|
|
|
CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
|
Subject: How to write alienation: A simple lesson
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 06:01:44 am EDT (Viewed 360 times) |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
I've actually been giving this subject some thought lately, because two of my favorite storytelling franchises - Doctor Who and Spider-Man - arguably revolve around two guys whose chief characteristic is their alienation from the world around them, and yet, an unholy shitload of writers - both among the fans and those officially sanctioned to establish canon for those characters - seem not to have a fucking clue how to actually write alienation.
To be fair, a lot of those writers at least manage to recognize some, if not all, of the more frequently occurring symptoms of alienation in those characters - including isolation, unpopularity, unfamiliarity with the world(s) around them, and even occasional inhumanity in their behavior toward others - but they still fail, because they fail to recognize that those symptoms are symptoms.
In other words, those symptoms are not the root causes of those characters' alienation, because even when those characters aren't alone or unloved, even when they find themselves surrounded by that which is familiar to them, and even when they behave humanely, they are still alienated.
While it's natural, and even necessary, to include some, if not all, of the aforementioned symptoms of alienation, to varying degrees, the big mistake that Russell T. Davies makes with Doctor Who, and that Joe Quesada makes with Spider-Man (although, to be fair to Davies, he's never misunderstood the Doctor to the dismaying extent that Quesada has completely misunderstood Spidey), is in mistaking the symptoms for the root cause, because it leads them to emphasize the symptoms not only to an unnecessary, but also an unnatural degree, to the point that the symptoms are almost emphasized at the expense of the root cause.
So, do you really want to know how to write a character who's alienated?
Do you want to know what it actually feels like to be alienated?
Really simple.
You can be surrounded by crowds, you can have countless people whom you love - and just as many who love you back - you can live among people and places you've known your entire life, and you can have compassion for them all, but at the same time, from your earliest childhood memories to your wisest adult years, whenever you look at anyone's face - whether they're a complete stranger, a passing acquaintance, a close friend, a family member, or Your One True Love - you always realize that you have absolutely no clue what is going on behind that person's eyes.
THAT is what it means to be alienated.
And yes, you can work on narrowing that communication gap, between you and everyone else who exists outside of your head, but that's all you can do, is work on it, because it's never going to go away, because in a very real sense, it's always going to be at least a little bit like trying to think in a foreign language.
And it's not just a matter of sorrow, for all you fucking emos out there who think of "alienation" as a trendy label that gives you permission to wallow in self-pity - it's simply an inability to understand, and if there is any "tragedy" to it, it's the fact that, past a certain point, no matter how much you know, or how much you learn, there will always be limits to what you can grasp.
And yes, alienation can be painful - as painful as anything - but it's not actually about pain.
Rather, more than anything else, it's almost ... a learning disability.
And if you're wondering about what qualifies me to speak so presumptively on this matter ... well, let's just say I'm something of a lifelong expert on this subject.
Trust me on this one.
|
Manga Shoggoth
Member Since: Fri Jan 02, 2004
Posts: 391
|
Subject: I can hear more than a few echoes... Nice piece. [Re: CrazySugarFreakBoy!]
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 07:42:01 am EDT (Viewed 323 times) |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 95
.
As is always the case with my writing, please feel free to comment.
I welcome both positive and negative criticism of my work, although I cannot promise to enjoy the negative.
|
CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
|
Subject: I always thought there could be interesting parallels drawn between Dream and the Shoggoth's perspectives ... [Re: Manga Shoggoth]
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 07:54:08 am EDT (Viewed 310 times) |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
|
Visionary thought this was an interesting rant with personal touches. Well done.
|
Subject: Pffffftt.... Weirdo. ;-) [Re: CrazySugarFreakBoy!]
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 02:10:10 pm EDT (Viewed 1 times) |
|
|
Posted with Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14 on Windows XP
Interesting stuff. Naturally, from my appreciation of the Vision to my own characters like Hallie and Magweed and others, I like to explore some of this territory myself. I'm not sure that I agree that feelings of alienation are forever unresolvable... but then considering that they're universal, I suppose it may just come down to the degree to which each individual acknowledges and accepts them.
|
killer shrike
|
Subject: Yeah, you're wrong [Re: CrazySugarFreakBoy!]
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 02:29:44 pm EDT |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista
About Spidey at least. I don't know about Doctor Who because, well, I don't follow his stories. But you're totally off about what makes Spider-Man tick.
Spider-Man isn't so much alienated as "crapped on by life." He's got bad luck, and overwhelming responsibilities that make him disappoint a lot of people in his life.
Your description of how to write a character who's alienated makes them out to be one of the following:
Self-absorbed
Socially retarded
Socipathic
And clearly Pete's none of these. If anyhting, he's got empathy coming out of his ears, and a strong sense of duty, lessons learned from his Uncle in life and tragically in death.
