Man, writing a blog is hard work! My mind is asking itself a thousand questions.  What should I write about?  Should I write a story based on research or everyday happenings?  Do I make it emotional or rational?  How do I help the reader visualize the topic?  Is what I have to say even important enough to share with others?  After stumbling through these types of questions and not getting a clear response, it never fails that my mind falls into a cloudy state where even a lighthouse spotlight couldn’t see through the fog.  During these times, my mind is blank and I can’t come up with one simple idea that could set me on the right path.

How do professional bloggers do this?  I have one very enthusiastic and emotion-driven friend in Bellingham, Washington who has been writing a blog entitled “Aesthetic Voyage” for the last year and a half.  Every single day, this “liver of life” types up a story, a scene, or a conversation that he came across in his day while also attaching a photo that inspired his meanderings.  He even goes a step further and includes a song as well as a quote that moved him that day.  He does this 365 days a year.  How does he do it and how can each one be as inspirational as the next?

Then there is my consultant/author/speaker friend in Los Angeles whose words are focused on helping us change the way we look at the work that surrounds us.  Every week he posts a new, witty, logical, and well informed article on his blog that lets the reader ponder ways to improved not only their work life but to further their perceptions of their inner being.  The way he discusses each topic is articulate, clear, upbeat, researched and consistent.

These are two different types of bloggers with two different styles of writing.  What do they have in common?  Their heads both seem to be filled with clever ideas.  How do I open up my mind and become a little more like them?  Wait a second…I just wrote about blogging!  Perhaps these blogs were just the inspiration I needed to help the haze lift.  I think I am now prepared to begin my journey into the world of writing.

And, to make a finer point, it did a great job of adapting a story that was very much designed for a completely different medium.

In an age where it’s just logical to assume that every hit book (or comic book, or video game, or blog or news article or internet meme or, God help us, board game) is going to get a movie made out of it eventually, it’s easy to forget just how incredibly different the mediums of print and movie actually are. Many people who are fans of a particular book or series of books go into the inevitable movie version expecting to have a similar, if not completely the same, experience that they had when reading the books, but really, that’s just not actually possible.

Consider, aside from the obvious points of film being a visual medium and books being a print medium (or, in the case of a comic book, a film’s visuals being movement-based, while a comic’s visual are static-image-based; or a game, where the experience is interactive, rather than observatory; I could go on forever here), the basic experience of taking them in is inherently different. A book might get read over the course of several days, or several weeks, or even several months (or in the case of “War and Peace” and myself, a handful of years), and it’s designed for that, with chapter breaks and the like. A book is built to be read by a single person over a period of time, with numerous breaks. There are people (like, for instance, Junie) who tend to read books in single fast marathons, with as few breaks in the process as possible (indeed, Junie will often start and finish a book within the same weekend, although doing so in the same day generally requires her to be on some hard-core lounging-by-the-pool-for-hours vacation time to really pull off, and with Junie, those times are rarified and precious), but even then, it’s very much a one-on-one process, author-to-reader, as the reader has time. Even in book clubs, the reading is largely solo.

Conversely, watching a movie is more often than not a group experience. Even when it’s at home, alone, during the middle of the day, the experience of watching a movie is largely designed to happen right then and there: push the story into your brain in two hours, and done. While I’m a huge fan of a good solid three-act structure, that structure is not often made explicit; there aren’t chapter breaks where it’s intended for you to put the movie down for the night and return to it the next morning (even in movies where there are, literally, chapter breaks).

So if the experience of reading a book is designed to be like a 12-course meal, slowly and carefully consumed and enjoyed over a long stretch of time, then the experience of a movie would be that of a quick-order lunch from a take-out counter. And while it’s somewhat easy to conceive of re-working a gourmet hotdog into a drawn-out chef’s tasting menu of deconstructed hotdoggery (that is to say, turning a movie into a novel), the very concept of somehow taking a feast and fitting it all into something that can be eaten by hand while one walks to the gym should logically fill even the greatest culinary adaptor with absolute terror.

