The Star Chamber

I’ve just seen The Dark Knight, so have compiled my thoughts for this blog. This is more of a critique than a review, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you might like to wait until you have before reading the entirety of this article. As far as the typical ‘review’ part of this post goes, suffice to say I largely agree with a very good review I heard on Radio 5Live last week, from Mark Kermode, which you can listen to here. The remainder of this post is, as I’ve said, more a critique than a review, so it might contain information you’d rather not read before seeing the film (though I’ve endeavoured not to include any obvious ’spoilers’). You’ve been warned, so click ‘more’ and read on at your own peril.

Read the rest of this entry »

Gav left a comment on the previous post, but I thought it warranted a full enough reply to become a new post in it’s own right, so if you haven’t read the previous blog, and the associated comment from Gav, you may wish to do so first. Right, here goes…

Do you think that all adaptation is doomed to failure?

No, I don’t think they’re all doomed to failure, but I do think that one of the characteristics of true greatness is that it’s something which could only have been done by a particular person at a particular time. Dickens, Orwell, Tolkien and so on produced great works that really couldn’t have been produced by anyone else at any other time. In that way, greatness isn’t just the product of its author, but of its circumstance too (and that’s why even the most talented have to be lucky to achieve greatness, or be recognised for it).

I also think it’s a defining characteristic of greatness that it explores and uses its medium every bit as well as it explores and uses its content – being not only a great story, for example, but also a great novel; ditto for a great song needing great composition, arrangement, playing, etc, or a great film needing cinematography every bit as great as any profound truth revealed in the words of the script or the portrayals of the actors.

Both of these factors, to my mind, militate against the chances of an adaptation being particularly good. As regards the first point, an adaptation is usually (though not always) out of time and circumstance with the original work, hence it’s unlikely to be able to recapture whatever it was that meant only that person could do that thing at that time; and as regards the second point, adapting means recreating a work in a new medium which, given the connectedness of work and medium, I think is difficult, if not impossible, to do with the same degree of success.

There is a reverse to this, of course - there are many adaptations which are vastly superior to the original, because the original chose its medium poorly and the basic idea is actually better executed in a different way. This can be true of remakes, as well (which I consider to be part of this whole discussion, as a form of adaptation). So it’s not that I think all adaptations are doomed to failure; I think that the quality of the original counts inversely against their chances, it’s adaptations of the best, most popular and most well-known stories that are therefore most likely to fail - sadly it’s just that kind of adaptation which is tried most frequently. I also think that attempting such a thing is slightly pointless, since there’s a better alternative, as I’ll explain in the next part of the question…

By that I mean something that perhaps goes the whole hog of reinventing a character into a different setting - would Sherlock Holmes (as depicted in the stories) as a character translated to a different (i.e. non-Victorian London) setting always offend? What if Holmes stayed the same character but was transposed to a modern setting, facing mysteries of a contemporary nature and armed with modern technology?

I think this is where inspiration becomes a better bet than adaptation. Inspiration is a factor in everything we do, so we needn’t on the one hand be afraid to admit to it, or on the other feel so beholden to our inspirations that we have to emblazen their names and faces the bastard offspring we create. Sherlock Holmes can be - and doubtless has been - successfully translated to a different setting, facing mysteries of a contemporary nature and armed with modern technology, but it’s under a different name completely, with no reason to pretend he’s Sherlock Holmes anymore. I’d actually say the television series House is an example of this. House is clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes, but it’s not an adaptation of it. Wouldn’t it just be completely tedious if it was actually called Sherlock Holmes, M.D., and leave everyone wondering, ‘er, why have they made him a doctor?’. More of this in the next part of the question…

Is not the problem with some reinventions that they don’t reinvent at all, but sort of smudge stuff around a bit, losing the essential essence of the originals but not adding anything?

Yes. The basic problem with adaptations is that if they lose the essence of the original (i.e., the thing that made it interesting and made someone want to adapt it in the first place) then it begs the question, why adapt it at all? If it keeps the essence, but changes everything else, then I think it’s really a case of working better as inspiration rather than adaptation. Adaptation brings constraints which inspiration doesn’t, and I think ultimately it’s those constraints which flaw most adaptations. Adaptation is about details while inspiration is about basics. When you adapt something, you retain details - sure lots of things change, but details nonetheless remain, even if it’s only a name or a crucial plot point or whatever - and yet on the other hand, in an adaptation, details are precisely the things you’re forced to change, so adaptations sort of slit their own throats in that regard. The details you keep in order to prove it’s an adaptation really only serve to highlight the compromises and misjudged changes made elsewhere. Better to wholeheartedly abandon the detail, I think, identify the basics, and use them as inspiration (and once you do that, of course, you can still use all the details you want, as long as you’re not relying on them to the point of ripping off - House, though not Holmes, has a drug addiction and lives at 221b).