I don't have problems with the idea as superhero as social outcast Superman works best when his status as an outsider is referenced, as is Batman, in small doses. In Marvel you've got the X-Men, the Hulk, the Thing, and probably more I'm forgetting. But they are all alienated by circumstances, not pathology.
The appeal of Spider-Man is he's a hard luck hero, and the irony of Spider-Man is he'd have the world on a string if he didn't have to be a superhero. He's not a great character because he has a "learning disability." And fans and writers who get that are truly the ones who understand the character.
> I've actually been giving this subject some thought lately, because two of my favorite storytelling franchises - Doctor Who and Spider-Man - arguably revolve around two guys whose chief characteristic is their alienation from the world around them, and yet, an unholy shitload of writers - both among the fans and those officially sanctioned to establish canon for those characters - seem not to have a fucking clue how to actually write alienation.
>
> To be fair, a lot of those writers at least manage to recognize some, if not all, of the more frequently occurring symptoms of alienation in those characters - including isolation, unpopularity, unfamiliarity with the world(s) around them, and even occasional inhumanity in their behavior toward others - but they still fail, because they fail to recognize that those symptoms are symptoms.
>
> In other words, those symptoms are not the root causes of those characters' alienation, because even when those characters aren't alone or unloved, even when they find themselves surrounded by that which is familiar to them, and even when they behave humanely, they are still alienated.
>
> While it's natural, and even necessary, to include some, if not all, of the aforementioned symptoms of alienation, to varying degrees, the big mistake that Russell T. Davies makes with Doctor Who, and that Joe Quesada makes with Spider-Man (although, to be fair to Davies, he's never misunderstood the Doctor to the dismaying extent that Quesada has completely misunderstood Spidey), is in mistaking the symptoms for the root cause, because it leads them to emphasize the symptoms not only to an unnecessary, but also an unnatural degree, to the point that the symptoms are almost emphasized at the expense of the root cause.
>
> So, do you really want to know how to write a character who's alienated?
>
> Do you want to know what it actually feels like to be alienated?
>
> Really simple.
>
> You can be surrounded by crowds, you can have countless people whom you love - and just as many who love you back - you can live among people and places you've known your entire life, and you can have compassion for them all, but at the same time, from your earliest childhood memories to your wisest adult years, whenever you look at anyone's face - whether they're a complete stranger, a passing acquaintance, a close friend, a family member, or Your One True Love - you always realize that you have absolutely no clue what is going on behind that person's eyes.
>
> THAT is what it means to be alienated.
>
> And yes, you can work on narrowing that communication gap, between you and everyone else who exists outside of your head, but that's all you can do, is work on it, because it's never going to go away, because in a very real sense, it's always going to be at least a little bit like trying to think in a foreign language.
>
> And it's not just a matter of sorrow, for all you fucking emos out there who think of "alienation" as a trendy label that gives you permission to wallow in self-pity - it's simply an inability to understand, and if there is any "tragedy" to it, it's the fact that, past a certain point, no matter how much you know, or how much you learn, there will always be limits to what you can grasp.
>
> And yes, alienation can be painful - as painful as anything - but it's not actually about pain.
>
> Rather, more than anything else, it's almost ... a learning disability.
>
> And if you're wondering about what qualifies me to speak so presumptively on this matter ... well, let's just say I'm something of a lifelong expert on this subject.
>
> Trust me on this one.
|
|
HH
|
Subject: Actually that's a tough lesson. [Re: CrazySugarFreakBoy!]
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 02:53:46 pm EDT (Viewed 1 times) |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000
> I've actually been giving this subject some thought lately, because two of my favorite storytelling franchises - Doctor Who and Spider-Man - arguably revolve around two guys whose chief characteristic is their alienation from the world around them, and yet, an unholy shitload of writers - both among the fans and those officially sanctioned to establish canon for those characters - seem not to have a fucking clue how to actually write alienation.
|
In fact Peter Parker's premise is really "I've got a secret. You've all misjudged me. If only you knew how cool I really am". The alienation comes from being misjudged - it's the world's fault not any failing of Spidey's. They're just not ready for him. It's a classic teen angst feeling that lee hooked into way back when, and a big part of Spidey's early success.
As for the Doctor, while the current regime has played up the loneliness aspect ("Last of the Time Lords" and all that), he's often been played as alien - hence the debate amonsgt older fans at the Doctor showing interest in romancing a human companion. But that alienation has often been the alienation of Holmes to Watson, the incomprehnsibility of an eccentric genius, rather than the emotional dissociation you're describing in your article.
