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Pacific Rim and the Culture of Rip-Off Vs. Homage

Pacific Rim and the Culture of Rip-Off Vs. Homage

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“This is not a rip-off, it’s an homage!”–Peter Swan (Liam Neeson) in The Dead Pool

Watching the special features on Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim this past weekend, I was struck by something the director said. Paraphrased, he told the design crew not to take any elements from previously-existing kaiju (such as Godzilla, Gamera and so forth), but to pay tribute to the spirit of those films. In other words, it’s a classic homage.

"And I would do anything for loooove...."
“And I would do anything for loooove….”

Now, bear with me on this. I’m a fan of Asian cinema, particularly the 80s and 90s classics such as The Bride with White Hair, Jet Li’s Once Upon a Time in China series, The Heroic Trio and its amazing sequel Executioners, and so forth.  I’m not obsessive about it — there’s a lot I haven’t seen — but I know the high points.

So when I see something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, I see exactly what the lnfluences are. Except in this case, they’re not homages: they’re recreations of some of the exact moments from the films that influenced them, only couched so that you (the general American audience who’s never seen them before) will think they’re Tarantino’s or Ang Lee’s original ideas.

That, my friends, is a rip-off.

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What I Learned From A New Hope

What I Learned From A New Hope

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Star Wars A New Hope-smallI was seven years old when the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, hit the theaters. That was a magical summer in my childhood, a time when the future was gigantic bubble of fun and optimism that seemed to be moving closer to me day by day.

Years later, when I started penning my own stories, I flailed about like most fledgling writers, not really sure what I was doing. Eventually, I got my act together, but it wasn’t until later as I looked back on what worked, and what didn’t, that I started to realize that the most important lessons about storytelling were the ones I unwittingly learned at the movie theater, watching heroes battle an evil empire in a galaxy far, far away.

Motivation

It’s vital for characters to have deep and compelling motivations, so when I think of this topic, I always go back to the basics. Luke, our main hero, begins the movie yearning to get off his desert homeworld and find adventure among the stars. That seems simple, and it is, but it’s also a motivation that so many people share. Who among us didn’t yearn for personal freedom when we were growing up, the chance to get away from our ordinary lives and do something exciting?

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Plot, Plain and Simple

Plot, Plain and Simple

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Writing the Novel From Plot to PrintI may have mentioned this before, but now that I’ve started talking about problems associated with plot, I’ll mention it again: There’s a lot of talk out there about plot-driven narratives versus character-driven narratives, where the former is “bad” and the latter is “good.”

Here’s the skinny: these are terms useful to the book reviewer or critic. They’re not useful to the writer and here’s why: There is no plot without character and there is no character without plot. Specifically, there’s no action without a character to perform it, and no characters without actions to define them. Nothing happens unless someone decides to do it, and unless someone does something, there’s no plot. In fact, there’s no story. This is true for every novel, every short story, every film, every TV show, and an awful lot of poetry. Regardless of genre.

There are things like allegories and satires, in which this might be debatable. Of course, the primary purpose of these is not to tell a story, but to get a particular point across, so screwing with the narrative is okay and even expected. But the best of these will at the very least pretend to include character and plot.

Last week, I talked about how badly-used plot devices often arise out of the writer ignoring character and “making” something happen, often to manipulate the reactions of readers and viewers. You can avoid this by asking yourself some simple questions right at the start. Many of us start writing with character in mind, so we ask ourselves, “Given this type of person, what kind of interesting things can happen to her?” Even if you start somewhere else, however, one of the first questions you’ll have to ask yourself is “Whose story is it?”

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Excuse me, Are you Using that Plot Device?

Excuse me, Are you Using that Plot Device?

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Crossing LinesThe other day, I was watching a new Canadian show that I’m not sure is even airing in the US called Crossing Lines. It stars, among others, William Fichtner and Donald Sutherland, and promises to be a kind of Agents of Shield without the Marvel universe – a group of police officers from different countries come together to solve international crimes as an arm of the International Court. So far so good, except for . . .

In the second episode, a tender moment occurs where two characters bond over similar family issues. They look warmly into each other’s eyes and promise to talk about it later. I call out “Dead man!” And of course I was right. One of them was dead by the end of episode, leaving the other feeling bereft. And leaving me rolling my eyes.

While “Dead man!” can be fun to play (as can “She did it!”) it’s a sad commentary on the state of narrative that these games can be played so often.

