Monthly Archives: December 2020

Movie Novelizations at Arisia 2021

Posted on by Henry

I’ve had a writing break. I’m still on break, as it were, at least for another day or two. Working at home so much even before the pandemic means that I’m used to the struggle of easing myself back into my work schedule. Doesn’t make it easier. Reading about people’s struggles adjusting to working at home last March and April was vindicating, and offered guilty nourishment for my schadenfreude.

This year I will be attending Arisia virtually, and will only be on one panel. Organizing Arisia for 2021 seems like a particularly difficult and thankless task, so I am glad that a) someone else is doing it, and b) they’re still doing their best to run a convention despite COVID-19. After working digital LARP camps this summer, I really didn’t want to be on more than one or two panels in a weekend, so this is perfect for me.

The panel I’m on this year will focus on movie novelizations. I hope to include some exploration of other translations of story across media (from pure-text to text with illustration, animation, or live action… and vice versa). I’m fascinated by the ways in which stories (and the story-telling arts) change as the medium shifts, and the ways that story elements become more or less accessible for audiences across different media.

I don’t think that any particular narrative tricks are *impossible* to translate from one medium to another, but they’re certainly not all equally easy to alter.

Take, for example, the ability to convey internal emotional state. A story told purely via text can be first person, granting the reader direct access to the character’s emotional and physical state. In live action form, on a screen, that character’s emotional state is only accessible through the viewer’s interpretation of the actor… with as much (or more) variation in interpretation due to a viewer’s personal response to an actor.

Or perhaps I should compare the ease with which text can dilate and contract time, glossing over the details of a battle in a few sweeping sentences (Lloyd Alexander does this neatly a number of times in his Chronicles of Prydain series) while giving tight focus to an emotional conversation. Live action film can do these things, but I think the audience’s perception of time (and how time works on the screen) is different than the assumptions of a reader. Meanwhile, film can convey a myriad of elements in one shot, encompassing more details (and background clues) in a single frame than is feasible by text; Knives Out is a glowing example of this.

All of which is to say, I’m very excited to nerd out about this with other similarly excited people. I think there’s a lot of good material to explore.

I’ll post more details about when this panel will be when I know more myself.

Musing on Emotional Arcs

Posted on by Henry

Quick bookkeeping: I’ll be away next Thursday, and likely won’t post here. I’m not traveling. But I am planning to spend more time on video calls with family in other time zones, and generally taking a break. I hope you’re all staying safe.

When it comes to making progress in my writing, I frequently feel as though I’m swimming against a tether, trying to pull a ship on the strength of my strokes alone. The only reassurance I have comes from comparing my older pieces to more recent ones, comparing what I missed then to what I possess now.

The biggest change I’ve noticed, over the course of about seven years, is a heightened appreciation for the emotional content of a story; feelings are fun to play with, especially pathos.

For a long time I focused myopically on the tension and climax of a physical plot: threat, danger, difficult circumstances, and the struggle to prevail despite insurmountable challenges. I had trained for that. Running RPGs for my friends prepared me well for creating fun obstacles and leaving my players overwhelmed… but just barely able to pull through and win the day.

When I spoke with fellow students in my MFA program, and when I read their work, it was clear that this was a place others struggled. I heard friends lament their “inability” to write conflict, tension, and danger, or bemoan the difficulty they found in forcing their characters through awful challenges.

To be clear, none of them were unable to write those things, they just weren’t used to doing it.

Meanwhile, I’d look at my characters and wonder what kind of people they were. My friends were writing believable people, tying them into evocative emotional relationships, and most of my characters felt like blanks. Running RPGs, I’d gotten used to setting up all the other pieces and then letting my players fill their characters’ interior worlds. Writing characters, grappling with their internal worlds and emotional experiences, I fumbled over and over again.

Everything felt like playing with cardboard cutouts. Characters did not “speak to me” or take life of their own on the page, except in little promising glimmers.

This isn’t some marvelous tale of miraculous change. My swimming metaphor above, struggling against a massive sea anchor, still feels true. But I have made progress. However it may feel, I am not stuck in place.

I’m not sure whether I’m glad that I started with more familiarity in active conflict and physical plots. But as someone who loves genre fiction and RPGs, I can’t say that I’m surprised. My “YA” reading as a twelve and thirteen year old was almost entirely 1970s & 80s genre fiction, or more recent work from those authors—largely books I’d hesitate to recommend to any young teen these days. There were a few standouts, but I suspect that I wasn’t in the right place to learn about writing characters’ internal lives or a good emotional arc when I was reading most of those books.

More recently, I have been blessed by a number of extremely good novels in the past decade, books which have helped me considerably in writing the internal emotional struggles of my characters. N.K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Lois McMaster Bujold, Seth Dickinson, John Scalzi, Katherine Addison, and Nnedi Okorafor all helped a great deal.

All of which is to say, I’ve been having much more fun writing emotional arcs of late, especially when I can tie them neatly into the grueling difficulties characters face in the physical plot. It’s good stuff.

