The importance of text

Always bet on text. [Link]

At every step of communication technology, textual encoding comes first, everything else after. Because it's vastly cheaper on a symbol-by-symbol basis. You have a working optical telegraph network running in 1790 in France. You the better part of a century of electrical telegraphy, trans-oceanic cables and everything, before anyone bothers with trying to carry voice. You have decades of teleprinter and text-only computer networking, mail and news, chat and publishing, editing and diagnostics, before bandwidth gets cheap enough for images, voice and video. You have pagers, SMS, WAP, USSD and blackberries before iPhones. You haveTeletext and BBSs, netnews and gopher before the web. And today many of the best, and certainly the most efficient parts of the web remain text-centric. I can download all of wikipedia and carry it around on the average smartphone.

Bond as Moneypenny

Velvet, a spy thriller comic from Ed Brubaker. [Link]

In the opening issue of the comic book Velvet, the secretary to the director of an elite British spy agency decides to go digging into the mysterious death of a secret agent. This, she learns, is a mistake, and soon enough she finds herself standing over a dead body, and framed for murder. “This is as bad as it gets, secretary,” says one of the armed men who bursts in to arrest her. “No,” she answers, “it isn’t.” Seconds later, every secret agent in the room is writhing on the floor, and she’s leaping out the window in a stealth suit.

Turns out this isn’t a story about Moneypenny, the secretary waiting for James Bond behind a desk at MI6. It’s a story that asks, what if a 40-something secretary was secretly James Bond all along?

And this on casting:

“I loved the idea of flipping the typical male-oriented spy story, and doing one about a woman who was also a mature, middle-aged woman,” says Brubaker. He saw the character’s age as fundamental to the story; it helped cement her as mature, seasoned rather than a vulnerable young woman-in-danger, and it allowed her to have a deeper, richer history as a spy. “In the espionage field, it totally makes sense that someone could have a secret history; they could have a job for 20 years that turns out to be a front, basically,” says Brubaker. “But it has to be someone who’s lived a real life.”

When he started pitching the concept as a TV pilot, however, Velvet’s age turned out to be more controversial than expected. “The notes that we got from everybody were that she needed to be 25, and an agent-in-training learning from the cool male secret agent. I was just like ‘OK, this is… just appalling to me,’” Rather than a character that had lived a real life, they wanted a woman 20 years younger, stripped of Velvet’s expertise and maturity. “Imagine Taken, if Liam Neeson’s character were 30,” he adds. “It’s just not the same movie.”

Brubaker recalls one of his favorite actors, Diane Lane, talking about how all the good roles seemed to evaporate after she turned 40, leaving nothing but moms or jilted wives left for younger women. “How is it possible that nobody wants to write an amazing part for a woman that’s not basically a kid? Most of the [male] actors we see in the world are in their 40s, or late 30s,” he says. “You don’t see the person who chose to be James Bond but also happens to be a woman.”

Operational Themes

Fascinating piece on why some tv shows work and some don't. [Link]

As television has evolved to include more serialized, heavily “mythologized” drama — even in the stock genres of crime, medicine, and the law — the operational theme of the protagonist must remain front and center for the series to succeed. In Breaking Bad, Walter White’s operational theme — “to save everything I love I must become something everyone hates” — creates an endless supply of drama. Every situation Walter enters requires him to tell, develop, and sustain a lie.

This brilliant operational theme requires every single scene in the show to be front–loaded with deception and subterfuge. It’s a recipe for perfect ongoing drama that allowed the show to slowly string out and develop its more academic theme: the seduction of a good man by the infinite charms of wealth, power, and his descent into darkness. But make no mistake, academic is the right word for those themes. It was the initial simplicity of Walter White’s operational theme that consistently opened dramatic avenues episode after episode.

It doesn’t end with Walter White. The current “golden era” of television is littered with very easily identifiable operational themes that burden their protagonists. Tony Soprano wants to remain a sadistic mobster even though his unconscious musters every weapon at its disposal to get him to turn away from his horrific life. Don Draper continually tries to keep up the idealized appearance of the successful mid–century man in the grey flannel suit as his inner demons plague him with the truth that his entire life is a lie. Doctor House wants to be left in peace to be a belligerent drug addict but is forced to put his basic instincts aside and perform the job of genius diagnostician.

Outside of TV, my favorite example of the perfect fusion of situation and character into operational theme is the film Die Hard. The entire narrative is an extended metaphor for marital therapy: a husband trying to earn back his estranged wife. The terrorists are the physical manifestation of the emotional barriers that keep John McClane from familial bliss. As with any person in couples counseling, McClane systematically loses his metaphorical armor as he fights to the point of exhaustion. He ends up shoeless and bloody, blubbering to his “therapist” about his love for his wife — bleeding both thematically and practically.

