On Writing on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Flight from Hell – the end of season 2

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 15:07:27 +0000

There’s still a bit to go before the last episodes of season 2 of Flight from Hell are available online, but I’ve already sent them out. (which reminds me, a new episode was posted today)

For the past few days I felt lost. I’ve written 2 seasons of Flight from Hell – 12 episodes each, so 24 in total. About 3000 words/episode, give or take. About 70-75 thousand words, I think. Unless my maths deceive me. And I know where the story is going and who the characters are, but there’s a point in anything I write when I wonder if the story isn’t, in fact, dull, crap, stupid, cliche or unreadable… or all of them together. That point, for Flight from Hell, is now.

Once upon a time, that feeling was absolutely correct. I wrote crap. That’s what teenagers and beginners do. It’s how you learn, by smearing the paper with what you think is brilliance and seeing later that you sound like a childish drama queen with a speech impediment and a slight IQ problem. These days the feeling is usually wrong (not always, but usually). As such, it’s something that I need to deal with. I need to push myself through doubt, through indecision, through the desire to flee and abandon the novel.

This is why last year I thought writing a serial novel is a brilliant idea: I’ve already made a contract to go on. As well as being a series of physical, on-paper contracts, writing for the Big World Network is a metaphorical contract with myself, a promise that no matter what, I’ll go through with it. Flight from Hell might not be the best thing I’ll ever write (I should hope not; it’d be disappointing to write my best work at 25). It might not even be as mind-blowing as I wanted it to be. But I’m hoping it’s good and I’m trying to make it so. You aren’t a real writer if you only ever write in your head. So eventually I had to take the big step and step on insecure ground, exposing myself to failure and criticism – but mostly, to being disappointed in myself.

This morning, feeling like I was about to curl up in a corner and hyperventilate because I was so afraid of screwing things up, I re-read a pep talk I got on NaNoWriMo a few years back. It was by Neil Gaiman, because of course it was. And it started like this:

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone[…] You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that […] it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

So true.

It turns out many writers have doubts. Including Neil Gaiman. Including 75% of the writers his editor knows. I assume that out of the rest of the 25%, you have at least 5% who think that they’re the best thing since Shakespeare and that perfection flows from their pens like lava out of the Vesuvius, cca. 79 AD.

So I got myself an Irish Coffee, which is basically coffee with whiskey in it. I rarely indulge in alcohol, but it’s fucking brilliant with anxiety. The amount of alcohol in an Irish Coffee is usually perfect: enough to lower my inhibitions, but not enough to make me think I’m funny or brilliant when I’m blatantly not.

I wrote.

I now have 1129 words of the 25th episode of Flight from Hell. And I’m in love with it again. Not because alcohol makes any novel idea looks pretty, but because I loosened up enough to remember why I love writing it.

The only thing I hate is that I write from a single character’s point of view and it’s frustrating not to know how to reveal others’ POVs as well. I know them, I know what they’re thinking, and Nakir is a bit clueless. But it’s not an insurmountable problem.

Last time I finished a season, I wrote an article called „12 episodes, 12 quotes” to entice people to check it out. But fuck it. I didn’t feel like advertising this time around. I’d rather celebrate, because it’s a fun novel and when I sent that first episode to the Big World Network last year, I had no idea that it would actually be a novel, and one people like reading, at that.

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.)

Discussions on literature (consider us drunk)

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 19:07:49 +0000

Linda’s come over, all the way from the other side of the country. Which is really cool. And conversations are getting really weird. We were talking Flight from Hell and we got to incubi and succubi.

Linda: Do you remember how incubi and succubi used to be so rare in fiction? And now they’re all over the place.

Me: I swear to God I didn’t know Amanda had a series called Incubus before submitting to the Big World Network.

Linda: Speaking of Incubus. *fangirls* I really, really like it. It’s fun!!! But no, I mean, all over the place. Everywhere.