Star Trek, Discovery, Idealism

Posted on by Henry

Star Trek has been a part of my life since I was tiny. I grew up on The Next Generation, watching it curled up on the couch with my older sibs. While I remember the death of Tasha Yar, I don’t remember Riker without a beard (I see the impossibility there, presumably my brain edits out most of the worse stuff).

I was, arguably, too young for the show. I know it wasn’t geared towards toddlers. Some of my earliest nightmares grew out of Star Trek episodes. Those did not stop me from watching.

Of course, the same can be said for watching my sibs play Doom. Maybe toddler-Henry’s judgement just wasn’t that good. Toddler-Henry almost certainly valued spending time with sibs more than not having nightmares. That’s still true.

All of which is to say, Star Trek has a special place in my heart. Moreover, at a formative age Star Trek fed me an underlying idealism that serves as the keystone for good Star Trek stories. If you’ve watched enough older Trek you know what I’m talking about. When it isn’t there, the Star Trek-ness of the story just falls apart.

That idealism isn’t always well-written. But I admire it all the same. With it, generations of Star Trek have tried to do something that much of the rest of its contemporary narrative milieu dismissed as naive, or uninteresting, or hopelessly unrealistic. Unlike those other stories, well-written Star Trek refuels me.

All of which brings me around to Star Trek: Discovery. I’m working my way through it, bit by bit, but as much as I’m having fun seeing science fiction in the Star Trek universe it still doesn’t feel quite like Trek. This won’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with both Discovery and older Trek. Discovery’s first (and second, so far) season are dramatic and often exciting, and they have more character growth and development than I remember from TOS or TNG, but… they don’t hold the Trek idealism that I love. There are glimpses of it, moments when that idealism comes through, but it’s mostly hidden behind their larger threatening story arcs.

The most Star Trek thing I’ve seen in them so far have been Captain Pike and Number One, part of why I’m so excited for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

I have heard good things about Discovery’s third season, however. I’ve heard that it feels more full of the old idealism. I could really use that right now. So I’m still plugging away, doing my best to appreciate the science fiction show wearing Star Trek’s skin, and looking forward to it growing into something more hopeful and idealistic.

Frogfeast

Posted on by Henry

The swamps that filter the end of the vast Enjeket River are known only as Frogfeast in the local tongue. This name is spoken many ways in many other languages, but they all come back to the same truths: sweltering heat, muggy air, and a cacophony of buzzing insects have fed a frog population like no other. Those who live near the edge of Frogfeast say that even the Enjeket River hippos do not venture into the swamp.

Presumably, that is an exaggeration. Enjeket River hippos are savage and truculent beasts known equally well for their ponderous girth and their propensity for violence. None doubt that a full grown hippo anywhere else on the Enjeket River would be free to do as it pleased without opposition. Surely they only avoid Frogfeast due to its foul smells and dense, sucking mud.

Others venture into Frogfeast, however. Locals swear by the potency of medicines made from the swamp’s plants, and they are known to paddle cautiously through Frogfeast’s twisting waterways in search of herbs. Habitual herb gatherers are a paranoid lot, and will uniformly refuse to push into the dense thickets or across the larger stretches of swamp where they swear giant toads make their lairs. They are picky about where they will drink, and constantly chew the tough roots of a boring local flower.

Visitors from further afield explore where the locals adamantly avoid, hunting places where the waters pool and twist in odd colors, and the air takes on a strange tang reminiscent of molding citrus and iron rust. There they seek out twisting, sponge-textured mineral deposits which are said to form in the swamp’s waters, though they also prize other equally rare formations. Most such finds are valuable in the extreme.

The foolhardy from afar make the most noise. Most often those with more wealth than sense, they all have a conspicuous smattering of knowledge about the history of lost cities on the Enjeket. They bring tools and employed labor in hopes of discovering the treasures of those whom the Enjeket swallowed in ages past. Some few of them swear that Frogfeast itself covers a lost city, but most agree that it merely serves as a catchment basin, a suitable pan for the gold dust of drowned or desolated civilizations as it were.

Of all these, the locals have the longest life expectancies. Many from afar who forge paths into Frogfeast become lost. Others drown, pulled under by mud. Still others are sucked dry by countless leeches and too many biting bugs, or else take ill and wither away under fevers, vomiting, diarrhea and visions. Some merely disappear without trace, never to be seen again.

Then, of course, there are those who reemerge hale but with some sickness of the mind. They speak of swirls of light, and of smells that no others can find. In time, most of these who are found recover, though they all speak of dis-ease at the thought of returning to Frogfeast. They tend to give the swamp agency, and claim that the swamp would not tolerate their return. A few, humored by their compatriots, have written fanciful stories of their experiences while under the influence of those hallucinations. And some, a bare handful, travel back to Frogfeast once again as quickly as they can, melting into the swamp’s dense undergrowth and vanishing without a trace. They become ghost stories, of a sort, and travelers scare each other with tales of sightings—glimpses caught of them years later, weaving through the swamp, seemingly untouched by the passage of time.