The bathroom confession in Die Hard could have just easily been an episode of HBO’s In Treatment: a man denuded through adversity of all the trappings of macho pride, forced to confront his raw emotional wounds.

It seems obvious, and, frankly, inevitable — in the way that a Mark Rothko painting, or an Arne Jacobsen chair, appear inevitable — that simple operational themes are the key to serialized success. And yet, by and large, most attempts at serialized, mythologized sci–fi fail to pull off this trick. Think of all the genre series that have attempted to capitalize on the serialized mystery/heavy–mythology vogue triggered by Lost: Flash Forward, Kingdom Hospital, Surface, The Event, Invasion, V, Threshold, Awake, Journeyman, Dollhouse, Persons Unknown, Terra Nova, the American remake of Life on Mars — the list goes on and on.

Most of the sci–fi shows we now regard as classics — and the majority that are currently successful and truly long–running, like Supernatural — are not Lost clones. Rather, they are straightforward procedural franchises with simple operational themes.

The brothers Winchester, Nick Burkhardt in Grimm, Mulder and Scully in The X–Files — even Buffy, the Vampire Slayer — are all basically cops: rolling into a new case week after week, interrogating suspects, finding lore that matches the methodology of the villains, confronting evildoers, serving justice, and moving on to the next week’s transgressor. In the best of these series, an overarching theme buttresses the set–up: Mulder and Scully’s dynamic was defined by opposing viewpoints which fueled every scene. In addition to being thrust into stories by their occupation every week, they always had a basic ideological conflict that spoke to their character.

Even the beloved crew of the Starship Enterprise are hyper–competent trouble–shooters placed into stories weekly by dint of external mission as opposed to internal need. In the best Star Trek series, this necessity was supported by an interesting character dynamic: Captain Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are a three–man representation of the ego, superego, and id. The drama of the series lied in watching these three archetypes integrate into a coherent solution to the planet–of–the–week’s problem: McCoy would shout, “dammit, man, we gotta do something!” Spock would reply that “to do something would be illogical.” Kirk would eventually say “I have a plan.”

Compare that infinitely fruitful character interaction with the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation — a long and tedious stew of underdeveloped, under–thought characters kept afloat by the exigencies of a procedural franchise. On Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first two years there was always a potentially interesting issue with the planet–of–the–week. But it took almost two years for the characters to become anywhere as interesting as the show’s premise. (It’s a miracle of the extant love of Star Trek in the core audience, or the innate intrigue of the show’s premise, or the economics of first–run syndication in the late eighties — or maybe some combination of the three — that the show survived long enough for its characters to find their way into being fully–realized people who could carry a story like “The Inner Light,” “Chains of Command,” or “Tapestry.”)

Had the writers merely dropped the original characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation on a desert island — a place with no innate sense of mission — the series would have surely collapsed.

Lost succeeded in telling a longitudinal story because it managed to create a central operational theme for every single one of the characters in its voluminous ensemble. In the earliest days of the creation of the series, the creative team behind Lost — co–creators Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams, with the assistance of Paul Dini, Christian Taylor, Jennifer Johnson, and myself — came upon the idea of using flashbacks to develop the operational themes for each character. The flashbacks to the crash of Oceanic 815 first presented in the pilot transformed into full–blown plots extending through the course of the series. The island stories were presented in direct contrast to who the characters were in their former everyday lives. Every action in the island — present became an attempt to compensate for shortcomings in the past’s real world.

The operating theme of Lost is simple and applies to every character: who do you say you are when you can reinvent yourself with impunity? Every member of the Lost ensemble was living a lie on the island. These lies dictated their behavior and led them to try — either successfully or unsuccessfully — to remake themselves into their most desired version of themselves.

Jack strove to lead in spite of a life of personal failure and the scorn of an unloving father. Kate yearned to prove herself a good person in spite of being a wanted criminal. Michael tried to be an able parent after being absent from his son’s entire life. Charlie struggled to be a caretaker to Claire and her unborn child while concealing his drug addiction. John Locke — mysteriously healed of his paralysis by the island — was hell–bent on proving himself a man of action and principle after a lifetime of meek submission. Sun pretended to be a dutiful Korean wife, concealing even her fluency in the English from the brutal husband — whose brutality itself was a smokescreen to conceal a deep yearning for his own broken dreams — whom she was preparing to escape. The list goes on. What’s important is that every character had the same operational theme. The synthesis of personal desire for reinvention in contrast to the reality of each character’s previous life propelled one story after another for the course of Lost’s first two seasons: forty–eight hours of television that cemented the show’s place in the popular culture.

