“Eight essential attributes of the short story” · Joy William
February 26, 2024 at 04:49PM
Comments closedTag: writing
Once I’ve found out what modes of behavior are most useful to the human race I show them to people and underline them. I show them in parables: if you act this way the following will happen, but if you act like that then the opposite will take place. This isn’t the same thing as committed art. At most pedagogics.
Bertolt Brecht, BRECHT ON THEATRE
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I’ve been asked before about the nature of what we call in comics WFH: Work For Hire. This is when one is hired to work on characters owned by the hiring company. The company owns whatever work you do outright, in return for payment: the old Marvel payment voucher used to assert that they owned all rights to the work “in perpetuity, throughout the universe.” The contracts may still state, as they once did, that Marvel Comics is the legal author of the work.
I entered the comics medium as creator and writer of original works. I had been invited to pitch a Batman piece to Archie Goodwin, which I did because Archie fucking Goodwin asked me to my face to write something for him, and Archie was a legendary writer and editor and when he asked you to do something you did it and tried very hard not to disappoint him.
(Archie once also said to me that one secret to longform superhero comics writing was that they were structured like soap operas, only with fight scenes instead of love scenes.)
Some people happily spend their entire careers in WFH, delighted to write the superhero characters they grew up with and to extend the arc of their stories. Some of us walked into it backwards and had to make adjustments. There are values to working in that area: it pays actual money, it sharpens your technical chops, it’s operating in relatively common culture (any issue of X-Men sells more copies than most novels I read), and you get to play around a bit.
So how do you approach something created by someone else, probably re-created by other people a dozen times, that you don’t own? If you’re a TV writer doing an episode of STAR TREK or LAW AND ORDER, you have a ton of guardrails and you obey and enjoy them. In comics, things are always a lot looser and more ad hoc, and one of the ways to think about it is F FOR FAKE.
The story goes that Orson Welles was hired to edit the footage of a documentary shot by a guy called Francois Reichenbach about a great art forger called Elmyr. Now, editing is its own kind of authorship, its own art and language – subordinate to the original piece, sure, but editing can change everything about and around it. As Welles got to work, so the story goes, he discovered he could do a better job by adding some things. At some point, the biographer of Elmyr whom Reichenbach interviewed on film was discovered to have produced a hoax biography of Howard Hughes. And then things took a turn. Welles grabbed Reichenbach, Gary Graver and Oja Kadar and turned Reichenbach’s footage into a film essay on fakery.
He was still doing the job of turning Reichenbach’s material into a film, mind you: technically, he was still as much a hired hand as anyone writing Batman.
F FOR FAKE is in fact one of my favourite Welles films. It’s warm, clever, mischievous and relaxed. He shoots footage of his own crew. Whole scenes are set around a dinner table as Welles holds court and contextualises the material. It’s as close to having dinner with a happy and garrulous Welles as we’ll ever get. It’s also full of Welles’ interests, obsessions, and personal mythology.
Reichenbach’s material is still in there. Reichenbach’s original intent – a film about Elmyr and forgery – is still in there. Welles serves the underlying material, but he expands it, grows it, adds something of himself into it. He did what he saw as the best possible work-for-hire job by transforming the material he was given into a form he felt was more true to itself and to him.
Taking the work done by other people and infusing it with your interests, obsessions and your notes for experiments. So, yes, you’re experimenting with other people’s money. But since that money is buying your material outright, and they have the right to make you clean up your lab and produce something closer to their desires in the event you produce a three-balled monstrosity, it’s a fair exchange.
In Welles’ case, he makes F FOR FAKE: perhaps a minor work in his oeuvre, but a wonderful experiment in filmic lyric essay. And he did it off a work-for-hire job.
So there are ways into work for hire, ways where you can do the job of repainting a house you don’t own, experiment and learn a whole bunch of new things on their dime, sign your work, apply your new skills and discoveries to your own work later and get shit done with your creative soul left intact.
It can be hard to gain perspective on work for hire, if you find yourself in that position. Maybe this will be useful. Or maybe I just found you a good film to watch.
Originally written for my newsletter, 19 November 2023
Comments closedWHOniverse Script Library, they call it. Looks like a couple of hundred teleplays in there.
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Actually picked this up yesterday. Here’s why I picked it up:
I wanted to keep alive the nature of my practice, which is to travel the question rather than try to answer it, and then to unsettle my subjects so that they tilted a little as in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘… tipping/of an object toward the light’. My intention has been to draw things to the surface, place them in arrangement while keeping the parts apart, and to leave the reader free to cast their own light and to turn these things over in their own mind as I have in mine. I’ve come to think of this form as the exploded essay, and a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge. Each is a series of short texts that cast light on one another rather like the aspects of a poem. They align artworks, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny, reminiscence and a poet’s response.
The Exploded Essay. Sold.
Comments closedComments closedIf we crave truth unmediated by art we are chasing a phantom. We need the commentator’s craft, even to make sense of the news. We need historians, not to collect facts, but to help us pick a path through the facts, to meaning. We need fiction to remind us that the unknown and unknowable is real, and exerts its force. Some writers and adaptors disclaim responsibility. They say the public wants escapism – so let’s give them what they want. They cheat their audience as politicians cheat when they make uncosted pledges: the bill comes later, when we lose a grip on our own story, and fall into individual distress and political incoherence.
