This is honestly more description than the interviews in this book received. (photo via)
I am puzzled.
Recently I’ve received a couple books that are in a documentary format, primarily interviews, with a few faux news reports or audio diary transcripts. Specifically audio diaries. It’s weird. There’s something in the air.
Is this an attempt to ape a format from another medium? People talk about the growth of ‘cinematic’ writing (which is yet another meaningless phrase that only confuses people as they disagree on the definition, but WHATEVER) so is this just another layer of extrapolation after that? Trying to translate documentaries into novels?
Friends, we’ve already discovered that format for writing. It’s called non-fiction. There aren’t that many non-fiction books in this specific interview/transcript format for a reason.
This isn’t to say that trying new formats is terrible and no one should ever do it. But trying to imitate documentaries in book format this way feels a bit like using translation software to get text from English to Japanese to Spanish and seeing what you get. You can do it. But without some extra work, it’s not going to be any good to anyone.
Authors that are successful massage the format to make use of novelistic techniques — techniques that make books unique, make them different from movies. They still bring in techniques inspired by movies, but they don’t drop everything that’s powerful about the written word. And when they do bring in movie techniques, ones that rely heavily on visual or aural cues, they figure out a way to translate those cues.
Because here’s the problem: Interviews. Transcripts. With nothing else. No support.
You get two people talking in a white room, no sense of how these people look, act, or sound (unless there are clumsy comments made by either of the people). Interviews happen after action, so we as readers don’t even get to see what happens — we hear about it afterward! No one likes that! I don’t care about how a character feels about things exploding two days after the fact. I don’t care about two characters slowly falling for each other (maybe??? It’s hard to tell!) if they are never on the page together because of the interview format.
If an entire novel is done in dialogue/monologue like this, that author had better be a master stylist who can really nail down character voices. Losing the power of description and narration means dialogue has to carry that weight, and man. Not a lot of people can write dialogue that good.
No actor is going to come in and give the words life through body language, tone, a single minute gesture. That’s what the rest of the novel is there for. That’s why we don’t read movie scripts. We watch movies.
Wait, or is it an attempt to imitate the format of archive files? Like, transcripts from recordings surrounding an “incident”? Reaching for a sort of verisimilitude found in a bunch of musty manila folders in a locked file cabinet deep in the archives of the X-Files? Because, let me tell you, documents in a manila folder do not make engaging reading.
Anyway, hooray, I gave up on this particular book and my life is the better for it. If you have an example of this format done well, PLEASE SHARE and I’ll be your new best friend.
Em Short on editing in interactive fiction. I’m generally interested in interactive fiction, especially as it becomes a bigger form, nowadays. I’ve only used beta readers on mine, though I have tried a sort of exit survey for them. But because I’ve mostly done IF for fun, I wouldn’t dream of asking someone to do anything like a normal story critique. I’d like to, but it’s a lot harder.
This is fascinating and I think a lot about transhumanism and body hacking, but clearly I have a line because the guy described at the end of the article creeps me the heck out. Like, the photo of him makes my scalp itch. However, I do like the line “The philosophers, he said, are letting us down.”
What it means to move innovation into the academic sphere (spoiler: Nothing that great) and how it fails students. I want to quote the whole article, but will settle on this:
“A 2015 Pell Institute report demonstrates that the past three decades have seen drastically widening gaps between rich and poor students in attendance and completion rates. And Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton show in their 2013 book Paying for the Party how higher education reinforces inequality not only in numbers but in ways that permeate people’s lives and opportunities, from where they live to whom they socialize with. Those results might be fine for a country living under an aristocracy, but not for a democracy. And they have snowballed under the banner of innovation.”
Melissa Gira Grant in Pacific Standard laying down some historical truths very plainly. Feminism needs to exist for poor women and non-white women, women demeaned by capitalism and attacked by racism.
“Women took the women’s movement to mean their progress up the capitalist ladder,” James said. “Nothing has changed but the gender of those who exploit us.”
Accessible design is so fascinating to me. “Now 10 years old, DeafSpace is an architectural approach that springs from the particular ways Deaf people perceive and inhabit space. …That share is likely to rise as tens of millions of Baby Boomers reach their seventies and eighties. Why should the places designed for them take hearing as a given?”
I’m not entirely sure I understood this story (time travel is hard) but gosh it was wonderful. I really liked the structural things Caroline did, with rock/paper/scissors and the probabilities of survival. Following items as they appeared and disappeared was almost like watching a magic trick. I sort of want to draw out the loops of this story. I feel like it would be very pretty.
