The Parthenon: Home for the Intellectual Discussion Welcome TKL and Art_Of_War, new Thread Hosts!!

Such wonderfully insightful responses to the question, and my feelings on writing and the Mary Sue/Gary Stu phenomenon are already spoken for. I couldn't hope to contribute anything worthwhile to the discussion, but I would like to make a couple of small points.

First, MS/GS's are a bane of OC's. I write OC's regularly, and its amazing that to this day readers avoid OC-driven stories like the plague. (I think the other main factor in OC avoidance is niche reading and its extreme form, myopic interest) It's too bad, really.

Second, the rule I try to live by when writing is, "It's all about the story, damn it." To that end, unless you're writing specifically about the coolest person alive there shouldn't be any MS/GS's mucking about. Sure, every author implants many, if not all characters, parts of themselves. After all, we write what we know.

Of course, when writing about heroic personas its difficult to imbue them with true abhorrent flaws.

I consider myself a storyteller and if I can maintain such a degree of separation from the work and especially the characters then the potential for MS/GS's should remain minimal.

Third, any author can see if they are writing MS/GS's if they apply true honesty to their work. This isn't usually an easy thing to do, especially when writing fantastical fiction. We all know about them and we all have opinions on them. It shouldn't take much pure reflection to ascertain if we're writing them and even why we are doing so.

 

I don't avoid OC fics when it comes to Allana romance.

This question is actually about an original story (historical AU where Hitler won WWII) that I'm working on, but I suppose its answer might apply to fanfics as well. I have a story that revolves around a little girl and I want to avoid Mary Sue at all costs. I know that giving this kid an altered version of my first name, my mom's maiden name, and an ancestral village similar to mine point to teh direction of Mary Sue, but I'm not willing to really change any of that, so I'm going to tweak the plot instead.

Should this kid be orphaned or should the fates of her parents remain unknown and unimportant? I know that this girl will be taken from her home village, but alot remains to be determined right now.

I want to choose between these:

1. ESB'ish story where the kid's taken to an enemy country and finds out that her mother's not in her life because Mom's a pathetic traitor who's defected to the enemy, spilled many secrets, and is responsible for all of the poverty and suffering in the village. The mother then either turns around or perverts Chan to serve the enemy.

2. Chan gets kidnapped for an experiment, learns lots of stuff from careless captors, and frees herself and every other kid who's been taken unwillingly from his/her home. In the meantime, Chan and gang face all sorts of tortures and dangers that come with squaring off against adult scientists.

3. Chan is taken by the Nazis (or maybe Japanese or whoever would side with Hitler in a Nazi-dominated world), brainwashed, and taught the art of bending science to fit evil desires. She's very grateful to her people's enemies for refining her raw talents in physics and eagerly followed every order until she's told to infiltrate and murder her people, starting with the seaside village of her birth. On one hand, she feels indebted to teh people who trained, fed, and clothed her with decent clothing (she starts out with rags) for the last 10+ years and thus obliged to comply to the orders of genocide, but on the other hand, she sees and can't bring herself to destroy her home and the people she once lived with and loved.

 

I have been thoroughly enjoying the conversation. I've been terribly busy and didn't have much time to write a considered response. Suffice it to say that I have been very impressed with the thoughts so many of you have expressed.

I have a few thoughts. First off, I think among the amazingly eloquent thoughts I've read so far, Eldrich's rule "It's all about the story damn it," hits the proverbial nail most readily on the head. The characterisitcs of the various characters in the story should be driven by the story, not by personal preferences, unless the story is something along the lines of "How would the universe be different if [insert your character here] was around." Of course, you can imagine how MSish that story sounds without even reading it. My point is that the needs of the stories make demands on the characters and this whole issue of Mary Sue is a function of the characters making demands on the story.

This whole issue of Mary-Sue/Gary Stu is, in large part, a silly obsession. Why? If you?re a good writer, like dianethx is, you are probably a good writer because you write characters and situations that are real. oqiduan writes stories that are heavily OC-centric but she still has a very high readership. Why? Because she writes stories and characters that are real. (Yes, I do get the irony of talking about ?real? in the GFFA ). If you?re a not-so-good writer, Mary-Sues are probably not your problem.

