Category: television (Page 1 of 2)

Fantasy Lit Is Basically Prestige TV

Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake, but when I read Jared Shurin’s observation about the influence prestige TV dramas have had on fantasy novels over the last decade, I knew immediately that he’d put into words that overwhelming but unnameable feeling I’ve been having since forever about fantasy fiction and why I feel so out of step with what’s going on in the current literary landscape.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy prestige TV shows. I watched Game of Thrones. I used to write weekly recaps/reviews of Mad Men for a film website. I will go to the grave saying The Americans is the best fucking show ever made. I like all these programs and others too. I’m in favor of well-made serialized dramas on my TV screen.

But what I’m not so in favor of, I guess (thought I’m stilling working this out within my own brain), is the transformation of books into text-based TV shows, and particularly fantasy fiction, which AS FANTASY, has the capacity to go beyond what can be perceived with our eyes and into the realms of dreaming and language and, well, the fantastic, i.e.: that which cannot be understood with our senses but goes beyond those limits, and that if we surrender the literary landscape to the grammar of cinematic storytelling (of which, I must note, I’m a huge fan), we’re on our way to losing something special in our written stories, something that we might not even remember existed if we keep aping the structure and conventions of TV and movies.

What I’m really getting at, I think, is that while I’ve certainly loved books like Black Sun and She Who Became the Sun and The City We Became and This Is How You Lose the Time War, I can also TOTALLY see them as TV shows, and that’s not just because at this point in our history we can pretty much see any book as a TV show eventually. It’s because these books (yes, even Time War) follow the structure and storytelling conventions of prestige television almost perfectly. Multiple viewpoints (aka the A story, B story, and C story of a TV show), sequences and chapters that could very easily translate into a single episode of a show, and the kind of complex characterization that makes for juicy roles top-notch actors want to play.

None of this is a criticism by the way. Again, I LIKE this stuff.

But it’s only one way to tell a story. And for fantasy — a genre in which the only thing limiting the author are the made-up rules of her own made-up secondary world — it feels like we’ve traded something expansive for something rather more… limited.

Look, I get it. Conventions change. Reader expectations change. Prestige TV is dope as shit, so why wouldn’t we want our books to do the same thing?

But then I read something like Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales (or, like, “Smith of Wooten Major”), or John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost, or a Clark Ashton Smith short story, and I’m like, “This could be a TV show, but in doing so, a lot would have to change.” The translation from written word to cinematic image would be just that: a translation. And something would be lost in the process.

Talented filmmakers could certainly make something of these stories, and they might even be genius things, but they would be fundamentally different things from the written literature.

Think about the previous Narnia movie adaptations, and consider what might come of Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming attempts, and then go back and reread the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s not that they are “unfilmable” or some such nonsense. They are perfectly adaptable to cinema.

But the cinematic versions would need to alter the literary ones. Choices would need to be made that go beyond just, “What should we cut for time?”

This was the particular talent of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillippa Boyens when they adapted The Lord of the Rings to the screen. They made a lot of changes, and whether you think those changes were necessary or not, they resulted in three movies that are pretty fucking great, both as adaptations of the source material and as movies in their own right.

And then think about how sloggy and stilted something like Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is. Rowling was still writing in the age before all our base are belong to prestige TV.

Not that anyone writing in the 20th or 21st century can escape the influence of cinema entirely, but the prestige TV template hadn’t quite solidified yet in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was starting to (I’m looking at you George R.R. Martin, former TV writer… I mean, is it any wonder Game of Thrones became one of the most successful prestige shows of the last twenty years? It’s like the guy knew how to write things that would play well on TV!), but the influence of television on our literary landscape wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as it is now.

Movies? Yes.

But HBO-style TV, with its multiple viewpoints and intersecting story lines and character-focused narratives, not so much.

That’s why it was so important to get it right when taking a book and making it into a movie. So much could go wrong in that translation.

But now, book to (small) screen feels almost effortless. Sure, we may have to cut here and condense there, but in the main, it’s all right there on the page. A show bible ready-made.

I know I sound grumpy about it, and maybe I am, but I also know that I love these books-that-could-be-TV-shows-because-TV-shows-are-how-we-tell-stories-now. I really, really like a lot of these fantasy series! And yes, I would totally watch the TV adaptation if/when it comes out.

But I also kind of like the omniscient narrator? And stories with just one viewpoint character? And fantastical elements that defy visualization? And maybe stories with characters that are maybe a little “flat” (hello, Conan!) but are still awesome anyway because fantasy is a genre that delivers on maybe more than just deep characterization.

