As a worldbuilder, your world is a vast, interlinked creation, it stands there whirling in your head or your codebase or your notes. However few people want to hear the story of your world, they want to hear the story of people in it. Indeed there’s a chance your world came about out of a desire to tell a character’s story.

Either way, at some point, you have to tell a tale about what’s going on. A tale requires someone or someones to tell the tale about. In short, no matter your goals in making the world, you have to settle down and tell the stories in it.

This means a main character or characters. It may seem odd to discuss this since so many of us have our main characters in mind, but it’s not as simple as it may seem. I wanted to return to some of my previous discussion and go over main characters.

What Is A Main Character or Characters?

As I’ve stated earlier, a main characters are like lenses on a world. It is through them that people experience your setting, including the characters themselves. The viewpoints of these characters are gateways to understanding what’s going on and experiencing it.

I find this perspective very helpful because:

1. It makes you immediately think of a focus for your storytelling, gamebuilding, etc.
2. It gives you someone you and your audience can relate to and helps you (and them) develop empathy and connection. This is necessary to experience the story and the world.
3.  It helps you do even more worldbuilding by climbing inside someone’s head and seeing how things look. You don’t just walk a mile in someone’s shoes, you walk that mile in their mind.
4. It helps you admit you can’t write or tell everything.

Now who is your main character?  Well, that may be more challenging than you think.

Zooming In

As noted, the truth of a lot of writing is that many games, tales, and so on are created with a given main character or characters in mind. People already have their characters chosen, and some fleshed out, and the world is created to let their stories come to life. The worldbuilding may go far beyond them and make their stories only one of many to be told (which I think should be the case), but it often starts with them.

Of course you may think you know your main characters since you started with them – but this isn’t always the case. As you build your setting, there may be better choices. Your hero’s tale may not be as interesting as her sidekick, the villain’s perspective turns out to be heroicc, and that throawaway character is actually more relatable. A good look at “Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” is a fine example of perspective switching – and one I agree with as the cast of ‘Hamlet’ is a bunch of basket cases.

The main character you started with may not be the one you need.

Or maybe you really build a world with so much going on and now you want to tell the tales and you aren’t sure where to start. You’ve got a potential cast of hundreds, or you have a world so detailed you could just whip up someone new to tell your stories. Where do you start?

If you have to evaluate a current main character for a demotion, a side character for a promotion, or figure where to start, I find these are good rules:

1. A good main character or characters is in position for enough of the story to be told from their viewpoint (or viewpoints). They don’t have to see everything, but enough to tell the story you want to tell.
2. A good main character knows enough for the audience to understand what’s going on via their perspective – of course it doesn’t have to be everything or even the majority of things. Jut enough.
3. A good main character is relate-able for the audience. They don’t have to be like the audience, just someone the audience “gets”. A good writer/game designer/etc can make characters that are vastly different than the target audience but are still characters people understand.

Use this checklist to evaluate your main character or characters for the story you’re telling. You just might be surprised at who can tell your tale and how – and who can’t.

More Thoughts on Characters Before The World

If you’re the kind of person who created may characters before the setting (as happens the majority of the time in my opinion), then the checklist above is quite important. There’s good chance the world you made has gotten far more complex and populous and your story might not be best served by the perspective you wanted initially.

However, an additional danger you face is that our world may not be fleshed out enough in that you only created enough to tell the tale of your original chosen character or characters. You’ve got enough to tell their story, but their story is all that’s going on – the rest of the setting is just a cardboard cutout, a Potemkin universe.

Frankly, this happens a lot, as I’m sure we’re all aware. There’s a story, there’s a main character, but it’s happening a peculiarly dead setting, the story equivalent of on-rails video games. It may even be a decent or a good story – but it really doesn’t involve much worldbuilding.

I find a great way to avoid this is a simple rule – do you know your world well enough that, if all your main characters couldn’t be written for some reason, you have characters or potential characters that could tell interesting tales. They may not be the ones you wanted, but they could still be told. That’s always a good measure of the world’s completeness – especially if you started with specific main characters in mind.

