Literature on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Writing, video games and so forth

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 11:55:18 +0000

I don’t often write blog posts because somebody says „Be part of this! Write about this topic!” And yet here we are, because I find a certain topic interesting.

Cathy Day, whom I’ve occasionally mentioned on this blog, wrote the following:

I’ve never played a video game, but I recognize that it’s a narrative experience that lots and lots of people value. No judgement. But in my fiction-writing classes, I often read stories and novels that read as if I’m watching someone else play a video game. There’s plot, action, scene, all great, but virtually no interiority, which for me is *absolutely necessary* in fiction. My students have always used films and TV shows to talk about fiction, but now they also reference video games. “This is like Bioshock,” for example, and I have no idea what that even means. I wonder if other creative writing teachers have noticed this quality in student fiction or these references? I wonder if people who play video games could give me some tips about how to help my students make the transition from gaming to writing narrative.

She wrote it on Facebook, then she posted it on her blog and asked for opinions. I like the question and it’s part of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s a slightly different take, and I’ll start from here: what is up with literature, anyway?

I’ve run into endless discussions concerning whether listening to an audiobook counts as reading the book. Some say it’s less valuable to listen to a book than to read it – because it’s lazier. And then, of course, people often say that books are superior to movies/TV shows, because the latter are less valuable/more commercial/easier to follow. Theater is above TV, but I’m not sure where it is in relation to reading books. Probably a bit lower on the scale of values, unless you’re watching some damned difficult crap. Video games are, of course, at the very bottom of this scale of values, because Pacman can’t compare to Tolstoy, or something like that.

Which is all fascinating and, in my opinion, all wrong. I describe myself as a writer, but what I actually mean by it is that I am a storyteller whose main medium is the written word. But man, I love other mediums, too. I write my own novel and I do my own audio recording of it. If you read it yourself, you get to add intonations and moods yourself. If you listen to it, you get my interpretation of how the story and the characters sound like. You might think this is good, right? I am telling a story, I naturally want to get it across my way, no? No. Sometimes it helps me. At other times, I am very sad that my own voice, no matter how good, will never echo in your mind in the same way as your own soundless inner voice.

The fun part is that no matter how a story gets told, we never get the whole of it. We recreate it from what we have, but in the end we all see our own version of that story. Fans put this in practice: they often write their own crazy stories based on small gestures which are definitely there, but which meant something entirely different to the scriptwriter, director, actors. And that’s perfectly alright and normal and I love it.

So where am I going? Well, to this: there’s no ‘right’ way to tell a story. There is no ‘perfect’ medium. Art is a lie: it makes us think we’re getting the full story, but it’s always giving us more of something, less of something else. There will be things you will wish you had been able to leave out, but must add. A movie will never manage to have an indistinct background as well as a comic series can. It’s easier to hide background details in film than in literature: in literature you need to mention them, but keep the reader’s attention focused on something more exciting. In film, you literally put them in the background.

Here’s what I mean. Look at one of the pages of Exiles, a number of The Sandman, from the volume The Wake:

Look at the subtlety of the black and white, at the elegance of the drawings. The scenery is barren, or maybe it barely exists at all. Different fonts to suggest different types of speech, but they don’t tell you anything about what characters’ voices sound like. I can’t change fonts in a book: it’s too odd, it jumps at you. What you can’t do: add music; describe actual voice pitch; add every gesture. There is a lot of suggestion here – and in other mediums, that suggestion would need to be done in different ways. Literature would use vague words, cinema might use filters and carefully considered sets.

It is unfair to compare a medium with another from a value POV because they all do different things.

But what about video games and fiction writing and what Cathy Day said? I’ve taken you on a ride, but we’re finally arriving at our destination. She mentioned no interiority from the characters. Well…

In video games the main character can be a shell that the player enters (usually first-person games: shooters, Portal, Amnesia). Or s/he can be very clearly defined as a character (Monkey Island’s „Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate!”). In the first case, the player’s psychology substitutes that of the character’s, doesn’t it? There is still psychology going on, but you don’t see it because it’s yours. You put it all in. It’s something you simply can’t do with books, they need psychology.

Well, the problem with video games from this point of view is that they don’t teach you how books look like. Which is an odd thing to say, I suppose, but I think it’s the basic problem that Cathy Day encountered: her writers might have stories to tell, but they aren’t familiar with how literature tells stories.

Oh, no. What is there to be done?

Well, the short answer is: read books. Read more books. Look at what it is that books do. Grab books from various different genres, different countries, different times and see what they do and how they do it. What catches your attention? What makes them interesting? What makes you read on? Study books, don’t just read them. If you like a page, figure out why you like it. I am not saying you should do this as a reader. As a reader, you really ought to give in to the story and enjoy it. But as a writer, that’s how you learn how to do things. By studying others.

C. Day is asking about transitioning from one medium to another.

Well, transitioning is a bit like translating. The theory of translation says the following: a translator doesn’t go from language A to language B. Instead, he goes from language A to a certain meaning, which he then moves into language B. In other words, „Mary goes to the market” is English. It is then translated into the idea of Mary going to the market, in present tense, which then needs to be retold in, say, Romanian: „Mary merge la piață.” This can lead to several choices for the translator (Do I call her Mary, because that’s her original name? Or do I call her Maria, so Romanian readers can feel closer to her?).