Okay, I hear you say, so it’s a plot device, and maybe it’s a bit overused (where “a bit” means I’m understating). Is that really so wrong? Yes, yes it is. The problem with this kind of thing is that because we recognize it, we feel manipulated, and when your viewers, or your readers, feel manipulated, you’ve lost them. You’ve reminded them that not only did you make this bit up, you’ve made all of it up. When your readers start considering the structure of the narrative, they’ve taken a step back from it. And bang, as they say, goes your willing suspension of disbelief.

We could argue that this kind of manipulation doesn’t happen as much in novels or short stories as it does in television and movies. Maybe not. Novels, for one, have time enough to make readers genuinely care about a character before she gets killed. And plot devices are actually useful things; both as readers and writers we love them, except when we hate them.

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Scale: What Pre-Modern Battles Really Looked Like

Scale: What Pre-Modern Battles Really Looked Like

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Gladiator
More men please!

That battle scene from Gladiator?

More men, please! Where you see a line of Romans, imagine five. Ancient armies numbered in the tens of thousands.

Sure, a thousand be-weaponed extras on-screen makes your mind go “1…2…3… Lots.” But real battles were several orders of magnitude larger.

Waterloo French Cavalry
More cavalry please!

Remember the Rod Steiger Waterloo? More cavalry, please! That should be 9,000 sabres. When you measure it out, they should fill the space between the two farmsteads. The only reason the Allied Infantry didn’t turn tail and run was because Wellington had positioned them behind a ridge so that they couldn’t see the tsunami of horseflesh about to wash around their squares.

Take an earlier battle on the same scale; Chalons — Huns and “allies” versus some Romans and lots of Romanized barbarians who hated each other. Jordanes says Chalons left 150,000 men dead on the field. That has to be a wild overestimate. However, suppose he’s out by a factor of ten and the body count reflects 10% of the men fighting… that takes us back to one hundred and fifty thousand warriors jostling and yelling, say about 75,000 a side.

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A Man Writing Female Characters

A Man Writing Female Characters

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Men WritingThere is an idea in our culture – and perhaps it’s universally felt – that women are not as good at writing male characters and men are not as good writing female characters. I’m not going to waste my time or yours debating whether this is true. (Hint: it’s not.)

However, when I talk to people who have read my books, I’m sometimes hit with the comment, “I’m surprised how well you write women characters.” While I take the compliment in the spirit it was intended, part of me is always thinking, “Why wouldn’t I be good at it? I’ve known women all my life. My wife is a woman. Some of my best friends are women. Hell, even my mother is a woman!”

Yet, people sometimes get strange ideas in their heads when it comes to sex. It seems predetermined in some circles that women authors write squishy, feely, ‘romantic’ sci-fi/fantasy, while men write bloody and gritty. If that were true, I’d probably have to look into gender-reorientation therapy, because I firmly believe that emotion — that gooey, squishy stuff — is the bedrock of all fiction.

Even when writing all that ‘manly’ combat action and suspense, emotion must be at the heart of it, or else there is no substance to the style. Because it is not the cuts and thrusts that really get our hearts pumping, but the meaning behind those lethal blows.

For me, writing a female character is a little more challenging, only because I have to put aside a lot of preconceived notions, but that’s what writing is all about. Whether the character is a princess, a professional assassin, or an amorous Cyclops, it comes down to whether or not you can understand their personal reality and convey it convincingly on the page.

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Crowdfunding Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Julia Rios

Crowdfunding Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Julia Rios

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Herein we have Black Gate (or at least MOI, in my guise as doughty avatar) interviewing the inimitable Julia Rios, one of the editors for an upcoming YA fantasy anthology called Kaleidoscope.

Julia is straight-up The Right Stuff, in the humble opinion of this blogger, and everything she touches has a tendency to turn to rainbows.

I’m a product of the early eighties.

I like rainbows.

I am very excited for this anthology.

JuliaRiosBG: What is Kaleidoscope and how did the project come about?

Kaleidoscope is an anthology of diverse YA contemporary fantasy stories. I’m co-editing it with Alisa Krasnostein, the publisher at Twelfth Planet Press in Australia. Right now, we’re having a fundraiser on Pozible so we can afford to make the book and pay our authors the SFWA professional rate of $0.05 per word.

As for how this started, Kaleidoscope is a project born of podcasts! I host the Outer Alliance Podcast, which celebrates QUILTBAG content in SF/F. Alisa, my co-editor, is one of the members of Galactic Suburbia, which is an Australian feminist SF podcast. I love Galactic Suburbia, and apparently I’m not the only one, because they’ve racked up *two* Hugo nominations.

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Look Over There, See the Pretty Castle?

Look Over There, See the Pretty Castle?