We All Want To Be Someone

So when you tell your tales, sit down and make sure you’ve got the right perspective or perspectives. You build a huge world and you want to make it work, make people experience it.

If you can’t find the right characters, well, create some more! After all if you build a good setting, it can produce even more ways to tell the tale there . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.

Welcome back to the round up of news about adaptations, remakes, and reboots.  Each month, Lost in Translation brings a selection of links to news items related to the focus of the column.  Enjoy!

American Gods picked up by Starz
Starz has picked up the series now that HBO is out.  Fremantle Media is still developing the Neil Gaiman novel for a TV series.

Lifetime to air sequel to The Omen
Lifetime, of all networks, is working with The Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara to create Damien, which follows the young terror of The Omen as an adult as he faces his destiny.

Yet…
The Omen is to be remade again.  This will be the second remake from Fox, the previous being the 2006 version.  I got nothing here.

Predator also getting a remake/reboot.
Shane Black, of Lethal Weapon and Iron Man 3 fame, will write the treatment and then pass on the writing to Fred Dekker.  Black is also slated to direct the reboot.

Audition getting an American treatment.
Takashi Miike’s Audition will have an English langauage remake with Mario Kassar, one of the people behind the Terminator franchise.  The Japanese horror movie was originally based on a novel by Ryu Murakami, about a lonely man who holds fake auditions to find a girlfriend.

NBC’s Peter Pan musical announces casting for Captain Hook.
Christopher Walken will play Hook in the musical.  NBC saw success with The Sound of Music last November, giving the network confidence in further musical adaptations.  Walken started in musicals and can be seen dancing in Fat Boy Slim’s video for “Weapon of Choice“.

Trailer for Ouija out.
In the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel adaptations, a movie based on the Ouija board seems like a weak premise.  The trailer for the Michael Bay-helmed adaption isn’t helping.

HBO’s Westwood remake adds to cast.
Anthony Hopkins and Evan Rachel Wood are joining the cast of the remake of the Yul Brynner film.  The switch from feature film to TV series will give writers time to explore the ramifications of Westworld.

Sinister Six gets release date.
Sony, following in Marvel Studio’s footsteps, is branching off the Spider-Man license and spinning off Sinister Six, to hit theatres November 2016.  Sony also announced The Amazing Spider-Man 3 for 2018.  The Sinister Six are a group of villains in Spider-Man’s rogues gallery.

You’re tearing me apart!
Oh, hi there!  Tommy Wiseau, creator and star of The Room is getting his follow up, The Neighbors made as a sitcom.  The show, which has an official website, is supposed to be out in September.  The Room, which can be seen at repertory cinemas, is considered to be one of the worst films ever.

Orphan Black to spawn a comic book series.
IDW Publishing will release a comic book series based on the Canadian hit science fiction series.  The title is expected out next year.

Amazon places order for The Man in the High Castle
Amazon has picked up the Philip K. Dick novel after the SyFy Channel‘s plans fell through.  The original novel won a Hugo in 1962.

And the latest updates to the Writing Prompt Generator are here!

I haven’t incorporated every suggestion – and there are ones  I will use because this isn’t done yet.  Most of my focus was on:

• Recombining various abstract “strings” to mix up a few results.
• Adding some Dickens-inspired lines about the times one lives in.
• Adding a bit more crazy-sounding or odd lines.

Probably my next effort will be to put in more locational and object references.

So it’s definitely coming along.  Still don’t feel it’s really “broken out” to get really crazy and wild and unpredictable, the patterns are still obvious, but let’s see what I can do with it.

On other news:

• I do still have some other generator designs – may get to one just to take a break.
• Still getting ideas on social media.  People really love the Disqus stuff and Tumblr is gaining followers regularly.  Not entirely sure about message boards or Facebook or mailing lists since people have their own agendas and goals here.
• As for Way With Worlds, heroes, villains, and main characters will be the next set of issues I tackle!