And yet, novels get adapted into movies all the time. Sometimes the movie is awful; heck, a lot of times the movie is awful, at least relatively. It is not, nor should it be, easy to fit a novel’s-worth of story into a two- or three-hour movie. And the ways that the process can fail are themselves complicated and varied.

For instance, the movie might stray from the book in ways that wind up completely changing the story and point of the book. Starship Troopers has only the very basic and simplistic links to the Robert A. Heinlein book it’s supposed to be an adaptation of, and whether one thinks it’s a brilliant satire or a ridiculous waste of celluloid, it’s hard to argue that it is not at all a good adaptation of the book.

On the other side, a movie adaptation can stick too faithfully to the book, losing sight of the fact that the movie doesn’t have two weeks of steady consumption for the audience to process all the details, as the book had. Many would say Watchmen fell into this trap, being an incredibly close and thorough translation of the comic book series (with one rather large exception near the end, of course), and as a result it was ponderous and plodding and oppressively long. I’ve heard (and on occasion voiced) similar feelings about the first few Harry Potter movies, which at times could feel as if they were abandoning the whole point of telling a story via film in order to stop and say “Hey, remember this part from the book? Cool, right?”

In my thinking, the adaptations that do the best job are the ones that don’t necessarily stick to every detail that was in the book, and don’t necessarily toss out everything that isn’t purely cinematic, but rather twist and trim in the service of a different ideal: being as faithful as the movie can be to the heart and soul of the book. Or, put another way, to the message that the book is trying to impart.

The Hunger Games carries this off well. There are deviations from the book, to be sure, and there are new elements introduced that are clearly there just because it’s more visual, and it never once tries to ham-fistedly stick with the “Katniss as the only viewpoint” format of the book. But all of those changes serve to produce a movie that is telling the same tale that the book does: How oppression dehumanizes, both the actual victims of the oppression and the people made to treat it like entertainment. It can’t (and thankfully, doesn’t try to) be told exclusively from the inside of Katniss’ skull, and yet it is still entirely Katniss’ story.

Like the books or not, like the movie or not, disagree with this change or that subtraction, as adaptations go, The Hunger Games is a success.

Take the 134. An artery between Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley, it’s driven by a lot of people on their way to or from points along the 101 or the 5 or the 210 or the 2. It’s an alternate route to get to Hollywood without going through Downtown; it’s the major way to traverse Glendale and Eagle Rock and southern Burbank; it is the gateway to the north end of Griffith Park and the wonderful Los Angeles Zoo and Dr Sheldon Cooper’s favorite place in the whole world, Travel Town.
It’s the archetype of freeway architecture, all wide lanes and curing, almost flying interchange bridges. It curls along the bottom of the San Rafael Hills, giving a spectacular view all the way past Mt Washington and Montecito Heights, to the skyline of Downtown. On a clear day, you can see Century City. As freeway goes, it’s a good one.

It takes a lot to cause traffic on the 134. And by “it takes a lot”, I mean there are many and varied ways that traffic happens on this damn road. For instance, it might be, oh, let’s say, a fiery flaming torch of fire:

Other days, it might not take an inferno of doom. It might be something like, oh, who knows, maybe, say, a rainbow?

Seriously. Huge amounts of rain pour down over the whole area (which can often cause traffic as Los Angelinos are sometimes terrified by the concept of water falling from the sky), and what winds up actually causing traffic on the venerable 134 Freeway? A rainbow. I could not make this stuff up, more’s the pity.

To be fair, though, it was a faint double-rainbow, which is pretty awesome.

And, more to the point here, I’ve been exploring the joys of long-dose antibiotics and barium swallows (the most awesome type of radiologically-contrasting birds). Nothing all that serious, but plenty enough to make me miserable and incapable of figuring out how to get the automated post uploading to work.

In other words, the documentary is humming along, the fever has backed off, and a ton of new posts are in the pipe.

{note: excepting the single line of the introduction, this post was written by An Anonymous Doctor and was originally published on Whatever (http://whatever.scalzi.com)}

How Not to be a Clever Writer.

