Posts – No More Than Pen and Ink

My Journey to Appreciating Comic Books

By Marlin on Friday, April 1, 2016

I didn’t understand comic books for the longest time. They weren’t present in my childhood. I never went down to the local comic store or followed new issues. I don’t even know that I was ever given comics that I can recall. Sure I was aware of the genre but as with many things I didn’t experience as a child (Power-Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elvis) I thought of them as childish, artless expressions of simple ideas that must not be worth engaging with simply because they weren’t part of my world. Around the time that I went to college I started to think more deeply about art and story and in the process came to realize that if I wanted people to set aside their prejudices about genres and media that I enjoyed I should make an effort to explore and understand the value of media that I thought of as ‘beneath me’. So I did some research on what works were considered the best works in comics and came up with Watchmen by Alan Moore and the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. I got my hands on them and read them. In short order I was blown away. Those works caused me to rethink my position on comics entirely. Thankfully my distrust of the value of power-rangers and ninja turtles was not similarly affected by the experience.

Watchmen was a brutally adult take on the super-hero concept. Wrapped in layers of depth in storytelling, steeped in awareness of genre tropes and the realities of humanity and the ethos of the cold war it masterfully told a story like nothing I had experienced before. The short chapter-sized issue chunks of story were tightly wound with personal arcs interwoven with text notes that laid groundwork for the past of the world and a whole parallel story of a boy sitting in a city street reading a comic that seems to be completely unrelated until everything is pulled together at the end. It was amazing. The characters felt real, the struggles were harsh, and the art was used to tell this story in a way that other media would struggle with. If you have seen the movie based on this graphic novel it fails to capture the depth of the impact by losing the Black Freighter mini story and the interstitial in-world notes between chapters which couldn’t be incorporated due to length as well as by losing the humanity of the characters by ignoring the fact that none of the characters other than Doctor Manhattan have any sort of superpowers and choosing to show the characters as hyper-competent fighters able to take super-human abuse which detracts from how frail they are as people.

Sandman was my introduction to Neil Gaiman, and to the DC comics universe, both of which I thank it for completely. It is a fantastically mythic journey through the world of Dream. It starts out presenting itself as a serial collection of horror comics with the immortal personification of Dream as the connection linking the stories together but as it comes together it becomes a timeless tale of humanity through myth and story. The first volume of stories collected in Sandman Vol 1: Fables & Nocturnes bring in other DC heroes like Constantine and Martian Manhunter as well as Cain and Abel who were hosts of pulp era DC Horror variety comics, but as the story evolves it leaves the DC universe and involves itself in much deeper mythologies. In full attendance are gods and myths from all around the world, presented side by side in wonderfully imaginative, disturbing and human stories. We have ancient deities, DC comic heros, Mark Twain, Shakespeare and G.K. Chesterton all entering stories involving Dream and the rest of his Endless family of personified concepts. It is expansive and mythic in scope encompassing a wide variety of experiences. I was completely hooked on comics as a genre and Neil Gaiman as a fantasist in one fell swoop.

After these experiences I sat in the metaphoric room of my mind feeling my perception of the world fall apart around me. The form was definitely valid as art and a means of storytelling. I would later go on to perform the same feat of prejudice smashing with superhero comics, anime, manga, tabletop roleplaying games and did similar analysis of horror which I still fail to see the value in and rap which I find quite amazing as a form, but have had a much more difficult time of finding examples that I could enjoy due to either content or personal taste.

Since my initial foray into comics I have read a variety of other comics of varying degrees of quality. There are always examples of a genre done poorly that can be confused with the quality of the genre or form that it is presented in by those outside the genre. I would like to explain some of the ways that I think comic content has value. What it does well can be described with the trite cliche that “a picture is worth a thousand words” even if you may not appreciate the comic book aesthetic, but there is a wide variety of art styles available to the genre though the need to draw so many pictures to tell a story will always lend to a more simple and “cartoonish” style. But the ability to use character posture and expressions combined with the background, lighting and color scheme to portray meaning and emotion even without any text is powerful. When combined skillfully with dialog and narrative description it can become an impressive synthesis. Giving a very flexible and inexpensive framework to present imaginative scenarios that would be costly, inefficient, or impossible to present in other media.