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.

(This originally ran at MuseHack, but I had to run it here – a project to make albums that never were.  Sanctumites, this is for you)

Imagine a record shop with records that never were.  It sounds like something out of a Neil Gaiman story, but Toby Barlow of Public Pool has his own vision.  It’s a project for his art collective where artists submit an album cover for a band that never was.  A random L&P will then be labeled and put in these albums – and they’ll be sold (with the artist getting the money).  That’s the kind of crazy art project I can get behind, so let’s talk to Toby!

1) Toby, how did you get involved in all of this?

I’ve been working in and around the arts since I was a kid, I grew up at an artists’ colony called Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York. Actually, my first novel, Sharp Teeth, first began as an idea for an art installation. Then I moved to Detroit and the enormous opportunity for creativity here just gobsmacked me. I’ve been going non-stop ever since.

2) Tell us more about Public Pool.

It’s a collective space put together a few years ago now by some artists and art lovers in Hamtramck, which is its own little city tucked in the heart of Detroit. We’ve had great shows with artists like Scott Hocking, Lauren Semivan, Mitch Cope, The Hygienic Dress League and a ton of others.

3) What other art spaces and collectives can you reccomend – and is there a good way to find them?

There are great art spaces all over Detroit. Popps Packing, in our neighborhood, is fantastic. N’Namdi Gallery in Sugar Hill has spectacular shows. Detroit Artists Market on Woodward is really good. And then there are places like Powerhouse Productions that are worth checking out. And, of course, Heidelberg and MOCAD. I’m only scratching the surface here, and I’m not sure the best way to find them all. We should probably have some Detroit Artists Guide on the world wide web (oh boy, great, another project.)

4) OK, tell us about the record project. How did you come up with the idea?

We hatched this plot because we we sitting around talking about art and we realized that, for most of us, LP covers were the first real art we put our hands on. It seemed a tragedy that this magnificent form had devolved into being little jpg images in an itunes store. So we thought we would create a show as a celebration to the actual thing itself, an homage, and a chance to recreate the record stores we loved as kids.

Plus, everyone has band names they play around with, or song names, or entire mythologies that they have spun around imaginary characters. We thought we should give artists and designers a show to play with all that.

We thought it was important too to get people to construct an actual cover that we could slip an LP into. We like the idea of buying a bunch of LP’s from the local used record shop, covering the label on the LP with the label made by the artist, and then slipping it into the artist’s cover. It adds some fun and mystery to the thing, cause no one will know what the actual album is and if there is a relation between the fact and fiction. Maybe there will be, maybe there won’t. That’s when art gets intriguing and mind bendingly fun.

5) How has response been so far?

Fantastic. Boing Boing picked up on it early, and that caught a lot of people’s attention. People seem to love it, and there is, of course, a huge maker culture out there of people looking to create actual things. Obviously in a show like this, the more is the merrier, so we hope people will still get the itch to make their own album.

6) You said if you get enough submissions you may publish a book. Are you planning self-publishing?

Well, we’ll see how many entries we get and what the calibre is, it’s one of those things where you don’t know if you have a book until you’re staring right at it. But if Taschen doesn’t want to publish it, we might have to do it ourselves.

7) How can we help promote this idea?

Tell everyone you know. Make your own beautiful LP. Send it to us. We’ll sell it and you’ll make money.

8) Anything you want to share to encourage artists in this crazy time?

This is an amazing time for artists. Everything is beautiful and tragic. I don’t think real artists need any encouragement. They just need to stay off their iphones and get the work done.

Folks, you know what to do . . . and if you don’t, spread the word and enter the contest.

 

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.

This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on July 17th, 2014.

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Second Contact? Near-First Contact?

I don’t really know what the best term would be, but what we’re talking about is that time after the first contact has been made between two alien civilizations, but not so long after that they’re well-acclimated to each other. In other words, early enough that even the xenophiles are experiencing culture shock.

