![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On writing...
Jul. 28th, 2014 10:05 pm...as if I'm some sort of expert. Unless you consider the combination of "an unknown quantity" (the "x") and "a drip under pressure" (the "spurt").
I almost snookered myself this week, and I did so in a very interesting manner.
First, I glommed onto the first idea that came into my head, and that was: what if there was a culture that took the concept of Chekhov's gun literally? In other words, what if there was a world where everything that appeared in a story of any kind had to be necessary and irreplaceable? After all, Wikipedia quotes Chekhov on this dramatic principle as follows:
Ignoring the question for a moment, it occurs to me that following the advice offered by Anton Pavlovich is much easier in written and spoken media (e.g., radio) than in visual media (e.g., movies, television, the theater). And there's the rub.
In a written story, not only is there is no need to go crazy with descriptions of, say, what people look like (see: rule 9 of Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules for Good Writing), but it's astonishingly easy to avoid doing so, at least for me. The same is true for places and things (idem, rule 10). If you read The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for example, the overwhelming source of your information, as the reader, is what the characters are saying (and they don't waste breath describing stuff).
So it seems to me that, in a visual work—and here, let's confine ourselves to stage plays—about the only way you can justify having, say, a bouquet of lilies in a vase on a table at stage left that does absolutely nothing at all during the entire play is to hand-wave a bit and maintain that the vase of flowers helps create a certain visual "atmosphere" that allows the audience to more easily suspend their disbelief.
But that's us (or at least, "us-of-the-Western-tradition"), and I wanted to see what I could do with an "alien" culture. Not necessarily a non-human culture, but one sufficiently different to make it a mystery to present-day Earthlings (in much the same way that, say, some Japanese stories—and here, the tale of The 47 Ronin comes to mind—pose a challenge to those little aquainted with Japanese culture).
Where could I find such a culture? My mind immediately thought back to an idea for a story that crossed my mind several years ago, about an Earthling whose mind is transferred to a machine, and said person's adventures (in the spirit of Serenity) in quest of, among other things, enough money to have a human body created that he might "slip back into."
Everything was going along smoothly until I hit a small snag: a better story line than the one I was working on. Unfortunately, said new line had nothing at all to do with Chekhov's gun. It was that situation—having two arcs, where the better one wasn't much use for Idol, and there did not appear to be any good way to combine the two—that, given a killer work schedule and the added stress of helping out with getting daughter Natalie's house rented, almost had me putting in for my third and last bye.
That said, the more I read the piece I wrote, the more I think it hangs together.
I almost snookered myself this week, and I did so in a very interesting manner.
First, I glommed onto the first idea that came into my head, and that was: what if there was a culture that took the concept of Chekhov's gun literally? In other words, what if there was a world where everything that appeared in a story of any kind had to be necessary and irreplaceable? After all, Wikipedia quotes Chekhov on this dramatic principle as follows:
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.So does this mean that if mention is made of a bouquet of lilies in a vase on a table, that... something must happen to justify said mention? Must the vase be broken? Must the lilies wilt? Or can we just let the vase stand there, unmolested. If we can do that, a curious question arises: How minor can something be in a story and still be relevant, in the Chekhovian sense?
Ignoring the question for a moment, it occurs to me that following the advice offered by Anton Pavlovich is much easier in written and spoken media (e.g., radio) than in visual media (e.g., movies, television, the theater). And there's the rub.
In a written story, not only is there is no need to go crazy with descriptions of, say, what people look like (see: rule 9 of Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules for Good Writing), but it's astonishingly easy to avoid doing so, at least for me. The same is true for places and things (idem, rule 10). If you read The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for example, the overwhelming source of your information, as the reader, is what the characters are saying (and they don't waste breath describing stuff).
So it seems to me that, in a visual work—and here, let's confine ourselves to stage plays—about the only way you can justify having, say, a bouquet of lilies in a vase on a table at stage left that does absolutely nothing at all during the entire play is to hand-wave a bit and maintain that the vase of flowers helps create a certain visual "atmosphere" that allows the audience to more easily suspend their disbelief.
But that's us (or at least, "us-of-the-Western-tradition"), and I wanted to see what I could do with an "alien" culture. Not necessarily a non-human culture, but one sufficiently different to make it a mystery to present-day Earthlings (in much the same way that, say, some Japanese stories—and here, the tale of The 47 Ronin comes to mind—pose a challenge to those little aquainted with Japanese culture).
Where could I find such a culture? My mind immediately thought back to an idea for a story that crossed my mind several years ago, about an Earthling whose mind is transferred to a machine, and said person's adventures (in the spirit of Serenity) in quest of, among other things, enough money to have a human body created that he might "slip back into."
Everything was going along smoothly until I hit a small snag: a better story line than the one I was working on. Unfortunately, said new line had nothing at all to do with Chekhov's gun. It was that situation—having two arcs, where the better one wasn't much use for Idol, and there did not appear to be any good way to combine the two—that, given a killer work schedule and the added stress of helping out with getting daughter Natalie's house rented, almost had me putting in for my third and last bye.
That said, the more I read the piece I wrote, the more I think it hangs together.