So, in short - my opinion: adaptation’s alright for the evolution of species, it’s a bit wank for films ‘n’ that.

Right, that’s it.

Matt

…blog more often!

Here’s one:

Thanks to Mark Gibbons for pointing me to this news item:

Robert Downey Jr ‘to play Holmes’

Anyone whose reaction to this news is ‘oh, wow, that’s going to be great!’ might prefer to stop reading now. Actually, no, what am I saying? It’s exactly those people who should continue reading…

Apparently the Ritchie version is going be ‘less stuffy’ than previous versions, which no doubt means Sherlock Holmes will be an irritating cockney twat. Why on Earth you would even try to make Sherlock Holmes less stuffy is beyond me; the character just ceases to be Sherlock Holmes if you do that. The whole point is that he’s completely relentless, single-minded and consumed by the need to solve the mystery. The success that brings him as a detective is mirrored by his loneliness and isolation (yes, there’s Watson, but in the original stories, Watson is only a temporary lodger, who marries and moves out before too long, leaving Holmes as something of a recluse who Watson does his best to drop in on from time to time). Is this new Holmes going to be a playboy with a string of super-model girlfriends to his name, as well? Bollocks.

I suppose the argument for making him less stuffy is that the modern audience can’t empathise with him, but that’s nonsense – whether or not an audience can empathise with any character is down to the skill of the depiction.

There’s just enough humanness in Holmes to show that he is capable of feeling the loneliness that his obsession brings him - there’s a moment in one of the stories where he thinks Watson has been shot and he explodes with rage; there’s the sort of weird mixed, emotion he displays at Irene Adler, the woman who manages to actually deceive and outwit him; and there’s one or two victims for whom Holmes shows moments of genuine sympathy or fondness - but that’s it; it’s just enough to show that he’s human, and that he obviously is capable of feeling something, which hints at the possibility of loneliness without making him an unfortunate character. If you fiddle with that - either by taking away his feelings completely, or, as Ritchie seems likely to do, making him more human - then he just ends up tediously perfect where he’s supposed to be a flawed genius. He’s a cocaine addict for crying out loud - are they going to glamourise that and make it part of his bad-boy cool?

Why people insist on meddling with characters like this, I don’t know. There’s always the trite argument about ‘doing something new’, but that’s plainly just bollocks - it’s not new, it’s just inferior to the original, and completely misses the point. Do something new by all means, but doing a shit version of Sherlock Holmes certainly doesn’t qualify - they’ve been doing that for years.

The same is true of a great many well-known, archetypal characters – Tarzan, for instance – something about these characters, perhaps the lack of ownership an adapting director or writer feels over the character, seems to fill them with the desire to tinker to no good end.

It astonishes me how awful, by and large, any attempts to film characters like these have been. They’re not hard stories to adapt - in the case of Sherlock Holmes, they’re recounted in exactly the manner mysteries are depicted on screen, and they’re heavy on dialogue; you could virtually film them off the page, but for reasons I can’t understand, successive writers, directors and producers insist on making life hard for themselves by trying to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place.

There are some reasonably good adaptations of Sherlock Holmes of course, but even those are often spoilt by completely needless (and frankly nonsensical) tinkering, like placing them in a contemporary period or relocating them to the USA while leaving Holmes as an Englishman. Basil Rathbone always seemed to me to have a good version of the character, for instance, but the stories are somewhat wayward and oddly chosen, to say the least - Nazis in a lot of them, I see to recall.

The thing that makes me laugh is that, what with this tendency to tinker with characters like Sherlock Holmes, those involved would actually stand more chance of seeming like they were doing something ‘new’ if they just did it straight up. It’s sort of gone full circle in that regard. If you did a straight adaptation of one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, complete with all the details and nuances that have dropped out of the less subtle archetype we’ve got now, then people would probably be astonished. I bet a lot of them would have a hard time believing half that stuff was in the stories in the first place.

So, to give this some broader relevance, I’ll sum up by saying if you’re aim is to do something new, don’t confuse it with the aim of trying to restore an old favourite to prominence. Both are laudable aims, but not to be combined. Restoring the fame of a once-loved character is a question of reminding people what was there to love in the first place, not replacing it with something you’ve decided they’ve come to love instead in the meantime. Whatever it was that made the character popular or worthy of attention in the first place will, by simple fact of its long absence, seem new in itself; nothing else is needed.