As before, humans can play either side of the field in the options presented. (more…)

So last time we chatted about worldbuilding I mentioned that I think that it is a skill – but a skill like some of the management professions. Worldbuilding is the ability to combine skills, knowledge, and so on to produce a setting. The worldbuilding skill lets you build a world, relying on various other things you know and do and can find, much as a manager rallies people.

Now as noted I think it’s a skill that can be identified and thus improved – which is fairly obvious as we can compare world quality and seek to improve the quality of those we build. But there’s only so much you can do with your worldbuilding ability before you have to improve what it relies on – all the other things you know and can do.

Much as a good manager needs good people a good Worldbuilder calls on a huge amount of other talents to make their setting. In fact, that leads to a problem I want to address . . .

Different Foundations (Not of the Asimov Kind)

So let me get this out of the way: worldbuilding relies on rallying your different abilities and knowledge to build a world. That means that no one does it alike, no one is the same, and everyone has advantages and problems. This makes improving oneself rather complicated.

Tolkein’s worldbuilding was the result of knowledge of myth and a love of creating language, and possibly his desire to make thesauruses cry. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a mix of sharp wit, cultural knowledge, parody, and an understanding of the human condition. The world of Psycho-Pass is one focused on extrapolating technology and psychology.

(This is just about solo worldbuilding, look at the crazy-quilt composite worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, and WH40K).

Every worldbuilder is different. They have different inclinations and abilities to call on. They also have different gaps. What you, as a worldbuilder are good at and bad at is going to be different than anyone else on the planet. You will do some things better than anyone else – and find ways to screw up no one else could imagine.

Because everyone is so different, this makes it rather challenging. You wish to improve the various knowledges your worldbuilding calls on – but where do you start when there’s no obvious path?

What Do You Improve?

So, beyond your core worldbuilding skills, what others should you get, develop, improve, or at least get to functional mediocrity? This is a challenging question and an overwhelming one.

It’s overwhelming because:

1. Where do you start? There’s so much you could learn and there’s not really a clear path.
2. Role models can be challenging to look at because even if you admire them, you’re not them. I may love Grant Morrison and Terry Pratchett and so on but I’m not them.  Even if some of them pointed to clear paths, they may be too radically different from you.
3. There may be so many gaps. Even if you want to fix something, where do you start?

Ages ago I just would have shrugged and said “I dunno learn things and have fun with it.” But in time I can see it as a real issue.

However, having watched authors, friends, and myself work on worldbuilding, I have found a few major rules that’ll help:

1) Go with what you know. You will never ever know everything you need to be perfect, so work with what you know and with improving what you know. Build on your strengths.

By improving your strengths, be they genealogy or language, you are working on improving skills in a less-stressful, more personal way and using what you’ve already got in your head. In many cases, diving deep into one subject connects you to others past a certain point, just as Biology and Chemistry come together, or psychology and history intertwine.

2) Fill in the gaps when you need. Admit when you have gaps and work on filling them in – don’t ignore them or be ashamed of them. Just learn to realize when you don’t know something it’s OK to fill it in – and it won’t be perfect, just good enough to do the job.

This means you learn to fix gaps in knowledge without worrying about it – and develop your research skills.  If anything, research is a another “metaskill” like wolrdbuilding every worldbuilder should have.

3) Have fun. Part of #1 is to run with what you know and enjoy and use that to be a better worldbuilder. The enthusiasm an take you down the rabbit hole more than once into some interesting and useful areas of knowledge.

By building and using what you enjoy you’ll be a better worldbuilder. It also relieves the pressure and keeps things from being too formalized – which can kill imagination.

4) Use everything. Learn to rally everything you know, learned, understand, or even have vague knowledge about. Building a world is a gritty, hands-on business, so when you have something that pops into your head use it. I’ve used everything from my knowledge of cooking to obscure historical tidbits.