But accepting for a moment that your assumption is correct about alienation being a fundamental aspect of the characters you're still making more assumptions still. These are:
1. Alienation can best be written by writing it accurately: If books and movies and TV can't depict love or hate or any other emotional condition without stylising it, why should alienation be different? In real life most emotions make no sense at all. Stories don't allow things to make no sense; there have to be themes and resolutions. Accurate depiction of emotion can destroy a plot because it makes little narrative sense or dramatic activity.
2. The alienation the series want to convey is the alinatation you're describing and have experienced. But it isn't neccessarily so. Just as romantic fiction ensures that dying heroines always die of some wasting illness that leaves them looking pale and interesting to the end - and continent and unsuppurated - so dramatic fiction insists on characters who are tormented in socially acceptable ways. Alienation because tragically terrible things have happened to our poor lonely hero is fine - readers who are sexually attracted to him want to comfort the poor man. Alienation because our hero is misunderstood in a world that hates and fears him is fine - readers who are angry at the world and full of angst identify and get validation. But alienation because the character is emotionally stunted, intellectually remote, morally numb, those things don't play so well.
> So, do you really want to know how to write a character who's alienated?
> Do you want to know what it actually feels like to be alienated?
> Really simple.
|
But the two are different things.
Now I'm not trying to rain on your parade. It would really help some writers to understand real alienation, either by experience or observation; but writing is like painting. It's about catching the essence of the subject, not making a perfect photograph. There will always be stylistic and thematic choices. And as with all art people know what they like.
|
CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
|
Subject: A couple of points. [Re: HH]
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 03:59:45 pm EDT (Viewed 365 times) |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
The alienation comes from being misjudged - it's the world's fault not any failing of Spidey's. They're just not ready for him.
I'm not blaming Spidey. I still blame the world for reacting to him the way that they do, but then again, I also feel that it's still the world's fault if my ideas of the underlying root causes of alienation are correct. You don't blame someone for having a learning disability, after all, and you certainly shouldn't abuse them.
But that alienation has often been the alienation of Holmes to Watson, the incomprehnsibility of an eccentric genius, rather than the emotional dissociation you're describing in your article.
Speaking from personal experience, I see them as the exact same thing. It was something I really liked about Luke Rattigan's scenes with the Doctor in "The Sontaran Strategem," because the Doctor clearly understood the emotional disconnect you develop, when you can see connections that nobody else can. It's almost like being an autistic savant - you see too much, and it actually stunts your ability to perceive in other ways, something that Doyle himself alluded to with Holmes, by having him deliberately limit his awareness of certain subjects, just so he could be a better detective.
|
CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
|
Subject: Yes, that makes me stand out so much here. :) [Re: Visionary thought this was an interesting rant with personal touches. Well done.]
Posted Sun May 11, 2008 at 05:58:01 pm EDT (Viewed 324 times) |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
And I might have allowed my personal perspective to bias me on this point ...
> I'm not sure that I agree that feelings of alienation are forever unresolvable...
|
... But then again, I turn 33 at the end of the month, and I've pretty much given up any hope of "belonging" to the human race on a deeper emotional level, because in many ways, I feel like as much of an extraterrestrial now as I ever have.
|
HH
|
Subject: Re: A couple of points. [Re: CrazySugarFreakBoy!]
Posted Mon May 12, 2008 at 09:35:13 am EDT |
|
|
Posted with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000
> The alienation comes from being misjudged - it's the world's fault not any failing of Spidey's. They're just not ready for him.
> I'm not blaming Spidey. I still blame the world for reacting to him the way that they do, but then again, I also feel that it's still the world's fault if my ideas of the underlying root causes of alienation are correct. You don't blame someone for having a learning disability, after all, and you certainly shouldn't abuse them.
|
font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode">The root word of alientation is alien - outsider, foreigner, other. An outsider is outside because that's where they come from.
> But that alienation has often been the alienation of Holmes to Watson, the incomprehnsibility of an eccentric genius, rather than the emotional dissociation you're describing in your article.
|
> Speaking from personal experience, I see them as the exact same thing.
|
font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode">The inexplicably brilliant character we mortals cannot comprehend and whome we see through the eyes for Dr Watson or Rose Tyler or whoever really comes from a literary tradtion. We rarely see that character's point of view because the drama is better if we're watching him but not seeing the mechanisms of his conjuring trick until it's done. But that's a feature of narrative choices rather than a fair reflection of the social and intellectual gap you're describing from real life, which is closer to autism or Asperger's syndrome. It's why there are no successful Spock-POV moments in all of Trek literature; he's the outsider we watch and admire, not understand.
> It was something I really liked about Luke Rattigan's scenes with the Doctor in "The Sontaran Strategem," because the Doctor clearly understood the emotional disconnect you develop, when you can see connections that nobody else can. It's almost like being an autistic savant - you see too much, and it actually stunts your ability to perceive in other ways, something that Doyle himself alluded to with Holmes, by having him deliberately limit his awareness of certain subjects, just so he could be a better detective.
|
font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode">That was a nice connect, yes.