I have yet to read a fic that screamed ?Mary-Sue problems? that didn?t also scream ?grammar problems, structural problems, etc.? When I posted my first response to this question, I made a few tongue-in-cheek comments about highly successful characters that could be considered MS/GS?s. People mentioned characters like Hawkeye from MASH, for example. I?d agree that according to the definitions of MS/GS, Hawkeye fit the bill. But?and this is a big but?people loved Hawkeye! I don?t mean people in the story. I mean people watching the show. For many people, Hawkeye is their favorite character. Somehow, people gave those little problems a bye. Why? Because the story was so well done; because, despite it all, it felt real at the time; because the timing was just right;

If you have a good story and it drives your characters, it?s unlikely you?ll be accused of writing MS?s, even if the character(s) fit the bill in every way. If you write bad stories, MS/GS is probably the least of your concerns.

I?ll shut up by highlighting my absolutely favorite thing I?ve read on this topic:

 

Well, it seems that this topic has died a not-so-slow-but-definitely-painful death!

I guess that's my cue.

So I got this amazingly detailed PM from the brilliant and thoughtful Ophelia with a wonderful idea for our next discussion item.

Therefore...

NEW TOPIC!!!

Can you bring the "real time" effect seen most viscerally in a show like 24 to the written word?

As a way to start off the discussion, I'll share with you some of Ophelia's thoughts she shared in her PM. (I have her permission, don't worry).

Your thoughts?

Let the discussion begin!!!

 

I actually try not to pay much attention to time moving unless it's integral to my story. The problem is on SW there is time between travelling from one star system to another and trying to get that right is more trouble when it's worth.
My theory is "they get there when they get there" and don't pay much attention to some character who get there early while others get there later.

However, time is integral to some stories like the one I'm doing now. There is a scene that goes through the night and the story ends with the sun rising, cleraly it shows how much time passed as the sequence of scenes began in the late afternoon.

BTW, I've never watched 24 and have tried to figure out exactly what you meant by this.

 

Oh!

Good point!

24 is an American show on Fox featuring a character by the name of Jack Bauer and details his experiences during a 24-hour period. The "gimmick" is that the show literally takes place over a 24-hour period so each 1 hr episode is an hour of "real time," evidenced by a clock ticking down periodically. As a result, as you switch from one scene to the next, the clock continues to tick so you end up jumping to a scene with time having elapsed and you have to piece together what's happened. It's a very exciting show. Hope that helps.

 

Oh, is THAT what's it's about? I've heard about 24 but it looks like an interesting concept?

Is what i posted relevant then?

 

Hi all! This is my first time in the Parthenon, let me put my glasses on in order to look suitably intellectual.

Great topic Souderwan! I recently read Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr, and that book has a style which has quite an impact on the feeling of time. Basically, at times it has very little punctuation.

There are frequently pages where you can literally count the number of full stops (periods) and commas combined on one hand. At first, I found it nearly impossible to follow, and even really irritating. After I got used to it though, I realised that it had a dramatic impact on the whole tone of the book. It forces the reader to read in a very rushed and almost stream-of-consciousness kind of way.

The lack of punctuation is matched by a lack of paragraphing and also a refusal to put speech inside quotation marks. It sounds like an absolute nightmare to read but actually lends itself to some really powerful and engaging writing. So I think there's definitely something to be said for the writer's ability to influence the speed of his reader's reading by use of punctuation, paragraphing and the like.

Also, there is a film which has done the real-time thing, called 'Nick of Time'. It's possible it could have served as the inspiration for 24, as it was made in the mid-90s I think. I can't remeber how well it works as it's been ages since I've seen it, but if anyone's interested in this technique, it'd probably be worth checking out.

 

Absolutely.

I'm off for now but I'll be back to respond to your thoughts when I can! Keep the discussion going.

 

I've never seen the show. I would think it would be difficult to write a story like that and do it well. Would you have a time or date for each scene change? I have seen stories that do that and, as a reader, I tend to completely ignore the time/date as I'm reading.

However, that being said, Princess_Arulmohzi wrote a story using emails that gave a sense of immediacy to the piece and I read every word for clues. Wonderful story!

But that might not be what you are talking about.