Leveraging everything you have calls upon all your diverse levels of knowledge. I turn, it may lead you to new areas of skill improvement, or ideas of what you can improve.  It also may help “fill in gaps” in other areas – maybe your knowledge of music is lame, but your experience with a real-life band lets you write about musicians well.

When you choose what worldbuilding skills, working with what you have, having fun, and learning to fill in your gaps (and finding what you need to fill in) is a good rule to use for improving the knowledge and abilities that let you worldbuild.

Accept The Gaps

You also have to accept you can’t know, understand, and so everything.

This is challenging. We’ve seen very talented worldbuilders who seem to know everything (to us). We’ve seen amazing creations that humble us. We figure we’ll never be as good as them.

The truth is you’ll never be like them – because we’re all different. But as good? Not so. We’re all good in different ways.

Even the authors I greatly admire are ones I can also target for criticism (I shan’t for the sake of propriety). I’ve written on this enough, been obsessed with worldbuilding enough, that the gaps jump out at me. It’s only my own sense of enthusiasm that keeps me from constantly picking myself apart when I make settings or give advice, because I’m not perfect.

You are going to do some things poorly, you are going to do some things mistakenly, and you’re going to make some doozies of errors. You can’t prevent this.

You can’t prevent this because you’re human, you don’t know everything. Building a world is playing god(dess) and you’re only human, so your qualifications are somewhat limited.

So what you can do is get better as worldbuilder, get better with all the skills and knowledge you call upon, and keep moving on.  You can do more good and screw up less.

I’d even say that barreling ahead helps reduce errors. If you stay engaged, keep making good settings, keep working t it, all your other advantages may help make up for, cover up,or even repair your gaps.

Worrying about it constantly isn’t going to help – that just wastes time and energy.

Things You Might Want To Improve

OK, I gave you advice on what to improve skills-wise, but here’s a grab-bag of things I think help worldbuilders in general. Consider it inspiration if you’re really looking for where to start

• Biology – Biology of any kind gives you knowledge of a variety of things from how people react to drugs to obscure things about diseases. It’s great for designing races as well.
• Chemistry – Most people don’t know much about chemistry, but it’s a fascinating fields – considering so much of the world is chemistry. Good for worldbuilding when you want to deal with specific reactions, chemical issues, etc.
• Culture and Traditions – Wether it’s relevant to your story or not, knowledge of a given culture helps you understand people. It also gives you ideas for building fictional cultures, of course – if nothing else you may get inspired by the cultures you do know.
• Economics – Economics is an ill-appreciated area of knowledge, and its practitioners don’t always engender confidence. But as its an area few people understand, understanding it is great for designing settings as you’ll have knowledge of something that others don’t, letting you create suprising depth.
• Food – Most writing on food I find is poor as most people don’t know food, from how to cook to its history. Knowledge of food helps you flesh out cultures, produce believable writing on issues like diet and famine, and more. Just ask yourself how much of history is merely people trying to eat . . .
• History – Knowing the history of anything helps you not just use that knowledge, but use the general understanding of people and situations. History gives you a sense of cause-and-effect, which is a huge part of world building.
• Literature – Like music, literature gives you an understanding of people and how they communicate. Also probably a pretty good thing to know about if you’re a writer anyway.
• Medicine – Medicine tells you a lot about how people get hurt and sick and well as treated. That in-depth knowledge can be useful for worldbuidling, writing on diseases, or understanding injuries and their recovery. Many people have erroneous assumptions about medical issues, so it also helps you make more realistic worlds – in surprising ways.
• Music – Music is a huge part of cultures and most people take it for granted – understanding it means you don’t. I’d also add the history of music is often fascinating and inspiring.
• Psychology – Knowing people is great as you’ll probably be writing people. It also introduces you to a variety of colorful and interesting people (sometimes the very practitioners themselves) that can inspire you.
• Religion and Philosophy – Most people know less about religion and philosophy as it’s filtered through their own religion and philosophy.  Knowing how people think, worship, deal with ethics, etc. gives you a lot to call on for worldbuilding, and a perspective that keeps you from being trapped by as many assumptions.  As religion and philosophy is a core part of many cultures, it also gives you a big leg up on designing cultures.
• Zoology – Zoology is a gold mine of ideas for worldbuilding, from writing about real animals to extrapolating fictional ones. Just general reading on zoology can give you plenty of crazy ideas as planet Earth contains and has contained some pretty wild animals.  An evening spent just watching nature documentaries can let you populate several alien worlds.