Like, maybe, drama and snappy dialogue aren’t the things I always need from my fantasy. Maybe I need weirdness. And wonder. And a strangeness that cannot be translated to the TV screen. And something older, like a fairy tale. And not the new kind where everyone is a fully-realized, three-dimensional person with motivations and psychological depth, but the old kind, where everyone is an archetype and acts weird AF sometimes, and we just accept it because we don’t need psychological realism in our Grimm.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking through some stuff, I guess.

But man, when I read Shurin’s point about prestige TV, it was like the scales fell from my eyes. It’s why I’m a bit out of step both as a writer and a reader. I like prestige TV, and I like the way modern fantasy novels are written, but I also like the old stuff too, the less prestige-y stuff. The weird stuff and the ancient. I kinda wish we could have more of it. Maybe we do, and I’m not reading it (highly possible). If it is, I want to know. I want to read something that can only be read, that lives in words best of all and isn’t a word-version of something practically cinematic.

Fantasy is expansive. I don’t want it narrowed down to a set of storytelling conventions that emerged from only one form of media.

However, as Shurin points out, it IS “slightly reductive” to reduce all currently-popular fantasy literature to this one thing, and it’s not as if This Is How You Lose the Time War (or insert other popular novel) is merely a film treatment. That IS too reductive, and something like Time War is also an epistolary novel, which has a long and venerable tradition that predates TV by a long shot. So maybe my griping is taking things too far. Maybe I need to chill.

Nevertheless, our society is a cinematic one. The moving image dominates our thoughts and dreams and our entertainment, and as Shurin predicts, the next great influence on fantasy literature will be (video) gaming, so yeah, we can’t escape the image makers. I’m intrigued by the ways gaming can influence our literary storytelling, so again, it’s not that I’m opposed to this sort of cross-pollinating. I’m just wondering: Is it possible to have a successful (i.e.: widely read) fantasy novel these days that doesn’t get its storytelling paradigm from prestige TV (or video games or INSERT NEW VISUAL MEDIUM HERE)? We still read classic fantasy, yes, but those books have the backing of time and reputation. We read them because we’ve been told we should read them, or because age bestows a kind of authority.

Like with so many things, a throwback — a new piece of art that hearkens to an earlier form — can be seen either as a delightfully retro oddity or as simply “out of step.” But these throwbacks are catering to a niche crowd, to those who intentionally seek out the strange and “arty.” The popular stuff, the stuff that garners widespread attention, fits itself (most often) within the current paradigm. It might do things a little differently, but not too different. There’s a sweet-spot that such things often hit — the spot between familiar and new — that is precisely what makes them both popular and critically acclaimed. This is the way of things. There’s no sense yelling at the clouds about it. It always has been and always will be.

What I wonder is if we can ever again escape the velocity of cinematic storytelling when it comes to literature. Or does the moving image (in whatever form, even gaming) simply have too much allure. Has our collective imagination been too thoroughly colonized by cinema to ever go back (or forward) to something else? Do we even want to try something else? Maybe it’s just me, the weird freak who wants more flat characters and overt “telling” in my fantasy novels, and is kind of sick of snappy dialogue, and pines for the omniscient narrator. Not all the time, but sometimes. The dictates of the market are one thing; what fantasy literature has the potential to be is something else.

Another Lost Weekend

Once again I’ve failed to use my Saturday wisely. Many worthy and important things could have gotten done; instead, it was T.V. time. An episode of Jim Henson’s Storyteller Greek Myths (much more tragic and somber than its fairy tale counterpart); an episode of The Crown (which led me down the rabbit hole of Googling all the stuff from the episode to see if it was real; sadly, some of it was); and then Ken Burns’s Jazz ended up being on PBS when I turned off Netflix, and I watched that for half an hour.

Yikes.

I am so bad at getting my work done when I have *actual time to do it.*

Instead, I waste such time, and when the eleventh hour arises, I scramble like mad to do all the work I’ve been putting off for too long. It’s bonkers and unhealthy, and I wish I was better at being disciplined.

Having just read James Clear’s Atomic Habits recently, you’d think I’d know how to develop small habits that will make my life run more smoothly. Alas, I feel like most of my days are filled with too much to do and not enough time to do it, and then when a weekend like today rolls around, I’m so burned out that all I want to do is veg.

