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Miscellaneous things
1. At some point, someone told me that Facebook doesn't show you when you have messages from non-friends, it just sticks them in a folder somewhere. I finally went looking for that folder, and I discovered someone trying to contact me about a freelance opportunity A YEAR AGO. Needless to say, it is no longer an opportunity, and I feel a bit like an idiot about it (though she was quite nice when I emailed her, and said they'd keep me in mind for the future). Anyway, thanks for the professional support, Facebook. Just go on being awesome.
2. I found myself tonight trying to figure out if it would have been possible to lock a door from the inside without a key in 1930. This is surprisingly difficult to google for! What do you call those keyless door locks, anyway, the kind where you push a button or press in the knob? I ended up reading a bunch of pages on the history of doorknobs, and finally googling for "push button door lock" got me to a page in which I learned that Schlage patented one in 1924 (apparently the first) and started selling them widely. I still don't think they would be widespread enough to be available in a low-rent office building in 1930, though, which is what I need for this scene. Maybe if the doors were recently upgraded, perhaps due to a rash of burglaries or something ...? (Of course, I could also just tweak that scene a bit, so I don't need it ...)
3. I'm still reading Diana Wynne Jones, with essays from Reflections: On the Magic of Writing interspersed between her books. I realized something else I absolutely love about her books is the way that ... I'm trying to think exactly how to phrase this ... her characters' thoughts and feelings on other characters do not necessarily reflect the author's feelings about that character. Does that make sense? I was noticing this particularly in the Dalemark books, since they're in omniscient third, which means you get everyone's opinions on everyone else, and even among a cast of mostly-very-sympathetic characters, there's still a tremendous amount of variety in how everyone feels about everybody else. Then I ran across one of her essays where she's talking about having the same character, or facets of the same character, pop up in different books, and one she mentioned is that Tacroy in The Lives of Christopher Chant and Torquil in Archer's Goon are facets of the same character. Now that she's said that, I can see it (in a way, Torquil is a sort of a "through a glass darkly" Tacroy, or vice versa), but it would never have occurred to me before -- and this is what's interesting to me about that from a writerly perspective -- because the way that the narrator reacts to the two characters is radically different. Christopher likes Tacroy immediately, so we get his sympathetic view of him, whereas Howard hates Torquil, for reasons that are entirely obvious in the book. It's just really interesting to me, because yeah, authors tend to have the same characters pop up in different books, which is something she's discussing in the essay, but I think it's rarer for very similar characters to turn up in different books but play radically different roles, which seems to be what's happening here.
And it made an impression on me because it is remarkably hard to do. This is one of the things that chases me off a lot of mediocre fanfic, because instead of the characters acting towards each other as they do in canon, you get everyone behaving as the author wishes they would behave (i.e. everyone hates X because the author hates X, even if they get along just fine in canon, or X and Y get over their differences even if they really shouldn't be able to). Obviously it isn't always that extreme or obvious, and I've been guilty of it myself, I'm sure. I think it's more insidious and harder to recognize in original fiction, since there's no baseline to go back to. In particular, there's a tendency for the writer to just end up with everyone getting along (the writer likes all the characters, so why wouldn't they like each other?!) or else everyone ganging up on the one who represents the Wrong Viewpoint. This is something I really need to keep in mind in something like Kismet, say, where there are a bunch of characters who have dramatically opposed viewpoints, and they really need to look very different when seen through each other's eyes.
2. I found myself tonight trying to figure out if it would have been possible to lock a door from the inside without a key in 1930. This is surprisingly difficult to google for! What do you call those keyless door locks, anyway, the kind where you push a button or press in the knob? I ended up reading a bunch of pages on the history of doorknobs, and finally googling for "push button door lock" got me to a page in which I learned that Schlage patented one in 1924 (apparently the first) and started selling them widely. I still don't think they would be widespread enough to be available in a low-rent office building in 1930, though, which is what I need for this scene. Maybe if the doors were recently upgraded, perhaps due to a rash of burglaries or something ...? (Of course, I could also just tweak that scene a bit, so I don't need it ...)
