- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- videos
As you all know, I have been writing a novel and this is the writing community...
This video by Shaun is actually pretty inspiring. The idea that JKRowling went from zero to billionaire by writing a series that had so many stupid mistakes in it lifts quite a burden off my shoulders.
I've seen the Harry Potter movies, they're not bad, nor are they particularly amazing. Well, it is amazing that they actually got made and fully budgeted until the end. The Narnia series after the third movie had to abort to save the wallet of the producers, Pirates of the Caribbean made a deep dive into the bottom of the ocean of low quality, The Hobbit was bad in ways mere mortals are not qualified to explain. I'd have swapped the amount of production effort HP and PotC got to the last movie if I could.
The Harry Potter directors were smart enough to cut out some of JKR's weird shit. I didn't read past the third novel. I only watched the movies, and they did make a good job of toning down the worst parts of the bullying and slavery apologia. I can see where HP movie fans and HP theory readers can have very different understandings of how JKR talked about slavery.
There is probably a large Venn Diagram intersection of people who downplay the slavery and people who pretended to read the whole series to the end for some kind of clout.
As I write, I'm meticulously paranoid about details that don't mean something later in the story, or dig a hole that later becomes a plothole and gets forgotten instead of filled. In fact, I'm kind of worried that my paranoia could make the novel(s) incompletable.
Sherlock Is Garbage, And Here's Why - Hbomberguy[1:49:52] dabbles a bit on that with the recent BBC sherlock series. He notes a director who is apparently talented at building up, but is utterly incapable of actually building to a destination. I had already felt like Sherlock was off, and Hbomberguy just happened to release a damning video that precisely articulates why I liked individual episodes of Sherlock, but felt the series as a whole wasn't adding up. Because really, it literally was just kind of going nowhere, but with the aesthetics of about to get there. And Sherlock wasn't the first series the director ruined for Hbomberguy.
Game of Thrones is an interesting example. The guy's ending was clearly a shower thought, he built a world, he built several books. Maybe he built something so big he couldn't finish it. This could be me in 10 years (minus the financial success, statistically speaking).
I have to walk the tight rope between a story with no errors or accidental loose ends, but also a story that cleanly arrives with a satisfying destination.
Best of luck to everyone.
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Game of Thrones is very different than Harry Potter in that sense.
Harry Potter is completely, and as Shaun points out, inherently stagnant. Change can only happen on an individual scale, the system is perfect and if something is bad, it is because some evil person out there deliberately made it so because they're evil and bad. The reason Harry Potter isn't going anywhere is because, well, where is it supposed to go? Rowling sees no fundamental problems in this world that would need fixing.
A Song of Ice and Fire is orders of magnitude more complex. GRRM has established a narrative that is arguably too thorough for its own good. Everything is intertwined, if one king makes decision X we get to see how it affects every character in the story, there are so many plot threads in the air that it's not really feasible for all of them to be concluded in a satisfactory manner.
Basically, GoT conditioned its viewers to drop all suspension of disbelief. Every actions must always have realistic consequences. And in a world as large as the one created by GRRM, that's borderline impossible to write.
Edit: GoT is going somewhere, but because of how realistic it's trying to be it's impossible to neatly tie it all up because that's not how the world works. Unlike Harry Potter, which is simply stagnant, GoT is moving in many different directions and there's no end in sight, but there is continuous progression.
That's one of the things that annoyed me so much about the Sept being blown up.
Literally a huge attack which implicates an unpopular Cersei, and resulted in the death of nearly an entire House with a popular queen as a member, and wiped out the leadership and place of worship of the dominant religion. But nothing happens.
That's the kind of shit that would lead to a revolt. It's just weirdly implied that she just killed all her enemies in one go and now there's no more, and she just smirks and sips wine the rest of the series until she dies.
It's sort of implied that people are kind of upset but nothing really happens. It's just a complete dumping of the main thesis of GoT which is that actions have consequences and the "game of thrones" is difficult to play.
GoT is moving in many different directions and there’s no end in sight, but there is continuous progression.
That is realistic though; empires rise and fall, life goes on. Until climate change ends it all that is. Maybe GRRM should have written something analogous to that in... ooooh right
Don't worry we went up north and had a random character kill the changer of climates.
I wonder if it would have helped if GRRM made a George Lucas-style Lore database so that he could have other contributors to his work without breaking canon.
Speaking of which, kinda mad that new Star Wars basically rendered that lore database pointless.
That's not really the problem.
The problem that GoT has is more like "Luke Skywalker blew up the death star and the movie just ends?? They didn't even address the chaos that would've ensued on previously Empire-controlled worlds! And we never found out how the destruction of Alderaan impacted the galactic economy! So many loose threads!"
GoT set out to answer all these questions other fantasy novels just leave open. But there's a reason other novels leave them open.
Edit: Here's something GRRM said in an interview:
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
This is what GRRM tried to do differently in ASOIAF, he sought to answer all these questions. And he's really, really good at answering them and keeping it exciting, but the problem is that if you do that, your story can never truly end. By the time you get to the end of one plot thread, you have begun 5 new ones and now you gotta answer those questions too. This is why we don't ask what Aragorn's tax policy was, comrades.
Luke Skywalker blew up the death star and the movie just ends?? They didn’t even address the chaos that would’ve ensued on previously Empire-controlled worlds!
tbf I think there's a good movie somewhere in that idea
This is why we don’t ask what Aragorn’s tax policy was, comrades.
Your reasoning is way better, I'm just in denial that Gondor has a flat tax from which the nobility is exempt :/
I recommend writing down just every fact of importance you establish. If it's not important enough to write down, then it can be ignored and fans will get a few laughs out of a meaningless continuity error or w/e.
This. So hard. I don't refer to my notes often, but I get to expanding on those notes as I write them. I establish a quirk in my magic system, I can ask and answer 'why.'
In a novel, you have to be precise and efficient with details, but your notes don't have any such limitation.
I'd say a bigger problem is kinda keeping your notes in sync with the book. Like just outright forgetting to demonstrate a quirk of the magic system in advance, and despite being planned it ends up looking like you pulled the conclusion out your ass for the big confrontation. This of course is why you find a beta reader who doesn't see your notes
My notes trouble is that I don't know any application(s) that correctly implements a native desktop app, native mobile app, dark mode, and syncing. Obsidian thinks I'll pay $8/month for an electron app. Right now I'm getting by with just dropbox.
I love critiques on bad writing and see them as inspirational too. A lot of these people seem to have such huge egos that they wouldn't take criticism. I on the other hand tend to over-correct.
But now that I'm away from people who told me outright that they don't like fantasy, I can better work with what I have.
Seeing things like those videos really helps when I'm revising my draft.
I don't see myself so much as on a tight rope, but throwing a grappling hook at a mountain and hoping to climb up without fucking up. I know where the end point is, but I just have to keep going and make sure I have a strong anchor.
I'm excited that we have so many writers here.
Also one thing that's helped me with details is having two docs open - one for the story/manuscript/chapter and one for the details I want to add/address.
Then I can double check both to make sure I have everything I want to say. Like implementing foreshadowing or renaming a character I didn't like. It's been nice because putting it all on one doc is exhausting and not fun to look at and I need to put my scathing self-critique somewhere.
Putting the idea out there that a decent amount of fanfiction is actually written better than published work. And some fanfic authors (esp fix-it fic writers) have fewer :brainworms:
