The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Reverse Psychology in Literature

    There will always be taboos in society and culture, even in literature. And because there will always be taboos, people will always try to challenge them. Sometimes I wonder if taboos aren’t created just so there can be radicals to toe that line.

    What is considered taboo today, I have no idea, but I’m sure writers do whatever they can to push that. I think it’s healthy. Signifies growth. Keeps us from becoming stagnant in our ideas. We might never have had a Renaissance otherwise.

    So perhaps that is why the tastemakers matter. So there will always be someone to thumb their noses at them. Turn standards on their heads and do the complete opposite of what is accepted in order to keep humans evolving mentally.

    Although I feel sometimes that we are de-evolving by allowing the tastemakers to censor literature and whatnot in the name of safety. Protection. Censorship is a slippery slope. Once you start saying no, there’s the question of where to draw that line. And who gets to decide that? I think each person should define their own boundaries, or the boundaries of their children. Also, perhaps, public areas where parents relinquish their control over their child temporarily.

    That’s not to say I don’t have my own personal boundaries, or things I consider taboo in my own writing. There are certain lines I won’t cross.

    Although I won’t say never. I have to continue to challenging myself, as well, so maybe sometimes I need to write what makes me uncomfortable. I wrote a novel where one of the main characters was a serial killer. I never thought I’d write gratuitous sex and violence, but the story took me there, and I am a better writer for it.

    So I think my final answer is that of course there are taboos, but that’s a good thing, the tastemakers matter because in their restriction they cause us to flourish, and that books should never be banned, only monitored around those not old enough to set their own boundaries who are away from their parental units.

    Is that all just semantics? Am I actually pro censorship? Do the reasons you support an issue matter in the end?

  • The danger of ideas

    Beware of books signI’ve seen both sides of the argument.

    Censorship isn’t a popular topic among writers, but I understand why some people feel justified in trying to protect their children, their families, and their communities from ideas that are not their own.

    Ideas are very powerful things. And when ideas conflict with our personal beliefs, our instinct is to fight back.

    After all, ideas can change people. Yes, as much as we like to deny personal responsibility, when we allow ideas to be shared we run the risk of changing minds. People introduced to new ideas begin to think in new ways.

    And if that happened, it could create all sorts of problems:

    • Women could vote
    • Children could receive an education
    • The disabled could find jobs
    • All races could be treated as equals
    • Anyone could fall in love and marry
    • Individuals could become more important than institutions
    • We could put an end to pollution, save endangered species and ecosystems, and become conservators of our planet
    • We could live in peace

    So, the next time someone says to you they don’t want you to read a book, remember this. They are probably saving you from ideas that could make you see things in a different way.

    Thank them. Put down your book. Go back to work.

    It’s probably safer that way.

  • Let Your Freak Flag Fly

    My youngest brother lives and works abroad.  It’s cool for him because he gets to travel all over the world, and he’ll often call me from different countries to let me know what’s going on in his life.  It’s fun for him because it gives him someone to share his adventures with, but it’s also fun for me because . . . well, I love messing with his head.

    You see, my brother is more than a little bit paranoid, and for whatever reason, he believes that while he’s jet setting across the globe, his cell phone calls are most likely monitored.  If not by the CIA, then probably some foreign entity who wants to keep track of him to make sure he’s not some sort of super spy.  (Trust me, he’s not.  I love my brother, but he’s got nothing on James Bond.)

    He loves it when I bring up the Dali Lama, while he’s traveling in China.  He enjoys it almost as much as when I chant, “What do we want? Oppression!  When do we want it?  Now!”  I can tell I’m helping because he rarely calls from China anymore.

    Now everything I just wrote . . . absolute gospel truth.  And yes, I know I’m a bit of a dick to my brother, but honestly, it’s the only way I know how to interact with the world, so at this point, I just go with it.  But when I think about these interactions, I’m sometimes surprised to find a shred of sentiment at their base.  For whatever reason, when my brother starts to get nutty about whether or not someone’s listening in on his phone conversations, it flips this little switch inside my head that makes me want to give a big middle finger to anyone who has an opinion about what I can or cannot say.

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  • Banned and Dangerous

    “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.” – Mae West

    Literature has been a flashpoint for centuries. Every generation of every society had problems with certain literature. Books have pushed thought and idea to their breaking point.

    That is what literature is really about. It’s about exposing the dark underbelly of life, showing us the things that we think, but are afraid to admit. Literature shows the truth of human potential, both in triumph and tragedy.