The same value proposition that makes it cheaper to produce than a film and easier to consume than a novel allows for rapid iteration and consumption of ideas. Though it does also lend itself to formula. It combines the power of exploring new ideas of a short story with the ability to string shorter stories together into longer arcs that can be followed throughout. Comics experiment a lot, the storytelling style has changed a lot from the early days of the golden age of comics just as popular fiction has changed since the days of pulp. There certainly are awful comics that don’t leverage their strengths or childish stories meant to drive sales to people who have less desire for quality or consistency in their consumption but there are also awful and childish novels and movies or whatever your favorite genre of storytelling is.

One last point that I would like to make about the genre is the distinction between comics and graphic novels. Comics are a serial format consisting of issues of generally 20-40 page each issue telling a single story, frequently these individual issues have come to be part of larger stories told in sequence progressing in larger collections of 5-12 issues analogous to a single novel in a series which could then be part of a larger continuing arc of connected stories. Graphic novel was a term specifically referring to a longer whole work intended to be self-contained and not serialized, but it has come to also refer to the collected volumes published containing a single storyline or part of a storyline from a serially released comic as well.

Comics are a valuable genre and there are many different kinds of stories being told in the form. Don’t let prejudice or a narrow experience of a small part of the medium turn you off. There is definitely worthy art to be found in the comic form.

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Stars and the Spaces Between: Thoughts About Reviewing

By Marlin on Friday, March 18, 2016

Looking out at the night sky you see countless points of light, stars shining down on the world. Each its own giant body far, far away giving only a glimmer of its true self. The five-star review scale is similar: visible and more interesting than nothingness, but hiding vast unknowable shapes behind a tiny point of light. I am conflicted about giving starred ratings. On the one hand I find that it is a useful and understandable metric of something; though whether that something should be enjoyment or quality (both of which are subject to personal bias and perception and should therefore never be treated as entirely objective) changes depending on individual and circumstance. On the other hand they say so little that without explaining the bounds of the scale and the metrics used they mean nothing. So I write up reviews to go with my star rating, the stars provides a quick and easily scannable metric, the review provides grounding for it and explains the thoughts that led to that conclusion. I thought it would be a good idea to explain the metrics and process that I aspire to use when writing reviews.

I try to use my starred ratings as an indication of how much I appreciate the work, with an eye towards understanding what it is trying to be and rating it on how well it achieves those goals. I used to be a little more effusive about my favorite authors and genres, handing out five star reviews much more frequently but have recently backed away from handing out four and five stars without first digging deeper to see the weaknesses in a work. My goal is to be critical, not just an effusive fanboy. Pushing the scale to the top doesn’t give as much room to indicate when something is truly exceptional. As such I have been trying to limit my five star ratings to works that are qualitatively excellent and/or exceptionally effective.

In the review I try to point out both what I think the high and low points of the story are, what it does best even when I disliked it and vice-versa. I want to be fair and generally a story has to do something right to get published. I will admit that I tend to find that it is more enjoyable writing a scathing response to a story I have a disagreement with. For example I really enjoyed writing my review of Altered Carbon and wrote it almost immediately after finishing the story; I had a pent up well of reactions to that story and I really wanted to get them out. I want to be that excited and thorough in defending a story that I like.

My goal is to be informative and insightful about the experience contained in the work I review, I want to explain what I liked and disliked specifically about the work in a respectful and clearly readable format without revealing too much off the mystery of the story. In the process I may also use it as an opportunity to reflect and respond to the general ideas that the work is presenting. I struggle sometimes with fiction, particularly genre fiction, with whether I should explicitly state what I think the underlying message is, in some cases this is fair, but frequently I don’t think it is fair to treat a work of literature as a message. Even when a work of fiction conveys ideas and perspectives, it is not necessarily presenting an argument.

