Stanislavsky v. Brecht

[Recidiva]

No 3, I said I Lem, I don't claim to know him. and I heartily agree, it is impossible but I believe it is still something worth striving for in a work of fiction.

Your evidence is subjective and even if you take it on face value then you are proving my theory and not your own. It's not what you wrote, but what you wrote about that forged a connection with the reader.
What readers take from your work (my work, anyone's work) is, I would hazard, what they themselves put in by reading, like measuring particles or the efficacy of opening the box to see the state of the cat. A story, in this way, is very much like a Rorschach ink blot.

Whatever you write is open to interpretation and I say that if your characters are pieces of you then you are muddying the waters for the reader.

What I am not saying however (not that anyone said I am) is that the story I write affects the way I write it. If I'm writing a stroke piece and it gets me hot then that is definitely going to affect the way that I'm writing it. If I'm writing a brazen bully and I don't like that character, that too is going to affect the way I write him but in this case too I would say that the author should stay well clear of injecting their own feelings about the character because they would be intruding on their originality.

My villain must have as much character as my hero and so neither of them can or ought to be affected by my feelings for them. My feelings for them include any emotions that I give them and if I give them my emotions then I am ultimately writing about myself and my own feelings about myself.

"Classical" (for want of a better term) actors become their characters, method actors make the characters into themselves. And so it is with writing. You either create your characters out of whole cloth or you write about yourself in different disguises

That's one school of thought. Two influences I've recalled from artists I respect. Robert Heinlein wrote "Who is more inside their writing than an author?" (paraphrase) and he's one of those people I find capable of writing in many different voices.

Also, I had an acting teacher that would stop me and say "What the fuck is that?" when I tried being "someone else." He was an excellent teacher, best I ever had, an expert at motivations and when something didn't ring true or an actor was hiding behind something easy and not attempting to make a brave choice. He told me that people don't go to the theater to see actors. They go to the theater to see YOU. Scared the hell out of me at first, because I lost my entire sense of hiding or being someone else. But then it did become all me. Regardless of what you think you got from somewhere else, it's all you.

In the end, though, once past that hurdle, that attitude got me through a ton of difficulties with acting and writing, and opened up lots of possibilities about who "I" am.

 

[gauchecritic]

I have no interest in writing a truly alien... alien, there's only one message (IMO) in that story; "You cannot know the other." That's not a message I care about so an alien that cannot be used as mirror is useless to me.

Which is fair enough, but there are other lessons or messages there. We can learn about ourselves by looking at those which are different to us. We can observe the reactions of others when faced with that difference. We can learn that difference is motivational. And that those that are different aren't necessarily alien.

 

[Recidiva]

Which is fair enough, but there are other lessons or messages there. We can learn about ourselves by looking at those which are different to us. We can observe the reactions of others when faced with that difference. We can learn that difference is motivational. And that those that are different aren't necessarily alien.

There are written pieces that for me are "message" pieces that make me nuts. Authors that want to teach or preach, and aren't telling a story, they're laying down the law.

Discovering differences in motivation and particularly weeding out your own personal bias is key to creating a cast of characters that provide meaningful conflict.

Say as an actor, with the idea of motivation, you have to play a character who murders someone just to steal a dime. For fun. Okay. That might not be you. Motivations of a character don't have to match motivations of an actor.

Could you steal and murder for a dime? Maybe not. Can you construct a character that appears to steal and murder for a dime while creating a believable history, backstory and motivation?

"To understand all is to forgive all" is what I think to be part of the realm of the author. I dislike people who create conflicts they themselves can't think around or solve. They provide no understanding, no insight, and only portray ignorance.

 

[gauchecritic]

As for why I write or what I expect my stories to do for people - I don't even think about that anymore because I really have no idea. I think I write for the same reason that I'll run over to a friend and say, "Come here. I've got to tell you this!" It might be a good story or it might just be weird or it might just be something cool. I certainly don't think of my stories as necessarily being dramatic or emotionally moving or heavy on character. More and more they seem like self-indulgent screeds - me talking about how things seem to me.

How things seem to you and passing that message along. Which isn't writing about yourself but about others and how they appear, which is how you become a story teller and remain unseen by, and not distracting to, the reader.

 

[elsol]

Which is fair enough, but there are other lessons or messages there. We can learn about ourselves by looking at those which are different to us. We can observe the reactions of others when faced with that difference. We can learn that difference is motivational. And that those that are different aren't necessarily alien.

*cough*cough*

The alien is used as a mirror to talk about us. And at the end we get to ... different is not alien... therefore the 'Alien is us.'

That's my point... for any other message, the alien must be us.

 

[gauchecritic]

*cough*cough*

The alien is used as a mirror to talk about us. And at the end we get to ... different is not alien... therefore the 'Alien is us.'

That's my point... for any other message, the alien must be us.

Not quite. The alien is other. And the way that people learn anything is that everyone not ourself is other. Which takes it from the general to the very particular.
I will go further and say that any story, about any subject, eventually teaches us that we are all different and we are ultimately alone.

 

[CharleyH]

I'm not sure what this thread's about - kind of Roschachian to me - but I find it interesting that it's framed in terms of acting and theater, because I think for me, acting is pretty much the very antithesis of what I find myself doing in fiction these days.

