Where is my hoverboard?

I have been thinking on this for a while, not specifically "Where is my hoverboard?" but on the general question that it implies. "Why is our world so boring?"

Fiction promises us in fantasy, Dragons, magic, Heroes and Villains. We are presented with a clear cut world where we know who the demons are and who we have to route for. But taking it out of fantasy read any thriller on the shelves at the moment and our world should be chock full of secret societies and conspiracies to over throw the government/steal all your money/bring on the apocalypse etc.

Yet the world keeps on turning. We are in a bit of an economic downturn but it is not exactly on par with being invaded by aliens. So what has gone wrong, are we not pretty enough for our alien overlords to bother with? Is it simply too much work to be setting up a secret society or just not enough profit to be found in beaming advertisements directly into peoples minds.

Re-creation

We often try too hard to capture something in writing much more description than needed. Often to the detriment of the narrative. There is a technique used in post-production where rather than try to reproduce a real world thing exactly, which would be time consuming and unnecessary for say a three second shot of a rainbow. They rather capture the essence of the thing in question. Take our rainbow example.

It is certainly possible to create a rainbow using a computer, one that would be indistinguishable to the real thing but it would be a time consuming process to capture the subtle hues that glimmer in a rainbow. So instead of wasting the money they ask not what is a rainbow but what do people expect a rainbow. Try it now, write down five words you would associate with a rainbow. Bright, Colourful, sparkling, beautiful, stunning etc I would be willing to bet that your list is somewhat like that one. Yet if you were to go outside and record one on film you might get snatches of the some of the above but only once in a blue moon would you get the 'Rainbow' that immediately comes to mind.

Did you know that silencers are not really silent? The more accurate term to describe them are suppressors. In the 'real' world the sound escaping one of them would be on par to a car door slamming. It is quiet enough to stop an inquisitive guard from immediately knowing that a gun had been fired but not to keep him oblivious. This is another example of playing to the audiences expectations. Because in Hollywood we have been told silencers are silent then they remain so.

So next time you are writing try to think that you don't need to perfectly craft a immaculate representation of what you are trying to describe but rather if you are able to get the quintessential essence of what makes up that thing then your writing will be the better for it. You are showing the object to the audience, not creating it from nothing and parsing it into their minds.

Different mediums

For the past week I have been wrestling with a short story that keeps jumping between being a story in prose and in script. I start writing it in prose form and then I am suddenly hit with a scene that would be almost impossible to write without destroying the flow of the narrative, yet this scene could easily translate to script. Likewise I will succumb and start writing it in script and come up against the limitations of that medium as well. I write in both mediums regularly so it is not a lack of experience that is driving my inability to get this story down it is simply that it is a story of the modern times.

Let me explain. When we write a story we write it for one specific medium, you do not write a piece of prose and start planning how it would look in script. This is generally why most novelisations of movies, of movies based on Novels find it incredibly hard to please their fan led audience of the former. Because the original story has been through many drafts to be distilled into a publishable story for that medium when it is translated it loses that refined quality and becomes a square trying to fit into a circular hole.
If the original author goes back to that story and presents the alternative version it can certainly help to appease fans, we call this 'reimagining' or a 'reboot' but both terms fall short of what is actually happening. Just as the method of transfer changes so does our understanding of the story. No two stories are alike. You can have the same story, written by the same author with the only difference being is the medium and they will never be the same story. Heraclitus famously said "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you." and this is most true for a writer. So many things go into the crafting of a story, and one of the most important variables is the method of transfer to your audience. In other words, you should not even try to recreate your story, but write one that fits in your world that may use the same characters and plot line. If that makes sense :D

The best example I can think of this is with the BBC show 'The Thick of It' to its big screen adaption 'In the Loop', which has some amazingly funny lines 'Difficult Difficult Lemon Difficult'. It follows a similar plot to what you would find in the TV show, but the writers have realised that recreating the TV on the big screen with a bigger budget would lose the charm and wit of the original. So using the same cast, with some characters renamed but essentially the same but without the history of the TV cannon and others were transplanted completely. They recreated the world to fit the shape of the motion picture rather than scale up the TV show.

So my little short story that started this rant? I need to think of it as two seperate stories. Write the prose, and write the script. The concept of the story is quite vast so why not write two different stories in the same world rather than try to rehash one story to meet two mediums.