I think this is a good example of a misunderstanding between people who have different communication and thought styles. Eliezer is obviously very verbally-oriented and George Lucas is an extreme visual thinker:
Small, shy, and socially maladroit, Lucas was a daydreamer who had trouble reading and writing at school and who gravitated toward mechanics and the visual arts, in which he showed early talent. "I was more picture-oriented," he says. He liked woodworking, tinkering, and taking photos, mostly of objects rather than people. He sculpted and did watercolors and ink drawings of landscapes and sports cars, some of which he sold. Comic books were a passion: He collected so many that his father built a shed for them; Lucas later called them his primary model for terse visual narrative.
Someone like Eliezer watches Star Wars and thinks about how weak the dialogue and plotting is. Someone like George Lucas would look at Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic and think how sad it was that someone spent so much time stacking and arranging letters.
I think this is part of the reason why--in this overwhelmingly verbal/textual age--people think movies can be "bad," (synonymo...
Yes, George Lucas is a bad writer and doesn't understand or care about writing. But that shouldn't stop him from hiring good writers. In the past, it hasn't: for the Last Crusade, he hired Tom Stoppard. Added: and for Revenge of the Sith, he hired him again.
It's often said (or implied without saying it explicitly) that the works recognized as "Great Literature" are praised mainly for historical reasons only, that contemporary fiction is superior in most ways that matter, in particular because it's better suited to modern values and the way of life, and that it's primarily literary snobbery that stands in the way of a widespread adoption of these attitudes.
This, however, is wrong. Great Literature works survive as such because they prove relevant to every new generation. When they don't, they very quickly become forgotten or relegated to "famous back then, known mostly to scholars nowadays". Great Literature works that retain their high status over many hundreds of years usually have done that by having something relevant to say to every generation in those centuries; sometimes there're gaps of obscurity and then rediscovery, but those are the exception, not the rule.
The reason that the wrong attitude is popular is that people tend not to know or think of once-Great works that fell from the top. They see Shakespeares, but not Ben Jonsons. Ben Jonson was much higher regarded than Shakespeare for about 100 years after...
This conversation is bizarre.
You: "Let's work together and, as an exercise, take a famous classic work and rewrite it as a better one"
I: "This is a naive and ill-founded proposal that has near-zero chance of success. You don't seem to understand what made past great works great, or what it takes to make a successful work of literature today. Most likely you'll end up with an embarrasingly badly written piece of pastiche".
You: "The whole point is to be better than the original! Rationalists should win! Try harder! If what you say happens, that just means I haven't achieved my goal."
... yes, it does? What does this pronouncement have to do with anything I've said? Why are you just repeating empty slogans?
I still feel a sense of genuine puzzlement on how such disastrous writing happens in movies and TV shows.
Smart people who only hang out with other smart people are often puzzled like that.
The best unexpected outcome of working in K-12 education was learning how isolated I'd made myself, intelligence-wise. Now I've broken out of that isolation, and when I think about how to make the world a better place I think about the world and not just the world of smarty smart-pants.
(Bonus points if you have Yoda lecture Anakin about the inevitability of death, but I'd understand if they didn't go there.)
New Pro Life Fan Fiction:
The Force for Life, where Luke tries to bring Jedi/Sith immortality to the masses.
I note that while the Sith are implicitly condemned for their desire to cheat death, the Jedi are portrayed as actually achieving it. There is a lot of "have your cake and eat it too" moral propaganda. Condemn the desire for something, while granting the desire to those denying it.
I suspect that too much is being read into the Star Wars case here: I'm not convinced it's typical. It felt to me like George Lucas was being given too much of a free hand, and so there wasn't anyone doing that checking, and that the interest was more in the 'event' of new films than their quality.
I also think that this post is more generally a bit muddled. The assumption seems to be that 'old' books are worse but that we hold them to lower standards, and I don't think this is true: it's certainly not demonstrated above. Nor is there any reason to think th...
This is probably stating the obvious, but most people watch television to be "entertained." They don't sit and think about the plot. They don't wonder about the character's motivations. They just passively watch. Producers probably know this and don't feel the need to spend extra money to appease a small portion of the population, even if it would make the show better all-around. They have no incentive to make better characters.
No, this isn't stating the obvious, it's cheap, unthinking cynicism. In reality, TV shows compete against each other very aggressively, and having more complex, interesting, realistic characters can and does bring a huge competitive advantage to one show over another. That depends on the genre, in the more lowbrow sitcoms you may want a very stereotypical character instead, but those do not capture all the market or even most of it. What you're saying is easily falsified just by reading a few articles on which shows get cancelled and speculations as to why.
TV shows die due to bad writing all the time (Heroes is a particularly striking recent example where a show was off to a great start and fizzled out due to bad writing and characters the viewers couldn't care about in the later seasons). Unless the show is particularly formulaic, the producers have all the incentive to organize better characters, and in fact the networks interfere in the shows' character development and plot arcs all the time, demanding this or that change because they're convinced their audience will like it better. Every major TV show has a huge amount of attention devoted to characters.
No, this isn't stating the obvious, it's cheap, unthinking cynicism. In reality, TV shows compete against each other very aggressively, and having more complex, interesting, realistic characters can and does bring a huge competitive advantage to one show over another.
TV shows do compete aggressively, but having complex and realistic characters is only a good investment for the small minority of shows that are highly serialized and oriented around complex characters (Mad Men and Breaking Bad are good examples). There is a market for shows like this, but it is small and not terribly profitable.