The operational theme of Lost — obvious as it seems in retrospect — did not become clear to the creative team until after the pilot had been shot and we were tasked with figuring out how exactly the series would work in episode after episode. We were very close to falling prey to the fallacy that makes for the downfall of most of the proposed serialized sci–fi pilots that come down the pike: we were almost — almost — seduced by a shiny concept — the mysteries of the island, from the smoke monster to the presence of ghosts from the past in the present. We almost focused on the mystery instead of the operational theme of the characters.

To this day, I thank god we had the epiphany early.

By dealing with the unknown, beguiling, and generally spectacular (aliens! robots! vampires! alien robot vampires!), sci–fi as a genre has the sneaky ability to fool otherwise extremely capable writers into believing that a nifty concept with a lot of unanswered questions is enough to carry a television series. It isn’t.

To have something spectacular take place — the arrival of aliens, a space/time conflagration that causes everyone to see a few minutes of their future, a plane crash in a mysterious island — and then spend twenty–two episodes showing how the characters figure out merely what happened, how, and whether it can be fixed, is not only the biggest failure of the imagination possible in sci–fi drama, it is also an insult to the genre. It assumes that sci–fi is somehow “easier” than a deeply character–driven kitchen–sink narrative (like Mad Men) that requires the protagonist to have a rich inner life in order to motivate conflict.

The island on Lost served the same purpose as the ad agency on Mad Men: it was a space where the protagonist sought to invent a new life in spite of all evidence to the impossibility of that endeavor. The conspiracy inOrphan Black is nothing more or less than a perfect physicalization of a young woman’s struggle to define her own identity: one which just so happens to cause her to come into conflict and allegiance with numerous clones of herself, all of them living vastly different lives with remarkably different outcomes.

Many big and shiny ideas can tap dance around a lack of an operational theme for a while — the length of a pilot, maybe even a season of decompressed cable–style narrative. But no amount of spectacle can obscure the truth that a protagonist or ensemble with a stark, robust, and recognizable operational theme is the source of all televisual drama.

Ironically, sci–fi, the genre that most often suffers from underdeveloped characters on TV probably demands more character from its characters than any other genre. Why? Because it is, at the core, a metaphorical exercise. Sci–fi poses a question that extends beyond the easily understandable stakes of the cop, doctor, or lawyer. How are the aliens, robots, mysterious islands, viral outbreaks, and vampires an external manifestation of your main character’s self–concept?

Not All Men

This erupted over the internet after Elliot Rodger killed 4 men and 2 women. [Link]

Over the weekend, as the discussion across Twitter turned to these horrible events, a lot of men started tweeting this, saying “not all men are like that.” It’s not an unexpected response. However, it’s also not a helpful one.

Why is it not helpful to say “not all men are like that”? For lots of reasons. For one, women know this. They already know not every man is a rapist, or a murderer, or violent. They don’t need you to tell them.

Second, it’s defensive. When people are defensive, they aren’t listening to the other person; they’re busy thinking of ways to defend themselves. I watched this happen on Twitter, over and again.

The problem with that sentiment is that on the internet, in the written word, you have to take someone at their word as to what they meant. To do otherwise is to 'mansplain' with a 'what you really meant was...' and that would be wrong and condescending.
If you write broad, sweeping generalizations without caveats, I have to assume you mean what you wrote. Getting defensive about it tends to reinforce that opinion.

Good isn't boring

Why we don't need to darken heroic characters to make them interesting. [Link]

“Captain America is only interesting if he’s a prick,” declared a recent article on Vulture.com, inspiring so many angry Marvel fan rebuttals that it probably qualified as outright click bait.

Of course, the idea of Captain America as “boring” has already been debunked by the $580 million his new movie just made at the box office. What we’re really talking about here isn’t Captain America as a character, but the way we react to blockbuster movie protagonists who aren’t morally ambiguous antiheroes.

In the 21st century, this kind of pure-hearted, optimistic hero is too often seen as childish and shallow, hence why so many people perceive Cap to be a stodgy do-gooder. The assumption is that in order to modernize an old-fashioned hero into a “serious” character, he needs to get darker. In other words, the infamous gritty reboot.

No matter how much time the Captain America films spend on real-world topics like PTSD and surveillance culture, in many people’s eyes they will never be truly respectable until the lead character starts acting like an asshole.

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is the ultimate example of the gritty superhero reboot. By hiring a respected director of psychological thrillers, Warner Brothers made it very clear that they were steering clear of the cartoonishness that drove the Batman franchise into the ground with the widely derided Batman & Robin. But despite Nolan’s lack of affection for the cheesier aspects of the superhero genre, the Dark Knight trilogy is really no less comic book-ish than its more brightly colored counterparts.

Nolan’s Batmobile might be a military all-terrain vehicle instead of a sports car with fins, but that doesn’t make the Joker or the Scarecrow any more plausible as real-world villains. All three Dark Knightmovies still require the same suspension of disbelief as any other movie about a guy who fights crime in an ankle-length cape and bat mask. However, with their storylines focusing on police corruption and urban terrorism, they were seen as being far more “serious” than other superhero movies, and therefore, they must be better. Critics agreed that finally, here were some superhero movies that non-geeky, non-frivolous adults could enjoy.

