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Category: Editing Rant
Editing Rant: Medium Matters
Photo 2865655 © R. Gino Santa Maria / Shutterfree, Llc | Dreamstime.com (Picture paid for)
“The movie isn’t as good as the book.” “I don’t know why people think this statue is so great, I mean look at this photo of it.” “This song is awful (when played on my phone).”
“Medium” in art covers both the skill set needed to create the art (painting, photography, scrapbooking, violin, orchestra), and the materials used to create the artwork (marble, wood, instrument).
And when judging art, Medium Matters. One of the most amazing books I read was an urban fantasy by Darin Kennedy, The Mussorgsky Riddle. The mystery centered around a piano suite in ten movements (Pictures at an Exhibition) written by Mussorgsky, inspired by paintings at a show in the Imperial Academy of Arts from Viktor Hartmann. Plot, piano, and paintings mixed together (and if you hear it on audiobook, another artist is added into the mix).
Not any one medium is better than the other, but being aware of the limitations can help one appreciate the transference of art from one medium to another. How is a painting different from a sculpture? What happens when pop music is played by an orchestra (as sometimes happens with songs by Queen)? Should we judge a book against a movie or are they two different things with two different audiences?
I recently heard people comparing a single book to the three-season television show which spun off it, saying the secondary characters, which developed as the television show ran beyond the original story, lacked depth in the book. No kidding. Yet both the book and the television show felt the same as they explored victory and growth, adulthood and loss.
Other conversations I had recently compared black and white movies to technicolor television. Comics to graphic novels – and I’m not talking about long comics, I’m talking about well-loved science fiction and fantasy novels translated to book format, for example “More than Human” by Theodore Sturgeon (published 1953) released as a hardback graphic novel in 1978. Each of these have their own particular imprint on my soul.
Pulling this back to writing and reading. Medium Matters. Figure out what best fits your story. Is it a flash (under 1,000 words) or novel (75,000 words)? Should it be shrunk to a short story (5,000 words) or will a novella length be better (20,000 words)? Will one hundred words, precisely, for a drabble be the right size? Should it be a play, or a serial? Could it work in audiobook, and, if so, should one person or a cast read it?
Choose the presentation of the story. Write it to the end, then carve it like a statue until only the parts that should be there remain.
Editing Rant: Know your Genre – Christmas Edition
Photo 31391356 | Bad Christmas Tree © Wojtek Kaczkowski | Dreamstime.com
The story I was reading was a Reverse Harem Superhero Christmas tale – ’tis the season and all. Somehow it manages to fall down on all three genres badly.
Reverse harems/Why Choose are basically three-for-one romances. The heroine falls in love with each of the potential love interests in turn, and they fall in love with her back. “Why Choose” sub-category is more about the romance, while “Reverse Harem” is more about the erotica. Each of the love interests (usually, but not exclusively male) should be different – individuals in their own rights – bringing a different set of character traits which match the heroine, filling a need in her, and she, in return, fills a different need in each of them. With one male, she might be strong and be by his side in battle, with the gender neutral mate, she and they might craft and create together, bouncing ideas off each other, and with the final “choice”, she could be the soft he needs, while he can be vulnerable with her. These books are so much fun to have the zing of falling in love three (or even more) times in a row, but they are hard to write – giving each couple a chance in the spotlight takes up time and requires a lot of work at pacing.
To save time, the author in this book always had the three potential love interests (PLIs) on screen together. The PLIs never had solo time, they always appear together, and they always did practically the same thing. Really, one PLI could have worked as well as three.
For the superhero genre, her powers had no impact on the story, were amorphous in their definition, and were hardly used. The plot would have been the same if she could fly or travel through time or turned purple.
For the Christmas part of the genre, the author was exploring someone who always had a bad time at Christmas. The Christmas genre is about found family, discovering joy, and gifts. At the end of the story, the reader should feel uplifted. It’s okay for the character to have a crappy time at the start of the story, but the plot should pull them out the other side with all the reasons to live. Instead, we end the tale nearly as desperate as w
It’s okay to turn tropes on end, pull from other genres to create new mashes, but you still need to deliver the POINT of the genre. Science fiction without science, Fantasy without magic, Romance without at least a Happily for Now – these are not genre.