I try to avoid giving a mere plot summary, I want to engage the story with what it is trying to do and how it does it: with addressing the parts of the story and the ideological backing not with explaining the narrative, though as part of that it is generally necessary to present a synopsis of the premise. I try to present an argument, but I think I frequently fail to do this coherently. I suspect that I should adhere more firmly to the academic thesis->support->conclusion format.

I wanted to set out some of my thoughts on how I review so I could be more aware of what I am doing and hopefully leverage that to make my reviews better. Next up: I review my review of reviewing and determine that I have gone too far and the universe has collapsed.

Oops.

Have a great weekend

Marlin

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Project: Mouse Story

By Marlin on Friday, March 11, 2016

When I started reading more at the beginning of the year the goal was to get back to writing more. It was my love of reading that got me into writing in the first place. So I decided that I was going to read more, write about what I’m reading and work my way up to writing more stories myself. Just like I hadn’t been entirely not reading, I have been working on stories in bits and pieces but I want to be more consistent about it. If you have been looking around this website at all you may have noticed that I added progress bars to the sidebar for my current writing projects. As you can see I am still working sporadically on rewriting my YA fantasy novel Underfoot, and I’ve started planning an “Untitled Mouse Story”.

The idea came to me when I was thinking about stories I loved as a child in reference to stories that I could tell for my children. I thought about Redwall and the countless hours I had as a child and young adult living in that world with those friendly woodland creatures. Initially I thought that there wasn’t much to be done in the genre of anthropomorphic animal fantasy that hasn’t already been done, but then I remembered that it is silly to think that way and of course that are plenty of things to explore and it doesn’t really matter if it gets compared to Redwall anyway so I started to think about the things that I liked about that world and the things that I could do with anthropomorphic animals and came up with a few ideas for a setting that I really liked.

I wanted to have realistic size differences between the animals and more animal-like characteristics as opposed to the diminished size difference and largely anthropomorphic nature of Brian Jacques animals. I wanted to play with the sense of wonder and scale that could evoke. I realized that this would make the world more brutal and dangerous than Jacques setting, as the natural predators to the smaller animals would be truly terrifying from the perspective of the prey, but I also liked that so I started coming up with ways that would shape the world. In the process of Google image searching for inspiration I stumbled upon Mouse Guard a comic that sounds like it takes a similar direction to what I was looking for, with a whole mouse country protected by a dedicated collection of guardmice defending it from outside threats. I really liked the way the art looked and there was also a Mouse Guard tabletop RPG where you play a Mouse in the Mouse Guard (which sounded awesome so I bought it because I have a weakness for collecting tabletop RPG books, someday the kids will be old enough to play with me, someday.)

I haven’t had a chance to read any of the Mouse Guard books yet so I don’t really know how they play out, but I still want to play around with a setting in the same vein and I don’t believe anything like Brian Jacques strange insistence on not reading anything for fear of being influenced by it (which probably explains how every Redwall book ended up being very similar). My understanding of the creative process leaves room to borrow and modify concepts others have used and to create in a larger context.

So I stared drawing up some ideas and figuring out a direction I wanted to go with the concept. I am leaning towards making the setting reminiscent of the American frontier because I thought that would fit the blend of wild and dangerous but still with some civilization that I wanted too evoke. Also because I had an image in my mind of rat inventors running a industrial foundry where they experiment with machines and create weapons, traps and other mechanical devices. I want to lean towards the animal side of anthropomorphism, with grasping hands and tool use, but probably not much in the way of clothing or upright walking.

So far I have a main character who is a mouse named Veil who leaves the more civilized land to come to the frontier to start a new life with his two childmice and finds that he has exchanged the familiar dangers of living in the city with the new dangers of living in the wild and he has to learn how to make it work while still keeping his family safe. Veil discovers a rag-tag band of heroes trying to protect the settlers from carnivores and other dangers and becomes the first mouse to join their ranks. Its going to be an adventure story with animal heroes fighting against stronger foes and surviving through perseverance, ingenuity, and cooperation.

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An (Attempted) Defense of Fantasy

By Marlin on Thursday, August 26, 2010

This post has been reworked from a paper from last year.