Incidentally, I’m led to believe that the three most filmed characters are, in order, Holmes, Dracula and Tarzan. Oddly, they all seem to suffer from the same curse in adaptation - perhaps that’s why studios continue to adapt them so frequently. All of them are characters which, given how ubiquitous they are, you’d think there would have been a definitive, comprehensive treatment of years ago, but there really just hasn’t been. Guy Ritchie won’t be the one to manage it for Sherlock Holmes; I would wager much on that.

Matt

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You can’t go wrong with a word with three wyes in it (syzygy – see? Great). You can, however, go wrong with using synonyms, so here’s my advice.

A synonym is, as you doubtless already know, a word with a similar meaning to another word. Two such words are synonyms of each other. Almost every word in English has a whole raft of synonyms. To take one example at random, we find the following synonyms for red: bloodshot, bloody, blush, blushing, brick, burgundy, cardinal, carmine, cerise, cherry, claret, color, commie, coral, crimson, erubescence, fiery, glowing, inflamed, magenta, maroon, pink, reddishness, roseate, rosy, rouge, rubescence, rubicundity, rubious, ruby, ruddy, rufosity, rust, scarlet, solferino, titian, vermilion.

I’ve just culled that list from thesaurus.com to serve as an example. A thesaurus is, of course, the ultimate source of synonyms, and many people (myself included) will from time to time refer to a thesaurus whilst writing in order to find a suitable synonym. However, knowing exactly when, why and how to use synonyms (and, indeed, the thesaurus itself) to best effect can be difficult. My advice in short is this:

• Don’t use a synonym just because it’s a more complicated or longer word.
• Don’t use synonyms for variation (or to avoid repetition).
• Use a synonym when you wish to be more specific.

I’ll go through these prescriptions and proscriptions in some more detail.

Don’t use a synonym just because it’s a more complicated or longer word
This is an easy one - being more complicated than you need to be can confuse or perturb your reader; simple as that. It’s not big, it’s not particularly clever (top marks for a big vocabulary, but looking it up in a thesaurus is nothing special, and anyway, clever is knowing how to use it). Long, complex words have their place, as we shall see shortly, but they offer nothing when used simply because they are long and complex.

Don’t use synonyms for variation (or to avoid repetition)
Synonyms are often used to provide variation, and that in turn is often to avoid repetition. As sensible and obvious as this use may seem, I think it’s a mistake. If you find yourself with repetition in your writing, rather than reaching for the thesaurus and using a synonym to disguise it, the first thing you should do is ask why has the repetition arisen. Is it simply because you’re using a very simple word - black, red, tree, water - which necessarily occurs often? If so, repetition may not be a problem at all; such simple, common words have a tendency to fade from view when read as part of a larger piece, and so multiple uses of the same word may not be a problem at all (this is somewhat akin to the principle of Said Bookism).

Repetition may also occur because of a poorly structured sentence or paragraph, or problems with the narrative. Is the repetition occurring simply because you are saying the same thing more than you need to? In this case, all that use of synonyms will do is conceal the basic fault in the writing. Don’t do it; much better to address the structural problem than simply plastering over the cracks. If the same word occurs in two nearby sentences, can you actually combine those sentences into and reduce duplication and redundancy? Is the repetition there because you’ve made everything look and feel the same? Don’t use synonyms to hide this, expand your ideas, try to bring greater variation to the descriptions you’re writing (and I mean genuine variation, not simply saying the same thing two different ways).

There are also questions of style. Are you using the repetition to stress a point? In this case, sometimes use of synonyms is helpful (you’re not concealing your repetition, you’re actually strengthening it) but you should also consider using adjectives, adverbs or intensifiers to create the same stress. If you are using synonyms for stress, be careful that the actual, precise meanings of those words you use are compatible without simply being identical. This is akin to the next point…

Use a synonym when you wish to be more specific
This absolutely has to be the main reason for using a synonym. Sometimes using the word red is fine, but if you want to insinuate the bloody tone of the colour in question, maybe crimson is better. The trick here is to be absolutely clear of your own meaning. I often find myself with a vague idea of what I’m trying to say, but with the feeling that there’s probably a word with a more accurate, more precise meaning out there to be found. In such cases, I tend to mark the word I’m unhappy with in square brackets and come back to it later. So I might simply write [dark], knowing it’s not really quite the right word, and after some consideration and consulting a thesaurus (and then a dictionary to check the exact meaning of the words in question) I’ll change it to tenebrous.