    It is a powerful and dangerous medium. People have been killed, jailed, or ran out of town for things they wrote. Writers get protested, boycotted, or outright censored by others who feel what they wrote crossed some sort of line.

    What is that line, though? It is an ever-changing, evolving thing that is based entirely on social norms. Quite frankly, the line is worthless, and part of art is finding that edge. Artists have lived on that line since story-culture was born.

    You cannot second guess the line. You can’t wonder where it is, and if what you are writing is going to be hated or even latched onto by people with political agendas. Just write. If it is good, maybe it will get published. If some people think it is offensive, that’s their problem.

    Books should never be banned just because someone is scared by what they find inside. It isn’t society’s job to protect me. I can make my own decisions about what I think and feel. So can most of you. The banning of art by any government or organization is a red flag in any society.

    Now, I’m not suggesting that you should let your children read whatever they want. But what you choose to let your child to read, or what your school district wants to teach them should be between you, your school district, and your child. Chances are, your school district will be much more conservative than the average person anyway.

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  • The Off-Limits (Week of 12 March 2012)

    The Confabulator Cafe is just a little place in the middle of a vast plain of imagination. This plain is only one level of all the steps that make up the worlds of genre writing, literature and non-fiction. Librarians stock shelves in their schools and their towns with all manner of writing for the entertainment and edification of students everywhere. The Cafe is made up of people who have been in those libraries, whether at school, college or the town they live in. These shelves are filled with books that say things that reveal truths about the Human Condition and sometimes that makes us uncomfortable.

    This week, the Confabulators are exploring the idea of what’s taboo in literature. Is banning of books ever appropriate? Who are the tastemakers and why do they matter? There are as many viewpoints on these subjects as there are people who care about them and that’s why we’ve labeled these blog entries under “politics”. We’re not necessarily political except when it comes to books.

    So grab a drink, pull up a chair and let us know what you think as we explore some of the more shadowy parts of what it means to be a writer.

  • What’s Your Favorite Book To Film Adaptation?

    The Confabulators go to the movies the same as the rest of you. We read a book, envision characters and places and hear the characters’ voices in our heads. You might think this makes us a harder audience to please than normal, but that’s not necessarily true. We can set our ideas aside and sit in the darkened theater alongside everyone else who’s read a book and appreciate it for what it is: a film. This week we challenged the Confabulators to tell us about their favorite adaptations.

    R.L. Naquin

    Disney’s version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I waited my whole life to see that done right on the big screen. I read the book a million times. I had a map of Narnia on my wall next to my bed. I was the White Witch in a fourth-grade musical production we wrote ourselves. When the opening credits started to roll on the film, I was already crying. It was done so well, even down to keeping some of the dialogue from the book. Cried like a baby all through it.

     

    Kevin Wohler:

    When adapting a book to film which is more important, a faithful adaptation or making something even greater than the original text? Take, for example, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This visually stunning movie is more than an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Between the great performances, special effects, and the soundtrack by Vangelis, the film transcends the novel on which it is loosely based. After seeing the film, I read the book. And while the book is strong in its own right, I feel the film is even better.

     

    Angela Kordahl:

    My favorite book to film adaptation is undoubtably Fight Club.  IMHO, the book had a lot of unrealized potential that the movie tapped into, and turned a sketch into a fully realized world.  The movie did what film can do best, creating indelible images and dramatizing big action, without undermining the integrity of the book’s ideology.

     

    Muriel Green:

    Eat, Pray, Love because the things that were changed made sense cinematically and yet stayed true to the spirit of the book.

     

    Jason Arnett:

    Adapting books into film is very, very tricky and often if something’s not right it’s because the fans were too invested in the book to see the film as being it’s own thing, separate from the book. I really like The Silence of the Lambs as an adaptation even though it’s slightly different from the novel. The film is so good one can’t really complain. The other adaptation that is something you maybe haven’t seen or read and that’s Firebreather. It was a comic book then adapted as a Cartoon Network animated feature. Both are very good for different reasons and aimed at very different audiences.

  • On Building Trust With Your Words.

    All week we here at the Cafe have been discussing how to reveal character through language. Put yourself in the reader’s mind. What should the reader be told, what should the reader be allowed to infer, and what should the reader be assumed to know? A technical writer must also ask those questions, not to illuminate character, but to convey factual information.

