Twisted Tuesdays, The Weekly Zym Options

[zymurgy]

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

The Importance of Being G.

J.K Rowling has long since abandoned the idea that her books are for kids. Ron Weasley has ceased merely saying things “he wouldn’t if his mother were there,” and gets his French into solid print. Draco is no longer content with a mere sneer, but gets some rather brutish action in this last book. And of course, Voldemort is no longer a vague and shadowy presence.

However, Project Ferret retains its policy of child-friendly stories and posts. We may not be by kids, but we are definitely proud of being for kids. Kids with a capital K.

Now, you might ask why this is so. “JK said that in her story! Why can’t I say it?”

Because, as much as Harry Potter may have spiraled into dark times and despair, we should hope that the kids who read it have not. The point of FanFiction, as I see it, is to expand, elaborate, and sometimes straight out change what was given to us by the author.

Canon, in other words, is seen as “raw material.” Even as it is worshiped, like a lump of gold, it simply isn’t pretty enough for a smith. We’ve got to play with it, twist it around, and make something new.

And boy does JK give us a wealth to work with! We have characters, a setting, a premise, and even a time period worked out for us in advance. Simply put, the only thing a Fanfic author has to do is mix and match, adding originals as he sees fit.

That being so, why choose to use what we have, which can be put to a million uses, to write a story inappropriate for children? JK has already done that; hundreds of Fanfic authors have already done that. Why not have a bit of fun in the other direction?

None of this, of course, is to say that we should present only the happiness of Harry’s world. Clean fic is not necessarily happy, simplistic, or easy. All of Half-Blood Prince, for instance, could have been rewritten, portraying the same events, but in a way more accessible to the young – it would still be HBP, just from a different angle.

There is a place for serious fic here, for sad fic, and even for certain situations that aren’t to be avoided as canon stands. However, I don’t think there’s a place for so-called “adult” fic.

Why, after all, do we write and read fanfiction? Simply because we don’t want the story to be over – we don’t accept ‘that’s all she wrote,’ for an answer. As much as we understand that Sirius flew backwards through a veil and died, we still want to know more, to see more, to have another view.

And why have that view be one where he swears like a sailor, drowns his sorrows in fire whiskey, or commits a bloody and brutal murder of Peter Pettigrew?

Of all the angles available, the least chosen seems to be that of the first floor window we started from. And it simply isn’t fair to those of us (loosely termed ‘kids,’) who are still there, to have all the fic over our heads and beyond our reach. The stories, dangled just out of our reach, with teasing summaries or teasers, make us understandably upset.

Why couldn’t that author write the really cool story, (where Ron gets kidnapped by Death Eaters and has to escape on his own, without magic, but turns out he’s really Remus in Pollyjuice, while Harry believes he’s actually Draco because he misunderstood something he overheard in a dark corridor while he was hiding from Filch, and there’s a Basilisk who wears sunglasses so that it won’t petrify people, and Neville turns out to be a member of Arborists Anonymous… ) so that we could read it? Honestly!

Finally, the importance of being K is a question of numbers. It is better to have something that everybody can read, rather than something a few, however few they may be, cannot.





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[zymurgy]

Tuesday, March 28, 2006
In Defense of Repetition.

Repetition is a touchy thing. A lot of authors are deathly afraid of it – and rightly so. Too much of something as simple as a single word can completely ruin the flow of a passage. For instance, take a look at this example:


Harry went to Hogwarts that September. Harry was overjoyed that he was finally leaving the Dursleys once again! Hermione and Ron met Harry at the station and they all had a joyous time of it.

In that time, I’ll bet you were already heartily sick of the word Harry – and you were probably even looking askance at the lack of creativity showed by the indirect repetition of ‘joy.’

The same passage could be improved by shuffling things about and making use of either a brain or a thesaurus, thus


That summer, overjoyed to be leaving the Dursleys once again, Harry returned to Hogwarts. Hermione and Ron met him at the station, with much laughter, hollering, and sprouting of canary feathers.

Or, if that passage is too banal, try an example right out of Order of the Phoenix:


Dudley backed into the alley wall. Harry was pointing the wand directly at Dudley’s heart. Harry could feel fourteen years of hatred for Dudley pounding in his veins – what he wouldn’t give to strike now, to jinx Dudley so thoroughly that he’d have to crawl home […]

We have here four ‘Dudley’s and two ‘Harry’s in close succession. Not only that, the ‘Harry’s are both the first word in consecutive sentences. Now, I would never, ever try to rewrite anything JK … oh, wait, never mind. Yes I would.

