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wytchcroftThere was blood on the floor -
No, wait - let me start again.
In fan fiction, a beginning is a delicatessen nascent with the promise of blooming into a full pastiche-ery.
How was that for an opening?
Raymond Queneau who wrote one of my favourite books Zazie dans le Metro, also wrote a very erudite work on literary style called, with the full weight of knowing what it was, A Question of Style. The book follows a simple and beautiful idea (extant in music for a long time) by presenting the same simple story in 99 ways.
From journalistic, to first person, to past tense, to shopping list. It's amusing and educational to take the tram along with the character.
As a scribbler (which is like being a Dabbler only you don't have to be as able and you'll score more points on a scrabble board) I have found it useful for nudging into both writing exercises before commencing a long piece -
and also for throwing open the possibilities when work needs revising. Oh, ok let's tell the battle of waterloo from a bullets p.o.v. (I'm thinking of JG Ballard's Assassination of President Kennedy seen as a downhill bicycle race.)
Of course form and style are interlinked somewhat; a detective story tends to dictate a well known style of prose, for example.
Indeed the Detective thriller (or noir) form is well known for its hard-boiled style, probably the most widely imitated and parodied literary voice. Even Garfield's done it.
You know the kind of thing.
"It was a dark night. Steve hated dark nights. They reminded him of her eyes. Both were wide, black and mysterious. Both held the promise of something, danger, adventure. And later perhaps with the first electric whisper of dawn, madness.
Looking out at the grimy lines of the city of shadows, Steve could feel that madness rising already. "Gonna be a long night," he muttered. He was alone in his empty office. There was no/one to reply. Certainly not... her."
This kind of imitation is of course pastiche. I've wondered about pastiche before as someone who da- scribbles with fan-fiction now and again, (I did a big stint with my favourite show, firefly, some place else,) it becomes an issue when trying to take on a voice that is not one's* own..
I think this is why most fan-fiction is inspired and expands from television and movies, a specific visual 'look' and atmosphere may be captured by a writer in many different ways without a necessary limitation on their preferred style.
One reason why Firefly fan fic is hard is because Joss Whedon has made his scripts very verbal, almost literary, his characters twist the forms of vocabulary and dialect out of all normalcy. "Make the English language scream," Whedon has said.
Still, it's easier than (as I am realising) taking on the very succinct voice from a novel or story; an authorial tone which is surely part of the appeal of the original.
No mean feat. I have elsewhere been fairly brutal in my views on continuance novels, be they Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft, James Bond, or Dune - but as a fan ficster I can really sympathise with the hard ask the various writers have had. To adopt the pretence of being someone else (ala 'Chandler's' Poodle Springs, 'Ian Fleming's Devil May Care)
or to say, heck with that and we'll just not thanks. The Dune sequels don't really ape the originals stylistically.
And that's rather the point to this messy missive, neh?
I am interested in writing within the Dune cosmos, within the authorial voices of Frank Herbert firstly, but the visual verbal input from film and television too.
So...
Herbert - well... tricky business. Like taking on Tolkien. Hard to do without falling into parody. I haven't read any Tolkien fan-fic, does the Tolkien voice come through? And which Tolkien? JRR or his son? (Continuance hell again).
Tolkien... hmm... "The pale moon shone from the shields the warrior elf lords carried and in the flickering the shadows of their bodies seemed taller somehow, fey and noble. Raising Calaramdir high, Erelehil the anointed, Star of the West, Lord of the misty realm and the suburb of shalsy, cried out in an eldritch tone and as a single wave, the silvery might of the Elves roared from the line of dark trees and into the valley.
I was washing my hair at the time and found their racket quite disturbing.”
Y'see the dilemma?
Herbert was, in my opinion really a great writer stylistically, vivid, wide in scope and with a surprisingly individual authorial tone. On the other hand his editors (included ye fame-ed Campbell man) were not so hot. Unsurprising, Science Fiction was not considered literature at the time and most editing was for the sake of clarity of thought and to condense work into a magazine or journal format.
