Going to a Higher Place

[botias]

From Jane Espenson's blog:

If I were sitting down to write a House spec, I think I'd start by listing emotional moments I want to see that character go through. Regret? Genuine undistanced anger? A need for a human connection? What would cause that emotion? What would that emotion cause? I'd start working backwards from there. Notice that I am not starting with a disease.

Me, apparently I sit down to write and go, 'Hmmm, what would make Buffy do Spike?'

Options:

1) Arrange for Buffy to be really depressed and disconnected and flailing

2) Make it her solemn Chosen duty

3) Put her under a spell

Comments

[botias.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I don't know if I do or not. Jane Espenson, that seems to be her method. She says that she creates comedy not by 'being funny' but by analyzing comedy that works and reproducing it. The same with writing scripts that have emotional zing, apparently.

So far, my fic is pure self-indulgence. I start with something I want to happen and go from there, except for the claimy fic which I just thought would be fun(ny). This probably explains why my fic is short and devoid of interesting conflict. Now, Jane, she starts with something the characters want more than anything (and the audience as well presumably) and then arrange for them to get it it a way that turns out to cost them very, very dearly. No wonder she got on so well with Joss.

[herself_nyc]

I am always (admiringly) flummoxed by her writing advice, because it's so not at all what I do when I write fiction. My novels always arise out of some dim vague flicker of a thought about a person, some detail about them that catches my interest, and then I go from there. I never ask myself the kinds of questions she does. Maybe I should! But I don't.

[botias.livejournal.com]

I don't write the way she does either, but I love reading her blog. I find I do the same sorts of things that she discusses sub-consciously (whether this is emulation from a decade or three of voracious reading, or some hard-wired way in which the brain creates narratives, or a bit of both, I do not know) so I find it wonderfully revelatory to have her discuss things and how they work that I had never before thought of as 'things'.

Some people like the Great and Mysterious Oz, but I've always been the sort that is delighted to discover it is actually a very clever trick that even a tiny old man can do.