This false connection between gritty realism and literary quality is a common theme in the way we interpret popular fiction, but it’s particularly noticeable in the superhero genre, where “realism” is always going to be a matter of opinion.

And

At the most basic level, a “dark” or “gritty” narrative is about putting the hero in a place where they have to make a difficult choice. In the recent Batman and Superman movies, that  “hard choice” has generally been to do something bad, which is then interpreted as being more mature and realistic because real life is about compromise. Meanwhile in Marvel Studios movies, the opposite is almost always the case.

Tony Stark realises the impact of being a weapons manufacturer, and faces up to the consequences. Thor only regains his powers after performing an act of pure self-sacrifice. Captain America spurs on a Snowden-esque leak that trusts the public to pass judgement on corruption within his own intelligence agency—the polar opposite of Bruce Wayne’s attitude toward civilians in The Dark Knight Rises, in which the citizens of Gotham are infantilized to the point of being completely helpless until Batman shows up to save the day. In fact, the surveillance system Bruce Wayne uses to search for criminals in Gotham City is not so very different from the one Captain America just destroyed in The Winter Soldier.

This Marvel/DC division is even more evident when you compare the final battle scenes in Avengers and Man of Steel. Both involve an alien attack on a U.S. city, but Superman and the Avengers react in very different ways. Superman spends 20 minutes beating Zod to a pulp and razing various skyscrapers in the process, culminating in the infamous scene where he snaps Zod’s neck. The Avengers, on the other hand, prioritize civilian survival above the ultimate goal of defeating Loki, with half the battle focusing on getting pedestrians to safety and restricting the battle to a few city blocks. Both scenes involve making a difficult moral and tactical choice in the heat of battle, but Superman goes for the “dark” option while the Avengers focus on minimizing civilian casualties.

High School Never Ends (in Sci-Fi)

One clique is angry that another clique has invaded it's secret clubhouse. The Hugo Awards. [Link]

A few days ago the finalists for the Hugo were announced. The Hugos are the big prestigious award for science fiction and fantasy. One of my books was a finalist for best novel. A bunch of other works that I recommended showed up in other categories. Because I’m an outspoken right winger, hilarity ensued.

Many of you have never heard of me before, but the internet was quick to explain to you what a horrible person I am. There have been allegations of fraud, vote buying, log rolling, and making up fake accounts. The character assassination has started as well, and my detractors posted and tweeted and told anyone who would listen about how I was a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, a rape apologist, an angry white man, a religious fanatic, and how I wanted to drag homosexuals to death behind my pickup truck.

The libel and slander over the last few days have been so ridiculous that my wife was contacted by people she hasn’t talked to for years, concerned that she was married to such a horrible, awful, hateful, bad person, and that they were worried for her safety.

I wish I was exaggerating. Don’t take my word for it. My readers have been collecting a lot of them in the comments of the previous Hugo post and on my Facebook page. Plug my name into Google for the last few days. Make sure to read the comments to the various articles too. They’re fantastic.

Of course, none of this stuff is true, but it was expected. I knew if I succeeded I would be attacked. To the perpetually outraged the truth doesn’t matter, just feelings and narrative. I’d actually like to thank all of those people making stuff up about me because they are proving the point I was trying to make to begin with.

Allow me to explain why the presence of my slate on the Hugo nominations is so controversial. This is complicated and your time is valuable, so short explanation first, longer explanation if you care after.

Short Version:

1. I said a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work. Those openly on the right are sabotaged. This was denied.
2. So I got some right wingers on the ballot.
3. The biased voters immediately got all outraged and mobilized to do exactly what I said they’d do.
4. Point made.

I’ve said for a long time that the awards are biased against authors because of their personal beliefs. Authors can either cheer lead for left wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality. I was attacked for saying this. I knew that when an admitted right winger got in they would be maligned and politicked against, not for the quality of their art but rather for their unacceptable beliefs.

If one of us outspoken types got nominated, the inevitable backlash, outrage, and plans for their sabotage would be very visible. So I decided to prove this bias and launched a campaign I called Sad Puppies (because boring message fiction is the leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness).

The Hugos are supposed to be about honoring the best works, and many of the voters still take this responsibility very seriously. I thank them for this. But basically the Hugos are a popularity contest decided by the attendees of WorldCon. I am a popular writer, however my fans aren’t typical WorldCon attendees. Anyone who pays to purchase a WorldCon membership is allowed to vote. Other writers, bloggers, and even publishing houses have encouraged their fans to get involved in the nomination process before. I simply did the same thing. This controversy arises only because my fans are the wrong kind of fans.