So there’s a few things I figure you may want to know as a worldbuilder.  I hope it inspires you.

Concluding And Moving On

You’ll never get all the skills you use to build a world together. You have to focus on the right ones to compliment your general worldbuilding skill. Accepting your limits lets you charge ahead with what you do best.

Being yourself.

After all, I’d say the worldbuilders so often invoked were very much themselves – and it seems to have worked for them.

Besides being yourself is the one thing you can do right.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

Let’s talk the Writing Prompt Generator!

Based on the feedback I’ve been getting I’ve been adding new stuff – in this case disasters and antagonists, as well as tweaking things here and there.  It’s definitely spiced things up, so go check it out!

This was definitely one of the less-fun parts as I had to work out various setting-specific things first.  Putting the various words and phrases together is fun, but those moments of sitting down and listing things can be a pain (how many popular disasters are there in science fiction for instance?).  Fortunately the internet helped, and the research was pretty educational – for instance seeing trends in SF disasters – really much apocalyptic fiction really is SF.

Now when it comes together it produces some pretty frothy stuff.  I may need to take time to go through and just add more tweaks, variants, and weirdness

By my estimates I need a certain level of “base” opening lines to make this work – and I’m a bit under halfway there.  So my goal is to work on this thing through August.  It’s extremely educational.

I admit I think this isn’t going to be perfect – not in that it’ll be incoherent, but it’s hard to capture the “lightning in the bottle” opening lines, so I may be making it a tad tame.  There is a very, very fine line to walk here, and I’m learning that there’s a sweet spot in language that both explains and inspires – but you have to hit it.  Err on the side of explaining (“wham here it is”) and it’s dull and uninspiring.  Err too far on the side of looking for the combination that inspires and you risk falling into incoherent weirdness.

But again, always educational.

I also think this is the kind of generator more generator-makers should try.  It’s highly educational

That’s it for this update.  Do have some things brewing for future generators and some writing, always working on Way With Worlds (I plan to finish up my two-parter on skills and move on to the next subject), but let me leave you with a few opening lines . . .

• Political collapse – it was definitely Saturday. – A world so organized political disasters happen only on one day.
• A war is just like getting old. – You can’t reverse it and you’re filled with regrets.
• We called him John, and figured he was a comedian. – Imagine a guy who’s hilariously funny, but wants people to stop focusing on that.
• I’d never dealt with a climate change before. – Sounds like someone is aware of an issue.
• I pretended to be a librarian, that was the problem. – You CANNOT pretend to be a librarian, its a special skillset. Sounds like an odd comedy.
• I am a secretary. – Sounds simple, but I feel this is a more menacing opening.
• On Wednesday I become a chemist, which was really cool. – Childlike wonder at handling dangerous chemicals could go wrong.
• She was my worst enemy and the darkness in my life. – Well your relation is pretty clear – the question is why haven’t you done anything . . .
• Michael knew that knowledge requires injustice. – Oooh, a story on how knowing the truth doesn’t mean fairness?
• It was Monday, the day of giggling, everyone knew that. – This just sounds creepy, like every Monday everyone hears giggling
• One magical experiment gone haywire can change your life, four however . . . – A series of magical disasters make things too normal.
• I never figured a mass murder would be like this. – Sounds very “Breaking Bad” ish.
• The rogue robots were behind the starship crash. – Well, that’s simple.  But why?  Were they willing to sacrifice themselves.
• That scientist was the source of all my pain. – This can’t end well.
• I pretended to be an explorer, which everyone expected. – Getting to live your childhood dream doesn’t mean you’re good at it.
• I have a tale about hope, birth, and being a dungeon delver. – If you spend your time exploring dungeons, what if you miss your child’s birth?  What’s it like when dad goes away so often?
• On Saturday I become a scientist, and that’s where things get complicated. – I’d like to know how, maybe you know something people don’t.
• I never wanted to be a demon. – This sounds like a rather dark supernatural romance.
• It was Thursday, the day of disbelief and drug addiction. – If you have nothing to believe in, drugs are tempting.
• Because of her, the wind is weeping. – One person who fails you makes the whole world seem sad.

