Recently, The Economist outlined How to Make a Good Biopic in light of the slew of biographical and semi-biographical films being released in the coming weeks. The article wrote, “Oscar voters love them because the ‘based on a true story’ tag gives them a veneer of seriousness…” The article goes on to discuss a number of critically-acclaimed films from the biopic and partial-biopic subgenre, all which certainly fit the “seriousness” that is applauded by The Academy year after year. But just last year, the Oscar-nabbing film The Social Networkstirred up controversy when its portrayal of its subjects was called “a complete work of fiction” by, well, its subjects. Since the people portrayed in the film were all public figures, it was technically fair game to not bother with changing character names despite a good chunk of the movie being largely fictionalized.
Of course, this particular case is a little more interesting since the people portrayed are not yet dead or even far removed enough from the news item that is now being packaged for the big screen. Moviegoers saw this happen yet again with Moneyball although Paul DePodesta did request that his name be changed (Peter Brand played by Jonah Hill) after finding the script to be more “Inspired by Real Events” than “Based on a True Story.” These labels are like the film industry equivalent of FDA regulations regarding our country’s love for Frankenfood (as demonstrated by Taco Bell’s beef vs. meat vs. meat product vs. not-meat-at-all fiasco earlier this year) and with technology allowing a quicker turnover between conception of an idea and its accessibility to an audience, it may not be too surprising if the litigious ultimately push for stricter terms of use for these labels.
Law and Order and its many spinoffs boast that their stories are “Ripped From the Headlines,” and rip they do. Their most popular spinoff, SVU, has covered pretty much any and every special victims news headline from the last three or four decades (and considering most of the series takes place in present-day Manhattan, those who don’t reside here are left to believe it’s easily the most dangerous place in the world). There are times they do little in changing the original news story with episodes parading characters like Billy Tripley, a shameless rip of Michael Jackson with the only differentiations being in name and career (Tripley is a toy company CEO). In their Domnique Strauss-Kahn episode (announced just two months after the incident), they pretty much ripped the headline when the headline was hot off the press and even had one of the detectives call it “another Dominique Strauss-Kahn situation” (like some sort of self-loving nod to the fortune of receiving this headline right before the new season).
So for lack of better exclamations, what’s up with that? It’s one thing to change names to protect the parties involved (or protect one’s own ass), but what’s the deal with being a clear rip of a story but also acknowledging the actual events within the storyline?
And how about the opposite of this occurrence of not changing characters/real people’s names and placing them in original/fictional/offbeat/obsessive situations? Once upon a time, FanFiction (or for those opposed to the extra syllable, “FanFic”) was contained within the science-fiction community in hopes of extending the lives of their favorite fictional characters. Eventually, this broke beyond sci-fi and into mainstream/more popular television shows and many took it upon themselves to create the storyline they wanted but were never given.
A visit to sites like WattPad and one will see that FanFic is no longer exclusive to fictional characters (preteen girls seem to find it cathartic to write and read about average suburban girls somehow ending up with Justin Bieber). Most are far from great literary works (hell, most can’t be called literary) but a surprising amount of these pieces have legitimately interesting plotlines and are well-written (take it from a person who knows not of Justin Bieber but somehow read a couple stories… in the name of research). The stories are free and available on the site with no need for download but the concept is reminiscent of the free-for-all self-publishing world that Amazon introduced with Kindle Direct Publishing years ago. Anyone can publish just about anything which means anyone who writes or blogs about anything remotely literary (as I occasionally do) now have inboxes/mailboxes full of ARCs and free books. One that recently crossed my path appeared particularly relevant to today’s discussion. If you thumb through the indie-published Hidden Gem books by India Lee, you’ll find it peppered with “articles” and “blog posts” by fictional entertainment magazines and bloggers. If you are well-versed in celebrity gossip, you’ll find these “fictional” bloggers are clear rips of the popular ONTD, Perez Hilton, JustJared, among others, using similar memes and vernacular as the individual bloggers do. But just as SVU did with the whole “referring to the thing we’re totally ripping from,” Lee refers to D-Listed and ONTD as competitors in searching for the Lady Gaga-esque protagonist’s true identity (the plotline, from what I gather, is pretty much Hannah Montana for the Gossip Girl crowd) and the tweeny, celebrity-laden story refers to real celebrities as well as what I believe are fictional ones (there’s just no way to tell anymore, I’m not hip and I’ve come to terms with that). And as Gaga has her Little Monsters and Justin Bieber has his Beliebers, a character by the name of Tyler Chase (undoubtedly based on Bieber) has his “Tyler Chasers.” The books are not free like the FanFic on WattPad (unless you’re on the Lit Drift staff, in which case you can find the ARCs on my desk) but considering it’s subject and publication method, is that pretty much the only thing that sets it apart?