And so we get strange works like Children of Dune, in some respects my favourite of all his books, the best and most naturally grandiose of his works, full of ideas on every subject and characters with rich interior lives and individual identities. We also get patches of really indescribably awful prose - mostly in uber-rich descriptions of nightfall or the sprawl of Harrakeen. Even Wikipedia picks on one of them, "glissandos of moonlight".
It is a shocker.
The opening, in a C.O.D. style would go something like this:
"There was blood upon the flagstones, against the harmony of the chamber room, the obsidian flooring with its calm white path, the blood sang a harsh counter-point, a jarring melody picked out by the fingers of moonlight as from a mal-tuned baliset.
And yet, and yet - was not such a harsh dissonance called for - did it not somehow compliment as well as collide with the music of the whole. Some perhaps thought so, for a man's voice said. "Oh well done my dear, very decorative. Yes, I like that."
You see my fix?
So, I open good old Raymond and try from various angles.
The floor felt the wetness of the blood as it splashed up on it.
Nah.
Blood, red. Floor, stained. A simple equation, a question of symmetry.
Blech.
keep at it.
I could see the blood in the moonlight, glistening, wet, red.
Yeah, yeah.
Humanistic:
When a man is murdered the cleaning of the bloody stains of death is an arduous chore left to the most reviled.
So, so.
One, corpse, one room, two doors, a little screaming, some chuckling. Stir and pour gently.
It becomes even harder in a way, like an over-zealous archaeologist rubbing away the precious hieroglyph key attempting to uncover the entrance sign to some tomb or other, the keen brass rubber who rubs out the brass.
The writing becomes a kind of erasure, what Burroughs would call rubbing out the word.
But ultimately what you end up with is more Douglas Adams than anything else - and at least he would sympathise with an opening that I can't seem to improve on and which can be quoted here in full:
"Slightly bloody."
*wow - i used 'one's' in a sentence, lookit me ma, top o'the world!
No, wait - let me start again.
In fan fiction, a beginning is a delicatessen nascent with the promise of blooming into a full pastiche-ery.
How was that for an opening?
Raymond Queneau who wrote one of my favourite books Zazie dans le Metro, also wrote a very erudite work on literary style called, with the full weight of knowing what it was, A Question of Style. The book follows a simple and beautiful idea (extant in music for a long time) by presenting the same simple story in 99 ways.
From journalistic, to first person, to past tense, to shopping list. It's amusing and educational to take the tram along with the character.
As a scribbler (which is like being a Dabbler only you don't have to be as able and you'll score more points on a scrabble board) I have found it useful for nudging into both writing exercises before commencing a long piece -
and also for throwing open the possibilities when work needs revising. Oh, ok let's tell the battle of waterloo from a bullets p.o.v. (I'm thinking of JG Ballard's Assassination of President Kennedy seen as a downhill bicycle race.)
Of course form and style are interlinked somewhat; a detective story tends to dictate a well known style of prose, for example.
Indeed the Detective thriller (or noir) form is well known for its hard-boiled style, probably the most widely imitated and parodied literary voice. Even Garfield's done it.
You know the kind of thing.
"It was a dark night. Steve hated dark nights. They reminded him of her eyes. Both were wide, black and mysterious. Both held the promise of something, danger, adventure. And later perhaps with the first electric whisper of dawn, madness.
Looking out at the grimy lines of the city of shadows, Steve could feel that madness rising already. "Gonna be a long night," he muttered. He was alone in his empty office. There was no/one to reply. Certainly not... her."
This kind of imitation is of course pastiche. I've wondered about pastiche before as someone who da- scribbles with fan-fiction now and again, (I did a big stint with my favourite show, firefly, some place else,) it becomes an issue when trying to take on a voice that is not one's* own..
I think this is why most fan-fiction is inspired and expands from television and movies, a specific visual 'look' and atmosphere may be captured by a writer in many different ways without a necessary limitation on their preferred style.