My standard beta response to this would be: This passage is correct technically, but it’s a bit bumpy. Try something along the lines of:


Dudley backed into the alley wall, staring wide-eyed at the wand pointed directly at his heart. Harry stared back, fourteen years of hatred pounding in his veins– what he wouldn’t give to strike now, to jinx Dudley so thoroughly he’d have to crawl home…


There you have it! We’ve halved both the ‘Harry’s and the ‘Dudley’s in one fell swoop, and, in spite of adding additional action of staring, and the description of Dudley’s eyes, we’ve managed to make the passage shorter by two words altogether.

This is my preferred method of dealing with repetition – rearranging things so that content is clear, with fewer instances of the word, and perhaps a bit more description to even things out a bit.
Now, onward to, as the title promised, the defense of this hideous ogre.

Everything can be good in the right quantities, at the right time, in the right circumstances. Repetition has its place in writing. To start, here’s that passage from Phoenix again, edited for repetition according to another school of thought:


Dudley backed into the alley wall. Harry was pointing the wand directly at his cousin’s heart. The underage wizard could feel fourteen years of hatred for the boy the size of a whale pounding in his veins – what the raven-haired teen wouldn’t give to strike now, to jinx the overweight bully so thoroughly that he’d have to crawl home […]


Now, taking a look at that makes me want to cry. If I read a story about Harry, I expect his name mentioned often. Not all the time of course, but it’s downright nauseating to watch him start off as Harry and start morphing into, “the bespectacled boy,” “the green-eyed Wizard,” and other strange aliases.

While I certainly don’t condone needless repetition as stated earlier, I am very much opposed to forced substitution and beating around the bush. Some writers do this sort of thing all the time, so afraid of Rogue Repetition that they tip the scale dramatically in the other direction – instead of simply juggling about with somebody’s actual names (first and last depending on circumstance), pronouns and a healthy dash of descriptive phrases, they’ll go ahead and come up with very strange alternatives, such as “the Quidditch-Robe wearing Gryffindor.”

Here’s another genuine JK Rowling example, also from Order of the Phoenix:


Harry hesitated for a fraction of a second, then said, “Lines.”
“That’s not to bad, then, eh?” said Ron.
“Nope,” said Harry.
“Hey – I forgot – did she let you off for Friday?”
“No,” said Harry.
Ron groaned sympathetically.


This passage contains three Harry’s and two Ron’s, but that’s not the interesting bit. What we’re looking at is the infamous word ‘said.’ Here it is, four times, without any substitution at all – not even a perfectly legitimate ‘ask’ instead of it on the second line.

Writers, myself included, worry a lot about how often we use the word 'said'. Some would go ahead and play the replacement game, using ‘sighed’ ‘grumbled’ and the like, but see how JK makes that all unnecessary by simply shuffling them about.

We have the first one after the main sentence, and before the quote, the second sentence reverses that. The third repeats the second placement, but it’s a short sentence, which segues nicely into the fourth line which solves the problem by being a free standing quote, and we end with Harry saying no again.

Now, the two “Harry says no,” lines are not only repetitive, but glaringly so.

They’re there for a reason – JK is beating it into our heads that Umbridge is a mean old grouch, and that Harry’s not even telling Ron all of it. It’s repetition with a purpose, for emphasis.

Before you go and chew my head off for condoning this sort of writing horror, here’s a rather repetitive passage, this time about a ring:


Bassanio:
If you did know to whom I gave the ring,
If you did know for whom I gave the ring
And would conceive for what I gave the ring
And how unwillingly I left the ring,
When naught would be accepted but the ring,
You would abate the strength of your displeasure.

Portia:
If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honor to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.

Now, hearing this on stage, some people tear their hair out and say, “Enough about that ring already!” Incidentally, so is character one who really doesn’t get what the big deal is.

Of course, the reason for this is because when things are extraordinarily important to you, you simply can’t shut up about them – how many times have you said “Harry Potter books,” lately? – and can you imagine that passage with, “to whom I gave the piece of jewelry,” and so on? Although, if this sort of conversation had gone on any longer without somebody going off in a huff, I would be all for cutting it down to size.

(On a side note, you can now tell your folks that you voluntarily read Shakespeare.)

The trick with Repetition is keeping to the golden mean. How do you avoid sounding like a broken record, but not sound like a particularly chatty thesaurus either? That, my friends, is why erasers really ought to be ten times as long as your pencil, and not the other way around. It takes constant fiddling, (and occasionally being yelled at by distraught beta-readers) a cool head, and a willingness to admit that writing, “the long-haired pillock,” instead of Bill is just plain silly.