This is fascinating, and also made me remember how an anti-evolution speaker came to my youth group when I was a wee young lass and scoffed, “What good is half an eye? If evolution is true, at some point there was something less than an eye, and what good is that? That animal never could’ve survived.”
Well. Sir. I give you…actual facts.
He also had this whole thing about the exquisite planning involved in the Bombardier Beetle’s namesake move, as though there aren’t a hundred weird evolutionary mis-steps leftover in humans alone.
That feeling, that panic, comes from those moments when this fact is unavoidable. It comes from being unable to not see what we’ve become – a planet-changing superorganism. It is from the realisation that I am part of it.
This is an interview with myself about Carry On. An unnecessarily long interview. There are going to be so many spoilers.
SPOILERS.
S~P~O~I~L~E~R~S.
So you read Carry On recently. Did you like it?
Pretty sure!
…so, not sure.
Look, I’m going to give it either 3 or 4 stars on Goodreads. Probably 3, thinking about it. We’ll see how I feel at the end of this interview.
Dang, what makes you want to knock this down to 3 stars?
Don’t think of it as knocking down! 3 stars is the assumed start for all books. While I read it, there was never a single moment that I wanted to knock it lower, but there also weren’t really any moments that made me want to elevate it. If I could: 3.5 stars.
Let’s get right into it, then. What did you think of Simon? Simon and Baaazzz?Â
Baz was interesting, at least! Simon was bowl of vanilla pudding. The instant boxed kind. Perfectly fine, sweet to be sure, but there’s nothing to chew on, and it’s the most basic of fake flavors. But the thing is: that’s what Simon needed to be. He was the center, the hero, the Chosen One, and this is nothing if not a Chosen One story. The boy is the Special, he enters the New World, except the rug is pulled out from under him at the last minute as he realizes several things:
He’s not straight
Wants to kiss his nemesis
Who is definitely a confirmed vampire
And wants to kiss him too
The Great Evil he’s been fighting…Â is himself
His mentor is a bananas murderer
So really, you’d think Simon would have a bit more of a reaction to this combo move. I suppose they’re a bit spread out, and the first parts are less traumatic than they are mildly surprising, and the last parts come during the climax so how much trauma can you really show in the resolution, but still. Simon is a bit flat. “I traded my magic for devil wings & tail, but I’m living with my boyfriend, so whatevs.”
As far as that boyfriend thing: Hooray! Great! Snore. They were fine, solidly in the middle rankings of Fictional Couplings I Have Read.
Okay, so you’re not sold on the Simon/Baz, that’s fine. Let’s go back to the rug-pulling. Think it worked, other than Pudding Simon?
I’m not not sold on Simon/Baz, hang on! I’m just not clamoring for more of their story. Mostly because Simon Snore I mean Snow. The bit at the beginning where he was listing all the things about Watford that he missed should have helped make him more relatable to me, but it didn’t. It felt like all he was was this guy obsessed with his roommate and a vague idea of evil. There was too much to set up to give much time to making Simon interesting. To me. Again, this is for me because I’m sure there are plenty of people who loved Simon. I didn’t much. Vanilla pudding.
Plenty of time to make Baz interesting, though I guess there’s a shortcut to that in the “everyone thinks he’s evil, secret tragedy, poor little rich boy” elements to his character.
The rug-pulling was neat. Except… I knew about all of it. Because I read Fangirl. If I hadn’t read Fangirl I suppose it might have been more exciting for me. It doesn’t have to be exciting, though. I like inverting tropes, and that helped this book a lot. If Rowell had followed the Chosen One story more closely, this would have been such a flop. But she was trying to say something new about it, change the meaning behind it. Make it more real. And I think she did that.
By making the Mage explicitly villainous, making Simon a created Chosen One, making that creation ultimately a bad thing rather than a blessing, taking the Chosen One-ness away from Simon at the end — doing all that, Rowell does start to get under the most fantastical and least realistic elements of the story.
Because to be honest, the magic isn’t the unrealistic part. The way things come together is. The idea that there is One True Hero to stop the One Pure Evil is a fantasy. There isn’t one either way. There’s people trying to do one sort of good thing, and people trying to do another sort of good that turns out to be harmful.
That’s Rowell’s strength, is people. She always writes such good people (even when they’re slightly bland like Simon). No one is a True Archetypal Villain. They’re just people, with different desires that conflict, and sometimes people make terrible choices in the service of their desires.
Do you want to talk about the other characters?
Not really. They were good!
You read a lot of fantasy. How’s this as a fantasy?
It’s fine! It’s definitely a Rainbow Rowellâ„¢ Book, in that plot is fine but comes after characters. This is not as much about magic as it is about Simon’s Feelings, but it’s also about magic. Magic that is driven by popular phrases.
