Fanatical Pupil

Word Count: 395

Don’t call it a comeback.

There’s more I actually wrote, but it’s longhand and I haven’t put it into the computer yet. Gives me a good head start for next week.

Charles Stross has finished the first draft of a book. This is not all that notable seeing as how he is a professional writer. What is good to note is that he reiterates one of the fundamental things that new writers (like myself) must bludgeon into the thick (at least in my case) skulls:

When a novel is finished in first draft, it’s not yet publishable.

I just finished reading an essay by Anne Lamont contained within the textbook: Writing Fiction (mentioned here), which expands upon that concept for several pages.

Unlike most processes which follow the Crap In -> Crap Out axiom, the writing process takes crap in, but somewhere along the way in the revision process, the crap is turned into gold. At least, that’s usually the idea.

I have just started reading Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway and in the opening chapter she provides a nugget of insight that new writers (as though I am not one) need drilled into them before they waste as much time I did trying to copy someone else’s process before realizing each writer has to create their own:

The mundane daily habits of writers are apparently fascinating. No author offers to answer questions at the end of a public reading without being asked: Do you write in the morning or at night? Do you write every day? Do you compose longhand or on a computer? Sometimes such questions show a reverent interest in the workings of genius. More often, I think, they are a plea for practical help: Is there something I can do to make this job less horrific? Is there a trick that will unlock my words?

Burroway goes on to list seven different authors with seven different writing processes.

So, here’s my advice, as one who’s taken far too long to ramp up to the actual process of writing fiction: Stop spending your time Googling to try to figure out what your favorite writers do to create their works of fiction. Instead, spend that time coming up with your own process. For every hour you spend looking to see if someone writes their drafts longhand, that’s an hour you could have been writing longhand to see if that works for you. So – again, from someone who’s spent far too long asking questions – stop trying to find others’ answers to your questions, and start making your own answers.

Since I’m so sure everyone cares what I think about the TV shows I watch (or should I call them Laptop shows since I watch them all on Hulu?).

I almost gave up on Heroes last week. It probably seems like I only write about shows when I feel like quitting them, but there is evidence that refutes that.

Anyway – there’s two main reasons why I felt like (and still do feel like – perhaps moreso now) giving up on Heroes.

1. The Vision of the Future is Not Clear. If this were real life, then, duh, the future wouldn’t be clear, and that’s just the way it is. But this is a TV show where some characters can travel through time and others can paint the future. Season One worked because we had a clear idea of what was going to happen in the future: There was going to be a nuclear (note to Sarah Palin: it’s pronounced noo-klee-ur) bomb in New York City. Easy enough. Very clear.

Move on to Seasons Two and Three: I have no idea. Maybe I’m just dense. But I don’t know what the writers’ and/or producers’ vision of the future is in Heroesland. Clearly there is some Grave Threat in the form of people acquiring super powers, and maybe massacring each other… But so far, all I can remember seeing is Future Peter showing Present Day Peter that people can fly, and the only ones who seem to have a problem with it are Future Peter and Future Claire. Yeah, there’s also the part where Hiro goes into the future (when he is killed by Ando) and everyone is going crazy, but that was just a short little jaunt through time, and the future seems so fluid and malleable in the Heroverse, that it’s hard to know if that future is even still going to happen.

Now, I do get that some of this future we see is supposed to be shrouded in mystery, but I feel like the Grave Threat should be made very clear, even if (and perhaps explicitly because) we don’t know exactly how it started and/or how it got to be the Grave Threat that it is in the future. I think I’m also annoyed and/or confused at how they keep changing the nature of the Grave Threat. I suppose it’s more comic book-like to have a new danger every season, but when everyone keeps changing the future, it makes it hard to worry that a given future is actually going to happen.

This issue is crystallized (and made more upsetting) by the fact that on the same night (for those who actually watch live TV) you can watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TSCC) which has a very clearly defined Grave Threat which doesn’t change. Even though the way in which it becomes the Grave Threat seems to change, we still have the same Grave Threat we’ve had since the opening scene of the first Terminator. Of course, the entire show, and really the entire point of everything Terminator-related, is based around the fact that we don’t know exactly how the future gets to be the future. (In the show, they are even growing turmoil within John Connor regarding the fact that no matter what he does, it seems that the future never changes)

It seems like Heroes is trying a similar tactic with its mystery by making the show center around trying to find out how and why the future ends up like it does, but in TSCC, it’s so much more clear why finding out is actually important.

2. Too many people. Here’s the list of characters from Heroes that I can name off the top of my head:
Parkman
Hiro & Ando
Peter
Nathan
Trish Strauss (Nikki’s sister)
Linderman
Noah Bennet
Claire Bennet
Sylar
Mohinder
Molly
Angela
Parkman’s Dad
The Haitian
Adam Monroe
Elle (who’s dead now… or is she?)
and now Arthur Petrelli

And the not so important, but maybe important, people:
Micah (even though he’s only been in one episode)
Claire’s Mom
Claire’s Biological Mom
Mya
Daphne
Knox
Peter’s girlfriend who got stuck in the future and we never hear about again
Trish & Nikkie’s sister (who we haven’t even met yet)

That’s at least 17 important people (taking out the “throw away” people) that you have to know about. LOST had close to that many important characters, but they were much more stratified in their levels of importance. You could not know much about a bunch of the people on LOST and still get by. But if you don’t know something about one of those main people on Heroes, your ability to keep up and be continually entertained will diminish rapidly.

For a quick comparison (again with TSCC):
Sarah Connor
John Connor
Derrick Reese
Cameron
Agent Ellison

And to compare to my other two shows, Chuck and Fringe:
Chuck
Sarah
Morgan
Casey
Ellie (?)
Captain Awesome
BuyMore employees who are mostly there for comic relief

I count four important people and maybe five if you cout Ellie.

Olivia
Peter
Walter
Olivia’s Dead-being-kept-alive-former-boyfriend
Agent Broyles (I guess JJ Abrams liked Lance Reddick in LOST)

Once again four to five important people (sorry Astrid, Agent Sidekick, and CEO Lady who reminds me way too much of Shirley Manson in TSCC).

There’s three shows with manageable cast sizes that leave me with enough Care for everyone involved. Heroes is not only stretching the Care a little thin, but the characters also sometimes make me not want to try to make it work.

Because there is all of a sudden a bunch of new music that I want coming out, and a slew (a slew!) of video games as well. Of course, this works well with the timing of my birthday, but it also means that I have to choose between things like:

The Killers – Day & Age
Snow Patrol – A Hundred Million Suns
The Streets – Everything Is Borrowed

All of which sound awesome from what I’ve heard of them so far.

and

Gears of War 2
Blitz: The League II
Fallout 3
The Last Remnant

and

Things I’ve been wanting since before I’d heard of most of what’s listed above, like a couple Bulls hats, a new Moleskine notebook, etc., etc.

Oh, the agony of such decisions.