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pretty blue castle-smallI have very little visual memory for places and possibly even less visual imagination. One time, I needed to know the type of paving in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor – you know, the stuff you walk on? Keep in mind that I’ve been walking on this stuff regularly since I was six. I drew a complete blank (no pun intended) and had to ask my husband, who, at the time, had been there exactly once. He was able to tell me that it’s cobblestones, by the way. Unless you’re under the arcade, where it’s flagstones.

Last week, I talked about describing characters and particularly the difficulties of describing point-of-view characters. But as writers, we’re far more often required to describe places and spaces, both interior and exterior. For fantasy writers, this often means versions of places that exist (or existed) historically in our own world. If you’re the kind of person who, like my husband, can call to mind the descriptive details of things you’ve seen, this will mean a certain degree of ease in your life as a writer.

If you’re my kind of person, alas, you’re not going to be able to tell your friends what colour their living room is painted, no matter how many times you’ve been to their house, let alone describe the halls of a castle or the streets of a town.

So, what do you do? Since that Plaza Mayor episode, I’ve tried to remedy my poor visual memory by taking and collecting photographs. Lots and lots of photographs. While I’m travelling, I take photos of anything and everything that I think might be useful in terms of exteriors or interiors. In The Sleeping God, I use the interior of a restaurant in Trujillo in western Spain, in The Soldier King, the punishment square and prison in Elvas, in Portugal, and the cistern system from another Portuguese town, Monserrat, in The Storm Witch. I also used the map of Elvas to lay out my characters’ escape route, but that’s not really the type of description I’m talking about here.

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Religion in Fantasy Lit

Religion in Fantasy Lit

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Linus Peanuts

“There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people… religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”
– Linus, Peanuts

Linus may have been right, but I’ve never been one to follow sensible advice. So today, I’m going to talk about religion in fantasy.

Religion is a touchy subject for some people, but it’s long been a tradition in the genre to create fictional deities and use them in a variety of ways. From Tolkien’s Silmarillion to the extensive pantheon of Stephen Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, fantasy is rich with mythology.

Whenever I begin to brainstorm ideas for a new novel or series, one step of my world-building is to imagine what sorts of religions will be present and how they shaped their societies. I have to ask myself questions such as: do the gods actually exist? If so, do they personally intervene in the lives of the characters? Does prayer possess temporal power? What is the role of religion in the daily lives of the common people?

These questions have vast ramifications for the story world. Even if the deities are unable or unwilling to directly intervene in the lives of mortals, the mere presence of belief will shape (or appear to shape) events. And if the deities actually answer the prayers of their adherents, that opens up all kinds of possibilities, which in turn should alter the structure of faith organizations. Just look to the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, when religion affected the politics and practices of great nations, and then imagine how powerful those priesthoods would have been if they could perform regular miracles, like ensuring bountiful harvests for the faithful or restoring the dead to life.

And what if the gods can physically manifest in the story world? How does that alter humanity’s relationship to the supernatural?

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New To View: An Interview With Betwixt‘s Joy Crelin

New To View: An Interview With Betwixt‘s Joy Crelin

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Betwixt Magazine Issue 1Fantasy and sci-fi markets come and go (as, in fact, do periodicals in general). Most don’t survive six months. Some, however, have an aura of staying power, even right out of the gate; it shows in their guidelines, in the way they present themselves to the watching, skeptical world. One such magazine is Betwixt. I recently posed a few questions to Joy Crelin, editor and publisher of Betwixt, to quiz her about her hopes for her new venture and to take her pulse on all things spec fic. Whether you’re a writer, a reader, or a magazine publisher, you’ll want to hear what she has to say.

There are a fair number of fantasy mags and ‘zines on the market. Where does Betwixt fit in the pantheon?

As Betwixt is still so new, its editorial point of view is still evolving — and honestly, I expect it will continue to evolve indefinitely. The gist of the magazine’s ethos is deliberate eclecticism. When it comes down to it, I want to publish the kinds of stories I want to read. That means fantasy, science fiction, horror, magic realism, slipstream, whateverpunk, and all the configurations and mash-ups and niches thereof. I like having the freedom to publish stories that speak to me without having to decide whether they conform well enough to someone else’s expectations of what a fantasy or science fiction story should be — or my expectations, for that matter!

At the same time, I recognize that eclectic can often read as wishy-washy, so it’s important to me that there be at least a degree of internal consistency in each issue of the magazine. Overarching themes tend to develop in most collection works I edit, whether I expect them to or not, and so far Betwixt has been no exception.

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