Month: August 2008

Is it just me, or is the Beloit College Mindset List sort of genuinely stupid? Not the idea behind it — which is basically, “let’s make everyone over 18 feel really old,” which I guess has its place — or even some of its cultural observations, but in the overall execution, its awkward phrasings, and its general failure to be anything like actually funny.

I was much more taken aback by Mike Sterling‘s observation that Neil Gaiman’s “Dream Hunters came out ten years ago, apparently. How old does that make you feel?” Surely that couldn’t be right…but damn, it is. It’s one thing to realize the cultural artifacts of your childhood are now old; it’s quite another to realize the things that seem like they happened just yesterday actually happened a decade ago.

• Chris Sims on the Joker:
  

  From the start, he’s an amazing visual, and it’s a complete inversion of the classic hero and villain formula. Batman was inspired as much by Count Dracula and the Shadow as he was heroes like Zorro, with a costume designed to frighten, but he’s still the good guy. The one in the bright colors with the big smile who does magic tricks… that’s the one you need to watch out for.

• And speak of the devil — “The devil! The devil!” — here’s the Joker as Ronald McDonald. Why so serious? You want fries with that?
• Question: is AOL really still “a leading ISP” anywhere outside of The New York Times crossword puzzle? I know it’s a handy three-letter word, but c’mon, Will Shortz, move with the times.
• The AV Club interviews the director of Star Wars: Clone Wars “about making George Lucas’ world cartoonish.” Doesn’t sound like too hard a job to me, frankly.
• In fact, the best, it seems, that can be said for Star Wars: The Clone Wars is what Tasha Robinson says here — that “it’s better than an unimportant filler plot arc in an already-completed story has any right to be,” but that that’s not saying much.
• Seriously, if you’re going to send out simultaneous story submissions — against what’s expressly written in the guidelines — at least send them as separate e-mails. I’m going to chalk this one up to inexperience.

Jane Espenson on character introductions:

I know you see the difference. The second description is highly physical. In fact, it uses visual characteristics to try to convey things about the character. This is a very good way to quickly convey character in, say, a novel, but it’s not especially helpful in a script.

Actually, I think I’d extend that and say it’s significantly worse in a novel. I think she’s absolutely right that “if you describe that character too precisely [in a script], you frustrate everyone during production, and you tip off any reader of a spec to your inexperience.” But I also think that, if you throw in any physical descriptions, in any writing, they need to matter. They can’t be there in place of characterization. It’s much better to get me inside a character’s head than to tell me what color the hair is on top of it. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve read that lead off with a string of physical descriptions — hair-color, age, height, weight, etc. — but that tell the reader absolutely nothing about the characters who have them.

I’m of the opinion that you don’t tell readers anything they don’t need to know; and you only tell them what they do need to know when they need to know it.