Me: Remember where vampires were a metaphor for sex?

Linda: Yeah.

Me: So we just decided to drop the metaphor part.

Linda: Remember that English lit class?!

Me: YES!!!! O_O

*flashback*

15-20 students are sitting around a table during a literature seminar.

Professor: So, how would you like to die? [note: In her defense, we were talking about Emily Dickinson]

Student: By incubus.

Class: *stupefied silence*

Linda: Do you know what an incubus is?!?!?!?!

Student: Yes. *confused*

Class: O_O *more stupefied silence*

Professor: *starts snickering*

Student: I want to die peacefully in my sleep.

Professor: *barely stops from laughing out loud*

Linda: *dramatically* But they suck your soul and drag you to hell!

[…]

Me: But do you remember that class in which a professor asked what the fuss about vampires was?

Linda: *falls over laughing*

*flashback*

Professor: What’s the fuss about vampires?

Student: [something-something metaphors, literature, symbolism]

Professor: No, I still don’t get it.

Annoyed student: They’re hot, sexy hunks used as sex metaphors!

Professor: Ooooooooooooh. I understand now! *gets wistful look*

[…]

Me: *checks her blog stats* OMG, somebody came from Google Plus! That place is alive!!!!!!!!1 This is the first time this happens. I should write a special ’thank you for sharing my post, single G+ actual user out there!'

[…]

Me: I never meant to put any actual gay stuff in Flight from Hell. Aside from Ashmedai-the-pansexual-devil being a threat in the background. I thought I could just skirt the issue constantly and have Nakir escape him over and over. Then I realized, Ashmedai would go for him in immoral, creepy ways. He totally would.

Linda: *does that dreamy thing fangirls do*

Me: And Nakir’s weak and confused and trying to play reverse psychology at one point and Ashmedai, well… „Lead us not into temptation, because we’ve already been there and proved we were abysmally bad at it.” [note: I have a thing for that ’lead us not into temptation’ saying recently]

Linda: *wiggles her eyebrows*

Me: Not that anything actually happens, mind you. Not really. Not beyond this one thing, this short, clothes-on thing which ends fast and makes the threat and Nakir’s confusion so much worse.

Linda: *does a sad face* I would love to see them together. Maybe all three of them. That would be fun.

Me: Bad idea in the text.

Linda: *puppy eyes* How about in the Alternate Universe Christmas Special?

Me: There is no Alternate Universe Christmas Special.

Linda: There could be. Hey, I knew this author who wrote fanfic of her own stories, ever thought of doing the same?

*conversation dives straight into the gutter*

[…]

Me: So sometimes, I look at the editors’ comments, and they’re, like, so confused, you know? Trying to solve that old question, which for once makes perfect sense: what did the author mean to say over here?

Linda: I only ever get giggles in the margins.

Me: I get confusion. What did the author mean?… And then the author shows up and says, no, no, no, wait! That’s not what I meant! Oh, crap. Let me change it. In chapter two, I had the devil say that thing, you know? *quotes from memory* „For that I, and not your husband, must be their father.” Except the first time I said it like crap and it was confusing. So when the editor modified it for clarity, there was this confused scene between the queen and the devil. He was like, „I won’t be your husband.” And she went, „Good, I’ve already got one of those.” And I went, „ooooh, wait, he was actually saying ‘I’ll be knocking you up myself’. Which is a bit different.”

[…]

Linda: I never thought I’d say this, but I am so happy to get rid of the romance subplot with my story. It didn’t work. At all. So right now I’ve taken the romance down and I’m adding a lot more crazy.

Me: Like?

Linda: Well, there’s a whole new plot with the Physics Department. Some klutzy students did some experiments and that’s why it’s… missing. Carmen goes off to search for the missing South Wing.

Me: You have a vanishing university.

Linda: Pretty much. Oh, and I have to figure out how to put in the vampire bounty hunter. Because I said there would be one – and there will be, dammit.