On Fairytales
Jordan and I hung out tonight. By that I mean that he and I went to see a movie. The movie: Happily N’Ever After. I think out critiques were: 1) It was good; and 2) the CG was too close to what you’d see with claymation to make it really good; and 3) the Evil Step Mother needed some sort of real conclusion to her storyline and not the cheap, candy-arse, way the writers and animators decided to have her end up. Jordan’s suggestion was that she needed to hook up with the Wizard and come back happy; which, I think, would’ve been an appropriate ending as her complaint throughout the movie was that Cinderella was the one who always had a happy ending and she always got nothing. She was just the STEPMOTHER.
I’m not sure if this was my choice or Jordan’s. Regardless, we were in the theatre all alone. Just he and I. So, as a result we had this verbal commentary running on the movie, on what we thought about the movie, and lots of things. It was actually very nice to be able to sit there and just talk about the various elements.
With that said, Cinderella (or Ella… can we say, Rip off Gail Carson Levine and her Ella Enchanted stories???) looks all of fifteen, has short hair, and might be construed (except for the dresses she wears) to be a rather effeminate boy. She is voiced by Sarah Michelle Gellar while the underdog and sculleryboy (don’t really know what to call him) is voiced by Freddie Prince Jr. which, in itself, led me to ask, “When are they going to get a divorce so Hollywood can move on?”
The real story was about the Stepmother and yet, we were inundated with poor voice-overs and voices that don’t really match the characters on the screen. However, we both agreed that we enjoyed the wicked stepmother character and the way she looked. She was just so evil and bad and … other stuff.
With all that said, I don’t think it is very kid friend and I really don’t think that the movie will be one that a lot of people will want to watch. I may end up buying it when it comes out on DVD as much for the special features as to explore the conceits used in the movie, the magical elements, the fact that a wizard and his assistants were charged with balancing good and evil, and the idea that sometimes a (relatively) omniscient wizard needs a vacation and has to leave the world of Fairy Tales in the capable (???) hands of the assistants.
What the movie really did, though, was to add some fodder in my mind for a series of stories I’ve been considering and drafting; which is really the reason to go and see the movie to being with. Granted, I think the Ella short form for Cinderella is not very good, but that is my opinion and, apparently, it is catching on. What really caught me, though, was the focus on the two syllables in that name Cinder and Ella. Cinder, being a partially or mostly burned piece of wood and Ella being a short form of the name (and the name Cinderella was called throughout the story). Cinder. Cinder. Cinder.
Granted, that means nothing to most people as I am not (on the blog) sharing what this all is working toward for me; but I find the idea of Cinder being an element to the name Cinderella, that she is, in effect, a scullery maid, and that she is kept low by the man in the form of her wicked stepmother, the word is just really harmonizing in my head.
Now, with that said, I put Jordan on the quest to concept a Pirates story for me a couple of weeks ago. He returned, tonight, having thought about it and after I said, “Crap!” at his initial concept statement (think scifi) I listened. I have to admit that I will have to flesh out a lot of the details, but he’s come up with another idea that can meld into my “working on” folder of things to write.
Back in the day Stephen King (author) used to write and publish a couple of books a year. What made him, according to him, a proliferate author was that he always had something sitting on the backburner waiting to be written. This is where the pirate story is going, the fairy tale stories, the space comedy stories, Backwards and others. I mean, I know that I can write them and I know that I want to write them and I know that I am beginning to see the motivation to write them; the issue is finding the ones that need to be worked on when. In the end I don’t want to be a scifi or fantasy writer and I don’t want to find myself stuck in a particular genre or field because that’s what I’ve always done and, for me, it is easier to remain there than explore and experiment.
Now, with all that said, the speed with which one writes I think is determined upon the need to produce and how producing written work affects the outcome financially. If you are paid to write and your pay comes as a result of what you produce then you learn to write quickly and think less about the minutiae of how words fit together realizing that you can revise or edit once you get the ideas and concepts down (NOTE: this blog is primarily one draft writing). I write quickly. On occasion people point this out. My only response is, “Get paid to write and have your pay be determined on how much you produce and how quickly. You will write faster.”
What I think this means, just for those interested in the speed of writing (and add to the dialogue within the interwebbyblogospherethingagrouping) is not determined by skill or ability but by what brought you to professional writing. Take someone who is not paid to write, an academic, where you know, generally, that most items you are going to work on you have weeks and months to come up with a finished product. Whereas, writing for a corporation (say, technology) where turnaround in manuals and releases is as time sensitive as the actual product, you learn to produce quickly.
Various authors come from a variety of backgrounds. What I am really seeing (from my quick finger perspective) is that the backgrounds that lend themselves to quick writing are the ones where turnaround is, initially, more important than what is produced. Whereas, if you are required to just produce and have some pretty open-ended deadlines (academics being a prime example) than what is produced is far more important than turnaround. With that said, both paths lead to quick writing, some authors just choose to take longer to think about how things are worded than others on the front-end, while other authors get concepts down and choose to change word choice on the back-end.
Done, for now.
John Hattaway | Alicia Grey | Denny Crane | Bond. James Bond | Jack Bristow