It touches on a lot of the points I was aiming at, and in more detail besides. It also goes for general advice on the whole craft of writing, and for anyone who’s struggling with, as Charlie Jane says eloquently, wanting “to be Joss Whedon so bad it hurts”, this is a great and useful read.

And I won’t even get into all the ways she’s totally wrong about the dramatic effectiveness of plots involving closed time-like loops [/injoke]

Because, yes, everyone can recognize that having other characters (or the description) flat-out tell the audience about some quality the lead possesses is ineffective writing, it doesn’t mean that a contrived and obvious bit of action intending to “show” some quality is going to be the bee’s knees of great writing. Building a character’s traits and qualities into their reactions to events that flow together in a natural way is not a particularly easy task. It’s one that even veterans with decades of writing experience under their belts can flub.

A recent interview that George Lucas did with The Hollywood Reporter brought to my mind one of the best examples of the trickiness of effective characterization: Han Solo and Greedo in the Mos Eisley Cantina.

Now, hang on a  moment; before any of you click away with a “oh, lord, he’s going to start being geeky about Star Wars, ughhh”, please understand: I am not going to rant about George Lucas altering Star Wars. I do not consider the Special Edition changes to have done anything to my childhood, nor do I think the prequels are any sort of blasphemy, nor do would I ever compare Mr Lucas to any particular mythological entities of elemental evil. I am, not to put to fine a point on it, not that sort of geek. I’m not even going to get into the claims he’s making about “original intent”, aside from saying that I think it’s awesome the way a 68-year-old man can troll half of the entire internet.

No, rather, one of Mr Lucas’ statements in that interview –that “Greedo shooting first” was the way the scene had always intended to be played, and that his alterations were simply “clearing up the confusion”- got me thinking about how the scene serves the characterization of everyone’s favorite smuggler.

He doesn’t shoot “first”; he shoots “only”

Consider the two options: Han Solo, whom we’ve been told is a smuggler, who is obviously the sort of person who will slip people by the lawful government for the right price, is confronted by someone pointing a gun at him, is intimidated back into his seat, and threatened. Not obliquely, with some clever word-play that might be interpreted vaguely as a threat, but with a direct “I’ve been waiting a long time to kill you”. His response? Han shoots Greedo dead and walks out, flipping the bartender a coin “for the mess”.

Without needing to tell us a thing, we’ve just been shown a guy who values his own life way more than anyone else’s. He’s not scared to do the practical, messy thing when it’s his hide in question. He comes from, and recognizes that he’s in, a kill-or-be-killed universe. This is clearly a guy not to be messed with, and not to threaten.

Is he, in the words Mr Lucas uses in his interview, a “cold-blooded killer”? Perhaps. If one doesn’t see Greedo’s direct threat (and the implied threat of the gangster boss Jabba backing him) as any particular reason to end a life, then sure, I could see the appellation. It seems more “deadly practical” to me, much as how, in later scenes, Han is ready to blow up a lone TIE fighter rather than “let it get away”, and will shoot Stormtroopers left, right, and center while on the Death Star. It is, as I said, a kill-or-be-killed universe, and the Han set up by this version of the cantina scene is clearly no idealist. It most certainly fits in with his unwillingness to “join the rebellion” in a “hopeless fight”, and serves as a great counterpoint to when he does come back and saves Luke from Darth Vader, at the very end of the Death Star battle sequence.

The Han shown here and the Han shown at the end of the movie are different people. He has an arc, and while he starts the film as a pragmatist and a scoundrel, he ends as a hero. A pragmatic, scoundrelly hero, but still.

Now, consider the scene as Mr Lucas “always intended it”.

Totally natural head tilt action

Here we’ve just been shown someone who, while he’s definitely willing to sneak people past the lawful government for a price, and who we’ve been told is a smuggler, waits until he’s actually shot at before firing his gun and killing the shooter. This Han Solo is the sort of person who, after not being killed by mere inches, nonchalantly walks out, flipping the bartender a coin “for the mess”. The only reason he’s not killed right then is because Greedo is an incredibly bad shot (or because Han has the otherwise-unmentioned superpower of being able to teleport his head two inches to the right at lightspeed). He’s willing to kill, certainly, but apparently not until the threat has been put into action and magically avoided. He’s definitely someone you don’t want to mess with, if only because he’ll easily dodge your shot if you’re under five feet away from him. Perhaps you might want to shoot at him from a distance, with a sight.