The same is true for changing mediums, I think: you have the story in medium A, which you then translate to yourself as a complex web of plot, character and details, which you then try to get across in medium B, with medium B’s tools and techniques. But the story is, to my mind, the central thing.

I haven’t played Bioshock, but I’ll talk about Tomb Raider, which is new, shiny and well-known, okay?

Lara Croft struggles there against two types of opponents: ones who catch her and ones who don’t. This division is important because those opponents transmit two different things: the ones who don’t catch her are at a distance. They have guns and other such. They can shoot her and kill her, but you can evade them. They are there to underline her skills with a gun/bow and arrow/weapon of choice. They create a stealthy Lara, who works hard at not being seen, who is a scared woman, but a deadly woman. They make you feel strong.

The enemies who catch her are up close and personal. They grab her. They hold her. You need to hit a sequence of buttons at the right time to escape their grasp and you often can’t. This Lara is more scared than skilled, more desperate and in difficulty than on top of the situation. I did wonder for awhile why the hell I needed to press left and right in quick succession to evade a crazy psycho, but the answer is this: because it’s effing hard for her to escape.

This is how the story works for games: is it difficult for Lara? The player will struggle. Are stealth and skill needed? You get ten opponents and alarms everywhere.

Literature is more subtle. You don’t have to kill ten opponents to prove stealth. One or two are enough. Four are numerous. I will disbelieve you at ten. Explosions don’t affect us much, because it isn’t the idea of an explosion that really makes an impact on us: it’s the sound of it, the light, the way things fly all over and are destroyed. You need to describe that.

Video games are explicit. They need to hit you over the head with a hammer to get a point across. Literature is subtle and relies on small things, on details and observations.

Here’s how it can be done. Lara against opponents who don’t catch her:

My knee scraped against the ground as I fell, but I couldn’t scream. They would hear me, and then they would kill me. I hurt all over, but I needed to find a way out, so I searched for something, anything, a rope, a surface I could climb on, but seconds ticked away and they got closer and closer…

Lara caught:

She felt his hands running across her body as he whispered words in Russian that she couldn’t understand. Lara had no idea whether he meant to kill her or rape her, she wanted to curl up into a ball and cry either way, but that wasn’t an option…

If you want to transition, you need to switch modes of expression. What can literature do that video games can’t do (as easily)? References, thoughts, impressions, feelings, moods. It comes down to learning what your medium can do, what has been done so far and how. Which is why writers need to read books.

(But you can pick up stuff from other mediums as well, of course. And as for video games, I really recommend that people should play some. You might eventually realize that they Aren’t Your Thing, but they are an experience of their own, no? A whole new type of telling stories.)

The Translator [short story]

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:22:43 +0000

Author’s notes: I wrote this a while ago for a friend. It turns out that this blog has any number of spiritual people visiting, so as I was going through stories and trying to pick one to post here, I decided that this one would be perfect for all audiences.

I broke a few polite rules in writing this one. One such unspoken rule is that a character’s name shouldn’t resemble that of the author. Another says that characters aren’t supposed to look like self-inserts unless they are self-inserts. Those things make it so much easier for people to interpret and criticize, but I like having fun and seeing what happens if I do one thing or another.

Here you go, peeps. I won’t bore you with other comments, although there’s much I could say.

Happy holidays and all that!

***

The Translator

Malena was born on the third of April, a heady Aries and a talented translator. She only waited for so long before she put her foot down and took charge of her destiny, riding it like a child of the sea would a dolphin.

She began her job with diligent care from the moment she first awakened from the drowsiness of the very young and into the slow comprehension of children. She first translated her own simple thoughts to the world in an agonized cry – ‘I’m hungry! I’m hungry!’ – first in the Spanish words of her parents and then repeated in the strange, native Tupi dialect of her Mestizo nanny. The dark-skinned woman had gasped in fear and tried to cover the child’s mouth before any of those of the house heard and fired her for teaching Malena to speak the wrong language. But before she could even reach out towards the tiny mouth, the great wooden doors of the child’s room burst open to admit Malena’s fiery, proud mother. ‘She speaks! Oh, she speaks!’ the Spanish lady cried, waving a white shirt about like a flag. ‘I’m hungry! I’m hungry!’ the child repeated again and again, first in Spanish, then in Tupi, making herself heard so loud that many years after men would claim to have heard her from across the town letting the world know that the devourer of knowledge had come to Earth.

After the joy of hearing their only daughter speak lifted and she was fed, Malena continued learning new words, translating her thoughts into both Spanish and Tupi until she finally drove all those around her to desperation and a visiting aunt dared to do what the others out of superstition would not even attempt: she pulled Malena aside and explained that one could not always speak in all tongues one knew. Just one outcome was needed. The child understood immediately.