The point here is that you only change to a synonym when the word you have doesn’t quite suit your meaning - if you mean dark, write dark, leave it as it is; but if you find yourself feeling dark doesn’t quite capture the feeling you have in mind, then go looking for a synonym by all means - just be sure to find the right one. I can’t stress this enough: when choosing a synonym make sure the meaning is accurate and represents what you’re trying to convey; don’t choose it just because it’s a longer, more obscure or more complicated word. Use a dictionary to check the precise meaning of all the synonyms you’re considering - remember, synonyms have similar meanings, but they’re not identical. It’s too easy to overlook the subtle change in meaning brought about by use of a synonym. Be wary of this, it leads to imprecise writing, and it won’t do anything to persuade your reader that what they are reading is the work of someone with a clear meaning in mind. Clever use of synonyms allows you to be both more descriptive and more specific; be sure that in using them you are achieving exactly that.

In the interests of trying to update this blog a little more often, I’ve decided to slightly widen the range of topics which I’ll post on - here, music. Check out this clip of Bruce Springsteen playing The Ghost of Tom Joad accompanied by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. Simply awesome.

And for a literary link, obviously The Ghost of Tom Joad refers to the character from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , which I’ve just started reading (prompted mostly by the song, I must admit). I’ll post more on the book in due course.

Matt

I’ve just finished reading Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Like many of you reading this, I thought I was familiar with the story - I remember reading the book when I was at school, and in any case so much of the book has entered the common, collective memory that it’s virtually impossible not to have heard of Lilliput, its diminutive inhabitants or the Little Ender and Big Ender factions they divide themselves into.

In truth, however, the book presented a great deal I was completely unfamiliar with. In hindsight, I think I must previously have read only the first two parts (where Gulliver encounters the tiny Lilliputians, and then the giant Brobdingnagians) and it was approached very much as a children’s book. In actual fact, the book contains four parts, and I thought that the third of those - Gulliver’s voyage to a floating island populated by a bizarre astronomer-elite - was far and away the best part. Whether you think you’re familiar with Gulliver’s Travels or not, if you haven’t read it within the last few years - and if you can’t, for example, recall the difference between a Struldbrug and a Laputan - read it. It almost certainly contains more than you remember.

Of particular interest to me on this reading, though, was its narrative style. Three points stand out in particular:

• It has no real plot as such.
• It has almost no dialogue, perhaps two or three lines in the entire book.
• The narrator (Gulliver) ‘tells’ us everything, while the author ’shows’ almost nothing.

Strictly speaking, Gulliver’s Travels is a satire, and as such could be considered as distinct from a novel, but either way the point stands - it doesn’t have a conventional narrative, and doesn’t adhere to the form of what we’d call a novel in the modern sense. And yet, it’s one of the best-known written works there is. When I type ‘Lilliputian’, the spellchecker doesn’t underline it as an error, because the word has entered the dictionary (worryingly, it does however underline the word spellchecker). The word Yahoo is also taken from Gulliver’s Travels. The story is so well known that many more people are familiar with it than have actually read the book (doubtless in part thanks to the various adaptations for film and television over the years, as well as various derivative works, but also due simply to the extent to which the book has permeated the cultural fabric). An unconventional format, then, is certainly no barrier to success, or to popularity.

Furthermore, Gulliver’s Travels actually serves as an example when this kind of disregard for supposed ‘rules’ of good writing - such as ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ - is highly desirable. Everything about the story’s characters, setting and events is told to us in an incredibly plain fashion. Indeed the contents pages contain short summaries, repeated at the head of each chapter, which invariably spell out events before we even read about them. There’s certainly no attempt to construct an unfolding plot. The narrator’s stated mission in most cases is simply to describe to us factually the places and peoples he has met. All this is ‘telling’ of the very most blatant kind, but what it does it ’show’ us something else - something about ourselves, something about the folly of our ways, the preposterousness of our pretend logic, the dubiousness of many of our long-standing arguments, the inaccuracy of our assumptions, the misguidedness of our prejudices, the irrationality of our beliefs and the failings of our institutions.

It seems to me that the theory of ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ is prevaricated upon the notion that the only thing a book is trying to ’show’ us is the story. That’s just not the case. Books can show us a lot more than that, and if they tell us something along, there’s certainly no crime in that.

Matt

Haven’t blogged in a while, so what I intend to do – if I can get my arse in gear – is write a few short(er) blogs over the next few days touching on a few topics.

First off, theme.

Gav Thorpe recently posted a blog on the subject, and it’s something I’ve talked to various people about (Gav included) at length in the past. I don’t really want to go into a huge amount of detail on the specific subject of theme – read Gav’s excellent blog for that – but what I do want to do is use theme as an example of what I would describe as a forgotten element of composition.