I wish I knew how to make my normal weekdays not so stuffed with things to do. I’m sure this is a common feeling for many people. The question I have is why are we all so busy all the time? Is it modern life that’s made things busy? Is it our jobs? I don’t work a high-powered corporate job or anything; I’m a high school English teacher. Is it having to work and raise children that makes things so busy? I know others who work and have kids and they don’t *seem* particularly stressed or overburdened (maybe they just hide it really well…). Or at the very least, I don’t see any of them turning a perfectly good Saturday into a wasted “lost weekend” of vegging and avoiding work.

Why do I do this to myself? What kind of small “atomic” habits can I develop to avoid this cycle of over-work/giving-in-to-acedia? I think it’s interesting that I’m self-diagnosing my problem as acedia, because that implies this is a spiritual malady and not necessarily something I can “life hack” away. With all things spiritual, prayer is often the first priority, so maybe my problem is lack of prayer. Maybe I need to work on my habits of prayer and see what else will fall into place after that. Small habits of prayer might lead to more small habits elsewhere.

Maybe next Saturday can be a little less lost.

The Golden Age of Geekdom

thI decided to set my series, Merlin’s Last Magic, in the 1980s because, for me, the 1980s were the “golden age” of fantasy-related stuff: Conan. Red Sonja. Labyrinth. The Dark Crystal. The Last Unicorn. The Neverending Story. Ladyhawke. Dragonslayer. Legend. The Dragonlance Chronicles. HeroQuest.

I grew up in the 80s, and because fantasy seemed to be everywhere during that decade, my imagination was fertilized by all of these movies, books, and board games. In writing Merlin’s Last Magic, I wanted to give a little nod to the decade that nurtured me.

But as I was preparing to write this post, I realized that perhaps the 1980s weren’t really the golden age. Or, if they were the golden age, then perhaps they’ve given birth to an even more exciting and fertile age for fantasy genre stuff: Right now.

I contend that perhaps it wasn’t the 80s at all that were THE decade for fantasy lovers; perhaps that time is now. Perhaps we are living in the true golden age at this very moment (the Platinum Age, perhaps). Just look around: fantasy and science fiction have never been more mainstream or popular, from HBO’s Game of Thrones to the Marvel movies to fantastic writers like Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, and Neil Gaiman (all of whom are being courted by Hollywood for big-budget adaptations of their work).

Being “Geek” is cool. Nerds no longer hide their obsessions but display them proudly. San Diego Comic-Con (not to mention the dozens of other conventions that have gained prominence in the last decade) has become Mecca not just for comics nerds and sci-fi geeks but for big-name celebrities and the mass media at large. When I was twelve, I tried to hide my love for J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-Earth; when I turned twenty, Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring was debuting in theaters, and suddenly, I didn’t have to hide anymore.

I think this new geek renaissance can be credited to both Jackson’s films and the Harry Potter phenomenon. Without either of these two creations, my fellows geeks and I would most likely still be part of a niche genre, something that the “wider world” looks down on with slight disdain. But because Jackson’s movies were incredible international hits, and because Harry Potter continues to be a straight-up juggernaut in the film and literature worlds, suddenly being “geeky” was cool. The media at large (and the people who consume it) are always gravitating towards what makes money, what sells. And starting with Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies, fantasy started to sell, and sell hard.

The success of the Game of Thrones TV show has cemented fantasy as a genre that adults can and should enjoy. Now we have TV shows like The Magicians, Vikings, and American Gods, (not to mention the Marvel and DC superhero shows), and no one is hiding their fandom for these SFF stories anymore. We are allowed to like (and even love) fantasy and science fiction in a way that was just not possible in the 1980s.

But we can’t dismiss the decade of my childhood. The golden age of geekdom that we are experiencing now is a direct result of the fantasy and sci-fi of the Reagan Decade. What do so many of today’s popular novelists, showrunners, and screenwriters have in common? We came of age in the 1980s (or at least, many of us did). We grew up soaking in the realms of Krynn and Fantasia and Thra. Our heroes were Conan and Molly Grue. We played endless hours of D&D and HeroQuest and Warhammer and turned all of those adventures into our first, fumbling stories and novels. Without the incubation of the 1980s, the golden age of today wouldn’t have happened.

For my own part, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain and the Merlin’s Last Magic series wouldn’t exist without the countless hours I spent reading Rosemary Suttcliffe’s Arthurian books, watching Excalibur when I was probably too young to be watching it, and playing Pendragon role-playing game (which, technically, I first discovered in 1990, but who’s counting). I learned to tell stories — and I learned to love telling stories — from reading MERP and RuneQuest and other fantasy RPGs, and then creating my own fantasy worlds in which to role-play. I fell in love with the realms of heroes by devouring books by Raymond E. Feist and Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weis. I became lost in the kingdoms of Faerie by watching Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, and  Willow like they were on an unending loop.