For the people saying that I bought votes, or made up fake people, or bought memberships for a couple hundred imaginary relatives, nope. For those saying I committed fraud, put up or shut up. That would be extremely easy to prove if it were the case. I’ve been up front and public the whole time. Sadly, the thing which has so damaged your calm consisted of a few blog posts and I drew a cartoon. And I’m a terrible artist: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/01/14/sad-puppies-2-the-illustrated-edition/

Eventually one of my friends colored the cartoon in PhotoShop and one of my fans thought it was funny and made a video. Sorry, outrage crowd. No big evil conspiracy. An evil right winger is treading in your sacred halls because of this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGKlOkQsxY

I mean, seriously, my spokesman was a manatee. No. I’m not making that up. So Sad Puppies 2: Rainbow Puppy Lighthouse The Huggening got my fans involved. Really, that was what we called it. Because writing is such a serious business.

Even last year’s winner, John Scalzi, has said that I did nothing different than what he and other authors have done before. And Scalzi and I seldom agree on anything. Tor.com wrote a scathing bit condemning my actions (and implied what a horrid writer I am). Of course, the very same website did the exact same thing explaining to Wheel of Time fans how the rules allowed them to nominate all 14 books as a single work and encouraged them to get involved. And a cursory Google search by my fans found dozens of other places where authors, reviewers, and bloggers had pushed their favorite works and tried to get fans involved.

We always hear about how fandom is supposed to be inclusive… Only apparently my fans are the wrong kind of fans. They don’t care about the liberal cause of the day. They don’t care about Social Justice. They like their books entertaining rather than preachy. They probably vote incorrectly. That sort of thing.

The last few days have been kind of awesome. I said that for the Hugo’s the writer’s politics were more important than the quality of their work. I was called a liar. Yet, within a couple of hours of the announcement there were multiple posts from the other side where groups of SJWs were strategizing how to make sure No Award beat me, and how to punish every other artist I recommended as well. Others were complaining that the rules needed to be changed to keep the undesirables out. All of this was while they proudly bragged how they had not read me, nor ever would… because tolerance. Hell if I know.

For those who have heard that I’m a terrible, undeserving writer whose mere presence is a mockery of their sacred system, but haven’t read any of my books, I’m actually pretty decent. Feel free to judge for yourself. For the record, my novel that is nominated, Warbound, is the final book in a trilogy that has sold extremely well, been translated into a bunch of other languages where it has also done well, gotten tons of positive reviews (out of the thousands of reviews for this series from across all the various different places I’m still at 4 ½ stars) won and been nominated for other awards, is one of the bestselling and most praised audiobook series there is, has won two Audies, is currently nominated for a third, and been a finalist for best novel in other countries where I don’t speak the language and can’t campaign, so there is that…

But everybody knows bad people can’t create art, says the side that keeps showering Roman Polanski with awards.

In closing, I would really like everybody who is a voting member of WorldCon to actually read the works in each category and vote based upon which ones they think are best. I fully expect Wheel of Time to win my category of best novel. It is a fourteen book epic written by two authors over twenty six years. Duh.

Personally, my goal has been reached. I got the thought police to show the world their pretty pink panties. :)

China makes Reader's Digest censor book

The price of liberty is $30,000. [Link]

The notion that the formerly mighty American publisher Reader's Digestwould allow the Chinese Communist party to censor its novels would once have appeared so outrageous as to be unimaginable. In the globalised world, what was once unimaginable is becoming commonplace, however. The Australian novelist LA (Louisa) Larkin has learned the hard way that old certainties no longer apply as the globalisation of trade leads to the globalisation of authoritarian power.

The fate of her book is more than a lesson in modern cynicism. It is the most resonant example of collaboration between the old enemies of communism and capitalism I have encountered.

Larkin published Thirst in 2012. She set her thriller in an Antarctic research station, where mercenaries besiege a team of scientists.

Larkin was delighted when Reader's Digest said it would take her work for one of its anthologies of condensed novels. Thirst would reach a global audience and – who knows? – take off. Reader's Digest promised "to ensure that neither the purpose nor the opinion of the author is distorted or misrepresented", and all seemed well.

One of Larkin's characters trapped in the station is Wendy Woo, a Chinese-Australian. Woo fled to Australia because the Chinese authorities arrested her mother for being a member of the banned religious group Falun Gong. Larkin has her saying that she had not "learned until much later of the horrific torture her mother had endured because she refused to recant".

State oppression in China is not a major theme of a novel set in Antarctica. But Larkin needed to provide a back story for Woo and a link between her and the villains of her drama. In any case, she was a free author living in a free country and was free to express her abhorrence of torture and the denial of freedom of conscience. Or so she thought, until she discovered last week that she was not as free as she thought.