3. I'm still reading Diana Wynne Jones, with essays from Reflections: On the Magic of Writing interspersed between her books. I realized something else I absolutely love about her books is the way that ... I'm trying to think exactly how to phrase this ... her characters' thoughts and feelings on other characters do not necessarily reflect the author's feelings about that character. Does that make sense? I was noticing this particularly in the Dalemark books, since they're in omniscient third, which means you get everyone's opinions on everyone else, and even among a cast of mostly-very-sympathetic characters, there's still a tremendous amount of variety in how everyone feels about everybody else. Then I ran across one of her essays where she's talking about having the same character, or facets of the same character, pop up in different books, and one she mentioned is that Tacroy in The Lives of Christopher Chant and Torquil in Archer's Goon are facets of the same character. Now that she's said that, I can see it (in a way, Torquil is a sort of a "through a glass darkly" Tacroy, or vice versa), but it would never have occurred to me before -- and this is what's interesting to me about that from a writerly perspective -- because the way that the narrator reacts to the two characters is radically different. Christopher likes Tacroy immediately, so we get his sympathetic view of him, whereas Howard hates Torquil, for reasons that are entirely obvious in the book. It's just really interesting to me, because yeah, authors tend to have the same characters pop up in different books, which is something she's discussing in the essay, but I think it's rarer for very similar characters to turn up in different books but play radically different roles, which seems to be what's happening here.
And it made an impression on me because it is remarkably hard to do. This is one of the things that chases me off a lot of mediocre fanfic, because instead of the characters acting towards each other as they do in canon, you get everyone behaving as the author wishes they would behave (i.e. everyone hates X because the author hates X, even if they get along just fine in canon, or X and Y get over their differences even if they really shouldn't be able to). Obviously it isn't always that extreme or obvious, and I've been guilty of it myself, I'm sure. I think it's more insidious and harder to recognize in original fiction, since there's no baseline to go back to. In particular, there's a tendency for the writer to just end up with everyone getting along (the writer likes all the characters, so why wouldn't they like each other?!) or else everyone ganging up on the one who represents the Wrong Viewpoint. This is something I really need to keep in mind in something like Kismet, say, where there are a bunch of characters who have dramatically opposed viewpoints, and they really need to look very different when seen through each other's eyes.
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I love authors that can manage to have characters hate each other and still keep everyone sympathetic. Everyone who dislikes the hero turning out to be a bad guy is one of my least favourite tropes. Martha Wells is really good at that balance, especially in the Ile Rien books. She has all sorts of people who dislike each other grudgingly working together, and it's great.
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I need to read more Martha Wells. I've only read a couple of her books so far and enjoyed them, but not in a "gotta pick up all the others by that author" kind of way; still, more of her books are on my to-check-out list.
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I really like that stuff about characters liking each other--that's something I always try to think about, either in original fiction or fanfic, if people would really get along, but it's hard sometimes, especially in fanfic, because you want those connections, we're often here for the emotional threads between people, but it's not necessarily realistic. Just as you have to love all your characters no matter what, you have to recognize their failings, too, in the universe you've set them in.
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Just as you have to love all your characters no matter what, you have to recognize their failings, too, in the universe you've set them in.
Yesssss, and I think this is something that authors sometimes struggle with because not only are you attached to your characters, but you're inside their heads all the time, so you know all the reasons why they do the things they do. Other characters, who don't have that inside knowledge, may (legitimately!) judge them more harshly.
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Meri, one of the major protagonists, is a lot of fun for this, because a lot of people really can't stand her, and also tend not to be able to stand the fact that she doesn't care that they can't stand her. But they have entirely legitimate reasons to find her infuriating, so she often looks very different from different points of view. (Her husband counts here too, of course, but he's doing it on purpose because he's kind of a jerk sometimes.)
I think the difficulty with it in fiction tends to come from the part where in real life, people have serious difficulty with the idea that you can like and dislike people and have that have nothing to do with whether or not the other person is a Bad Person, or that people can be mutually incompatible (even explosively so, sometimes) without anyone actually being In The Wrong. You can see it in fandom in things like how people who are very emotionally attached to Loki often feel the need to make it evil that he wasn't popular/everyone's favourite in Asgard, rather than it simply being that sometimes people don't like each other. (You can also see Loki doing this, but at least the narrative seems to be aware that in his case we've got some serious narcissistic fact-warping going on.)
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And yeah, I agree with you re: lack of nuance and the problem people have with recognizing that liking/disliking someone is not an objective judgment, but a highly subjective thing that's dependent on a whole lot of factors other than just "X is a good/bad person". I think especially in fanfic, writers will often just give in to the cathartic urge to have everyone react to their favorite/least favorite character as they would (or would want to); they've spent two seasons of a TV show wishing that Character A would lecture Character B on their (perceived) misbehavior, so by golly they're gonna make them do it! I was complaining in the comments on the LJ side about matchmaker fic, where the entire cast abandon their actual lives/personalities to start roleplaying the author in trying to shove two characters together. (I mentioned over there that I've long had the contrary urge to write a fic in which their friends instead try to warn them that dating so & so is a terrible idea -- which actually would be in character for some of my ships and the surrounding cast ...)
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