The stories I write now are the children of the stories I wandered in during my childhood. We are in an incredibly fertile age for fantasy and science fiction. But we cannot discount the debt we owe to the 80s. The cheesy special effects, the cliche story lines, the underground and misfit-like nature of these movies and books are there for us to see, in the hindsight of 30+ years. But these things do not diminish the magic and sway these stories still hold over us. If the future looks bright for SFF, it’s only because our destinies were forged in the fires of the gloriously geeky 80s.

Television and the Art of Plot: Why TV’s Game of Thrones is now better than the books

I feel like George R.R. Martin should know better. He used to write for television, after all. And yet his A Song of Ice and Fire books have gotten more bloated, more meandering, and more convoluted as the series has progressed. He’s added dozens of new characters (that detract from the old characters that we are already invested in), created new plot threads even as old ones haven’t been resolved, and succumbed to the ever-bloated “world building” of riverboat rides, turtles, and copious amounts of dysentery. It’s like he’s completely forgotten the lessons learned from writing for television.

Here’s the thing: television writers (and movie writers too) know how to plot (even if they don’t always write the most original of plots). In the classes and workshops I’ve attended for TV writing, one of the biggest lessons we learned was how to plot out an episode of a television show. Before one line of dialogue or description is written, the entire episode is planned out — from A story to B, C, and D story. Act breaks are planned, even if the show doesn’t air with commercials. And the basic structure of three or four or five act storytelling is employed. We build the individual beats of the story before we even begin writing the script. And we move beats around, add beats, take out beats, revise beats — all in an effort to build a scaffold before filling it in with the “guts” (i.e.: character, description, dialogue, theme). It’s not that character takes a backseat in TV writing — on the contrary, television is actually ideal for telling a character-based story — but TV writers know that they only have 60 minutes (or 48, or 22, or whatever) to tell the story, and they have to make sure that the storylines are balanced, that the episode will have dramatic moments balanced out with smaller character moments, that the storylines will all have some kind of thematic or plot-driven cohesion. To see all of this illustrated, look no further than Game of Thrones season 5.

I’ve enjoyed the Game of Thrones TV show since it debuted, but it wasn’t until season 4 that I really felt the show began to surpass the books. Not to beat up on Martin too much (he did, after all, create this amazing world and these endlessly fascinating characters), but I think somewhere around A Feast for Crows, he lost the threads of his narrative. I’ve read all five books, and I’m sure I will continue to read the other books as they come out, but I’m not as heavily invested in the novels as I once was. The TV show, on the other hand, is pretty much “can’t miss” TV for me at this point. With The Americans done for the season, Game of Thrones is my “IT” show. And I am LOVING season 5 and the new developments in the stories of some of its characters.

In the books, Sansa and Littlefinger are in the Vale, awaiting Sansa’s marriage to Harry the Heir. In the books, Arya is being trained by some priest of the faceless men. In the books, Tyrion is traveling all over Essos and *almost* running into Dany… but not quite. In the books, minor character Jeyne Poole is betrothed to Ramsay Bolton. In the books, Jaime is hanging out in the Riverlands, being Jaime. And Brienne? She’s having a run-in with Lady Stoneheart. Meanwhile, we’ve got a slew of new characters — from the smelly Greyjoy brothers and their smelly, stupid drowned god, to useless Quentyn Martell, to Jon Connington and Griff and who the hell else I don’t even know or care — and there are, like, a million more minor and side and supporting characters and everything is getting huge and complicated and very sprawling.

But the show has wisely decided to cut storylines like Lady Stoneheart, the Greyjoy bros, and Quentyn Martell. They’ve wisely decided to start bringing storylines TOGETHER as opposed to expanding them in a never-ending spider’s web of convoluted red herrings (and new characters we have no connection to). Instead, the show has decided to bring its already-huge cast of characters together in new and interesting ways. And not surprisingly, when these characters, whom we’ve watched develop over four seasons, are brought together in situations wrought with conflict, very compelling drama ensues. For example, it makes so much sense to have Jaqen be the one to train Arya. After all, she already has a connection to him, they have a history, so now her scenes are filled with great interplay between two characters who have a history together. Same with Tyrion traveling with Varys. We already know and love these characters, so now we get to see them as they encounter new conflicts and obstacles. And we have a connection to both of them.

