Tag Archives: Character
Reviews

Review: Stargate Universe

By on Wednesday, September 15, 2010

I’ve always wanted to do reviews of stories on this blog, but I never got around to it, either because I was so behind anyone else’s reviews or because I didn’t think anyone would read it.

I still don’t really expect anyone to read it, particularly since I haven’t posted here for a while. And I am still behind everyone else, but give me a break, I don’t have the money to get new stuff, so I am stuck reviewing what I watch.

I’ve been something of a fan of the Stargate series of TV shows ever since I found the 3rd season of Stargate SG-1 for $20 bucks at a used video and music store some 6 or so years ago. That was about the point that I realized that used television series were a much better deal in a money-to-time-entertained ratio and started to cultivate an understanding of the genre–by which I mean watching a lot of television. What I liked about Stargate SG-1 was that it didn’t really take itself seriously, it had engaging characters with entertaining quirks and lots of witty one-liners. It was entertaining, light science fiction fun. Not particularly great story, not all that deep, but fun. I managed to collect all 10 seasons on DVD (mostly for quite reasonable prices). Stargate Atlantis followed in much the same vein, if possibly taking itself more seriously and re-using tropes from the SG-1, but I still enjoyed it and watched it all.

So one would think that when Stargate Universe came out I would have been all over it. But it was in the middle of a busy time in my last semester and after initially watching part of the first episode of I put the show down as an attempt to imitate Battlestar Galactica (the new one) without actually having the depth and quality that made Battlestar Galactica transcendently awesome (I admit to being a bit of a BSG fanboy). So I belittled it and didn’t watch it.

Well, I recently revisited the show and I have changed my opinion. It is indeed trying to be   Battlestar Galactica, but it looks like it could actually be pretty good. It doesn’t have the same sense of fun that Stargate SG-1 has, and it doesn’t have the depth and quality that BSG has, but it does have a pretty good sense of tension and from the first 3 episodes looks like it could have deeper and more motivated characters than the other Stargates though I am a little concerned that the lack of cohesive cinematographic direction and the attempt to force character depth may cause the show to fall apart as it continues.

The characterization was somewhat heavy-handed in the first episode, there isn’t much nuance to the characters and acting at the beginning, which is usually to be expected. The writers managed to force (somewhat over-wrought) back-stories for the main characters into the narrative, which showed an attempt to get at the more realistic complicated characters that made BSG so good, but wasn’t executed quite as well in the first episodes at least.

The camera knew that it was trying to have odd angles and be shaky at times like Battlestar Galactica but it didn’t seem to know why and broke the documentary style quite frequently, and even when it did keep the documentary hand-camera style it often placed itself in places that people could not logically be, such as behind staircases, around corners and on cliff-faces above the action. In conventional cinema generally you want to keep viewers from thinking about the camera (though the trend nowadays has been to break that) BSG uses the camera to film the unreal (the spaceships and robots and space drama) as if there was actually someone there filming them, drawing attention to the camera and making it feel more real. Stargate Universe uses the camera to frame shots you generally wouldn’t think about, and call attention to the camera. . . and make it feel like they are trying to be BSG (or that there is a camera crew hiding on the spaceship filming the crew as some kind of prank reality TV setup).

The writing wasn’t bad. And I love the premise of getting stranded on a huge spaceship that you can’t control. While the pilot wasn’t enough to show me that this is an awesome show, it at least gave me hope that it could go in an interesting direction. I don’t know if it is going to be any good (particularly since I just spent most of this review pointing out its flaws). But I’m going to see where it goes.

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Reflections on Narrative Voice (Or Making the Best of What You’ve Got)

By on Wednesday, August 18, 2010

During my senior year of college (first semester, so about a year ago) I took a class on Narrative Voice and Character, it was an interesting class to say the least–made somewhat more so because the professor had never taught a creative writing class before and was still caught up in Bahktinian dialogics as the only framework for writing novels. The class itself focused much on how to write a novel, since those are the largest pieces of narrative and tend to have a lot of character. For this class we used a little out-of-print book titled “Thirteen Types of Narrative” (and somewhat dubiously subtitled “A practical guide on how to tell a story”) This book starts with an outline of a “situation to be made the basis of a series of exercises in narrative method, each demonstrating a different technique.” Okay, I can understand that particular way to teach narrative technique, show people how to tell the same story different ways. What really ended up bothering me about this book was the amount of information we were given in the “situation” I didn’t have enough information to make the characters based on the outline alone (without making stuff up) and I was given too much information to make them MY characters. We were told that the scene revolves around an American soldier named Peter Ellison (all of which is completely irrelevant to the scene–other than the American part) and that he is in England (stationed on duty) and has gone up a cathedral tower to take some pictures (for his uncle who used to live in the village and gave Peter the camera) we are given a detailed synopsis of the weather before we get to the important fact that he encounters a fat man (who thankfully does not have a name) who is distressed and intends to commit suicide. We are told quite frequently throughout the outline what Peter is thinking and feeling and (as you probably could have guessed) in the end Peter drops his camera over the edge of the cathedral tower with an attached note and tries to stall the fat guy until help arrives. The outline ends with help arriving.

