like shackles made of snow
Jan. 10th, 2008 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseThoughts on the Sanctity of Character
I got to pimp the OTW in class today – I’m TAing for Literary Theory 101, and we’re doing the Death of the Author. I was actually really pleased with my class. No one got outright shirty about the idea, and most were leery but accepting about the whole thing. Usually I have to push this one harder – I’m proud of them for using their brains and avoiding knee-jerk reactions.
Between class and fandom (which can’t seem to talk about anything but OTW at the moment, cool, it’s the shiny new thing) I’m been spending an awful lot of time contemplating reader/Author interactions. And at the same time, The Boy has been working through the climax of his current novel.
Okay, so as I’ve mentioned before, my boyfriend is a writer. Of fantasy novels. And I edit his work.
We’ve actually got a great thing going on, because he’s a tremendously talented writer who read waaaay too much Dragonlance as a kid, and is still in the process of figuring out how to write the genre fiction he loves with the same subtlety he can use in more realist matter. I’m a pretty good English major and literary critic with a heavy background in genre research, partially because I grew up in fandom and y’all are smart. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how genre creates meaning, but I can’t write plot worth a damn. He’s got the talent, I’ve got the incredibly pushy and overweening theories. It’s like chicken and another…chicken… /buffy
So right now he’s working on a novel about a naïve richboy talented mage and a Good Rogue who travel together – they’re not quite sure why. There have of course been slash jokes. Many of them. But we’ve both settled into a way of talking about this book as a love story, because really that’s what it is: a story about the beginning of a relationship. Platonic, but still all about the love. In the trend of certain pieces of Supernatural gen, frex.
I’m in love with this book. Granted, it’s being written for me - I’m the primary audience, the first one who hears this book. The Boy knows what I like, what I’ll pick up on. And it makes me intensely happy. Mashes all the right buttons. And I react to that in the way that I always react to texts I love – I think fannishly. I have melodramatic rescue fantasy AUs in my head. I doodle bits of them in class, sometimes, when I’m bored or depressed. Not sex, necessarily, but the whole set of forced-intimacy crackfic clichés and bodiceripper conventions. This is what I do.
Now, The Boy has read some of these. He knows I make them. We talk about them. And sometimes the crit that I give him, in terms of the direction in which I would like to see this novel push, dovetails with some of the fic in my head. Which is not a problem – this is his novel, no question of that. Anything that he disagrees with is dismissed. My input, if used, is transformed completely in his creative process. If anything, my fannishly-nurtured ability to think in multiple conflicting narratives has helped me to help him to explore alternatives in this novel, to think outside the box.
The characters are his. The novel is his. I have thoughts sometimes, and fantasies, and ideas. Every now and again I have a thought that maybe pushes the novel in one direction or another. But many of my more outlandish fantasies have no impact at all on the book. My fan stuff and my editrix stuff don’t really overlap.
Sometimes it bothers him that I edit his work, because he’s hung up on the Virtuoso Performance theory of writing, whereby no arteeste ever needs help. But I don’t think it ever bothers him that I write fic about his work. In fact, it tickles him pink. I wish we as a culture could move past the Cult of the Author business – for one thing, I’ll say that this is a better book because we’ve worked on it together, because I’ve asked questions and listened actively. I could never in a million years write anything like it myself, but I’ve helped make it as good as it is. The art is what matters, not the ego.
But my fannish interaction with the work has nothing to do with anything. It doesn’t violate the characters in any way. My sandbox play has no effect on the story, and I’m actually involved with the story. Imagine how totally effects-less fanworks not created by the author’s girlfriend would be.
The only sticky part of the kind of author-fan relationship we model is, I guess, the whole stealing ideas thing. But! Marion Zimmer Bradley! and all that. Only it seems a crying shame to me that it has to be a problem. For one thing, I think we can all agree that there’s really no such thing as originality. Everything that we read and hear reflects in our writing. And honestly I think that’s one of the strengths of fanwriting – that we have so many versions of our characters that we can get pretty wild. We’re not stealing ideas. I don’t think, for the most part, you can steal an idea. I mean, sure you can – if you use the exact same plot. But ideas are so dependent on execution that we’re influencing rather than stealing from one another.
I also want to link to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elfwreck's beautiful piece here dealing with the issue of character rape, because she does some wonderful work in acknowledging the real discomfort than can attend character transformation. It's s thing I do think about, because thus far The Boy hasn't been more than amused by my games in his world, but I do wonder. (Although last night I jokingly proposed a rentboy!AU crackfic, and it went over pretty well. We're a flexible group!)
I realize that this is all fairly jumbled, but any thoughts?
I got to pimp the OTW in class today – I’m TAing for Literary Theory 101, and we’re doing the Death of the Author. I was actually really pleased with my class. No one got outright shirty about the idea, and most were leery but accepting about the whole thing. Usually I have to push this one harder – I’m proud of them for using their brains and avoiding knee-jerk reactions.
Between class and fandom (which can’t seem to talk about anything but OTW at the moment, cool, it’s the shiny new thing) I’m been spending an awful lot of time contemplating reader/Author interactions. And at the same time, The Boy has been working through the climax of his current novel.
Okay, so as I’ve mentioned before, my boyfriend is a writer. Of fantasy novels. And I edit his work.
We’ve actually got a great thing going on, because he’s a tremendously talented writer who read waaaay too much Dragonlance as a kid, and is still in the process of figuring out how to write the genre fiction he loves with the same subtlety he can use in more realist matter. I’m a pretty good English major and literary critic with a heavy background in genre research, partially because I grew up in fandom and y’all are smart. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how genre creates meaning, but I can’t write plot worth a damn. He’s got the talent, I’ve got the incredibly pushy and overweening theories. It’s like chicken and another…chicken… /buffy
So right now he’s working on a novel about a naïve richboy talented mage and a Good Rogue who travel together – they’re not quite sure why. There have of course been slash jokes. Many of them. But we’ve both settled into a way of talking about this book as a love story, because really that’s what it is: a story about the beginning of a relationship. Platonic, but still all about the love. In the trend of certain pieces of Supernatural gen, frex.