 

I think the problem you run into with writing something "real time" is... okay, wait, lemme start that sentence again. I think one problem with writing "real time" is that real time itself is a bit dodgy. I pretty much know that every day I live, twenty-four hours actually pass. I know that I work eight hours every day. But while the time itself is regular and consistent (and please don't channel Einstein and club me with relativity), my perception of it is not at all consistent. Have you ever had the class that lasts entire ages of human history? Or a work day that feels like a week? Or, on the other end, I'm sure everyone has experienced the phenomenon of feeling like two or three hours have just disappeared (like, for example, if you're reading Talion: Revenant and it's all of a sudden two in the morning and you have to be at work at six ohmygod).

We've talked before about POV and how essential it is to pay careful attention to your narrative so you don't jump around all over the place, and if you were to write something in real time you would have to be almost obsessively aware of how you write it.

I'd say that omniscient POV might be the best way to get the regular, real time feel, but I'm not sure if I entirely agree with myself. I just think you would have to seriously consider how your POV character perceives the events of that twenty-four hour period, and pace the story accordingly.

It would be impossible, however, to write a story that takes 24 hours to read in which 24 hours of events occurred. Why? Because I read way, way faster than real time. It'd take me 18, max, maybe 20.

Joking. But really, reading is totally different from watching. Charles Dickens can effusively describe how a cask of wine spilled in the street, and continue for pages and pages (and pages...), and really only a minute or so of the story's time passes. The cliche is that a picture's worth a thousand words, because in a picture your eye catches all sorts of details instinctively that wouldn't be apparent in a story without at least some expression of it. Now while I hate cliches almost as much as I hate goulash, I do recognize that the medium of writing is a limitation for certain things (but a freedom for others, mwahaha).

If you want to read a couple of books whose plots technically take place during one-day spans, try One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzenitzyn (dear God I can't have spelled that right... can I?) or Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The former is, indeed, one day in the life of a man in a Siberian prison camp. It's fabulous and dark and Russian, just the way I like my literature. The latter kind of fudges the "one day" thing with a lot of flashback and sort of cyclical philosopizing, but it starts on the morning they were going to kill Santiago Nazar, and ends roughly around the evening. That's a weird one (but also fabulous, and Spanish, the other way I like it).

Anyways... all I really have to say is that I don't know anything at all. It's very low pressure to be ignorant.

 

I believe someone's doing such a fic on the Beyond boards, actually.

Never seen the show. WOuld be difficult to portray 24 continual hours like that. There's so many little minuteia to deal with. 24 hours is a lot longer than what some people think. And at the same time, it's shorter. Weird, eh?

 

It's far easier to telescope time and show it in terms of events. Take ESB for example, how long do you think the film goes for in terms of in-universe time? Think about it then highlight to read below.

**********************************Three months! This is hard to believe but George actually said it himself.*****************


See what I mean by telescoping time? It can be suited to your needs.

[image=http://img.web.de/c/microsites/Per_Anhalter/img_anhalter/ford_frei_200_214.jpg]

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doublly so.

 

Strangely enough, I not only think this can be done very easily in writing, I think it already has been done. There was one series I read as a kid - I wish I could remember the name now - that was basically about a boy and his spy!uncle who had a few hours to save the world. Each chapter was sub-titled with a time period e.g. Chapter 6 - the Big Bad Appears (5.14-6.37) or something like that.

I can think of a few novels that work with that premise. There's a big sense of counting down the clock in James Luceno's 'Labyrinth' as the action switches from Obi-Wan and Anakin's hunt for the mechno-chair to the events on Coruscant that lead up to Palpatine's abduction.

The way I see it, there are basically 3 action points:

1. Define the time period. '24' takes place in 24 hours. We can use the equivalent in the GFFA.

2. There will almost certainly be more than one story occuring concurrently. Of course, these stories are linked together - seperate threads that come together in the one resolution. And of course, it goes without saying that the resolution occurs within the set time period.

3. Write the story. Paying attention to the linearity of the outline i.e. time is accounted for. You cannot switch from Plot A to B and back, and expect the events of Plot A to remain as you left them. e.g. if Obi-Wan was in a duel with Grievous, and we went to Coruscant to watch Anakin leave Palpatine for the Jedi Temple, we can't go back to Obi-Wan and Grievous and find the battle exactly as we left it. The same time that it takes Anakin to travel to the Temple must have passed - the duel has either moved on or concluded. And etc.