But the Doctor does constantly elect to associate with people slower than himself, who don't really understand him. And he elects to relate with them in ways that prevent them from understanding him, leaking bits of his past slowly and reluctantly. He's not really misjudged. He's just private.
|
Hatman
Member Since: Thu Jan 01, 1970
Posts: 618
|
Subject: I'm with Shrike on this one. [Re: killer shrike]
Posted Wed May 14, 2008 at 10:44:53 pm EDT (Viewed 419 times) |
|
|
Posted with Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11 on MacOS X
> About Spidey at least. I don't know about Doctor Who because, well, I don't follow his stories. But you're totally off about what makes Spider-Man tick.
>
> Spider-Man isn't so much alienated as "crapped on by life." He's got bad luck, and overwhelming responsibilities that make him disappoint a lot of people in his life.
>
>
> Your description of how to write a character who's alienated makes them out to be one of the following:
>
> Self-absorbed
> Socially retarded
> Socipathic
>
> And clearly Pete's none of these. If anyhting, he's got empathy coming out of his ears, and a strong sense of duty, lessons learned from his Uncle in life and tragically in death.
>
> I don't have problems with the idea as superhero as social outcast Superman works best when his status as an outsider is referenced, as is Batman, in small doses. In Marvel you've got the X-Men, the Hulk, the Thing, and probably more I'm forgetting. But they are all alienated by circumstances, not pathology.
>
> The appeal of Spider-Man is he's a hard luck hero, and the irony of Spider-Man is he'd have the world on a string if he didn't have to be a superhero. He's not a great character because he has a "learning disability." And fans and writers who get that are truly the ones who understand the character.
>
>
>
> > I've actually been giving this subject some thought lately, because two of my favorite storytelling franchises - Doctor Who and Spider-Man - arguably revolve around two guys whose chief characteristic is their alienation from the world around them, and yet, an unholy shitload of writers - both among the fans and those officially sanctioned to establish canon for those characters - seem not to have a fucking clue how to actually write alienation.
> >
> > To be fair, a lot of those writers at least manage to recognize some, if not all, of the more frequently occurring symptoms of alienation in those characters - including isolation, unpopularity, unfamiliarity with the world(s) around them, and even occasional inhumanity in their behavior toward others - but they still fail, because they fail to recognize that those symptoms are symptoms.
> >
> > In other words, those symptoms are not the root causes of those characters' alienation, because even when those characters aren't alone or unloved, even when they find themselves surrounded by that which is familiar to them, and even when they behave humanely, they are still alienated.
> >
> > While it's natural, and even necessary, to include some, if not all, of the aforementioned symptoms of alienation, to varying degrees, the big mistake that Russell T. Davies makes with Doctor Who, and that Joe Quesada makes with Spider-Man (although, to be fair to Davies, he's never misunderstood the Doctor to the dismaying extent that Quesada has completely misunderstood Spidey), is in mistaking the symptoms for the root cause, because it leads them to emphasize the symptoms not only to an unnecessary, but also an unnatural degree, to the point that the symptoms are almost emphasized at the expense of the root cause.
> >
> > So, do you really want to know how to write a character who's alienated?
> >
> > Do you want to know what it actually feels like to be alienated?
> >
> > Really simple.
> >
> > You can be surrounded by crowds, you can have countless people whom you love - and just as many who love you back - you can live among people and places you've known your entire life, and you can have compassion for them all, but at the same time, from your earliest childhood memories to your wisest adult years, whenever you look at anyone's face - whether they're a complete stranger, a passing acquaintance, a close friend, a family member, or Your One True Love - you always realize that you have absolutely no clue what is going on behind that person's eyes.
> >
> > THAT is what it means to be alienated.
> >
> > And yes, you can work on narrowing that communication gap, between you and everyone else who exists outside of your head, but that's all you can do, is work on it, because it's never going to go away, because in a very real sense, it's always going to be at least a little bit like trying to think in a foreign language.
> >
> > And it's not just a matter of sorrow, for all you fucking emos out there who think of "alienation" as a trendy label that gives you permission to wallow in self-pity - it's simply an inability to understand, and if there is any "tragedy" to it, it's the fact that, past a certain point, no matter how much you know, or how much you learn, there will always be limits to what you can grasp.
> >
> > And yes, alienation can be painful - as painful as anything - but it's not actually about pain.
> >
> > Rather, more than anything else, it's almost ... a learning disability.
> >
> > And if you're wondering about what qualifies me to speak so presumptively on this matter ... well, let's just say I'm something of a lifelong expert on this subject.
> >
> > Trust me on this one.
|
|