    It comes down to trust, really, between reader and writer. You, as a writer, must create a space with your words in which trust can grow, in which the reader feels free to say to themselves, “I don’t know where this is going, but I’ll be glad to get there.” It’s a difficult challenge, and an awesome responsibility.

    The vast majority of the documents produced by my bureau are written by our techies for the benefit of other techies. It is presumed that the reader has, or can easily obtain, the necessary context to make sense of the information. For most ordinary purposes, that is true. We don’t need to explain every measurement, spell out every acronym (more than once), or describe the significance of the data. To do so would be patronizing and could actually damage the writer’s credibility.

    However…

    Some of our documents, arguably the most important ones, are not written for techies. They are written for the general public, or legislators, or for other members of our agency whose technical expertise lies in other areas. For these audiences, we must provide the context as elegantly and concisely as possible. We must educate them without either talking down to them or confusing them. Failure to do so can result in a loss of credibility for the entire agency, or worse, loss of funding.

    It’s not easy, building a trust relationship with someone you’ve never met, may never meet, and who may not even exist. Unlike bloggers, journalists, or novelists, it’s rare for a technical writer to develop a following, and for credibility to accrete to the byline. The relationship has to be established anew with each document. The stuff I write becomes part of the state’s permanent record [0], and it has to be right, first time, every time.

    [0] I wonder if this is what my teachers meant when they said, “This is going on your permanent record?”

  • On the Construction of Action Scenes

    Action scenes are a special kind of hell. Even now, writing about action scenes is literally painful. You see, action is not my strength; it’s basically carefully crafted description that paints a moving scene. Add the need for carefully chosen pacing — ugh. It’s a nightmare.

    During a conversation I can count on the dialogue to do most of the heavy lifting. I trust the readers to pick up a lot from dialogue, and let’s face it: a good action scene is all about what’s happening, not what’s being shouted across the battlefield. I feel like a decent action scene very quickly becomes a bad action scene when you throw in a lot of hammy dialogue to remind the reader that its emotional too.

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  • Bronzing the Imagination

    THE iconic image of Doc painted by James Bama

    Okay, I’m going to say what all the other Confabulators have either hinted at in emails to me or allowed to go unsaid on their blogs: this week’s topic was frustratingly hard to write. That is, until I understood the question (link to This Week’s topic blog post).

    It doesn’t take much to put a vision of a character in a person’s head: The boy with the lightning-shaped scar. The bronze man with the gold-flecked eyes. The masked man on the white horse.

    That’s Doc over there on the right in the picture but maybe you missed the Lone Ranger reference. With a certain group of fans you don’t have to say much more than that about some of the more iconic characters. The same would be true with the Harry Potter fans, I’m sure.

    For instance with Doc Savage, his physical features are so amazing that they only bear mentioning once each time in the original supersagas. He’s very tall, very handsome and he has some interesting habits. One of the more famous ones is how he unconsciously makes a trilling sound when he’s working on a problem. He has a vest with a lot of pockets that he almost always wears and it’s when he’s dressed as a ‘normal’ person that his clothing is gone into with any detail. However, it’s when he’s in a room with others that his physical features are shown rather than described. People ‘look up’ to him, they ‘move around’ him, they are in awe of the force of his personality.

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  • Surprise!

    In character development, as in a lot of other aspects of writing, having a good reader is an essential part of the writing process.  A response helps clarify if you have communicated what you intended to, or if you have written down quite another world than the one inside your head.

    Classic writing class instruction includes the axioms “Show, don’t tell,” and “specific is terrific.”  These have good ideals at their heart, especially concerning character development. Only Republican presidential debate transcripts are more agonizing to read than paragraphs of development through description.  “Mary Sue was a brave girl, intelligent, but understated.  She enjoyed eccentric clothing and pop music of the indie persuasion, and her kindness was obvious.  But she had a dark side, too.  Mary Sue was a passionate mix of the good and evil that lies in all of us.”

    However, if an author eschews explicit narration altogether, s/he may find that the audience takes away some surprising notions about a character.  This is where a good reader comes into the mix.  My brother is probably my best reader (as my husband has to be more supportive than critical), and after he read one of my novels, he asked me, “Was the judge supposed to sympathize with the government or the protestors?”  I launched into a tirade of explanation–how could this have even been in question?  Alas, if I wanted the audience to understand the judge’s motivations, I would have had to tell them what they were.

    When I’m writing, I always know if my character is inscrutable or creepy.  Sometimes I don’t let my audience know, though.   I know who I meant to introduce; only my audience can tell me who they met.