One reason why Firefly fan fic is hard is because Joss Whedon has made his scripts very verbal, almost literary, his characters twist the forms of vocabulary and dialect out of all normalcy. "Make the English language scream," Whedon has said.
Still, it's easier than (as I am realising) taking on the very succinct voice from a novel or story; an authorial tone which is surely part of the appeal of the original.
No mean feat. I have elsewhere been fairly brutal in my views on continuance novels, be they Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft, James Bond, or Dune - but as a fan ficster I can really sympathise with the hard ask the various writers have had. To adopt the pretence of being someone else (ala 'Chandler's' Poodle Springs, 'Ian Fleming's Devil May Care)
or to say, heck with that and we'll just not thanks. The Dune sequels don't really ape the originals stylistically.
And that's rather the point to this messy missive, neh?
I am interested in writing within the Dune cosmos, within the authorial voices of Frank Herbert firstly, but the visual verbal input from film and television too.
So...
Herbert - well... tricky business. Like taking on Tolkien. Hard to do without falling into parody. I haven't read any Tolkien fan-fic, does the Tolkien voice come through? And which Tolkien? JRR or his son? (Continuance hell again).
Tolkien... hmm... "The pale moon shone from the shields the warrior elf lords carried and in the flickering the shadows of their bodies seemed taller somehow, fey and noble. Raising Calaramdir high, Erelehil the anointed, Star of the West, Lord of the misty realm and the suburb of shalsy, cried out in an eldritch tone and as a single wave, the silvery might of the Elves roared from the line of dark trees and into the valley.
I was washing my hair at the time and found their racket quite disturbing.”
Y'see the dilemma?
Herbert was, in my opinion really a great writer stylistically, vivid, wide in scope and with a surprisingly individual authorial tone. On the other hand his editors (included ye fame-ed Campbell man) were not so hot. Unsurprising, Science Fiction was not considered literature at the time and most editing was for the sake of clarity of thought and to condense work into a magazine or journal format.
And so we get strange works like Children of Dune, in some respects my favourite of all his books, the best and most naturally grandiose of his works, full of ideas on every subject and characters with rich interior lives and individual identities. We also get patches of really indescribably awful prose - mostly in uber-rich descriptions of nightfall or the sprawl of Harrakeen. Even Wikipedia picks on one of them, "glissandos of moonlight".
It is a shocker.
The opening, in a C.O.D. style would go something like this:
"There was blood upon the flagstones, against the harmony of the chamber room, the obsidian flooring with its calm white path, the blood sang a harsh counter-point, a jarring melody picked out by the fingers of moonlight as from a mal-tuned baliset.
And yet, and yet - was not such a harsh dissonance called for - did it not somehow compliment as well as collide with the music of the whole. Some perhaps thought so, for a man's voice said. "Oh well done my dear, very decorative. Yes, I like that."
You see my fix?
So, I open good old Raymond and try from various angles.
The floor felt the wetness of the blood as it splashed up on it.
Nah.
Blood, red. Floor, stained. A simple equation, a question of symmetry.
Blech.
keep at it.
I could see the blood in the moonlight, glistening, wet, red.
Yeah, yeah.
Humanistic:
When a man is murdered the cleaning of the bloody stains of death is an arduous chore left to the most reviled.
So, so.
One, corpse, one room, two doors, a little screaming, some chuckling. Stir and pour gently.
It becomes even harder in a way, like an over-zealous archaeologist rubbing away the precious hieroglyph key attempting to uncover the entrance sign to some tomb or other, the keen brass rubber who rubs out the brass.
The writing becomes a kind of erasure, what Burroughs would call rubbing out the word.
But ultimately what you end up with is more Douglas Adams than anything else - and at least he would sympathise with an opening that I can't seem to improve on and which can be quoted here in full:
"Slightly bloody."
*wow - i used 'one's' in a sentence, lookit me ma, top o'the world!