When preparing to write a novel, everyone knows they need to come up with an idea for their story (the plot), and work out who their characters will be. They also know that when actually writing it, they’ll need to use a good standard of English (or whatever language they’re writing in). That’s all well and good as a starting point.

Looking a little deeper, writers may look to the various books, and increasingly websites, on the subject of writing for advice. This, too, is all well and good, except that in a great many cases the advice given there is really only concerned with those immediate and obvious facets of novel-writing: the story and the characters. Well-regarded sources like the Turkey City Lexicon do contain a great deal of useful advice, but almost all of it regards plots and characters, or the actual writing as it relates to those things (i.e., writing as a way to move the story along or develop characters). What you won’t find in places like that is a great a deal of advice on how to introduce themes – and themes aren’t the only area of writing which I feel are overlooked by those offering this kind advice.

Stories don’t appeal, and certainly don’t endure, on face value alone. It’s the deeper, hidden elements – the theme, the tone, the style – that speak to us and appeal to us, even if they’re not explicitly described. If you like, you can think of a novel as composed of two parts: it’s described elements (the plot, characters and setting), and it’s implied elements (its theme, its tone, its meaning). In most of the advice you’ll read about writing, plenty of attention is paid to the described elements, much less so to the implied elements, yet to my mind they are of equal merit – both are required for a great novel.

I’m not suggesting you throw out the kind of advice you find in the Turkey City Lexicon or books like Character and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. What I’m suggesting is that you view such advice in context – as advice specifically concerning certain, very obvious aspects of writing – and bear it in mind alongside considerations of theme, tone and the other less obvious, but equally important elements.

There is a mantra I try to remind myself of when writing to avoid forgetting these other, subtler elements. Here it is:

Character, not biography.
Theme, not subject.
Tone, not setting.

None of this is to say that your book won’t contain biography, won’t have a subject and won’t have setting – of course it will, but these are products, end results created by the other stages of composition. They are not requisite parts in the way that character, theme and tone are, hence my distinction between them. I’ll go into a little detail on these comparisons.

The fact that John was born on the 11th of December 1957 is biography. The fact that John is cautious is character. The difference should be obvious.

Likewise, you can describe your setting in all the detail you want, but nothing will immerse the reader in your book anywhere near as well as the proper tone will. You can spend as long as you like building a world, but it’s the evocation of surroundings as familiar as, say, a fog-bound street at night which will really make your reader feel like they know exactly where the story is taking place.

Tone pervades everything – not just the scenery, but the characters’ dialogue (old-fashioned, formal speech if your story is set in the past, for example), your choice of words, particularly your number and use of adjectives and adverbs; it influences your characters’ names, their appearance, perhaps even the length and number of your chapters. Tone is the shade in which you paint the story you have created – it needs to be the right one. The tone itself is only implied, but it is the tone in which everything else is described. Without tone, even good writing will have no colour (or no darkness, if that’s what you’re aiming for).

This started with a discussion of theme as one overlooked aspect of composition, and I’ve mentioned a few more. The above, though, is certainly not exhaustive. You can break the writing process - more accurately, composition - down into as many parts as you want, and someone else will always think of some more. That’s fine, there’s no exhaustive list (and anyone trying to create one would likely be on a hiding to nothing) but the point remains this: there is, when composing a novel, a great deal more to be borne in mind than it might at first appear. Even following all the usual advice there is, I’d argue, still more to think about.

Matt

Online now (and somewhat later than promised - sorry!) is my interview with author, Stephen Donaldson.

I interviewed Stephen shortly before the release of Fatal Revenant, the latest book in his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series, and the interview touches on both this and his many other works, as well as writing and literature in general. The interview originally appeared in issue 10 of Death Ray magazine, but the version now online contains some material not included in the magazine due to space constraints. The complete interview, as well as an overview of Stephen’s work, and a fact file on the author are online now in the Articles section of this website.

Matt

Following on from the recent frenzy of blog-ranting on the subject of narrative styles, I thought I’d post a few examples of some novels which I think demonstrate clever use of the omniscient narrator. Note that I’m focusing specifically on books about the legendary/historical characters that my earlier blog posts centred on - I think we’ve covered that plenty enough already, and besides which I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the use of narrative mode more generally. These then, are simply three books which spring to mind as good examples of narrative modes other than the most common third-person limited narrator. All three also employ other noteworthy techniques as we shall see…

You can use the comments thread below to leave your own recommendations, and read on to see mine…

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