When asked about my occupation I find myself dreading the invariable string of questions that follow my admission to being a writer: “what do you write,” they always ask, and then I have to admit that generally I write fantasy fiction (though I have taken to saying ‘fantastic fiction’ to include some of my other works), which is just not something you do in polite society. Other questions often follow: they ask things like “have you written anything worth-while?” (as if fantasy fiction itself is not worth their time) or “what made you decide to write fantasy?” (like it was a bad decision). These seemingly simple questions bring up a whole morass of hidden assumptions that plague my field. Fantasy fiction is invariably looked down upon by both art critics, literary professors, and often even by the ordinary man on the street. Many, if not most, people consider fantasy to be mere escapism, not worthy of serious consideration and certainly not worthy of a serious writer, but there is value in fantasy fiction that is often overlooked. There are truths that can more easily be communicated in a world well constructed separate from our own.

The first thing that has to be recognized to come to a clear understanding of fantasy is that there is more to fantasy fiction than scantily clad women in fabulously impractical ‘armor’, hulking men with huge swords, and antagonists who invariably return from the dead. While these things have become iconic of the genre, and admittedly have influenced more than their fair share of works, the heart of the genre is about a lot more. At it’s heart Fantasy is about looking at the world through a new lens; about comparison and contrast, about seeing the details of our own world reflected against an alien background; about showing what it means to be human in a world that has different stresses than our own.

When an author starts writing fiction their goal is to draw the reader into another world, whether that world resembles the world the reader lives in or not. As the author does this he is forced to focus his interpretation on specific aspects of the world; it is impossible to portray every aspect of the real world in a fictional setting. As such the author interprets the world as he sees it and focuses his interpretation into a ‘false reality’; with respectable generic fiction this reality is often assumed to be closer to the truth, but by being ‘closer’ to the truth it also hides the differences between it and truth. By presenting a reality that is clearly differentiated from our own fantasy gives the reader a better contrasted background against which to draw out the truth. Fantasy fiction allows the author to place events in a context of differing ethics, politics, and assumptions which allows the author to play out human psychology in situations that are impossible in the real world and which can bring revelation of human nature closer to the surface. The more literary-inclined might say that this is merely the easier way to achieve clarity of truth, but when you look at the detail necessary to create a believable and interactive world that differs from our own—that claim rings false. It might be less nuanced, but that doesn’t make it simpler or less true.

Worldbuilding takes a lot of effort to accomplish well: the author should take into account many aspects of human psychology, physiology, and sociology as he constructs a believable sense of humanity against a backdrop of different geographies, biologies, politics, religions, even physics. Every aspect of the world around them affects an individual human in different ways, the equations to figure out the human mind become more complicated the farther you move from reality.

Another misconception is that fantasy fiction is easier to write because you can just make anything up and it will work, but fantasy still bears the burden of plausibility, in fact it bears the burden even stronger than most other forms of fiction. Fantasy relies on the reader being willing to suspend their disbelief and enter another world; to do this effectively the author needs to give the reader reason to suspend disbelief; the author needs to give the reader a world which the reader can accept as possible for the story to be effective. As soon as the author loses internal consistency—the reader has left the world and the structure of the story is shattered. An author writing in a world that is exactly like our own does not bear as heavy a responsibility; he just has to stay true to what can actually happen and the reader will generally be willing to go along with it. Fantasy fiction is certainly not easier to write than it is to write any other type of story. Every genre has its own difficulties, weaknesses, and strengths, but they all require a certain level of effort and skill to do well.

Another conception about fantasy is the belief that escapism is necessarily and always a bad thing. I’m not saying that this is necessarily wrong, I myself try not to engage in mere escapism. But I would like to raise the question. In our own world situations are so complex that we often have difficulty separating the right decisions from the wrong. This complicated web of muddled perceptions and difficult decisions is a confusing and frustrating mess. Sometimes it is nice to be able to take a step back into a world where absolute truth is easier to find, where evil can be recognized by the color of their robes, and where decisions are easier to make. Escape in that sense could even possibly bring clarity to situations when the reader comes back into his own world. But even if it doesn’t it certainly can provide moments of relaxation away from the troubles of reality by showing the reader a world where troubles are much more obvious but just as expansive, where evil is clearly delineated, and where good will actually triumph. All of these things can bring a sense of peace and relaxation into an otherwise tense and hectic world. Whether it is in a right or wrong way, fantasy gives us hope.