I’m in love with this book. Granted, it’s being written for me - I’m the primary audience, the first one who hears this book. The Boy knows what I like, what I’ll pick up on. And it makes me intensely happy. Mashes all the right buttons. And I react to that in the way that I always react to texts I love – I think fannishly. I have melodramatic rescue fantasy AUs in my head. I doodle bits of them in class, sometimes, when I’m bored or depressed. Not sex, necessarily, but the whole set of forced-intimacy crackfic clichés and bodiceripper conventions. This is what I do.
Now, The Boy has read some of these. He knows I make them. We talk about them. And sometimes the crit that I give him, in terms of the direction in which I would like to see this novel push, dovetails with some of the fic in my head. Which is not a problem – this is his novel, no question of that. Anything that he disagrees with is dismissed. My input, if used, is transformed completely in his creative process. If anything, my fannishly-nurtured ability to think in multiple conflicting narratives has helped me to help him to explore alternatives in this novel, to think outside the box.
The characters are his. The novel is his. I have thoughts sometimes, and fantasies, and ideas. Every now and again I have a thought that maybe pushes the novel in one direction or another. But many of my more outlandish fantasies have no impact at all on the book. My fan stuff and my editrix stuff don’t really overlap.
Sometimes it bothers him that I edit his work, because he’s hung up on the Virtuoso Performance theory of writing, whereby no arteeste ever needs help. But I don’t think it ever bothers him that I write fic about his work. In fact, it tickles him pink. I wish we as a culture could move past the Cult of the Author business – for one thing, I’ll say that this is a better book because we’ve worked on it together, because I’ve asked questions and listened actively. I could never in a million years write anything like it myself, but I’ve helped make it as good as it is. The art is what matters, not the ego.
But my fannish interaction with the work has nothing to do with anything. It doesn’t violate the characters in any way. My sandbox play has no effect on the story, and I’m actually involved with the story. Imagine how totally effects-less fanworks not created by the author’s girlfriend would be.
The only sticky part of the kind of author-fan relationship we model is, I guess, the whole stealing ideas thing. But! Marion Zimmer Bradley! and all that. Only it seems a crying shame to me that it has to be a problem. For one thing, I think we can all agree that there’s really no such thing as originality. Everything that we read and hear reflects in our writing. And honestly I think that’s one of the strengths of fanwriting – that we have so many versions of our characters that we can get pretty wild. We’re not stealing ideas. I don’t think, for the most part, you can steal an idea. I mean, sure you can – if you use the exact same plot. But ideas are so dependent on execution that we’re influencing rather than stealing from one another.
I also want to link to
elfwreck's beautiful piece here dealing with the issue of character rape, because she does some wonderful work in acknowledging the real discomfort than can attend character transformation. It's s thing I do think about, because thus far The Boy hasn't been more than amused by my games in his world, but I do wonder. (Although last night I jokingly proposed a rentboy!AU crackfic, and it went over pretty well. We're a flexible group!)I realize that this is all fairly jumbled, but any thoughts?
no subject
Date: 2008-01-10 05:49 pm (UTC)he’s a tremendously talented writer who read waaaay too much Dragonlance as a kid, and is still in the process of figuring out how to write the genre fiction he loves with the same subtlety he can use in more realist matter.....But we’ve both settled into a way of talking about this book as a love story, because really that’s what it is: a story about the beginning of a relationship.
I think perhaps this the problem I have with the fantasy genre in general. I want to say that I like it, that it's a thing I enjoy, but the reality is that I find it very hard to pick up a fantasy novel and lose myself in it. Most are jarring in a way I couldn't define before, but maybe now I can. It's what you've said, about talking about the book as a love story. When I go over in my head a list of favourites that qualify as 'fantasy' - His Dark Materials, The Abhorsen Trilogy, Lord of the Rings, The Claidi Journals, and, yes, Dragonlance - there's a common factor that stands out, for me. The stories are not really about this fabulous new world the author has created; they're about the characters. I connect with those people and because of that I can move in their world fluidly, seamlessly, whatever the differences from my own. And that, in turn, makes the world so much more real - more real, in fact, than if the world itself had been the primary focus.
As to the idea stealing...seems a bit poetical to mention it now, but Thamiris actually co-wrote a great essay on plagarism and the fannish collective mind. I think we've lost the folklore mentality that no two people who tell the same story will really tell the same story. (Unless, of course, they take it word-for-word, but that's another matter.)
no subject
Date: 2008-01-10 06:07 pm (UTC)Oh, girl, I have such a chip on my should with regard to most modern fantasy. I was lucky enough to come up on Tolkien and Lewis and LeGuin, and didn't hit any of the bad stuff until I knew enough to scorn it. The Boy wasn't so lucky - he doesn't come from a reading family, and didn't have the careful guidance my parents gave me.
You know my current work is on fairytales, yes? It's nice that all of my interests seem to coincide in this. Thanks for the Tham like - she was such a wonderful writer and thinker.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-11 05:11 pm (UTC)Oh, yes. :) And it makes sense that it would all intersect, really. We call them Grimms' faerytales now, yes, but whose stories were they before two brothers wrote them down? Who does Arthur belong to? Malory? Marie de France?
Does Webber own the Phantom? Does LeRoux? Who gets Dracula and Sherlock Holmes?
I don't at all want to belittle copyright issues, or plagarism, but sometimes I wish we had a few less authors and a few more storytellers.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-11 10:21 pm (UTC)