Sophisticated audiences
Jan. 10th, 2006 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shalannaOkay, enough rambling about architecture and peanut butter. Back to writing for a moment.
Today's audiences are sophisticated. There isn't much they haven't seen (including lots of great special effects that made the impossible happen and seem very real), and they're on to all the "Twilight Zone" twists that used to work well for surprises in the past. They're too sophisticated to be fooled by stuff that wowed past generations.
Last night, I watched a couple of Robert Montgomery (TCM's Star of the Month) films. One was made in 1929 (the year before Mama was born), and the other was from 1931. They were a hollerin' hoot. That's because the costumes (which weren't a recreation, but were what nurses/soldiers really looked like back then, or what audiences thought they looked like) and hairstyles and everything were just so old-fashioned. The dialogue was sometimes corny, but it was always punchy, and I enjoyed the storylines, although they were old-timey. But they were definitely dated.
Today's audiences want to see realism. Most of the time, they don't want any cheesy plot elements, and you never know what they're going to think is cheesy. Modern audiences are sophisticated, cynical, postmodern-minded, for the most part.
But back in the day, it was a common device to have Clarence the guardian angel ("It's a Wonderful Life") or other angels ("A Guy Named Joe," "On Borrowed Time," etc.) in movies to help the main characters find out what they are doing wrong or what their true destinies are. I'm about to pull that rabbit out of the hat. I hesitated to overtly do so, because I didn't want to be called "that paranormal writer who's pretty far out," but hey, something's gotta give. And Candy Havens is having much success with _Charmed and Dangerous_. (She's from Dallas, too.) There are even mysteries being done with witches and magic and so forth, so it appears to have become more palatable to the general readership (not just hardcore fantasy readers, which is what my mom firmly STILL believes, bless her heart. BTW, "Bless your heart," in Texas, can mean "you pitifully misguided fool." (GRIN))
I was thinking of this because part of the solution (provided in part by Irene Radford, bless her!!) to making Daphne's narrative cohere and seem focused is for me to make the dwarf (whose truck hits Daphne's car) do some magic in that early scene. Initially, I was going to not have him revealed as a guardian angel/fairy godfather . . . I was going to let audiences decide whether that was even going on at all. But now what I think I'm going to do is let him say something that leads the reader to believe that magic or luck IS afoot. He appears again at the end to let readers know that he helped out. (Or readers may believe that Daphne imagined him once again. It's still up to the reader, but this time the ones who want to believe have evidence.) The Intrepid Editor said that I needed something impossible to happen in the first ten pages, so I thought, why not make clear who this guy is? Cool. And the other part of Irene's advice concerns having someone tell Daphne early on that we make our own luck. As Daphne comes to realize that her friends are a little flaky, she'll also come to accept this as the truth.
I think these are GREAT advances. Even though I didn't address doing any pruning or compression just yet, I think the plot fixing has to come first. After all, that's what the editors have mentioned, while praising the prose and the style/voice. Even Natasha Kern and Andrea (the agent from Donald Maass) long ago said, "Don't change your voice or style." So I'm going to fix the focus/plot first and foremost.
I'm working on it now (as soon as I get off here.)
Cross your fingers for me, except when you're typing. . . .
Today's audiences are sophisticated. There isn't much they haven't seen (including lots of great special effects that made the impossible happen and seem very real), and they're on to all the "Twilight Zone" twists that used to work well for surprises in the past. They're too sophisticated to be fooled by stuff that wowed past generations.
Last night, I watched a couple of Robert Montgomery (TCM's Star of the Month) films. One was made in 1929 (the year before Mama was born), and the other was from 1931. They were a hollerin' hoot. That's because the costumes (which weren't a recreation, but were what nurses/soldiers really looked like back then, or what audiences thought they looked like) and hairstyles and everything were just so old-fashioned. The dialogue was sometimes corny, but it was always punchy, and I enjoyed the storylines, although they were old-timey. But they were definitely dated.
Today's audiences want to see realism. Most of the time, they don't want any cheesy plot elements, and you never know what they're going to think is cheesy. Modern audiences are sophisticated, cynical, postmodern-minded, for the most part.
But back in the day, it was a common device to have Clarence the guardian angel ("It's a Wonderful Life") or other angels ("A Guy Named Joe," "On Borrowed Time," etc.) in movies to help the main characters find out what they are doing wrong or what their true destinies are. I'm about to pull that rabbit out of the hat. I hesitated to overtly do so, because I didn't want to be called "that paranormal writer who's pretty far out," but hey, something's gotta give. And Candy Havens is having much success with _Charmed and Dangerous_. (She's from Dallas, too.) There are even mysteries being done with witches and magic and so forth, so it appears to have become more palatable to the general readership (not just hardcore fantasy readers, which is what my mom firmly STILL believes, bless her heart. BTW, "Bless your heart," in Texas, can mean "you pitifully misguided fool." (GRIN))
I was thinking of this because part of the solution (provided in part by Irene Radford, bless her!!) to making Daphne's narrative cohere and seem focused is for me to make the dwarf (whose truck hits Daphne's car) do some magic in that early scene. Initially, I was going to not have him revealed as a guardian angel/fairy godfather . . . I was going to let audiences decide whether that was even going on at all. But now what I think I'm going to do is let him say something that leads the reader to believe that magic or luck IS afoot. He appears again at the end to let readers know that he helped out. (Or readers may believe that Daphne imagined him once again. It's still up to the reader, but this time the ones who want to believe have evidence.) The Intrepid Editor said that I needed something impossible to happen in the first ten pages, so I thought, why not make clear who this guy is? Cool. And the other part of Irene's advice concerns having someone tell Daphne early on that we make our own luck. As Daphne comes to realize that her friends are a little flaky, she'll also come to accept this as the truth.
I think these are GREAT advances. Even though I didn't address doing any pruning or compression just yet, I think the plot fixing has to come first. After all, that's what the editors have mentioned, while praising the prose and the style/voice. Even Natasha Kern and Andrea (the agent from Donald Maass) long ago said, "Don't change your voice or style." So I'm going to fix the focus/plot first and foremost.
I'm working on it now (as soon as I get off here.)
Cross your fingers for me, except when you're typing. . . .
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-11 07:43 am (UTC)This is going to sound like a ridiculously obvious question, but--you know whether the magic in the book is real or not, right? It's occurred to me that I once read a Martha Grimes mystery and thought it was fairly disjointed and didn't hang together well. Later I read a ninterview with her in which she said she never knows who the killer is until the very end of the story. It struck me that in the story I read, after she "figured it out" she apparently didn't edit the earlier part of the book with that in mind, because the ending felt completely arbitrary.
Now, that's an extreme example, because in Grimes's type of mystery it's extremely important that the clues hang together. But what I mean is, if you don't have a position on whether this is real magic or not, could that possibly be seeping out in the writing?
Sounds like you have a handle on the changes you want to make, though. Good luck with this--Daphne has a lot of potential, because despite the flaws you've given her (and in some cases because of them) she's very likable. I don't read much chick lit but I could see reading this story.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-11 06:08 pm (UTC)This is a really good point, I think. The story I workshopped at VP had the same problem --it begged the question of whether the fantasy element was real or in the protagonist's head. All the instructors -- Debra, Yog, JP Kelly -- thumped it into me pretty well that a) I needed to know the answer, and b) readers don't want to make the decision, and c) if the author wants to leave both possibilities in the story, then every scene, every paragraph, every sentence, every word, must contribute equally to both possibilities (and this, let me add, is NOT an easy one to pull off!).