Let me know what ideas you get . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

 

 

Experience comes through learning from mistakes.  These mistakes can be made by someone else.  Lost in Translation has looked at a number of adaptations, remakes, and reboots over the past three years, covering works of a variety of quality.  One of the difficult parts of the reviews is differentiating quality of the movie from the quality of the adaptation.

Generally, a bad movie is bad everywhere.  Not only does it miss the point of the original, the bad movie also misses the point of pacing, characterization, plot, and entertainment.  A good movie, though, may not necessarily be a good adaptation.  A good adaptation may not work as a good movie; there could be elements that don’t carry over during the translation between media.

In general, there are nine possible outcomes, combining the degrees of quality.  Along with beging good or bad, there’s the middle stage, the decent by not outstanding.  The middle stage is the interesting part when looking at adaptations here at Lost in Translation; the work shows signs of understanding the original work while still missing key elements.  I can highlight both and show why the adaptation works and why it needs more thought.

Good work, good adaptation is getting more common.  With movies, studios are realizing that an accurate adaptation will please the original work’s fanbase.  Word of mouth counts for a lot more today than in pre-Internet days; anyone can be a reviewer and can get their views out during the movie.  Risk-averse Hollywood needs the fanbase onside.  However, it’s still difficult to get a pitch perfect adaptation.  The best I’ve run into so far were Scott Pilgrim versus the World and Blade Runner.  Neither movie adapted the original fully, instead going with what I’ve called a “partial adaptation”.  Blade Runner left out a number of elements from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep just to be filmable.  Scott Pilgrim followed one plot line, the seven evil exes, and ignored some subplots; however, the movie used the graphic novel as the storyboard and filmed in Toronto to keep what was filmed accurate.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are few bad works that are also bad adaptations.  Few people set out to make a deliberately bad movie.  Even Ed Wood* was putting in his best effort to make the movie he envisioned.  With today’s blockbuster budgets breaking past $200 million, studios want to see the movie succeed.  Still, bad movies happen.  The worst I’ve reviewed here was Alien from L.A., a very loose adaptation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth that had problems that go far beyond the script.  Movies don’t get featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 without going that extra step.

Bad movies make it easy to point out what went wrong, but there’s nothing to point out where there was effort.  A lack of effort dooms adaptations, but even works that try can fail.  On the flip side, movies that have the deck stacked against it succeed against the odds.  The size of the budget is no guarentee; the big budget Battleship suffered from being too tied to the Save the Cat script formula while trying to reflect game play, while Flash Gordon was successful as an adaptation and became a cult classic despite executive meddling.  It’s these middle cases that make Lost in Translation interesting.

The good movie/bad adaptation combination comes out when a studio has a vision for the final product that deviates from the original work.  Real Steel was a family movie about a man reconnecting with his son through the rounds of a robot boxing league.  The Richard Matheson short story “Steel” that the movie was based on, though, was about a desperate man stepping into a ring posing as a robot in order to earn money to fix his own entrant.  Yet, Real Steel is worth seeing for what it is.  The 2014 Robocop could fall into this category; it eschewed the over-the-top violence and satire of the 1980s, reflecting the New Teens instead.