Fantasy is often looked down upon as a lesser form of art, if it is considered to be art at all. While it may be true that many of the representatives of the genre do not present works of high art, the same can be said of practitioners of literary fiction, general fiction, and any other genre you could consider. The genre itself has just as much artistic potential as any other. Inferior works of art have been created in all genres, persuasions, and languages. To dismiss the artistic potential of an entire genre based on the flaws of a few, or even many, specific instances is not a fair assessment. There are great writers who have made use of the fantasy genre. I need only point to Tolkien and George MacDonald to prove that the potential exists (If I were trying to make this a more solidly supported paper I should probably back that claim up with actual support, but since this is just a blog post I’ll let it slide).

Fantasy fiction has its place, it might not be the most important genre, but let it not be said that it is silly, trivial, or completely lacking artistic potential. It can bring out truth about humanity, it can communicate ideas and philosophies, and it can provide relaxation. All of these things are worthy goals and I spend hours doing the best that I can to create artistic, believable, and consistent worlds through which to explore serious concepts that have real bearing on this world. Do not dismiss what I do just because it is ‘fantastic’. Give it a chance. Read it before you make a decision.

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The Author/Text/Reader Relationship

By Marlin on Tuesday, August 24, 2010

In the first semester of my freshman year I was enrolled in ENG 112 “Critical Approaches to Literature” a class which was designed to be the foundation of the literature major at Geneva College (and was also required of writing majors). In the class we explored different schools of criticism (and had to write papers attempting to use some of them). We started with a whirlwind historical survey that covered the great thinkers on literature and then we launched into the real study of the theories of Literary Criticism we would have to imitate: New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction and the various forms of “Special Interest Criticism” (Marxist, Feminist, Cultural and Gender Studies). This class was my first C partially because of an ideological struggle that I had with the theories and my timidity at going beyond mere description of what the texts plainly said (after all, I was a freshman and these were great writers like Nathanial Hawthorne and Walt Whitman). I got over the timidity after this class, realizing that I would have to make assertions (no matter how ridiculous or obvious to me) and ‘back them up’ with textual support (however tenuous) to get good grades (and none of my professors ever called me on BS).

For those of you who don’t know what these theories of criticsim are I will give you a brief summary (albeit filtered through my own perceptions). New Criticism seeks to explore the form divorced from context and the author, looking at nothing other than the work in question and the techniques it employs, seeking to divine truth from the form of the work. Structuralism is an application (I struggled really hard not to add ‘mis-‘ to the beginning of ‘application there, but managed not to. And then negated that success by writing this parenthetical, ah well) of Sassure’s linguistic theory that words are merely signs of what is signified and treats the text as an encoded artifact to which the reader applies binary oppositions that create the meaning for the reader (such as Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Man/Woman) again, it is focused on the form (though in this case of meaning) and what the reader gets out of the text. Deconstruction takes structuralism and tries to show that the opposite of any binary pairing is equally valid (so Truth=Lies, Hate=Love and Evil=Good). And the Special Interest Criticisms try to show how various groups are repressed through the work. None of these systems of understanding literature (or any form of art) care about the author and all try to impose their own ideas onto the text.

In my notes I have sketches of the author-text-reader triangle for each of these forms (the triangle is just a way of visualizing how these views relate the different elements, drawn as a triangle with the privileged party at the top) they all have the reader or the text at the top. For New Criticism the triangle has the Text at the top and in my notes I have written in big ostentations script the words “The Text Knows More Than Its Creator” and across the page in distinction I have the triangle as I used to see it with the Author on the top and the words “The Author Owns Your Mind” and in smaller print “and the text”. At the time I was struggling to understand the relationship between the artist and the reader and the art. As a creator and someone who has always had great respect for the creator of works (and as a Christian who believes in an absolute creator) I found it difficult accept that the author had no role other than as a vehicle of blind production of platforms for the exposition of other people’s ideas. The author could not be ignored. At the time I may have over-reacted and gone too far in de-emphasizing the role the reader plays in the creative act.