This seems…untenable. Which to some extent she addresses, with creating new spells being difficult because a lot of popular phrases just don’t stick, and the fact that some phrases are popular for a long time and then fade. How well would someone be able to cast spells in a language they learn later in life? Idioms are always difficult to grasp in other languages, so would you basically be unable to do it until you got to a certain level of competency? Could someone teach you the phrase as a spell, and that teaches you the idiom as well?
However, thinking about it, I do like it more than any sort of Latin base for spells.
Some of the other things she brought in were interesting too. I mean, it’s obvious that she’s read plenty of fantasy, and that she spent a lot of time thinking about the magic in this world. And the logic of magic schools, since there was this ill-explored undercurrent of progressive changes to the magic world. Watford had been closed off and elitist, and now the Mage flings its doors open to the world.
Rowell’s actual writing about magic as it happened was great. I liked the way she made magic so physical, especially for Simon, and the imagery she used. How sort of painful it felt at times, and how different it felt to each person, even down to taste and smell.
So yeah, it’s a good YA fantasy!
Okay, you always have to say–
what
there’s always something–
say it
Who or what do you wish this book had been about instead of what it was about?
Too many books are about Smart Girls Doing the Work and Getting No Credit. ENOUGH. Stop writing books about the Harrys and Simons. Write the books about the people who actually do the work, solve the puzzles. Bitches get shit done. Write books about them. Tell me the story of the girl with glasses and too many books and her dumb but charming friend who she keeps helping out of trouble. Tell me the story of Penelope Bunce falling for Micah, and dang it, show me Micah!
Or Lucy, even. Lucy’s chapters were there purely to fill us in on the plot. She was not doing anything, ever. Just ghostly reminiscences, explaining to the reader what was up.
And obviously I wanted more of the Mage’s reforms. I was a little bummed about that whole thing. By making the Mage the villain of the piece, it felt like it made his desires wrongheaded. So his progressivism, his ardent desire to reform the world of magic, make it more open, more equal, was tainted by his actions. And there wasn’t enough of anyone else laying claim to the movement to untaint it all. So it felt like progressivism was villainous. My interest in the hierarchical issues of magical worlds is one thing — I didn’t expect to see anything like that in this book, so what I really wanted was just a small tweak to take away that sour note.
You always want all of those things.
It’s true. More smart girls, more women doing things, more activism in a positive light. Me all over.
We haven’t talked about the origin of this book.
The whole fictional world within a fictional world thing? That this is neither the fanfic from Fangirl nor the Gemma T. Leslie version of Simon Snow? That this is some third thing entirely?
Yep.
I don’t actually have much to say about that.
But you used to write Harry Potter fanfiction.
Mm-hmm, sure did.
Nothing to say.
Nope.
…FINE. Any last thoughts?
If you are in the middle of the Venn diagram of Fantasy Fans and Rainbow Rowell fans, you should definitely read this. You probably already have.
If you are a fan of YA fantasy, give this a go! It’s a quick read and is pretty fun.
And here are some things that I texted a friend while reading:
“I’m confused. I’m on page 185 and I can’t tell if I like Carry On.”
On Simon: “Book 5 Harry Potter with less personality?”
“I’m slightly offended that she changed ‘cold as a witch’s teat’ to ‘witch’s wit’
“Why does everyone always have to STUMBLE ON a key piece of information by ACCIDENT”
This week I finished Carry On, may have Thoughts someday. I say that a lot. I’ll try to follow up this time. Maybe I’ll set it up like a FAQ, since a lot of my thoughts are centered around questions/expectations.
A friend passed me a copy of City of Blades last week and I started it and oh my gosh it’s so good and so fascinating and mysterious and Mulaghesh is great. I want to dig into this with a spoon and eat it up, or maybe dissect it and study its parts, or maybe both.
Short things
Okay, not much in the way of short things this week. I did read a bunch of things, just not much of note, I guess? And stuff I immediately lost track of.
Who Pays Writers? | Dissent Magazine - Money and the arts, and the NEA, and grants, and how things were getting better for a shining moment mid-century, and then plummeted again. Because capitalism and our weird hatred for the arts. Writers need money and material security in order to be daring in their art — most writers, at least. I’m sure there are some willing to risk starvation and poverty in order to be experimental and radical, but mostly people want to having a roof and steady food, so they write what is safe to sell, what is a known quantity, what’s been done before. Giving security to those whose voices are different allows them to speak up. It gives them room to breathe while they create, rather than burning out and disappearing. At least, that’s what I think. Anyway. Art: it requires support.