Editing Rant: Lots is better than one
Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash
If you have been in the creative community any length of time, you might have heard the story about a pottery teacher. They ran an experiment, splitting the class in two – one group would have their grade based on the Best Piece, and the other group would have their grade based on the Amount of Pieces. (Variations on the story includes the grading period being a week to an entire term. Sometimes the group instructed to make a lot of pieces were told they could pick one out of the group to show as an example.)
What happens in the Best Piece group get stuck on their focus for perfection. They don’t have fun. They hardly make any art. And they do not experiment.
The group instructed to make lots, well, they had failures … and successes. They had some strange stuff as they explored different clays, and shapes, and techniques, and firing temperatures, and glazes. They had fun, made lot of art, and some of it was incredible. Overall they produced better art by making 20 or 50 pieces, then concentrating on just one.
I recently read several books by one author that showed her growth during a series of rapid releases in a two-year period. I actually do this a lot, reading several books by an author, because I want to see how authors grow over time. The first book tends to have first book issues. The second book straightens out some of them. But the fifth book, the author really has come into their own voice and style. And this progression is the same if the author did one book a year or all five books in the same year.
At this point, NaNoWriMo is nearly half over. Thousands of people around the world are writing incredibly messy first drafts. Some are going to spend a year (or ten) polishing the LIFE OUT OF THE STORY, until it is, in their view, perfection. Others will take this messy first draft, unfired, unedited, unglazed, and say it is good enough and publish it. But the real winners of NaNoWriMo are the ones who take a couple of draft passes, getting the story straight and correcting the grammar, send out the book to be beta, and then move onto the next story. Try a new genre, explore a new way to work a plot twist, extend the series – somehow they push themselves with their craft. When the NaNoWriMo manuscript comes back from beta, they polish the tale some more WITH THE NEW SKILLS they have picked up from the new story, and continue the process until it is GOOD ENOUGH to sell. Not perfect. But good enough. Now the polish process might take a year or two because Real Life demands its own time, but the point is they are attempting to produce like they are in the second group, making all the things, not in the first group, with one opus.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
You don’t learn to play an instrument working on just one song forever. You don’t learn to do embroidery by mastering one stitch. You don’t become a better painter with just one canvas you keep touching up.
And you don’t become a better writer with just one story.
Write long, write short. Write epically, write small. Write lyrically, write crap. But write.
Have a great NaNoWriMo – whatever word count you end up with – is still a count, and still counts.
Editing Rant: For the Win (Genre Expectations)
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
As I mentioned in February, “Romance is Fantasy”, one of the hardest things about editing is understanding underlying tropes/messages contained in your genre. I recently had an epiphany on how American Horror genre works while reviewing a Russian/Slavic style story.
First let me explain how Russian/Slavic stories work. While American stories are all about conquering, winning, being the best, happily ever after, Slavic stories vibrate with survival, perseverance. Endings are rarely happy – Winter is always coming and one day winter will win. A Slavic vibe acknowledges the System is hard to change. Nature eventually wins. Determination and perseverance is what is to be admired, not the actual Winning. Because everything that wins will eventually lose. Trying is what matters. And sometimes we need to hear that. Not everyone can be the best. Not every monster can be defeated. Not ever win is completely clean. The power is in the Trying.
Ivanova on Babylon Five captures the Russian feeling perfectly with “No Boom today, boom tomorrow, there is always a boom tomorrow.” It’s not depression, but an acceptance that eventually everything ends.
But inevitability of losing sets the American teeth on edge, even in the Horror format. In this culture, stories must have a happy ending. A WIN. But how does that work in American Horror? Well, at the end of every horror, book or movie, even when the creator hints at the monster not being fully defeated and will be coming back, we celebrate the Win of today. We get our Winning and Happy Ending. Everyone has the Chance to be President – the Best and Most Powerful. Sparkles and Unicorns.
Now here is where things get interesting. How American Horror finally clicked in my head.
Central to this Win of today at the end of an American Horror is a mirror-flip saying the Monster has a chance to Win someday too. It can and will come back.
Everything has a chance to pull itself to the Top by its bootstraps, even the monsters.
They can be the best they can be, this temporary setback isn’t the end.
I think this difference is why in American Horror the monsters are usually individuals with faces (or masks). Counterpoint, in the Slavic literature (horror and otherwise), monsters are systems and nature – faceless hordes and forces no individual can overcome, but together the group may persevere through the sacrifice of individuals for a while.
I’m a bit bubbly realizing how American Horror works. Happy for the Monsters. They too can do it. They can win, if they just keep trying. Good for them!