The book then continues in 14 chapters (one for each ‘type’ of narrative and one conclusion) in which is gives a description of each type along with examples from literature and the authors own envisioning of the initial situation. For class we were tasked with writing journal entries which included writing segments or whole portions of the outline in draft form in various narrative forms from different perspectives.

The Thirteen Types of Narrative according to the book are, 1. Third Person Past 2. Third Person Present 3. First Person Past (As If Spoken) 4. First Person Past (As If Written) 5. First Person Past (Spoken) In Third or First Person Framework 6. All Dialogue 7. In the Form of a Play 8. Catechetical 9. Epistolary 10. In the Form of a Diary (how this is different then First Person Past (As If Written) I’m not sure. 11. Documentary 12. Stream of Consciousness and 13. Series of First Person Narratives in Third Person Framework.

While I still think it is generally rather silly to try and focus in on a single element like Narrative Voice, and I had a strong problem with the way that the outline was set up the class was rather useful to me. First, I originally went into the class thinking that a story could only have one narrative form that would work for it, but quickly realized that this was not strictly true. A story told in a different way is a different story. Choosing narrative framework and viewpoint are highly important to the overall shape and meaning of the story. So now I like to explore other possible viewpoints on stories that I am writing just to see what they could have to say. The other thing I learned is how to force myself to write within someone else’s framework. . . and how to make my own freedoms. In one entry I managed to have the fat man succeed in committing suicide (because the outline only ever said that help arrives, it does not necessitate, though much of the book assumes, that the help be effective. I also wrote Peter as a secretly arrogant jerk who is only seems to be the noble hero that the outline forced him to be. I learned how to have fun within constraints (which interestingly enough helped me later to write my resume.) I also was forced to write a whole lot of stuff in a relatively short period of time.

I still hated that stupid outlined situation. And that book.

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Thoughts on Characterization

By on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

I know that this is the first time that I have used this site for anything other than posting portions of stories. But I originally intended it to be a much more comprehensive collection of my thoughts and ideas when I started it. I had a thought about how I tend to write characters and started to squeeze it into a facebook status, but it was not to be contained in such an abbreviated format. So here are my current thoughts on character, with some behind the scenes information about Without a Name (which hopefully you can expect more of soon).

Character has always been something of a struggle for me, whether I am trying to tell a story or play a role-playing game. One of the problems is inherent in the way that I write (or play) much of the time. I don’t do a lot of preparation and tend to just jump in where I see the action happening and explore what happens as it ‘happens’ on page (or in game). Which tends to work out pretty well for me as I think faster than I write and can usually keep ahead of myself and that helps to maintain my energy level and interest in what I am writing and I am constantly surprising myself with little gems of information. But it means that I don’t always (read almost never) come up with backstory for my characters unless the character actively ends up exploring their own past. This means my characters are often without a proper framework through which to explore the world save for my own experiences and gut instincts as to how ‘they’ would act.

I often find that it is difficult to flesh out my characters history when I try and so I tend to focus on the character at the moment, attitudes and opinions divorced from past experience. (How important can the details of an unremarkable past really be–I say tongue-in-cheek.) However, as a result my characters are all filtered through my own experiences without a lens of their own to help me focus them, this often leads to my characters feeling very similar even if they have different roles and attitudes. (Mind you, usually they won’t all act the same though they did in one of the stories I wrote, Wingless, because all the characters were, before the story began, essentially boring teenagers in a generally normal world that I didn’t care about and still don’t really know how to deal with.) On top of that my characters all apparently tend to sound like me. (Or so I have been told, I have trouble seeing this particular problem because I’m perfectly comfortable with my idiosyncrasies of vocabulary and word choice and so they don’t register as out of the ordinary to me.)

I have recently been working on Wingless but the lack of characterization kept showing up in problems with the dialog and with the very structure of the plot. So I have set that aside until I can figure out what to do about it. But it got me thinking about my other stories and I evaluated Without a Name with that in mind. And I think I avoided much of problem that has made Wingless so difficult for me.

For Without a Name I came up with a situation for the main character before I came up with anything else. Which is somewhat unusual, but I think that it was very useful to me as I have been writing it. I had this image of a young girl covered in dirt and sitting under a table in a nicely furnished house where everyone pretended she wasn’t there. I knew that this girl was somehow very powerful, so I jotted down a quick scene where a man was tasked with finding this important girl named Underfoot, this later became the prologue. And when I was searching for something to write about in the last two weeks of NaNoWriMo 2008 I found that scene and remembered the image and it exploded into this story. Underfoot channels and amplifies all of my insecurity and reliance on other people, but she has her own reasons and experiences for me to draw on and I hope that makes her at least somewhat relateable as a character.

The other problem that I have with character voice through dialog are compounded by the fact that the majority of the draft that has been posted here so far was written in the course of one week. But this problem is much easier to overcome than actual lack of character and I hope to solve that in later drafts by taking more care with my word choice in dialog and developing more voices.

I hope that this piece has at least been interesting. I must say that I had forgotten how much I rely on parentheticals when I am writing without turning on my ‘formal’ academic style. (Mind you I have lots of parentheticals even then, they are just usually switched to comma parenthesis rather than full parenthesis.)

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