Posts Tagged Literature

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

My favorite poem is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, in which Shakespeare does the opposite of the prevailing Petrarch-inspired tendency of poets to idealize their subjects.

Sonnet 130 speaks of real love, the kind of love that exists without blindness, but also without judgement. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”, he says.  The subject of the poem is not the most beautiful creature in the room, she does not fit into the typical ideal of the time in which the poem is written, one of golden hair and bright blue eyes and alabaster skin.

To everyone else, this woman, his mistress, may be unremarkable. He holds no illusions about her, he will not call her a goddess, but instead acknowledges her faults. He sees the truth of what he is, and loves her anyway.

On the surface, this poem seems filled with insults, but to me, this has always been one of the most honest love poems I’ve ever read. Rather than idealizing his mistress, setting her on a pedestal, and insisting on her perfection, this lover does the unthinkable. He allows the object of his affection to be imperfect, to be real and flawed, and it does not affect his love. He accepts her, totally and without question.

I have written in the past against DRM and methods of property protection that punish the consumer rather than the thieves, but my annoyance with DRM is in no way an endorsement of piracy, which is a huge issue, especially for the little guys.

And one of those guys has a book coming out this week. You might’ve heard of him, here and there.  Wil Wheaton.  Yes… that kid from Star Trek with the bad sweaters and really annoying sense of superiority.

Wil Wheaton may be a bit famous (or infamous).  He is somewhat like a demi-god among geeks. He, also, isn’t a fan of DRM, though I would understand why he might want to look into trying it, since his book, Just a Geek, has been pirated and offered up for free.

Now….this isn’t some tremendously wealthy celebrity or best-selling author for whom a bit of book piracy is just a drop in the bucket, because they’re making millions anyway.  This is a man who still has to work for a living, and and who just happens to do that work with his pen or in front of a camera.  His books are even self-published and promoted out of his own pocket, so any piracy directly affects him in a way that it never would a large corporation.

The same goes for the majority of authors and actors and musicians out there.  Because the majority of creative professionals are not wealthy. Most of us will never see even a shred of the type of celebrity that Wil might enjoy. We have to work for a living, and we offer up that work to the public, for your enjoyment.  If you do enjoy it, we ask a little bit of compensation. Not because we’re greedy bastards, but because we need that money to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, to feed our children, to pay for our shelter.  We may offer some content for free, and ask you to share it with your friends, because there’s no better advertisement than free advertisement.  But when we ask you to pay, all we are asking is compensation for our work, the same as you would pay farmer for his vegetables, or a butcher for his meat.

When you seek to profit from a pirated item, or when you purchase or download a pirated piece of work, that’s just like running into that farm stand and grabbing a bushel of vegetables and running off.  If the farmer’s a big industrial farmer, well, he may have several tons of vegetables to sell, and be able to shrug off the loss of that bushel, but if it’s a small family farm, the loss of even one bushel is a huge loss.  That’s the way it is for all of the other little guys out there too. Just because what we produce is something less tangible – a song, a movie, a book, an hour’s entertainment – doesn’t mean that we don’t need that money just as much or work just as hard to produce what we have.

So think about it, next time you head to your favorite torrent sites. You may enjoy the thought of “sticking it to the man” by pirating things produced by huge corporations, but sometimes the person you’re stealing from is the person next door.

Oh, and…if you’re a Star Trek fan? Head over and buy Memories of the Future.  It looks to be a good one.

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• an open letter to the guy who put just a geek the audiobook on his website for people to steal (wilwheaton.typepad.com)
• Just a Geek (oreilly.com)
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RPGs (either pen-and-paper or online) and fanfiction are hardly the greatest sources of literature available, and have suitable reputations among the literary establishment for being exactly the opposite.  You can easily find some of the worst writing you have ever seen among either community, and without much effort.  The vast majority of role-playing stories, forum roleplay, or fanfiction writing tends to be written by young adolescents playing at writing stories.

There is of course some excellent fanfiction to be found, and a number of authors such as Cassandra Clare and Naomi Novik began as fanfiction writers.  I’m sure there are more that just don’t admit to it. I’ve written my own share of fanfiction here and there and actively roleplay on a number of games.

I’ve always thought that both have a great potential for being good educational resources for aspiring writers: both as a way to practice by dabbling in a universe not your own and without pressure, and as examples of what not to do.