Since that class, which opened my mind to the world of literary criticism and the intellectual reader-games that the elite play with texts, I have come to what I think is a somewhat more mature understanding of how art works. The author creates the text, which is infused with the way that he thinks and views the world, the text then takes that view to the reader who then interprets the text in light of his own view of the world. This is inherent in the way our minds work. And it is a beautiful, interactive (almost collaborative) process that mirrors the absolute work of art that is God’s creation: God created and we are right now engaging with and interpreting his work in a cycle of incomplete understanding until the day all truth will be revealed. I think that it is the duty of the intelligent truth-seeker to use the text to get at the truth of what the author was trying to say. But I also think that it is the duty of the reader to seek out the truth in any text even when the author was aiming at lies, and that there will, by the grace of God, be truth hidden in any creative work beyond what the author intended. So nowadays I draw the triangle as a straight line with the text between the author and the reader (with God at the top), or I flip it so that the text is on the bottom and both the author and the reader are on top–and then I remove the line between author and reader.

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My Relation to Media

By Marlin on Thursday, August 19, 2010

This post came about in part because of this this post by Rosemary.

I was thinking about my life and how I spend my time. At the moment I am unemployed and searching for a job while I write. I have a lot of free time. Which I should spend doing more writing–one of the reasons I started posting here is that I am trying to make reasons to spend more time writing. The free time that I have is taken up almost exclusively by various different story media. I read a lot of books, I watch a lot of TV and movies, I play video games, and I read comics (both web-comics and graphic novels). Looking at that list one would generally think that these are all ways to pass the time and entertain myself. But they have another thing in common as well. They are all ways that story can be experienced. They each have different limitations and strengths, and each have stories that can be best told through them, but many of them come under attack for being less worthy or not artistic (as opposed to older forms such as novels). I can see an argument for not liking some of the media based on preference, but dismissing an entire medium as not worthy or inherently not artistic is a very arrogant thing to do. I would know, I used to do it all the time.

I started out as a book kid, always reading, devouring anything that I could get my hands on, stories of all kinds. I read the standard books intended for my age, plus classics, fantasy, mystery and science fiction intended for adults, and even books intended for girls (including but not limited to selections from the American Girl series.) I didn’t think about why I took to these stories so quickly, or what inspired me to devour such a broad selection. But looking back on it I know that I did it to experience the wonder and joys of things outside myself, it was part escapism, part exploration, and part education. I wanted to learn, to experience, to discover new places and ideas. Books provided a great way to do that. And story is a natural framework for that exploration. From this initial immersion in books I gained a love of all things bookish, of stories in general, and a desire to be able to produce that same kind of experience for others.

As I was growing up with books my mom would often watch Mystery TV shows based on books, and BBC productions of Jane Austen novels and such. Also I was of an age that I experienced the adaptation of the Lord of the Rings novels (which were quite foundational to my youth) into movies. I was initially quite distrusting of this media: it was interesting to experience your favorite stories as moving pictures with all the details of image and setting fleshed out, but it was often unsatisfying. The pictures weren’t MY pictures and the adaptations always left out stuff that was important. It seemed to me that these were just not as good as books. As I matured and experienced more stories that were originally created for that medium I realized that it wasn’t that the medium was inferior, but that the medium required more attention to pacing and generally a shorter, more immediate plot. But it was very strong as a story communication tool because it was detailed, visual and created a more comprehensive sensory experience. You could react emotionally not just to the situation and how you imagined it, but also to the emotions the actors were displaying, the visual setting and the music. I came to accept the Lord of the Rings movies as adaptation and realized that it was very good for what it was (which was not the books.) And when I got to college and my free time and attention span were curtailed I dove headlong into the world of cinema and television series (often neglecting my old print world) and while I desired a level of quality that Hollywood does not often meet, I enjoyed a different perspective on story and again experienced many new ideas, characters and places.