The cost of printing makes up the largest part of the price of book production. Publishers have outsourced manufacturing to China, like so many other industries have done. The printing firm noticed the heretical passages in Larkin's novel. All references to Falun Gong had to go, it said, as did all references to agents of the Chinese state engaging in torture.

They demanded censorship, even though the book was a Reader's Digest "worldwide English edition" for the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore – not, you will note, for China.

Phil Patterson from Larkin's London agents, Marjacq Scripts, tried to explain the basics for a free society to Reader's Digest. To allow China to engage in "extraterritorial censorship" of an Australian novelist writing for an American publisher would set a "very dangerous precedent", he told its editors. Larkin told me she would have found it unconscionable to change her book to please a dictatorship.

When she made the same point to Reader's Digest, it replied that if it insisted on defending freedom of publication, it would have to move the printing from China to Hong Kong at a cost of US$30,000.

People ask: "What price liberty?" Reader's Digest has an answer that is precise to the last cent: the price of liberty is US$30,000. The publisher, from the home of Jefferson, Madison and the first amendment, decided last week to accept the ban and scrap the book.

Big in Japan

An American writer who is much more famous for his work in Japan. [Link]

The odd, or oddest, part, was that I had always been a fan of Japanese culture, its films, books and art, though I had never studied it, and it played no role in my books. It was like having a distant teenage crush on someone who suddenly wrote and said, “I like you, too.”

The culmination of this peculiar adventure, which I had observed only from afar, occurred when Toei Studio made “Niryuu Shousetsuka: Serialist,” a film based on my book. That is to say, a Japanese movie set in Tokyo, with Japanese actors speaking Japanese, rather than my version, which features non-Japanese people and takes place mostly in Queens.

They made the movie very fast, in about six months, and invited me to the premiere in June 2013. My Japanese publishers had contrived to release my new book, “Mystery Girl,” at the same time. The novel wouldn’t even be published in English until July. Maybe it had something to do with the international date line, the way emails from East Asia seem to come from tomorrow, but my Japanese life was clearly way ahead of my American life. So I went.

At the airport, I was met by my editor and a TV crew, which, I assure you, had never happened before. I was put up in a hotel where James Bond might have stayed, with a remote-controlled tub that filled automatically and a giant button that opened the drapes — futuristic, but a ’60s kind of future. As requested, I put on a black suit and a tie (mind you, I can barely tie a tie, because in my real life I have no need for one) and went to the premiere, where each member of the cast, including the woman who sang the theme song, bowed and thanked me.

In a daze, I was paraded before the press, blinded by flashbulbs and tracked by TV cameras. But because I couldn’t understand the directions, I often talked to the wrong camera, stared into space or even leaned on the scenery — until my intrepid and glamorous young translator told the reporters to wave if they wanted David-san to look at their cameras, like a baby at a birthday party. I watched the film with her whispering in my ear: “He is the detective.” It was as if I had fallen asleep and had a weird dream about my own book. At the end, when the lights came up and I stood to leave, she tapped my shoulder and pointed. The audience was clapping wildly. For me. I took a few deep bows and fled.

A survey about SFF fandom

Interesting survey. [Link]

So there’s this really good conversation going on in Twitter about encouraging Diversity in SFF. The hashtag is #DiversityInSFF and I highly encourage checking it out. Anyway, reading that and thinking about the other conversations, I started wondering who the fans of speculative fiction are? I mean, I know who goes to conventions, but what about everyone else?

So I figured I’d just ask and made a survey.

Pass it around? The more people who fill it out, the better the sample.

Edited to add: I updated some of the questions and added some to address concerns people raised. If you go back to the same link, you can change your response.

The results are here, if you are curious.

I hate Strong Female Characters

This problem will continue as long as male is the default. It also doesn't help that common script-writing advice is to not include too many women. [Link]

But the phrase “Strong Female Character” has always set my teeth on edge, and so have many of characters who have so plainly been written to fit the bill.

I remember watching Shrek with my mother.

“The Princess knew kung-fu! That was nice,” I said. And yet I had a vague sense of unease, a sense that I was saying it because it was what I was supposed to say.

She rolled her eyes. “All the princesses know kung-fu now.”

No one ever asks if a male character is “strong”. Nor if he’s “feisty,” or “kick-ass” come to that.

The obvious thing to say here is that this is because he’s assumed to be “strong” by default. Part of the patronising promise of the Strong Female Character is that she’s anomalous. “Don’t worry!” that puff piece or interview is saying when it boasts the hero’s love interest is an SFC. “Of course, normal women are weak and boring and can’t do anything worthwhile. But this one is different. She is strong! See, she roundhouses people in the face.” Sometimes the phrase “not your typical damsel in distress” will be used, as if the writing of pop culture heroines had not moved on even slightly since Disney’s Snow White and as if a goodly percentage of SFCs did not end up, in fact, needing to be rescued. 

