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fangrrl_squeesYesterday, I speculated that perhaps I was taking my much-hypothesized Blakes 7 ficlet Descendant (note: must think of better title) a little too seriously. Overthinking would have been a better word, although taking it too seriously was also on my mind, as I've been re-acquainting myself with the sheer freakin' campiness that is inextricably tied up with the show. Sure, it had some very serious moments - particularly when contrasted against the other bit Brit sci-fi product of the time, Doctor Who - but there was a lot of tongue-in-cheek stuff sloshing around, too.
This morning, I listened to Travis: The Final Chapter, which is an interesting collection of interviews with cast and crew members from B7 discussing Travis' character - including why he was re-cast halfway through the show's run, and how that re-casting was used as an opportunity to tweak the character a bit. It was interesting to listen to several (apparently) intelligent and eloquent individuals get into the refinements of a character that, honestly, I'd considered a bit of a second banana/comic-strip stereotype. And there's no denying that Travis was, indeed, a second banana and a bit silly - Chris Boucher himself acknowedged that - but even the second bananas got a lot of thought put into them at this level of production, it seems.
I heard the actors and writers describe why the character was so loyal to the queen bitch of the universe - I liked the Ollie North/Ronald Reagan metaphor - and how being a loyal-to-the-chief career military man is going to shape a person's worldview. Why he took commands the way he did, why he'd show a surprising amount of loyalty to some individuals and casually butcher others. One person (I lost track of who was speaking) got into how, no, Travis isn't a thinker because any intelligent government is not going to want a thinking military, because sooner or later, they're going to think I've got the guns and they don't. Why aren't I in charge?
At first, I took it all in quite passively and with a bit of "No, duh! Of course the character's like that..." and then I got brought up short with the belated realization that a lot of thought - by many people - had gone into creating the character. It didn't matter that he was a second banana, or a bit campy with the whole eyepatch and cybernetic arm thing. He had been developed and thought about. It wasn't just a case of "We need some scary bad ass to follow Servalan around. You call central casting, I'll dash off some dialogue." Well, it might have started like that...
Every character in a story merits a great deal of thought. I've always - rather patronizingly - insisted that there is (or shouldn't) be any extraneous words in a screenplay. There's no extraneous scenes in a story. Every single moment exists to drive the story forward, even those scenes that are, at first glance, something the author plunked down as a hunk of "character development". The smart writers, of course, can move story and develop character at the same time - no extemporizing or pontificating needed. That's where I always trip up, but I digress.
I don't know why, but I had never consciously made the connection between every word/moment/scene matters and every character must matter. God knows, when it's spelled out like that, it seems a bit painfully obvious.
I'm not saying that even the third spearholder from the left has got to be able to answer the 100 Questions. I'm telling myself - or reassuring, I s'pose - that it's okay to go elbow deep in the stuff. After all, if I overwrite, I can always edit it out. But without a solid, developed background, my characters won't be anything but flat.
Fortunately, my background in roleplaying - and encounters with the 100 Questions, above - have left me very receptive to the idea of developing characters. I'm just a bit lazy, too. Oops. I guess I can't get away with that, anymore.
But, Ms. Bean, you say (because you're nothing if not polite), this is just fluffy sillyfic. Why are you expending so much brainjuice on it?
A couple of years ago, I decided that even if I was going to write just for myself - as if I had any choice - I was going to do the best I could. No more dashing off short vignettes just because they were kewl and stylish, if a bit short on content. No more dashing off similar with a severe lack of context, because I'm counting on my hypothetical readers to have kept up with the dozen preceding pieces and understand what was happening. Most of my writing is for my RPG characters, you see, and so I got into bad habits. I got used to writing for my game-master who, of course, knew pretty much everything that had happened to my character. I didn't want to bore them with establishing the setting and the context of the situation. Clearly, I was a moron.