At this point I think it would be worthwhile to mention my experience with cartoons. In my last year of high school I had friends online who talked a lot about different anime (Japanese animated TV serieses) initially I just thought the art style looked stupid and it was odd and foreign and therefor couldn’t be very good. After all I was seeing bits and pieces of the Pokemon and Naruto, which looked very juvenile and were generally poorly voice acted and translated. However the debate got so heated between some of my friends online that I decided it would be best if I experienced what this branch of media had to offer. I got some suggestions from my friends who were into that kind of stuff and I went out and watched Ghost in the Shell (which was excellent and deep), Bleach (which was pretty good at first but fell into poor execution particularly in filler story-lines), Fullmetal Alchemist (which was brilliant), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (which is either really deep and artistic or just very confused). They were very different from anything I had experienced before. But there was good story in there, there were things worth watching. And the foreign viewpoint was very refreshing. I was shocked to discover that there was art here. Even cheaply (when compared to Disney studios, us Americans are spoiled when it comes to animation) animated cartoons in different languages could tell worthwhile stories. If that was the case then anything could be worthwhile. I have had far less edifying experience with American cartoons, Disney animated movies tend to be almost worthwhile and Avatar: The Last Airbender was very surprisingly excellent. But given the state of American television animation it is no surprise that all television animation is seen as not worthwhile as art.

At college I also had the pleasure of experiencing and participating in theater (on a college level, but still not bad). As a bookish person I always had a high respect for plays, I had read Shakespeare and others. They were older and therefore definitely a respectable medium. But I didn’t fully understand what went in to it as a medium until I practiced my lines and character and then got up on stage and felt the audience reacting. Theater is beautiful because the experience isn’t the same twice and the audience contributes to the performance. The limitations are quite obvious, staging and effects somewhat limit what can and cannot be done and there can be difficulty in getting enough people together as both actors and audience to make it worthwhile. But the strengths are also very pronounced: it is an active and current moment of story living and breathing before you, which can create an astoundingly powerful experience if handled correctly.

I had always been dismissive of comic books and graphic novels when I was a kid and through high-school. What I saw of them were very juvenile and didn’t try to be anything other than mindless entertainment. To say nothing of the stupid costumes every comic-book hero seemed required to wear. Based on those interactions I rejected the graphic novel medium as nothing more than comic books dressed up for adults, made to look more mature. Picture books were for kids who didn’t have the mental capacity and attention span to read real stories. I read webcomics, but I never thought of them as particularly artistic (even if Megatokyo is a fascinating exploration of the relationship between reality and imagination and Girl Genius is just a very good story) mostly they were just a way to pass the time and get to a quick punchline. Then I saw a movie trailer for the Watchmen movie and thought it looked interesting. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that the graphic novel it was based on it had apparently won and award for best novel. . . and it was in comic form. So I picked up a copy and read it. And was blown away. This was a real novel, I could not deny the form. It WAS a novel. It just happened to be graphic. It was mature, artistic and deeply evocative of human condition and a particular era. After that I dove into Niel Gaiman’s Sandman Graphic novels which are just as good if not better than Watchmen.

I will admit that video games for me started as a fun way to pass the time. To play at being a cyborg space marine, to solve puzzles, and lead Briton armies against those dastardly Franks. I passed Age of Empires (an RTS) off as expanding my historical knowledge (which it really did), Myst as expanding my critical thinking and puzzle solving skills (which it did) and Halo as just being about the challenge of surviving (balancing ammunition and shields while using available cover to remove threats which would deplete my health) but I really was just playing them for fun. But as I experienced a wider range of video games: Bioshock, Portal, Mass Effect. I began to realize that even video games were a viable medium for story (and art) in an interactive way. Some of these games crossed the boundary between waste of time and worth-while story. Largely this isn’t the case, and many game developers aren’t reaching for the heights that they could. But there is definitely potential there, I just hope more people take advantage of it.