This is true, and yet it’s not all of the truth.

Are our best-loved male heroes Strong Male Characters? Is, say, Sherlock Holmes strong? In one sense, yes, of course. He faces danger and death in order to pursue justice. On the other hand, his physical strength is often unreliable – strong enough to bend an iron poker when on form, he nevertheless frequently has to rely on Watson to clobber his assailants, at least once because he’s neglected himself into a condition where he can’t even try to fight back. His mental and emotional resources also fluctuate. An addict and a depressive, he claims even his crime-fighting is a form of self-medication. Viewed this way, his willingness to place himself in physical danger might not be “strength” at all – it might be another form of self-destructiveness. Or on the other hand, perhaps his vulnerabilities make him all the stronger, as he succeeds in  surviving and flourishing in spite of threats located within as well without.

Is Sherlock Holmes strong? It’s not just that the answer is “of course”, it’s that it’s the wrong question.

What happens when one tries to fit other iconic male heroes into an imaginary “Strong Male Character” box?  A few fit reasonably well, but many look cramped and bewildered in there. They’re not used to this kind of confinement, poor things. They’re used to being interesting across more than one axis and in more than two dimensions.

“Of course I’m strong, I’m an idealised power fantasy, but the most interesting thing about me is that, on the inside, I’m a dorky little artist,” says Captain America sadly, sucking his stomach in.

“Does it still count as strength if I’m basically a psychopath?” inquires James Bond idly, lounging against the box wall and checking his cuffs.

Batman’s insistence that he can, must, will get into the Strong Male Character box comes close to hysteria, but there’s no room in there for his bat ears and cape and he won’t take them off.

The Doctor, finding that this box is in fact even smaller on the inside, babbles something incomprehensible and runs away. 

The ones that fit in most neatly – are usually the most boring. He-Man, Superman (sorry). The Lone Ranger. Jack Ryan, perhaps. Forgotten square-jawed heroes of forgotten pulp novels and the Boy’s Own Paper. If Strong-Male-Character compatibility was the primary criterion of writing heroes, our fiction would be a lot poorer. But it’s within this claustrophobic little box that we expect our heroines to live out their lives.

Let’s come back to Sherlock Holmes. A better question would be – “What is Sherlock Holmes like?”

He’s a brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, polymath genius.

Adding the word “strong” to that list doesn’t seem to me to enhance it much.

The Scriptwriting Formula

Why movies seem so formulaic in the past few years. They have the scriptwriting formula. Hollywood, where creativity goes to die. [Link]

And if the villain of the past few years of movies is the adolescent male for whom it seems all big-Hollywood product is engineered, Snyder’s guidelines have helped that bad guy close the door to other potential audiences. Save the Cat! doesn’t go so far as to require that protagonists be men. But the book does tell aspiring screenwriters to stick to stories about the young, because that’s “the crowd that shows up for movies.” Following this advice to its logical conclusion means far more stories about young men—since that’s who shows up at the multiplex the most. It’s not an accident that the chapter on creating a hero is called “It’s About A Guy Who … ” not “It’s About A Person Who … ” And with a young male protagonist, women are literally relegated to the B-plot—the love interest, or “helper,” who assists the male protagonist in overcoming his personal problems. It’s not an accident that Raimi’s megabudget Oz movie featured not Dorothy but a male protagonist.

Watching poorly executed movies with Snyder’s formula in mind can become a tiresome and repetitive slog. How many times can you watch a young man struggle with his problems, gain new power, then save the world? It’s enough to make you wonder: Is overreliance on Snyder’s story formula killing movies?

If so, then all is lost. The major studios increasingly rely on a small number of megabudget blockbusters for their profits. But big budgets mean big risks. And the only way to mitigate those risks is to stick with what’s been known to work before. In other words, formula—and the more precise the formula, the better. America’s greatest art form is headed straight, as the Snyderized Star Trek sequel notes, Into Darkness.

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It’s not that the formula can’t produce good, fun movies: Monsters University is very enjoyable. Star Wars, Die Hard, The Matrix, and The Avengers all follow something like the story path that Snyder laid out. But it does mean that Hollywood produces way too many movies about adolescent men coming to grips with who they are (think John Carter, Battleship, The Bourne Legacy, Tron: Legacy, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, virtually every superhero movie, and the entirety of the J.J. Abrams canon).

It also means that there’s far less wiggle room for even minor experimentation. Think of a classic popcorn flick like Jurassic Park. It’s a pretty classic three-act story, and it includes virtually all of the elements found in Snyder’s beat sheet. But they are out of order and out of proportion. Now compare that to a modern megablockbuster like The Amazing Spider-Man, which follows the Snyder structure beat by beat. There’s a reason that even Steven Spielberg is complaining that Hollywood is too reliant on formulaic blockbusters.