It's actually a very efficient style of writing i.e. you can switch from one 'highlight' of a story to another 'highlight' without writing all the boring in-between-highlights bit.


In fact, the more I think of it, the more I wonder if most movies don't already adopt that style in a less rigid way. Taking AotC and ESB for example - two movies where 2 clearly seperate story lines were going on at the same time - in ESB, we don't see boring things like Leia using the 'fresher or Luke doing the dishes or Han taking a bite from a protein bar. But we assume that that's probably happening when the focus is switched to another storyline.

 

In the ESB novel we do see Luke doing the cooking though, he fights off four remote droids with a spoon and a pot lid

It would depend on the story though, i think to do this sort of thing you would have to have a very closed and focused fic on only a few events.

 

lol! You have a point there. Well in that case, the dishes were relevant to the story - they were part of the theme of Luke's training. How long it took him to change from his flightsuit to the survivor!gear he wears during training - though visually fascinating - was not as relevant.

And I'm sure Leia must have used the 'freshers in Bespin to at least change into the colourful outfit she wore in ESB, but we don't see that.


I think the events in the story can be as few or as many as the author can handle, as long as they are all linked in some way to the overall plot and reach the same conclusion.

 

Well, I thought the concept of 24 interesting -- until I found out that they were following different people and thus coud AGAIN blend out all 'boring' stuff. I'd have liked to see just one person followed, even if that means there is a whole episode 'squandered' on the ride from A to B.
That would have been real time to me. The switching of pov spoiled it for me.

I wonder if there wasn't that old tradition of theater to have the action of a play happen in only 24 hopurs in only one place. IIRC it was all the rage once, so nothing new with the concept.
I think it only gets interesting if you either had to accomplish something that can't be done in 24 hours, or take the approach of telling really everything that happens. Everything in between is mostly viggies to short stories.

Look through what you have written so far. I found a short story that happens all in 24 hours among mine...

But you may ignore my opinion, since I actually do think 24 boring.

 

It's actually a very efficient style of writing i.e. you can switch from one 'highlight' of a story to another 'highlight' without writing all the boring in-between-highlights bit.

But I like all the boring in-between stuff. We never really get to see the Temple and how Jedi live or play because they are always on the run or fighting someone or plotting in the movies. I think the boring stuff gives us a breather.

I agree that it would be efficient, though.

 

But I like all the boring in-between stuff. We never really get to see the Temple and how Jedi live or play because they are always on the run or fighting someone or plotting in the movies. I think the boring stuff gives us a breather.
Lol! I guess so. But if, say, I was reading a mystery as to the murder of Yoda, I won't really care too much about laundry day in the Temple. Unless, of course, there was a clue in Mace's dirty robes...
Breathers are necessary - a story can only be so much non-stop-action, which is why you can never get round expositionary scenes. But they have to play a role in the overall story (and not only 24-type style stories).

 

I may be wrong, but it seems like some disambiguation would be helpful. I'll annoy everyone with my personal opinions later. Souderwan gave a good brief synopsis of "real time" film is, but I'll just add this:

"Real time" filming is related to cinema verite, which is a "fly on the wall" way of filming something that's supposed to make it seem as if the viewer is "really there" inside the film. It became famous as a means of avant garde filmmaking in the 1960's. Cinema verite remains highly regarded as a means of producing documentaries about important events (think of all the handheld camera shots of SCUDs being fired into Israel during Gulf War I), but it is pretty much universally loathed as a means of filming less-than-earth-shaking subjects (such as Andy Warhol's 8 hour film of a man sleeping). Very few true cinema verite pieces come out anymore, but directors often borrow elements from its "bag of tricks"--or just plain fake them. (A season of "24" is *so* not filmed in 24 hours, for instance--it's all fake.) At its best, faked cinema verite creates the same sense of "happening right now" urgency that actual live coverage of a war zone does.

Rarely, quiet, intimate pieces try the same techniques, the idea being to capture what someone's life is "really like." National Geographic and similar organizations sometimes produce interesting "An Ordinary Day In The Life Of A Kalahari Bushman" documentaries in a cinema verite-like format. Things like "An Ordinary Day In The Life Of A Mildly Depressed Housewife Living In A Mildly Depressed Town," or, heaven forbid, "An Ordinary Day In The Life Of A Pretentious And Jaded Film Student And His Two Irritating Friends" were pretty much booed off the world stage in the 1960's. (Maybe they should have played them for the Kalahari Bushmen.)