The reverse, the bad movie/good adaptation, is rare.  The effort needed to create a good adaptation would also go towards making a good movie.  The eye to detail that leads to good adaptations would also go to making sure that the movie’s pacing suits.  Cult classics have the potential to fall in this category; Street Fighter: The Movie might qualify.  But, most bad adaptations go the route of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, missing the point of the original work while still committing sins of the bad movie.

The middle case, the okay movie/okay adaptation, is ideal for reviewing.  This sort of adaptation allows for showing what does work and what doesn’t, providing a contrast.  These adaptations tend to be shallow, either because the format of the adaptation doesn’t allow for depth or the adapter doesn’t quite get the original.  The novel-to-movie adaptation can easily fall here; Dragonlance and Firefox are the exemplars.  In both cases, the adapters put an effort into being faithful, but the length of the adaptations prevented from getting deep just to cover the story.  Dragonlance also has the problem of a larger cast; in a movie, this prevents the audience from really getting to know anyone.  Television, either a regular series or a mini-series, could have been the better choice, something that A Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead have shown.

All the above discussion looks solely at the quality of the adaptation.  The original work hasn’t come into play, yet its quality also becomes an issue.  With Harry Potter, JK Rowling created a vibrant world that people want to visit all from playing with words.  The fanbase expected no less from an adaptation.  Meanwhile, the original Battlestar Galactica was seen as a throwback to an earlier for of science fiction, ignoring that the series routinely was in the top ratings until the network, ABC, couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted the series and moved it around or pre-empted it.  The popular view of Galactica gave the remake room to experiment and take a harder look at what it would be like for a ragtag fleet escaping the destruction of its homeworlds.  It is very possible for an adaptation or a remake to be seen as better than the original; the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series is seen as an improvement on the movie.

What all the above means for Lost in Translation is that the choice of works to review needs to be diverse.  If all I did was review just good adaptations or just bad ones, I’d be missing the full picture.  Quality of movie doesn’t matter; neither does box office success.  Limiting myself would mean missing on works that would allow for greater understanding on how adaptations work.

Next week, the July news round up.

So I had a dream about a comic adaption of a series of horror fantasy short stories. The art was almost Sepia-toned. I recall a picture of a shrine in a city, and the city and shrine looked to be mostly metal, almost as if the city was made of pipes and plates, though they came together elegantly.

The story was a mix of Lovecraftian and Celtic type legends, and may have been in a pace called Icyth. The first story started the entire cycle, and was about the arising of the Mathulesium, a one-man mausoleum from the depths of the sea. Another story was about a servant race who followed the same religion as their masters changing and possibly rebelling. Ultimately the story ended in the meltdown of the civilization and anarchy reigning.

So, folks, you have your story seed, go for it 😉

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

Hey gang, what’s up?

Well for me most of the “up” is the Writing Prompt Generator, which I’m tweaking here and there as I get feedback.  To be honest, I suspect this thing is easily going to take a month or two to get right – but on the other hand, I really am enjoying the feedback approach.  I might have to use it elsewhere.

I have notes for a few other generators, but we’ll see where that goes.  Work still has me pretty busy, to be honest, I need to carve out more Sanctum Time.

On that note, I hear from my users now and then and I wanted to explain to folks some of my future plans.

See Seventh Sanctum’s been around fifteen years – and I’m 46.  I’d like to build more of a community around it, but that’s also a tetchy proposition.  I also want to broaden it a bit to include a bit more than the generators and let people connect – thus the Codex and the tumblr.  My ultimate hope is that, before I’m 50, I’m able to organically cultivate an active Sanctum community for ideas, writing, and maybe some people to help me out.  Or heck, even inherit it – at 46 you have enough times you loose relatives, have friends with health problems, etc. that you get a might thoughtful.

I just don’t want to try and force a community.  It rarely works and it’s usually not worth the effort.  So I’m just building tools slowly, connecting things together – and asking people for advice.  The best communities I saw had an organic quality that grew out of another focus.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.