back there, the
smells and the sounds and the feed corn and the handknitted acrylic hats. </span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In a
lot of ways, the structure of the novel is a pond with a pebble dropped in the
middle. We watch all the ripples through the community through the eyes of the
most omniscient of all narrators, who knows what everyone is thinking and can
see anything she wants. Although I found myself constantly wanting there to be
a plot of some kind, more than just wanting everyone to be okay, and hoping the
murderer wouldn’t hurt anyone else, the ultimate goal of the pebble in the pond
story is to watch until all of the ripples cease. Susie’s father has the
hardest time letting go, but even he gradually comes to grips with his loss.
Our narrator wants everyone to be okay. When they all really are okay, in the
end, the story is over. Inserting herself back into the narrative like a bolt
from heaven makes not the slightest bit of narrative sense, unfortunately. </span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How
odd to read two books in a row with that same bizarre body swap right near the
end. In <u>The Walls Around Us</u>, Violet and Ori switch lives somehow so that
the innocent person gets to have the life that the guilty one had stolen from
her. It’s nonsensical, because Ori died, but then she gets to wake up with
Violet’s life. This jump from heaven of Susie’s is just as nonsensical. I kind
of can’t get over the fact that two otherwise wonderful novels fell into such a
terrible narrative trap, giving their characters some kind of closure and
justice that could not happen in the novels up to that point. In other words,
they created these worlds, they laid out all the rules, they set the limits,
and then in order to get what the authors wanted—because both instances absolutely
reek of writer—they threw all that away. I think the moral of the story is to plan
for a satisfying ending to a story so that you don’t have to make one up at the
last minute that contradicts absolutely everything that came before. Oh, boy,
does that ever make me mad as a reader. As writers, we’re in charge of
everything! Go back and make it so that these things actually fit! Add in
whatever you need to build these things into the story organically! </span></p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
the most important thing I learned from this book is the gas pedal and brake
pedal analogy, driving a narrative with the things we want to happen and the
things we don’t want to happen. That is a tremendously powerful way to think
about writing a story. It reminds me of the Hitchcock movie opening where
someone puts a bomb in the trunk of a car, and then someone else unwittingly
drives the car through a lot of crowded city spaces. It’s the classic
illustration of tension in film. Another image that keeps coming to mind lately
is one that a friend told me about, where she was visiting the Empire State
Building and this father put his toddler up on the railing between the bars,
where she could easily have slipped and fallen the entire way to the ground
below. Both my friend and I practically get panic attacks every time we think about
this scene. She had to take a Xanax last time we talked about it. It’s just
like the bomb in the trunk of the car. We can imagine so clearly and vividly
just how wrong things could go and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about
it. That’s a powerful tool in writing, something I have to remember to use. </span></p></div>
Emma Burnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10257426229151990033noreply@blogger.com0