Whether an imaginary film about Jedi folding laundry in the Jedi Temple would be interesting or not depends on whether they came across more like the Kalahari Bushmen (different and interesting) or like the pretentious film student (boring and annoying).

At any rate, this is notable:

1) Cinema verite has many signature elements, which ideally combine to create a compelling sense of reality and (usually) urgency.

a) Capturing action in "real time," as if the viewer were actually in the film watching events alongside the film's subjects, is one signature element of cinema verite. However, "real time" can be--and often is--used alone without cinema verite's other elements.

2) Directors making films about fictional people and events sometimes fake cinema verite's classic qualities, usually in an attempt to make their production seem gritty and real. The device of using "real time" is a favorite. Often directors fake other elements as well, but usually just for a quick effect. Many "real life" conditions are too distracting or annoying to extensively include in a film.

In no particular order, these are some characteristics of films that borrow from the cinema verite tradition:

• Film is not edited to remove anything "awkward," therefore the finished film takes the same amount of time to play as the real events took to unfold (i.e., the film happens in "real time.)
• Handheld cameras follow a subject around relentlessly, as if the cameras were somehow attached to him or her. "First person shooter" games are a descendant of this technique. The idea is that the viewer can somehow vicariously "be" the subject.


• When the camera is stationary, there is a relative absence of cutting between one camera and another for different angles of the same scene. It is as if the camera were the eyes of the viewer, who has taken up a stationary spot "sitting" or "standing" somewhere.


• Filming is done "in the real world" rather than on a soundstage. There is little or no effort to change the natural lighting and noises of the location


• Unscripted dialogue and "everyday people" are used rather than scripts an

 

Really interesting discussion there, Ophelia. I did have to laugh at one thing, though. Near the end of ANH which you quoted above, as I watched the movie for the second or third time (long, long ago), it started to bother me that the amount of time passing quoted in the movie didn't match my actual time sitting in the theater. So for me, that kind of timestamp backfired. Now I just find it vastly amusing.

 

In no particular order, these are some characteristics of films that borrow from the cinema verite tradition:
Film is not edited to remove anything "awkward," therefore the finished film takes the same amount of time to play as the real events took to unfold (i.e., the film happens in "real time.)
Handheld cameras follow a subject around relentlessly, as if the cameras were somehow attached to him or her. "First person shooter" games are a descendant of this technique. The idea is that the viewer can somehow vicariously "be" the subject.

When the camera is stationary, there is a relative absence of cutting between one camera and another for different angles of the same scene. It is as if the camera were the eyes of the viewer, who has taken up a stationary spot "sitting" or "standing" somewhere.

Filming is done "in the real world" rather than on a soundstage. There is little or no effort to change the natural lighting and noises of the location

Unscripted dialogue and "everyday people" are used rather than scripts and professional actors

The film has a "theme" or "topic" rather than a "plot"

The director avoids the usual means of exposition (dialogue, establishing shots) in favor of "making a point" through juxtaposition of images. For example, Godfrey Reggio's "Powaqqatsi" shows joyful, colorful images of pre-industrial societies next to gray, prison-like images of first-world cities.


Observation: It's been a long time since I've watched the Blair Witch Project. (It was one viewing actually). I think it has a lot of these characteristics...

 

Sometimes we want to show that something is articifical, that it was actually MADE rather than the fact it actually IS. A lot of good humour fics employ this as well as fan-made films like TROOPS.

 

Ophelia: Have you ever heard of/learned about the dogme film style? When I had my European cinema class freshman year of college, we watched a couple of dogme films and read a bunch of articles on the style, and it's pretty much similar to the cinema verite style, too. I found the films absolutely fascinating in their raw simplicity--no added lighting, no added sound, no tripods for filming, et cetera--and wondered if these two styles are just slightly different manifestations of the same general filmmaking experiment.

EDIT: Ahh, so the dogme 95 style is kind of a revisiting of the cinema verite purism of the earlier time period. I had to go look it all up because I forgot almost everything I learned from that class.