Is he a cold-blooded killer? No, I suppose not, though if he’s the sort to wait until nearly being killed before responding, one wonders why he’s so quick to chase after a lone TIE fighter later on (never mind blasting his way out of the space-port). Is he pragmatic? Goodness, no; if not for Greedo’s incredible aim, Han would’ve be a stain on the wall long ago. One wonders why he later makes such a big deal about Getting Out Of Dodge/Yavin4 before the Death Star shows up, because he clearly believes enough in ideals like “all life is precious” to wait until being shot at before even showing his weapon, and he’s not worried about being shot at even when he can see the finger pulling the trigger. There’s not much of an arc for the Han shown in this scene compared to the Han at the end of the movie, because this scene doesn’t tell us much about Han at all.

The theatrical version of the Cantina scene gives us a Han with… complexities. The Special Edition version gives us a Han with… uncanny luck, which never becomes a plot point later on. The original gives us a Han who’s not quite a good guy at the beginning, and becomes a hero by the end. The Special Edition gives us a Han who’s pretty much a good guy at the beginning, and a good guy at the end, with a somewhat strange middle segment of being kind of a jerk.

And the difference is simply one of a single shot. That is how tough really effective characterization can be; the simplest difference, and everything a scene was showing us about a character changes. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.

Shakespeare, of course, was a master of dialogue. The plays are almost entirely dialogue (or monologue, which is just a character talking to themselves), and it’s always tempting to simply exult in the turns of phrase and wordplay that he brought to the English language. It can be especially tempting to pay tribute to it all within the dialogue of the adaptation, but I’m trying to avoid that. Partially, my effort is because I honestly feel that it’s a trap to try to be clever and expository in dialogue. Fitting in as much cleverness and information into a character’s mouth as possible might seem like great writing, but it can also be a painfully obvious bit of The Author sticking into the reality of the story. Much like an event that only logically happens right then because the plot demands it happens right then, Clever Dialogue can sit on a good script like a lead brick, dragging the audience out of the experience and reminding them that Someone Wrote This.

(I am a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet, for instance. Seriously, they are tremendous writers. But every so often, as yet another character launches into a three-minute, machine-gun-style soliloquy about whatever happens to be happening right then, I can’t help but think, “who the heck actually talks like that?”)

Clever dialogue also runs the risk of not being honest dialogue, and that can kill a script. I love playing with words and language, but I can’t let the joy I get out of building a really stupid etymological pun (that only five people in the universe besides myself are going to get) to distract me from the fact that people inevitably prefer to watch characters that resemble real, living, fully-formed humans, and not just mouthpieces for my bad jokes. I might want to let the audience know that a particular character had a bad childhood, but a real person is not necessarily going to blurt out how bad their childhood was to whomever they’re talking to. Similarly, it might be very useful to me to have a character state out loud that they’ve just figured out a particular twist in the plot, and lay out for the audience exactly what the details of that realization are, but how many people really talk detailed exposition to themselves, or even to their companions?

It can go too far the other way, of course. I have a deep dislike for plots that only move forward because one character doesn’t say something that it would make every logical, emotional, and psychological sense in the world for them to just say. It’s that tiny sliver of a difference between someone being understandably taciturn (or even maliciously taciturn) and someone being flat-out stupid (and all too often, the stupidly-quiet person is someone we’re supposed to think is, if not “smart”, then at least rational).

Of course, another reason that I’m reluctant to simply crib directly from Shakespeare for the dialogue in this adaptation is that many of the characters I’m writing for are children, and when children are made to spit out overly-clever and wordsmithy lines that lack the deep-down honestly and guilelessness that defines childhood, then it’s extra-especially-super obvious.

Not to mention, Shakespeare’s characters are often quite a bit more crude and sexual than many people would credit, and there’s simply no way in hell that I’m going to give a 9-year-old a line anywhere even remotely like “The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.”