Hilary Mantel, in Remarkable Minds: A Celebration of the Reith Lectures (BBC Radio 4)
In this first lesson Valéry announces with all the solemnity of a shibboleth a dictum he had coined years before in the Cahiers, “L’œuvre de l’esprit n’existe qu’en acte” (the work of the mind exists only as act), by which he means two things. There is the obvious first meaning: a piece of music exists only when performed, a choreography when danced; a painting needs to be looked at, a poem to be read or read aloud.
But for Valéry it also means that the centre of interest is always situated some way upstream of the poem, the painting or the score, in the transformation and response, triggered by an initial stimulus, in the body of the artist himself. The stimulus may be a contrast of two colours, a disposition of planes in a landscape or a repeated sound, all of which excite a response in the creative mind. Insisting on the idea that an organism seeks a return to equilibrium after receiving a stimulus, Valéry often describes this process in the mind (the “act” described above) as an imbalance to be corrected, a symmetry to be restored or a dissonance to be resolved. For the artist the work of art can be the means by which a return to equilibrium is brought about.
Valéry attempts to give an ordered “map” of what he called the “implexe”, essentially a physiological reflex translated onto the conceptual and image-making plane of the mind. His ambition is to produce an esthétique généralisée, just as Einstein, whom he knew and admired, had produced a theory of general relativity.
Stephen Romer, TLS
Comments closedThe most-often repeated piece of advice in visual storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” As I have railed before, this leads to the most egregious repeating moment in television: “You need to see this,” someone is told over a communications device, and then it cuts to that person standing with some other people looking at the thing they apparently need to see. This is because the writers have had “show, don’t tell” dinned into their heads.
AND THEN SOMEONE TELLS THEM WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING AT ANYWAY.
Seriously, pick any bit of action tv, particularly streaming, and see if it happens in exactly that way. See how many times it happens. See how many times it happens in a single episode.
It’s a principle. Not a rule. Everyone else may treat it like a rule, but it’s not and you don’t have to.
There’s a bit in the old British show WAKING THE DEAD where crime scene manager Frankie tells prickly insane Detective Superintendent Boyd over a radio link, “Boyd, you need to see this.” And Boyd yells “Just bloody tell me!” Whoever wrote that is my comrade.
It slows things down. You need to choose slowing things down, not accepting it because you think there’s a rule that must be followed.
Like most things, show-don’t-tell is fine in its place. But it’s not connective tissue. It’s a bad end-of-scene gambit, it eats up useful time, it’s so over-used that it creates no anticipation or potential energy any more, and it’s not interesting. Images and words can strike sparks off each other with their frictions. The words can be telling a slightly different story than the image, and thereby enrich each other with meaning. If you want emotion, then emotion comes in the telling of something, not always the showing of it. Show don’t tell is a tool, not a rule – choose when to use it and you’ll surprise your audience.
-from my newsletter, 10 September 2023
Comments closedI remember a piece by Harry Harrison – maybe in HELL’S CARTOGRAPHERS – where he had to explain to his mother in law that when he was sitting staring at a wall for hours, he was in fact working. I imagine most writers will tell you three things about thinking time – it’s the most valuable work, the most frustrating work, and the least billable. Very few people in this world get paid for the hours spent staring at the wall. And it’s always frustrating, because what you want is for the form of a story to just drop into your head after thirty minutes in the chair, and that very rarely happens. It’s days or weeks of wandering around inside your own head and its stores, which looks to the rest of the world like you’ve become a vegetable creature whose circumnutations do nothing but slowly capture and engulf pieces of chocolate.
Yes, we are all outwardly lazy bastards — and if you are entering the journey of a creator of stories now, then be advised — you’re allowed to stare at the wall for as long as you damn well like and need to. Those days and weeks of farting around within the walls of your mind are what every piece of art people love come from. Every story you ever adored? Someone sat around like a piece of meat propped on a sofa until it happened. There are no lazy writers. It just takes some of us longer to get off the sofa and put the pen “on the attack against the innocent paper.”
(That line is from Olga Tokarczuk.)
You have permission to dream other lives and whole new worlds for as long as it takes.
— from my newsletter, 5 November 2023
Comments closedI don’t think I’ve ever written this down before.
Widows and orphans is actually a term from typography, a system to ensure a paragraph isn’t split across two pages. I borrowed the term to describe for myself what is one of the worst processes in writing for me.
When you’re asked to write a piece at a certain page count – like the one-page pitches I turned in today – you need to hit that count. A page-and-a-bit pitch makes you look like a slob at best, and an idiot at worst. When they ask for one page, you give them one page.
The first draft is almost never one page long. So it’s widows and orphans time.
Those paragraphs that end up with one word on its own on a line? That word’s an orphan. You need to rewrite that paragraph so that there’s not one word on its own taking up a line, because you need to buy back that line’s worth of space. This is usually a technical thing – clean up a few lines and the orphan will be back in the family. If you’re lucky, capturing your orphans will be enough to get you inside the page break and you won’t have to make any widows. But you’re a writer, so you’re never that lucky.
Widows, because sometimes you must kill your darlings. That one sentence you really like, that does its job in the piece perfectly? You know it’s too long, right? You have to find another way to say that, that uses fewer words and operates more efficiently but still has style and snap. Sometimes you have to make a lot of widows. Sometimes making the widows takes longer than it did to write the original document.
But when someone calls for a certain length, you’ve got to run the widows and orphans on it. All day. All week, if you have to. what it teaches you is to revise and revise again, and find a balance between energetic language and clear concise language.
And then sometimes you say fuck it, reduce the type size by one point instead, and go and have a drink.
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