A good series is one that a reader can pick up anywhere and enjoy it. They'll know they're missing some things, but they shouldn't be completely at sea. The George RR Martin A Song of Ice and Fire books are a good example of a series. Anne Rice's Vampire Armand is not. Sad to say, I had kept up with most of the Vampire Chronicles, but not all of them, and a friend of mine convinced me to try Armand. I didn't understand a bloody thing that was going on. Not one. Given that I'd only missed one (maybe two) books out of the series to date, that's not a good thing. I quit reading halfway through the second chapter, and it takes a lot for me to give up on a book. So, lesson learned and, from that point forward, I decided that even my fluffy-fic should be a bit more rigorously written.
Besides, god knows, my brain could do with the exercise.
Therefore, I'm going to keep on with my "overthinking" of Descendant. I'm not going to settle for what I've written for Kara and Andriss' backgrounds. More is needed, to enable them to stand up adjacent to established characters like Avon, Vila and certain others that I won't be naming just yet. Otherwise, it would be kinda like putting Tom Cruise next to Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. On a good day, Cruise is a competent actor - heck, I even admitted that I was impressed by him in Eyes Wide Shut - but when you put him next to an actor who (when not descending into a caricature of himself) can blow pretty much anyone out of the water... well, it doesn't matter if you gave the best performance of your life, you're going to come across as a bit lackluster.
Every moment matters. Every character matters. In regards to Descendant, Kara and Andriss need to matter in their own right. They must be more than just a means to get other characters out of trouble.
A: Hey. I've got an idea. Why don't we decrease costs and increase revenue? AAAH! I can't see!
B: It sounds like he's had a blinding flash of the obvious.
(Some Dilbert cartoon, by Scott Adams)
Gosh, do I feel stupid. Ah well, it's not the first time.
With that in mind, I might even sketch out a vignette or two about only Andriss and Kara - no tie-in with B7 beyond the general setting - to fix them more firmly in my mind, as full-blown characters in their own right. As I've been outlining (all in my head and it's time to get it onto paper, btw) the two characters have definitely grown a bit - so to speak - in terms of how they stack up compared to the B7 canon characters, but they're definitely still satellites whirling in orbit around Avon and Vila - especially Avon, of course. I'm not aiming to have a true ensemble cast - although that would be nice, I just don't think I have the chops to pull that off - but I see now that K&A need more mass to them, so to speak. To overextend the metaphor, I need planets, not satellites. The story setting should be the 'sun' around which everyone revolves. Secondary and tertiary characters are well and good, but A&K do not need to be them.
Hmm... much food for thought, here, and a much-needed kick in the butt...
This morning, I listened to Travis: The Final Chapter, which is an interesting collection of interviews with cast and crew members from B7 discussing Travis' character - including why he was re-cast halfway through the show's run, and how that re-casting was used as an opportunity to tweak the character a bit. It was interesting to listen to several (apparently) intelligent and eloquent individuals get into the refinements of a character that, honestly, I'd considered a bit of a second banana/comic-strip stereotype. And there's no denying that Travis was, indeed, a second banana and a bit silly - Chris Boucher himself acknowedged that - but even the second bananas got a lot of thought put into them at this level of production, it seems.
I heard the actors and writers describe why the character was so loyal to the queen bitch of the universe - I liked the Ollie North/Ronald Reagan metaphor - and how being a loyal-to-the-chief career military man is going to shape a person's worldview. Why he took commands the way he did, why he'd show a surprising amount of loyalty to some individuals and casually butcher others. One person (I lost track of who was speaking) got into how, no, Travis isn't a thinker because any intelligent government is not going to want a thinking military, because sooner or later, they're going to think I've got the guns and they don't. Why aren't I in charge?
At first, I took it all in quite passively and with a bit of "No, duh! Of course the character's like that..." and then I got brought up short with the belated realization that a lot of thought - by many people - had gone into creating the character. It didn't matter that he was a second banana, or a bit campy with the whole eyepatch and cybernetic arm thing. He had been developed and thought about. It wasn't just a case of "We need some scary bad ass to follow Servalan around. You call central casting, I'll dash off some dialogue." Well, it might have started like that...
Every character in a story merits a great deal of thought. I've always - rather patronizingly - insisted that there is (or shouldn't) be any extraneous words in a screenplay. There's no extraneous scenes in a story. Every single moment exists to drive the story forward, even those scenes that are, at first glance, something the author plunked down as a hunk of "character development". The smart writers, of course, can move story and develop character at the same time - no extemporizing or pontificating needed. That's where I always trip up, but I digress.