Of course, the biggest change in the show this season has been the Sansa storyline, and it is perhaps the most dramatic and compelling storyline as well. Instead of Sansa and Littlefinger interacting with a slew of new characters we have no history with, they are thrust right in the middle of a crazy situation involving characters we already love and hate. Sansa is in the North again. She IS Lady Stark. “The North remembers.” Theon is there. Will he rescue her? Will Ramsay treat her with the same sadistic violence he has used on others? Will Littlefinger use this marriage to overthrow the Boltons and claim the North for himself (through Sansa)? Will Stannis attack and “rescue” Sansa? Or will Brienne? Or will Brienne pretend to join Stannis’s army in order to get close to him and exact her revenge?

By putting all of these characters in intersecting storylines, we’re getting the most drama from the situation. The TV writers are pulling the characters and stories together, as opposed to Martin’s method of pulling everything further and further apart. And it’s because TV writers know that part of the reason we enjoy stories is so we can follow our favorite characters through their trials and tribulations. From a storytelling standpoint, it makes sense to have these character interact WITH EACH OTHER as opposed to strangers. And it’s economical storytelling too. It keeps things from getting out of hand and the plot getting too bloated. And of course, from a practical standpoint, it saves the show from hiring new actors to play new characters. Game of Thrones already has a huge cast for a TV show; there’s no way they could continue to have all the new characters Martin introduces every book. And yet, this practicality is precisely why the show’s plot has transformed into a better story than the one in the books. At a certain point, the story needs to contract, it needs to reach climaxes, it needs to explode with drama. The TV show is doing this. And my guess is it’s doing this because the show writers sat down before the season and plotted out how they could tell the story in the limited time and episodes they had. They figured out the best, most economical way to get all these characters together, interacting, having conflict, and moving the story forward. In other words, figuring out the plot. Writing the beats.

Martin is famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) a “gardener.” He doesn’t plan, he simply writes. He tends his garden of words and characters and plot lines, but doesn’t have a detailed outline or master-plan. His method is the exact opposite of how most TV shows are written. Television can’t afford to just make it up as they go along; they must have a plan before shooting starts, and that means writing beats and outlining the story. Actors have to be hired; sets have to be constructed and locations chosen. All these very real, very practical concerns are a boon to the TV writer because now she must plan ahead. And that’s why everyone is converging on Winterfell this season on Game of Thrones. They already have the set. They already have the actors. Why not put them together in an explosive, dramatic situation and watch the story unfold? And frankly, it’s a better story than the one Martin is currently writing.

I am a firm believer in not turning novels and stories into imitations of TV and movie scripts. I don’t want every book to read like it’s the treatment for a future movie deal. But when it comes to plotting, to story structure, to the core elements that make a story work, TV and film writers often have that stuff in their bones. They marinate in that stuff. They are *trained* to analyze how plot works and how stories can be told in a sufficient amount of time.

Novels and short stories don’t have to worry about the time constraints of TV and film (and theatre!), but I still think fiction writers can learn something from their dramatist cousins. New cities and new locations and new characters may contribute to the “world building” in a novel, but at a certain point, I as the reader do not want never-ending world building. I want drama. I want conflict. And I want it with the characters I care about, the characters I’ve already established a bond with, the characters I’m invested in. Those who write for the dramatic arts (TV, film, theatre) understand this. Novelists should understand this too.

The Americans: Possibly the Best Show on T.V.

A new season of The Americans starts tonight and I couldn’t be more excited. Despite the fact that no one seems to watch it (probably because F/X decided to stream the show with Amazon Prime instead of the much more ubiquitous Netflix), The Americans is quite possibly the best show on T.V. I like to think of it as being a mix between Alias (it’s a spy show with amazingly bad wigs), a period show with great attention to details (a la Mad Men, though The Americans is set in the 1980s), and a straight up action/drama (think: 24, Homeland, etc.). The acting is always good. The story lines are complicated, filled with tension, and almost always emotional. And the concept is fascinating: Two Soviet agents are groomed to pose as an American married couple in order to go deep undercover in the suburbs of Washington, D.C…. and they have two American children who know nothing about mom and dad’s spy games. It’s a brilliant set up!

I think the comparison to Alias highlights what’s best about The Americans. It’s got all the crazy undercover, wig-wearing, secret-identities-in-the-suburbs kinda thing that Alias did so well, but it’s also much more serious, more grounded, and ultimately more political than Alias ever was or ever tried to be. The Americans is as much a show about loyalty, patriotism, marriage, family, country, violence, and government as it is about spies spying. And even though it’s set in the 80s, it’s still dealing with relevant political and moral issues.

Also, did I mention the bad wigs? They’re hilarious.

Season three starts tonight, and I can’t wait.

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