So tell me – “Based On a True Story” vs. “Inspired By Real Events” vs. “Ripped From the Headlines” vs. “Fan Fiction” – where do you draw the line?
Plots are covered on page 1, characters on page 2, and lots of tips to fill the whitespace.
I created this just before NaNoWriMo 2011, to combine all my notes on writing and storytelling. It fits all on a double-sided A4 sheet, which you can keep in your back pocket. I hope you find it useful.
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
I’m kicking off my November by eating leftover Halloween candy for breakfast and getting a head start on NaNoWriMo. This year marks the fourth year I’ve participated (and, uh, failed), and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.
So let’s do this together. Gather your candy, get out of the gutter, and don’t make any excuses to write this month.
To inspire you, here’s a roundup of writing tips to keep you going. Some of them are old, some of them are new, some of them are serious, and some of them are totally insane. I’ll let you decide which is which.
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Tip #1: Write slowly. NaNoWriMo is like running a marathon. Don’t sprint the first 2 miles and then spend the next 24 dragging your feet along and wheezing. That’s not fun. Most NaNoWriMo-ers aim for 1,667 words a day. Stick to that, even if you want to write more.
Tip #2: Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide. (from author Roddy Doyle)
Tip #3: Stop writing when the going is good. Hemingway has said this, along with a whole slew of other authors I’m forgetting right now. Once you get to word 1,667, even if you’re pumped and want to keep going, stop. It’s much easier to pick things up when you’re already in the moment, rather than sit down to a blank screen and have no idea what you’re going to write next.
Tip #4:Listen to Mark Sample, put on some pants, and move out of your parents’ basement.
Tip #5: Have you considered writing a sex scene or giving your protagonist large breasts? And more insightful tips from Laura Ellen Scott.
Tip #6: Only bad writers think that their work is really good. And most good writers think their work is really bad. So don’t be so hard on yourself. Even if you think your writing is crap, keep going. The nature of NaNoWriMo is to create one big, sticky mess that you’ll need to clean up later, so don’t stress if everything is absolutely perfect. The point is to get words on the paper, and to edit, edit, edit starting December 1. And, besides, it’s rarely as bad as you think.
Tip #7: And following Tip #6, I can’t stress this enough: EDIT LATER. EDIT LATER. EDIT LATER.
Tip #14: Tell all your friends that you’re doing NaNoWriMo. Maybe they’ll shame you into finishing.
Tip #15: But don’t actually show anyone any part of your novel while you’re writing it. This is your story right now. Don’t let anyone in. Save the story until the new year, at which point you’ve presumably given it a thorough shake-down and editing, to get a fresh set of eyes on it.
Tip #16: If you get stuck in a rut, keep writing. Don’t stop. Take your character to the park. Write about your dog. It doesn’t matter. If you keep writing, you’ll find the story again eventually.
Tip #17: The Guardian put together a series of rules for writers a while back. Read these. These are really good. Seriously: Part One and Part Two.
Tip #18: Find your writing ritual quickly, and stick to it. Do you write best in the morning? Evening? In your pajamas? Outside? Whatever it is, make sure you spend less time on “preparing your space for writing” than actually writing. Time spent making coffee, cleaning your desk, and thinking about how literary you are does not count as writing time.
Tip #20: Come up with a way to reward yourself on December 1. This is going to get hard and ugly, so at least give yourself some sort of light at the end of the tunnel.
Tip #21: Back up your novel every day. I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH SO I WILL WRITE THIS IN CAPS LOCK. Imagine how upset you’ll be when your 30,000+ word novel-in-progress disappears because of accidental deletion or because you spilled your writer-coffee all over your computer. Sucks, right? So back that business up: email it to yourself, save it on Google Docs, save it to a flash drive, whatever. Do all three.
Tip #23: Following Tip #22: keep reading. Don’t be afraid about accidentally copying the writing style of the author you’re currently reading. You learn about writing from reading, so don’t stop learning.