Anyway, this has turning into a quite long post, and each of the sections could easily be expanded at a later time into whole posts if not essays of their own. Basically, I would urge everyone to not reject something because of the way it looks. Explore it and see if there is actually any value in it before you reject it. Story is a very flexible thing, it can show up in many forms.

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

By Marlin 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 Christianity in Fiction

By Marlin on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Yesterday I was reading Smoke and Mirrors a collection of “Short Fictions and Illusions” by Neil Gaiman and I came across a story titled “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” which is in Gaiman’s words from the prologue of the collection:

“a story about a boy a lot like I was once and his relationship with fiction.”

The story centers around the character, a twelve year old boy named Richard and his obsession with the Elric of Melnibone stories by Michael Moorcock, which I admittedly know next to nothing about, save that they were pulp Sword and Sorcery stories from the ’60s and ’70s. But this quote about the philosophy of writing, particularly as it referenced C. S. Lewis really caught my attention.

“Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret) his belief in Narnia. From the age of six–for half his life–he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon. . .

This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him (. . .) Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.”

I remembered a quote I read in my last semester at Geneva College during my philosophy class about C.S. Lewis. In his essay “Christianity and Culture” Lewis attempts to come to a logical reason why it is acceptable if not necessary and good for a Christians such as himself to engage in creating culture (which in his context means writing stories and essays). He comes to an argument that states that he can, and even goes so far as to say that having some Christians among the ranks of those producing ‘culture’ (as he discusses the issue in the essay) is necessary and good. As part of his discussion he says that:

“In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must add that when I speak of ‘resisting the abuse of culture’ I do not mean that a Christian should take money for supplying one thing (culture) and use the opportunity thus gained to supply a quite different thing (homiletics and apologetics). That is stealing. The mere presence of Christians in the ranks of the culture-sellers will inevitably provide an antidote.”

I agree whole-heartedly with this statement. And it is one of the reasons that I generally frown on what I see as the tendency of fantasy authors who are Christians to both merely target a Christian audience and insist on following in Lewis’s steps by writing allegories of Christ’s death in fantasy. Mind you, since they are setting out to sell, as Lewis says “homiletics and apologetics” they are not necessarily “stealing”, but are they accomplishing as much as they could? I would say no. They certainly are not accomplishing what Lewis saw as good about Christian culture creators.

Lewis was not trying to defraud his readers or slip anything by them. But it could easily be claimed that that was his goal as Gaiman points out. Lewis’s use of strong allegorical elements in the Narnia books is an interesting balance. The Narnia books live on today in part because of these elements and the way that Christian readers have latched onto them, but at the same time they turn some people away. They are what they are because and in spite of the allegorical elements. When I started reading the Narnia books I felt in some ways that the allegorical elements were like a secret code, you could love the books if you weren’t a Christian, but if you were you felt a special connection to them because they were about more, and they were saying something to you that others might not get.

I am a Christian, I tell stories. My goal is not to hide my Christianity, nor is it to preach it through my stories. But I think that Christian art should be so much more than allegory (which the Narnia books were but everyone seems to forget because of the allegorical elements). A story written by a Christian cannot help but be Christian as it is reflecting a Christian perspective on the world and therefore allegory is not a necessary (and even possibly in this day and age a not particularly helpful tool). God created so much more of creation than just the culminating moment of catholic redemption that is Jesus’s death on the cross, he created all of creation and the whole scope of history, writing about any aspect of that can be glorifying to God. Christian art is about where the attribution lies, not the subject matter.

That said. There will always be something beneath the surface of a story. It is in the nature of fiction.

Anyway. This post is probably somewhat disjointed and I feel like it might be trying to say two different things at the same time. Which means that it is about on par with some of my hastily written papers for college. But I just wanted to get some of my thoughts out on paper. I do not claim to have proved anything or accomplished anything really useful in this post. Other than to quote some cool people.

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Thoughts on Characterization

By Marlin 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.)