I don't know why, but I had never consciously made the connection between every word/moment/scene matters and every character must matter. God knows, when it's spelled out like that, it seems a bit painfully obvious.
I'm not saying that even the third spearholder from the left has got to be able to answer the 100 Questions. I'm telling myself - or reassuring, I s'pose - that it's okay to go elbow deep in the stuff. After all, if I overwrite, I can always edit it out. But without a solid, developed background, my characters won't be anything but flat.
Fortunately, my background in roleplaying - and encounters with the 100 Questions, above - have left me very receptive to the idea of developing characters. I'm just a bit lazy, too. Oops. I guess I can't get away with that, anymore.
But, Ms. Bean, you say (because you're nothing if not polite), this is just fluffy sillyfic. Why are you expending so much brainjuice on it?
A couple of years ago, I decided that even if I was going to write just for myself - as if I had any choice - I was going to do the best I could. No more dashing off short vignettes just because they were kewl and stylish, if a bit short on content. No more dashing off similar with a severe lack of context, because I'm counting on my hypothetical readers to have kept up with the dozen preceding pieces and understand what was happening. Most of my writing is for my RPG characters, you see, and so I got into bad habits. I got used to writing for my game-master who, of course, knew pretty much everything that had happened to my character. I didn't want to bore them with establishing the setting and the context of the situation. Clearly, I was a moron.
A good series is one that a reader can pick up anywhere and enjoy it. They'll know they're missing some things, but they shouldn't be completely at sea. The George RR Martin A Song of Ice and Fire books are a good example of a series. Anne Rice's Vampire Armand is not. Sad to say, I had kept up with most of the Vampire Chronicles, but not all of them, and a friend of mine convinced me to try Armand. I didn't understand a bloody thing that was going on. Not one. Given that I'd only missed one (maybe two) books out of the series to date, that's not a good thing. I quit reading halfway through the second chapter, and it takes a lot for me to give up on a book. So, lesson learned and, from that point forward, I decided that even my fluffy-fic should be a bit more rigorously written.
Besides, god knows, my brain could do with the exercise.
Therefore, I'm going to keep on with my "overthinking" of Descendant. I'm not going to settle for what I've written for Kara and Andriss' backgrounds. More is needed, to enable them to stand up adjacent to established characters like Avon, Vila and certain others that I won't be naming just yet. Otherwise, it would be kinda like putting Tom Cruise next to Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. On a good day, Cruise is a competent actor - heck, I even admitted that I was impressed by him in Eyes Wide Shut - but when you put him next to an actor who (when not descending into a caricature of himself) can blow pretty much anyone out of the water... well, it doesn't matter if you gave the best performance of your life, you're going to come across as a bit lackluster.
Every moment matters. Every character matters. In regards to Descendant, Kara and Andriss need to matter in their own right. They must be more than just a means to get other characters out of trouble.
A: Hey. I've got an idea. Why don't we decrease costs and increase revenue? AAAH! I can't see!
B: It sounds like he's had a blinding flash of the obvious.
(Some Dilbert cartoon, by Scott Adams)
Gosh, do I feel stupid. Ah well, it's not the first time.
With that in mind, I might even sketch out a vignette or two about only Andriss and Kara - no tie-in with B7 beyond the general setting - to fix them more firmly in my mind, as full-blown characters in their own right. As I've been outlining (all in my head and it's time to get it onto paper, btw) the two characters have definitely grown a bit - so to speak - in terms of how they stack up compared to the B7 canon characters, but they're definitely still satellites whirling in orbit around Avon and Vila - especially Avon, of course. I'm not aiming to have a true ensemble cast - although that would be nice, I just don't think I have the chops to pull that off - but I see now that K&A need more mass to them, so to speak. To overextend the metaphor, I need planets, not satellites. The story setting should be the 'sun' around which everyone revolves. Secondary and tertiary characters are well and good, but A&K do not need to be them.
Hmm... much food for thought, here, and a much-needed kick in the butt...