Tip #25: Use this NaNoWriMo report card to measure the progress of your novel (or the progress of your procrastination. Whatever.)
Tip #26: For the love of God, have fun at least most of the time.
Let’s add to this list. Share your writing tips in the comments below, and follow us on Twitter (@litdrift) for more writing tips throughout the month.
I write because I have to write. I write because I am in love with the world. I write because my tongue is too wet and sloppy a tool for the elegance of language and because I feel more comfortable speaking through two splayed hands, through the pianoing dance of my fingertips. I write because the world is created through language and story and because I have a role to play in weaving the future. I write because I believe in the human beings around me with a passion so intense and so vivid and so bright that I can’t help but want to reach them, and I want to reach not just them, but every future generation, and to tell them to keep trying and dreaming and striving, because it is worth it, and because the only way we can know each other is through these stories. I write to discover myself. I write because there is no other way. I write because I would go crazy otherwise. I write because I am crazy. I write because I need to make sense of the hideous intricacy of the universe. I write because I am happy. I write because I am in pain. I write because of the sheer joy of it. I write because sometimes it is the only thing that keeps me here. I write because, right now, I am breathing, and I can feel the beating of my heart within the rise and fall of my ribcage and I write because moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.
—Orhan Pamuk
My favorite quote about writing, and why we do it. Today is the third annual celebration of the National Day on Writing. In honor of the day, the National Writing Project is hosting the “Why I Write” project, which you can learn more about here.
I’ve written several posts about gender inequity in the writing profession here at LitDrift. To catch up, read those posts here, here and here.
It’s still hard out there for us ladywriters. Writer-esses? Oi vey.
First we have celebrated (Nobel laureate, ahem) writer, novelist and essayist V.S. Naipaul saying that there is no woman who is his literary equal. I’ll let him do the talking (courtesy of The Guardian piece):
He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.” The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.
Then we have the newly-released statistics, courtesy of VIDA, that analyze the gender breakdown of the authors included in the Best American anthologies in poetry, fiction, and essays. I’ll let the numbers do the talking:
In the Best American Essays Series from 1986 through 2010, the numbers look dire across the board. Works by women accounted for only 29% of those published in the anthology. There was only one year in twenty-five that the number of works by women published in the anthology outnumbered the works by men.
Gender equity in publishing is still escaping our grasp, but with the exciting growth of independent presses and publishers cropping up around the country, perhaps this will slowly start to change.
“I thought editors filled in missing commas and fixed misspelled words.” – Hazel, alt.punk
The recent release of my debut novel alt.punk was extraordinarily exciting; however, maturing the novel from first draft to publication was not without editing pains. Similar to the Kübler-Ross theory, I progressed through what I refer to as the “five stages of editing.”
Stage One: Ignorance
Yes, I was guilty of querying alt.punk to Casperian Books thinking, “I’ve revised and edited this to death. There is no way this could get any more perfect.”
Oh, how I was wrong. It’s embarrassing to admit just how wrong.
The Casperian Books team shot back a list of global revisions I needed to make, and after making those and resubmitting, they responded with something to the effect of, “better but it still needs a lot of work.” From there, I was paired up with an editor who, little did I know, would launch alt.punk into an extreme manuscript makeover, which to date, remains one of the most challenging ordeals of my life.
Dramatic? Yes. But it was a shock to learn just how wrong my visions of “perfect” were. Little did I know that I was progressing through the five stages of editing rather quickly.
With so many different styles of writing in the world, it’s completely possible that two people can call themselves writers and not even be in the same ballpark. There are poets, essayists, journalists, novelists and bloggers, not to mention reporters, short-story writers, reviewers, and playwrights.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses; I personally love writing fiction, although it’s sometimes difficult for me to create it. My sister is excellent at writing blurbs. Another friend of mine is great at spoken word poems. I consider myself to be good at a few things, but blurbs and spoken word poetry aren’t part of them.
But it’s the new year, and we’re all about challenges! So, I want to know what your literary kryptonite is.
What writing style makes you curl up with fear and cry?
Your challenge (if you choose to accept it) is to come up with something in that style and post it below. I’m going to come up with something too. Winner gets my love, and the satisfaction of knowing that you are awesome enough to break through everything you ever thought about yourself. Right on!
I’m kicking off my November by eating leftover Halloween candy for breakfast and getting a head start on NaNoWriMo. This year marks the fourth year I’ve participated (and, uh, failed), and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.