Without her parents knowing how she did it, Malena also came to speak the Portuguese of her grandmother and the Tupi dialects of her nanny’s friends. By the time she went to school, she had learned English and German from a tall man with round eyeglasses who had asked for a translator into the native dialects and had been brought to see the miracle child. Malena had led him around, laughing at his difficulty with any language, and ended up mimicking his way of speaking to perfection – coming to know words, he felt, which he had never spoken before her.

In school she learned French from her teachers before the others could even count properly to a hundred, then spent the rest of her classes yawning demonstratively until a miserable Hungarian boy started teaching her his language secretly while they waited for the lectures to be over. Malena found out that Attila had never wanted to leave his country, but his parents had dragged him across the Atlantic in the search of a better life.

„You shan’t find it here!” Malena had laughed, then danced circles around him in all her languages before she settled down to really look at him and study his plight. Reaching out, she translated him into something new, better suited for this new continent. She made his shyness into mystery, his strange accent into charm, his longing for home into a hint of an exotic land within his eyes. „You’ll always have Hungary in your heart,” she said, touching his chest. „And it will be there more than it will ever be on a map.”

After she translated Attila she noticed that translating from language to language became as easy as shaking one’s whiskers is for a cat. She only had to glance at a language to fill her huge bags of words, even if those languages were Chinese, Bengali, or the obscure Arawakan, or even the Latin caught in church. After some time she came to understand languages she had never heard before just reading them through those who spoke. But as time went, languages concerned her less and less.

She started translating cultures and people, touching them and seeing them melt under her fingers to become something of the same essence and of a different shape. Curious to see how far she could go, she experimented on her own person, translating herself into a common Tupi woman, into a Spanish noble girl, into an English princess and amused herself by going deeper and deeper every time until one day she found that she could translate her black hair to blond, her white skin to black, her round eyes to slants. Malena became a mistress of disguise, always the same deep inside, but ever more changing on the surface, today Japanese, tomorrow Hindu, the day after that Mestizo, always keeping it her secret. One day at school she became frustrated with a proud, stuck-up girl that boys all seemed to dream of and decided to translate herself into a tanned, manly Antonio just so she could scoff at the Consuela’s pride. That way, Malena accidentally found out about the difference between men and women, though at first she was confused by what she considered to be an accidental extra appendage. But as soon as she discovered that she had followed nature, she realized that her gift was more marvelous than she had expected. Consuela and her pride remained forgotten.

When Malena’s father decided that he had had enough of his ever prettier daughter running around acting disgracefully and making friends with the oddest of characters, he tried to stop her from going out and turn her into a proper young lady. In a fit of rage, Malena ran through the entire town, uncatchable until the very center of the town when her father’s fingers finally encircled her arm, only to have her translate her body into that of a sparrow that flew away, followed by the frightened cries of men and women who thought they’d seen the devil kidnap a child, or the fairies spirit her away.

Not daring to look back, Malena went on for days and nights as a bird or as a goat or a bear, dodging humans. When a hunter caught her fox’s trail, she learned how to translate into plants and started through being an oak. Later, sad and away from home, she turned into clouds and moonlight, then figured out how to turn rain into drought and poor men into rich. And all the time she felt that her true self, the one deep down inside was becoming smaller, smaller, smaller, a single point around which the world could be made to turn, whatever touched her becoming something else. The tinier she became, the more she could shift herself and the things around her. When she had been as large as a watermelon, she could transform into humans, when as large as an orange, into animals, when as a grape seed into plants. Now as the tiniest fleck of dust from the head of a pin, she flew over the ocean as breeze, dived between the water drops as a fish and turned dark, murderous oil spilled from boats into sea monsters. She translated herself into a cloud that kept a handsome sailor cool, then floated above the land again and translated a battlefield under her into a peaceful gathering. One day she translated herself into an atom, another into a solar system far away, exploring herself in all forms she could imagine.

Finally, when she felt that she could translate herself so well that she could be anything, anywhere, know anything, do anything, she discovered that the tiny spot she had become could hike upon atoms that seemed much larger than the Earth and see each fleck of light separate from the others. And there was something much, much smaller yet than her, something she could finally sense in the background, something she could not entirely understand nor translate yet either. As if the entire world was built within a vast, vast sea of this and never knew it. Wondering what more she could do if she could be as small as that, Malena dived.

She made herself smaller and smaller, holding her breath to get as tiny as the things around her, trying to translate them. She shed her name, her concepts of herself that were somewhere within, pushed them outside for later use, let them drag behind her. She became so small physicists would never guess her presence. She shed the idea of appearance, shed her personality and became smaller than can be conceived. She shed everything else she had, looking deep, deep inside for the thing she had in common with this strange mass of the tiniest particles. She became tiny, tiny, tiny beyond belief, beyond understanding, beyond what can be explained and in the end she also dropped her efforts at being smaller and gazed on, almost as tiny as these things.

What she saw she could almost touch, but not yet understand. She could smell that whatever it was molded itself into matter, she could taste how gravity worked, she could hear energy transformed and touch Life being alive. Almost there, she thought, almost there. Why, if she watched carefully, maybe she could find out. So she stood still without even realizing she was still, stopped thinking without realizing she was not thinking, watched without realizing she watched. She just was.

What there is left to say there are no words to translate.