avram | Entries tagged with writing

While The Art Store had Moleskines on sale last month I picked up not only a couple of large-sized sketchbooks at $10 each, but also a pocket-sized quadrille notebook for $7, figuring I’d try carrying it around with me as an idea capturing device. It seems to work so far. I’m much more likely to grab out a notebook and scribble down an idea or bit of passing dialog than I am to take it down in my PDA. This is most likely because text entry is still a pain with the PDA, and fetching the keyboard out of my bag is enough of an effort that it acts as a barrier to actually writing. Simplicity trumps technology in this case. No fancy Moleskine hacks yet, though I can see adopting the mark-up hack at some point.

The downside is permanence. I have to remember to copy the notes over into my computer so that I’ve got a backup in case I lose the notebook. Also, the computer is my primary work environment, and it’d be counter-productive to not have copies there.

So, OK, I’ve been jotting down bits of stuff for the past few weeks. I feel almost like a writer. I’m still no closer to actually finishing the script for scene 1 of the comic. So the next step: I took the script file (with chunks that need to be rewritten colored in red), formatted it with a four-inch left margin, and printed it out (one sheet, both sides). I’ve folded the sheet up and stuck it in the Moleskine’s back pocket.

Speaking of comics, I picked up volume 1 of Rod Espinosa’s Neotopia the other day. Man, this has gorgeous artwork. The story is good-vs-evil fantasy reminiscent of Miyazaki, centered around a young duchess’s body double who’s more noble than the duchess, something you could hand a ten-year-old without worrying about. It’s the art that really makes this stand out. Espinosa is willing to put the work into making detailed landscapes and flying ships, and then he fills out his linework with amazing colors and textures.

Current Music: "Weather With You", Crowded House

George Orwell gets a bad rap.

Because of 1984, his name has become associated with Newspeak, the language of bureaucratic tyranny and reality-avoidance. The word "Orwellian" conjures up all of the dark features of IngSoc and the Party from 1984, Orwell’s name (actually a pen name, he was born Eric Blair) fusing with the evil he warned us of like Victor Frankenstein’s last name becoming the name of his monster in the minds of people who’ve never read the book.

Orwell wrote a fantastic short essay on political writing, one I’ve linked to several times: “Politics and the English Language”. (That version’s better formatted than the one I linked to earlier.) Anyone who blogs on matters of politics or current affairs, or who writes letters to newspaper editorial sections, ought to read it. It’s got good advice for anyone who writes anything more public than a shopping list, but it’s especially aimed at political writers.

One characteristic of bad writing that Orwell identifies is the use of dying metaphors, “a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.” He writes:

By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

To draw attention to the use of fresh metaphors, I’m awarding the newly-minted George Orwell Living Metaphor Award to James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, who’s been blogging since September of last year. Here he is...

...on Time naming Bush Man of the Year:

From beginning to end, the magazine behaves like a man who knocks himself out making an extravagant six-course candlelit dinner for a blow-up doll, in an effort to convince himself he's really in love.

On Tucker Carlson’s performance on TV:

flighty, stammering, laughing at his own lame quips and then repeating them as if repetition makes them even swiftier, waving his hands around as if trying to throw them away

...on meeting Bernard Kerik:

A hard spherical object, Kerik is physically formidable, not someone you'd want to skirmish with over the last sticky bun on the tray. [...]

I'm glad the press is having a dance party with this, because God knows the Democrats are frozen at the steering wheel. I just saw a segment on MSNBC (which has been all over the Kerik story today, bless Rick Kaplan's cyborg heart) pitting a Republican strategist against a Democratic one, and the Democratic spokesman--who goes by the name of Michael Brown--seemed to have washed down his weeny pills with warm Ovaltine.

...on Condoleeza Rice replacing Colin Powell as Secretary of State:

Rice's face is the game face of the Bushies, bony with Unwavering Resolve, eyes fanatical, mouth tensed. She has shown herself to be not a listener but a dictation machine on playback.

...on the presidential debates:

I don't understand why candidates allow themselves to be strait-jacketed by debate formats that force them to perform Houdini acts to show the slightest animation or spontaneity and penalize any uncorseted expression of passion or emotion.

Current Music: Abbey Road medley, The Beatles

Feeling so-o-o-o-o uninspired. Bleh. Spent a bit of time at Ground, mostly just reading Sock, but sketched a little, even though the light was on the dim side.

( One single, solitary sketch, and not even a good one )

I’m trying something new: I’ve started writing out one of my comics ideas as if it were prose. Not quite exactly as prose — I'm taking less care with stylistic niceties than I would if the prose were going to be the finished product, and paying more attention to visual details. But still. Just a few paragraph so far. Two or three hundred words. My two protagonists haven’t even met yet. But it’s something. It’s forced me to make a few decisions, work out some details.

Current Music: "Clothes Of Sand", Nick Drake

Reading

camwyn’s response to a writing exercise got my juices flowing a bit. I think this took more than fifteen minutes, but hey, I’m not a formal participant:

( It has come to Our attention... )

Current Music: "So Alive", Ryan Adams

One topic that pops up occasionally among fans of fantasy novels and role-playing games is the question of whether the treatment of the various fantasy races — elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. — is racist. I think it generally is, though it’s not the serious, toxic racism of The Turner Diaries. It’s a more dilute racism, introduced for fictional convenience.

One common form of racism is the belief that a person’s character is determined by his ethnicity. This is a boon to writers of adventure fiction. If you and your audience share the same notions of what character traits go with what ethnicities, then all you have to do is give a character an ethnic name and maybe a spot of funny accent or touch of description and your audience will know to assume that he’s crafty or stubborn or greedy or lazy or whatever.

That sort of thing is deservedly frowned upon nowadays, but it’s common in fantasy and science-fiction. Greedy dwarves, logical Vulcans, belligerent orcs, inscrutable elves, all tropes straight out of pulp adventure fiction. Why else do you think we so often refer to “alien races” when they are more properly alien species?

I was reminded of this while reading CS Lewis’s review of Lord of the Rings in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (which I borrowed, along with Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, from Beth, who’s a big Lewis fan). He says:

Much that in a realistic work would be done by ‘character deliniation’ is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls.

Confirmation of what I’ve long believed.

I’m not claiming that Tolkien was a racist (though the thread running through LotR, the belief that nobility of character runs in bloodlines, is one that bothers me whenever I try to reread the series), or that modern fantasy authors are racists (though some of them might be), just that the common habit of assigning personality by “race” is a lazy one, and the descendent of a racist worldview, and something that an author might look towards trying to transcend if he wants to create a work of lasting quality (or even just of attention-getting novelty).

Current Music: "Spark", Wild Colonials

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Avram's journal

Days, sketched in brief

Neotopia, and more Moleskine neeping

The George Orwell Living Metaphor Award

Meh

An edict

Racism in fantasy

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April 2017

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