I’m very much a cynic when it comes to reading books about “how to be happy”.  Some people need them (the books are cheaper than getting a therapist), but I’ve never thought I was one of those people and now, after a bit of reading, I’m sure I’m not one of those people.

The books is set up with important topics/resolutions that she chose to tackle on a monthly basis.  In the first 100 pages I’ve already identified with a number of key points: The life crisis that lead me to  put myself and my family first has already come and gone for me.  I walked away from one career to develop another where I’m very content.  I’ve learned how to love my husband even with his flaws, and to minimize my tendencies that can drive him crazy.  My husband and I rarely ever go to bed angry, and we know that when we argue we really aren’t arguing – we are traveling to the same place, just taking slightly different routes.   Start a Blog to introduce novelty and challenge in your work (and although you are reading the MHP version, I also have one I started back I 2008 http://juniehildebrandt.blogspot.com/).  Overall, I love a challenge and see failure as a learning experience – which may my key to happiness.

I know I am very fortunate to be in such a “happy place”.  Rubin’s book wouldn’t be so popular if people already knew what I know.   In my life I haven’t consciously been trying to be “happy”, I’ve just looked for a way to deal with problems.  I have 200 more pages to go in this book and about 2000 more if you count the rest of the books in my project – plenty of good stuff for more posts!

I’m simplifying that unfairly, of course, but that’s largely the gist. From the Los Angeles Times:

Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues. [...]

Beginning Feb. 1, when the new agreement goes into effect, Netflix customers won’t even be able to add Warner movies to their queues until four weeks after the DVDs go on sale, a knowledgeable person not authorized to speak publicly confirmed. They would then have to wait another four weeks until Netflix starts shipping the discs.

Logically, Warner Bros clearly felt that they don’t get enough revenue from Netflix and Redbox (and, really, that’s completely understandable), and had a feeling that potential customers who really, really, really want to see a movie the instant it is released on DVD or digitally, would quite clearly love to utilize avenues that provide WB with better revenue (such as DVD sales or direct pay-per-view), if only there wasn’t that pesky Netflix and Redbox there letting them rent-or-stream the movie after only a few weeks of waiting.

So, did WB decide to combat this lack of traffic to their better-revenue-generating sources by enhancing the customer experience of those sources?  Or by leveraging the popularity of their titles alongside the tricky market that Netflix, and to a lesser extent Redbox, are always in to renegotiate better rates from the rental places?

No, no, of course not.  WB decided to make it more difficult for customers to find its titles, even when those titles aren’t technically available via the rental places yet. 

I’d be extremely surprised if imposing a silly 4-week wait on Netflix users even being able to remind themselves that the movie exists winds up generating any additional DVD sales for WB at all.  Frankly, I’d be shocked if it doesn’t just wind up slightly increasing the rate of outright piracy of the blocked WB titles during the embargo window.  As someone who is in the position of fighting to get access to various distribution avenues, and who has to rely on the quality of the actual work to generate revenues on the far end, I personally find the idea that WB thinks this restriction will benefit anyone, let alone their own bottom line, yet another example that fundamentally The Studios Just Don’t Get It Anymore.

The whole point of the movie business is to get people watching movies.  Every aspect of revenue generation is related to getting as many people as possible to watch, enjoy, recommend -and want to watch again- your product, and monetizing that viewership.  By actively trying to restrict where and how viewers see their products, rather than jumping on new ways to monetize however they want to experience it, WB is serving an old paradigm, in a way that has been and will probably continue to bite them right in the collective ass.

Which is a shame, because they make a lot of movies I enjoy watching, and that I will gladly pay money to watch. When I want, and How I want.

Bit of an update on this: Redbox is having none of this deal. And again, I can’t blame them.  Engaging in practices that actively harm everyone involved seems like a terrible way to maintain a revenue stream.

And Bridesmaids just became the best-selling Video On Demand title in history. Brought in another $40million in additional receipts. And all while being available on Netflix for rental. Ain’t that just amazing.