- Juliette Wade on How much description?
My general rule for description (of people or places) is that you need to stick with the rule of relevance: if it’s relevant, describe. If it isn’t, don’t. It sounds simple, but evaluating the degree of relevance in any location is where the tricky part starts. There are three big kinds of criteria I generally use to assess this: point of view criteria, plot criteria, and story criteria.
I get a lot of stories for Kaleidotrope where I learn more about a character’s hair and eye color than a do about who they are or why they’re doing something. Most of the time, if it’s just window dressing, you can drop it. Writing isn’t a visual medium. You have the reader’s imagination to help you, and moreover will often have a less satisfying story if you don’t let it. [via]
- I really like Warren Ellis’ challenge to artists to redesign Superman…as if the artists had never heard of Superman. Some of the results are really interesting.
- Along a slightly similar route, the Hypothetical Library: “imaginary book covers designed for actual authors.” [via]
- And along a very slightly similar route, John Seavey imagines a universe in which only the first Star Wars movie is canonical.
- And finally, I just like this quote from Jonathan Carroll, so I’m posting it.
comics
Wednesday various
- I don’t know, there has to be a better way to reform our failing public schools than by firing all the teachers. [via]
- Is it just me or is having Abe Lincoln say, “I’ve been a slave to vampires for thirty years” sort of in questionable taste? It feels like maybe it’s just me. Still, this is pretty neat as far as book trailers go.
- I admit it, I got a kick out of Hark! A Vagrant’s Canadian Stereotype Comics.
- Yes, and this font joke. [via]
- And finally, I meant to post about this when BBC Audiobooks America did their whole audio book by Twitter thing with Neil Gaiman, way back in October, but I just never got around to it. You can read the whole story here (or you can listen to the audio version here), but even I haven’t done that, and I contributed a line to the darn thing. They’ve apparently since done at least one other such story, with author Meg Cabot, but I’m much more interested in the experiment here than the results. It was fun to participate the day-of, but like Salon’s Laura Miller, I’ve yet to be convinced that the results are particularly readable to outside eyes.
Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason….At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” [Samuel R.] Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.
Which may just be another way of saying too man cooks — especially untrained cooks — spoil the broth.
Wednesday various
- I think I’m going to make a movie called Vaguely Historical People Killing Things and Shouting at Each Other.
- You know, Jeff VanderMeer is probably right: “in another 40 years lots of folks are gonna be laughing at lots of stuff we think works just fine now.”
- John Seavey makes the argument that Heroes is actually the best Watchmen adaptation ever. Yeah, I’m just not seeing it.
- “French celebrity philosopher” (how’s that for a title!) Bernard-Henri Lévy has come under fire recently for quoting a philosopher who never existed. [via]
- And finally, I didn’t watch this year’s Super Bowl, not even for the ads nor the stirring triumph of the New Orleans Saints. So I luckily missed this Dodge advertisement, though I got a general vibe from the internets that there was sexism aplenty that evening. The internets, they did not lie. So it’s nice to see someone parody the ad so skillfully, simply by reversing the genders.
Monday various
- So first the Discovery Channel created this commercial, which was actually kind of awesome. It was set to the tune of a traditional campire song (which was itself set to the tune of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul”). And then Randall Munroe created this webcomic, riffing off the commerical, which was itself pretty awesome. And now that awesomeness has gone one step further. Honestly, where else are you going to see Neil Gaiman singing while bouncing on a trampoline with his daughter? Or Cory Doctorow in full red cape and goggles regalia? This is just seriously fun. [via]
- Meanwhile, here’s the Ultimate Graphic Novel (in six panels). I don’t think they missed anything. [via]
- While I’m on the subject of comics and artwork, check out Derek Chatwood’s terrific illustrations. The short stories that accompany the drawings are worth reading, too! [via]
- Apparently, you can remove scratches from your DVDs using just a banana and some toothpaste. Time to MacGyver up! [via]
- And finally, the world’s luckiest sports fan? [via]
That’s one way of putting it
Shaenon Garrity on Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:
It’s fun. It’s just kind of like reading a novel about a Victorian inventor who comes up with the microchip, the integrated-circuit computer, the Internet, Google, and furry porn, yet is only considered on par with the guy who made those bikes with the one big wheel.
She also makes another really interesting point:
Also, just to put on my irritable-feminist hat for the day, I’ve noticed a tendency in fiction where these superhuman feats of intellect and inspiration are only considered plausible in male characters. While Joe and Sammy come up with every brilliant innovation in the history of American comic books, their lady Rosa Saks gets to be… the second-best artist of romance comics. Sure, in real life there weren’t many women during that period drawing great comic books, but neither were there any men who simultaneously combined all the best qualities of Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Will Eisner in their prime. Why must our ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy characters be confined to fanfiction.net?
Via Bookslut