Acting is the art of convincing an audience that you're someone other than who you really are. In my writing, I no longer even try to create characters who aren't essentially some aspect of myself. I've just given up on that. It seems dilletentish to me, like doing impressions or talking in dialect - "acting". I see fiction now as an attempt to reveal myself.

Intriguing. I am doing an opposite but same thing. Always I have written from a now and me POV (exception of chain stories), yet I find myself in a web of historical character. I am not sure I do impressions of characters, though perhaps this is true to some degree since I rely on historical fact. In absence of historical fact and thinking on character and WHO they were and WHAT they DID - I try to empathetically put myself in their position. I am not sure as a writer that I can truly do that, but neither can an actor. We can only DRAW from our experience to make it real. The author is in his or her best at being facadical, otherwise all stories are first person.

I guess that sounds very self-important and grand, but that's what I do. I think trying to do anything else is at best entertainment (nothing wrong with that, I'm just not interested) and at worst just lying. If you want to be someone else, you should do it in non-fiction. Pick someone real and try to figure them out.

INTRIGUING.

Anyhow, aren't all great fictional characters based on real characters anyhow? Was anyone ever invented out of whole cloth?

Again intriguing ... nothing is created ex nihilo ... out of nothing ... are you saying that there are no original ideas left?

 

[3113]

You misspeak here as this being a dilemna for sci-fi writers; it is a dilemna for some sci-fi writers, but not those who use the alien as a mirror for us.

But that wouldn't be a really alien-alien. As you point out, and *rightly* so, shows like Star Trek use aliens that are almost always humans with funny faces. And the differences between them and us are often moot, an exploration of the differences between human beings and human cultures, not between, say, humans and tube-worms (What would we have to say to a tube worm and what would a tube worm have to say to us?).

And I think you're right, by the way, that this exploration of the "other" is really an exploration of "us." We come back to the Merchant of Venice and Shylock's speech--"Does a Jew not bleed." The "other" in such stories almost always turns out to be "us" in disguise.

I have no interest in writing a truly alien... alien, there's only one message (IMO) in that story; "You cannot know the other." That's not a message I care about so an alien that cannot be used as mirror is useless to me.

That is indeed Lem's message--but his message is also yours; that human beings are always looking into the mirror. It's why so many people treat their dogs as if they were children rather than dogs and then are mystified when some "always friendly" dog bites a kid. They anthropormorphize--look at a dog and see themselves, not a animal that has significant differences from humans and so can't ever be "human."

And this is an animal that shares quite a lot with us including a common ancestor. When we get to tube worms it become really hard. And that's still from the same planet!

And I don't think, by the way, that I misspoke for Sci-Fi writers. I know quite a few, and this delemma, of whether to make the alien "human-but-different" or "truely alien" is one that's been around for a long time. Some sci-fi writers don't care about making alien-aliens, but a lot of writers want to try and make their aliens as close to both ways as possible--human-aliens...but not. That's what makes some of the best sci-fi, and it's not an easy thing to do. So, yes, it's usually a delemma. How alien can you make the alien before communication becomes logically impossible?

 

[rgraham666]

So, yes, it's usually a delemma. How alien can you make the alien before communication becomes logically impossible?

Closest I've ever seen to alien-aliens was Saberhagen's berserkers. Which weren't aliens exactly. Just giant robotic space ships built by aliens.

Communicating with them was easy. You shot at them. It was the only communication that needs no translation.

 

[3113]

Closest I've ever seen to alien-aliens was Saberhagen's berserkers. Which weren't aliens exactly. Just giant robotic space ships built by aliens.

Those count as aliens.

Communicating with them was easy. You shot at them. It was the only communication that needs no translation.

Yeah, there are a lot of those type of alien-aliens. They arrive and the only think you know is it's them or us.

 

[Recidiva]

Those count as aliens.


Yeah, there are a lot of those type of alien-aliens. They arrive and the only think you know is it's them or us.

Yes, that's the typical alien horror. Heinlein in "Starship Troopers" and Orson Scott Card in "Ender's Game" and suchlike.

But in the end, we never get any insight into the aliens, we get insight into what humans do when they are threatened.

 

[rgraham666]

Those count as aliens.

Yeah, there are a lot of those type of alien-aliens. They arrive and the only think you know is it's them or us.

Well, it really was the only thing to do. Only thing known about the berserkers was that if it was alive they would kill it.

They did make excellent foils for the humans involved, avatars of death.

 

[CharleyH]

Bump for interest.

 

[CharleyH]

Many of you are missing both the point of the thread and the point about writing.

 

[neonlyte]

Again intriguing ... nothing is created ex nihilo ... out of nothing ... are you saying that there are no original ideas left?

I haven't read all this thread and dangerously start from the end.

There are plenty of original 'scenes', they re-invent themselves in real life faster than writers can create. As to ideas... an idea is an interpretation of a singular or series of events. It is another 'scene', possibly original, more likely a variation upon a similar 'scene'. Truly original ideas, like invention, are born out of necessity and I'm not convinced a writer, in any guise, actually expresses an original idea as opposed to an original 'scene'.

There are some writers whose use of language is original, and I particularly enjoyed the original reference to 'Mr Jingles' made by a writer/poet at a recent party with regard to the author of this poem:

Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.