We can appeal to screenwriters to buck the trend. But why would they? The formula is incredibly useful. Indeed, I relied on Snyder’s beat sheet to write this piece, using every beat, in the order he lists. (Try reading this piece from the beginning and see if you can spot all the beats. Or click here to see a version of the essay in which they are all labeled.)

I could see the advantages of the beat sheet. It helped me order my thoughts and figure out what I should say next. But I also found myself writing to fit the needs of the formula rather than the good of the essay—some sections were cut short, others deleted entirely, and other bits included mostly to hit the beat sheet’s marks. It made writing easier, in other words, but it also made me less creative.

That’s why you’ve got that strangely familiar feeling at the movies. Hollywood needs to learn a screenplay style life-lesson of its own: Sure, sometimes you can let the formula guide you. But that shouldn’t be the only thing you know how to do.

And the beat sheet.

The Save the Cat! Beat Sheet

Opening image (p. 1): Sets the tone for the story and suggests the protagonist’s primary problem.

Theme is stated (p. 5): A question or statement, usually made to the protagonist, indicating the story’s main thematic idea.

Set-up (p. 1-10): An introduction to the main characters and setting—the background.

Catalyst (p. 12): A major event that changes the protagonist’s world and sets the story in motion.

Debate (p. 12-25): A question is raised about the choice now before the protagonist. Often this section lays out the stakes for the journey ahead.  

Break into Act II (p. 25-30): The hero definitively leaves his old world or situation and enters a strange new one.

B-story (p. 30): A secondary plotline that often fleshes out side characters—frequently a mentor or a love interest—who assist the hero on his journey.

Fun and games (p. 30-55): Snyder says this section offers “the promise of the premise.” It’s an exploration of the story’s core concept that gives the story its “trailer-friendly moments.” It’s usually lighter in tone, and it typically builds to a big victory at the midpoint.

Midpoint (p. 55): The A and B stories cross. The story builds to either a false victory or (less often) false defeat. New information is revealed that raises the stakes.

Bad guys close in (p. 55-75): After the victory at the midpoint, things grow steadily worse as the villains regroup and push forward.

All is lost (p. 75): Mirroring the midpoint, it’s usually a false defeat. The hero’s life is in shambles. Often there’s a major death or at least the sense of death—a reference to dying or mortality somehow.

Dark night of the soul (p. 75-85): A moment of contemplation in which the hero considers how far he’s come and all he’s learned. It’s the moment in which the hero asks, “Why is all this happening?”

Break into Act III (p. 85) A “Eureka!” moment that gives the hero the strength to keep going—and provides the key to success in Act III.

Finale (p. 85-110) Relying on all he has learned throughout the story, the hero solves his problems, defeats the villains, and changes the world for the better.

Final image (p. 110). A mirror of the opening image that underlines the lessons learned and illustrates how the world has changed.

How much fiction is ok in a fact-based film?

Lincoln, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty all have fictionalized things a bit more than some would like. [Link]

Filmmakers have been making movies based on real events forever, and similar charges have been made. But because these three major films are in contention, the issue has come to the forefront of this year's Oscar race, and with it a thorny cultural question: Does the audience deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Surely not, but just how much fiction is OK?

The latest episode involved "Lincoln," and the revelation that Spielberg and his screenwriter, the Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner, took liberties depicting the 1865 vote on the 13th amendment outlawing slavery. In response to a complaint by a Connecticut congressman, Kushner acknowledged he'd changed the details for dramatic effect, having two Connecticut congressmen vote against the amendment when, in fact, all four voted for it. (The names of those congressmen were changed, to avoid changing the vote of specific individuals.)

In a statement, Kushner said he had "adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what 'Lincoln' is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters."

In a historical piece, there is always the need to use fiction to fill in the gaps of what we don't know. In the case of Lincoln, facts that were known (how the Connecticut congressmen voted) were changed for no reason other than false drama. I think changing known facts is a bridge too far. History is exciting enough without having to make things up.

She Writes Like an Eighth Grader, But Better Than a CEO

Wait, what? [Link]

Well, golly gee:

She may have attended four universities, but Sarah Palin still writes like an eighth-grader.

AOL Weird News gave two writing analytic companies samples of the former Alaska governor's recently released emails and both agree that the Tea Party favorite writes as if she's in middle school.

The 24,000 emails during Palin's time as Alaska governor are still being sifted through. But the documents are filled with her famous folksy phrases like "holy moly," "shindig" and "holy flippin' crap."

Then comes the media reality check:

It turns out Palin's writing skills are still better than most educated Americans. Global Language Monitor gave Palin's emails a score of 8.2, which actually exceeds that of most chief executives.