So here’s a few lessons taken from these incredibly humble proving grounds:

• The Character’s the Thing:
  • While a decent plot is essential, a good character is what people will remember first and foremost, and really good characters can keep readers interested even at points when the plot itself may be a bit weak. Good, believable, multi-dimensional characters, much more than plot, can be the foundation-stone of your story and can hold it up on their shoulders when it gets weak.
  • Avoid the dreaded and despised Mary Sue!  A Mary Sue (or sometimes Gary Stu/Marty Stu for male characters) is usually a self-insertion, but a self-insertion of the way the writer wishes he or she really was. Perfect, popular, loved by all of the other characters in the story, capable of solving every problem, and with no faults whatsoever.  Where a good character can carry a weak story, the Mary Sue will send even good stories crashing to the ground.
    • Self insertions can work, if the character is believable and three-dimensional and realistic, but it is generally not advised in any situation.
• There Are No New Stories, only New Tellings of Old Ones:
  • Your characters won’t be the first to fall in love, go to school, have sex.  They won’t be the first to find themselves in the middle of a war, to fight an evil tyrant of whatever mundane or fantastic abilities, or be the first heroes to ever save a life.  Some of the best stories are where the author finds the common thread at the center of those old and over-used plots and twists it. (An excellent example of this is the TV series Dexter, which takes the now cliche and over-done forensic detective series and turns the hero scientist into a serial killer.)
• Sometimes the bad criticism is the best kind:
  • As flattering as it is to get a hundred “OMG I LOVE THIS FIC!” type reviews, they don’t really tell you a whole lot about how you actually did or how good your writing is.   Embrace the bad reviews.  Love them. Whatever you do, don’t ignore them!  Even the most malicious may have at its core some good suggestions for how you may become a better writer.  At the very least, you can use these reviews as an impetus to keep writing and keep getting better to prove that reviewer wrong.

You can learn as much (and possibly more) about writing from reading bad fiction as from reading masterpieces.  Unfortunately, fanfiction, in particular, tends to raise the ire of publishers (less so with most actual authors) due to intellectual property issues.  The fanficcers are generally doing it as a way to dabble in the worlds that they had grown to love and to keep that all-too special magic of a good story  going just a little bit longer, and never get any money from it, but publishers see plagiarists and imitation is only a sincere form of flattery when you’re not going to get sued for it.

I would love to see fanfiction used as a tool in the classroom, as a way to encourage creativity and a way to practice writing skills.  I think it could be a wonderful resource, even if using it just to compare the good writers with the bad and what makes each work or not work.  When a young writer can identify what doesn’t work in someone else’s writing, they’re one step closer to fixing what doesn’t work in their own.

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• Fanspeak: The Lingo of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Fandom (oup.com)
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The simple fact of the matter is . . . not much.  It’s really hard to set out to create something and not step somewhere that someone else has already been before, no matter what you’re trying to create.  Music builds and improves on the sounds of music past, borrowing and changing and remixing what has been done before.  Artists begin honing their skills through imitation, whether it’s imitation of the world around them or of another artist’s work.  Writers, well, writers may just write the same story another storyteller has told somewhere before.

Even Shakespeare was a plagiarist.  The success of the artist or writer comes not from being completely original, but from doing what has been done in a new and more interesting way.  Putting a new spin on something, taking something that was old and dreary and giving it new life.

The trick, when trying to come up with an idea for a story (or picture, or song) is not to completely avoid all of your possible influences but to take from them as if you’re borrowing a cup of sugar, with love and respect, and to give back. There are tons of common stories that have been done again, and again, and again, each time with differing levels of success. (girl meets guy; cop chases killer; knight sets off on a sacred quest; etc)  You shouldn’t get discouraged just because your story might have been told in some form before.  The trick is to take that same-old story and make it your own. Put your stamp on it, make it live and breathe as only you can do it.

It’s natural to borrow from the styles and techniques of the creators that you most admire, but in the end the story is your baby, no matter how many people have held it and fostered it before, and it’s your responsibility to nurture it to adulthood.  Do it well, and you’ve got something that people will proclaim “original”, even if at its most basic level it really isn’t.

This is why Stephen King can get away with writing the same story repeatedly (Male writer in New England finds himself in strange situation and must act the hero to get out of it) to such success, why J. K. Rowling could write a story about a boy in a magic school (which had been done many times before) and become the richest woman in England, and why Shakespeare could take common stories being told and performed in Tudor England and turn them into literary masterpieces.

They didn’t do anything totally original. They stood on the backs of what had come before and they reached higher, and did what they were doing better than their predecessors, but original, they were not.

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