The big money comes from shows with simple cardboard characters and one-off storylines like The Big Bang Theory (which set a record for biggest per-episode syndication deal ever) and Baywatch, which was syndicated in 142 countries. They have mass appeal and--most importantly--are easy to sell into syndication, where they become permanent cash cows.
I always thought it would be kind of neat to have a version of Don Quixote set in the present and in which the title character has a comic book superhero obsession instead of a "knight-errant" obsession...
You actually can get away with doing this kind of thing - but only if you're also writing in a language other than the one the original author used. You can get away with a lot more when you're doing a "translation" because it's literally impossible to simply leave everything as the original author wrote it.
Case in point: W.S. Kuniczak's "modern translation" of the Sienkiewicz Trilogy.
I was wondering if we could apply this process to older fiction, Great Literature that is historically praised, and excellent by its own time's standards, but which, if published by a modern author, would seem substandard or inappropriate in one way or another.
Historic Great Literature. You mean Lord of the Rings, right? Surely you don't expect us to read things from before that?
From EY's Facebook page, there were two posts that got me thinking about fiction and how to work it better and make it stronger:
It would have been trivial to fix _Revenge of the Sith_'s inadequate motivation of Anakin's dark turn; have Padme already in the hospital slowly dying as her children come to term, not just some nebulous "visions". (Bonus points if you have Yoda lecture Anakin about the inevitability of death, but I'd understand if they didn't go there.) At the end, Anakin doesn't try to choke Padme; he watches the ship with her fly out of his reach, away from his ability to use his unnatural Sith powers to save her. Now Anakin's motives are 320% more sympathetic and the movie makes 170% more sense. If I'd put some serious work in, I'm pretty sure I could've had the movie audience in tears.
I still feel a sense of genuine puzzlement on how such disastrous writing happens in movies and TV shows. Are the viewers who care about this such a tiny percentage that it's not worth trying to sell to them? Are there really so few writers who could read over the script and see in 30 seconds how to fix something like this? (If option 2 is really the problem and people know it's the problem, I'd happily do it for $10,000 a shot.) Is it Graham's Design Paradox - can Hollywood moguls just not tell the difference between competent writers making such an offer, and fakers who'll take the money and run? Are the producers' egos so grotesque that they can't ask a writer for help? Is there some twisted sense of superiority bound up with believing that the audience is too dumb to care about this kind of thing, even though it looks to me like they do? I don't understand how a >$100M movie ends up with flaws that I could fix at the script stage with 30 seconds of advice.
A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is then a character with only one 'part'.
A good rule of thumb is that to create a 3D character, that person must contain at least two different 2D characters who come into conflict. Contrary to the first thought that crosses your mind, three-dimensional good people are constructed by combining at least two different good people with two different ideals, not by combining a good person and a bad person. Deep sympathetic characters have two sympathetic parts in conflict, not a sympathetic part in conflict with an unsympathetic part. Deep smart characters are created by combining at least two different people who are geniuses.
E.g. HPMOR!Hermione contains both a sensible young girl who tries to keep herself and her friends out of trouble, and a starry-eyed heroine, neither of whom are stupid. (Actually, since HPMOR!Hermione is also the one character who I created as close to her canon self as I could manage - she didn't *need* upgrading - I should credit this one to J. K. Rowling.) (Admittedly, I didn't actually follow that rule deliberately to construct Methods, I figured it out afterward when everyone was praising the characterization and I was like, "Wait, people are calling me a character author now? What the hell did I just do right?")
If instead you try to construct a genius character by having an emotionally impoverished 'genius' part in conflict with a warm nongenius part... ugh. Cliche. Don't write the first thing that pops into your head from watching Star Trek. This is not how real geniuses work. HPMOR!Harry, the primary protagonist, contains so many different people he has to give them names, and none of them are stupid, nor does any one of them contain his emotions set aside in a neat jar; they contain different mixtures of emotions and ideals. Combining two cliche characters won't be enough to build a deep character. Combining two different realistic people in that character's situation works much better. Two is not a limit, it's a minimum, but everyone involved still has to be recognizably the same person when combined.
Closely related is Orson Scott Card's observation that a conflict between Good and Evil can be interesting, but it's often not half as interesting as a conflict between Good and Good. All standard rules about cliches still apply, and a conflict between good and good which you've previously read about and to which the reader can already guess your correct approved answer, cannot carry the story. A good rule of thumb is that if you have a conflict between good and good which you feel unsure about yourself, or which you can remember feeling unsure about, or you're not sure where exactly to draw the line, you can build a story around it. I consider the most successful moral conflict in HPMOR to be the argument between Harry and Dumbledore in Ch. 77 because it almost perfectly divided the readers on who was in the right *and* about whose side the author was taking. (*This* was done by deliberately following Orson Scott Card's rule, not by accident. Likewise _Three Worlds Collide_, though it was only afterward that I realized how much of the praise for that story, which I hadn't dreamed would be considered literarily meritful by serious SF writers, stemmed from the sheer rarity of stories built around genuinely open moral arguments. Orson Scott Card: "Propaganda only works when the reader feels like you've been absolutely fair to other side", and writing about a moral dilemma where *you're* still trying to figure out the answer is an excellent way to achieve this.)
Character shallowness can be a symptom of moral shallowness if it reflects a conflict between Good and Evil drawn along lines too clear to bring two good parts of a good character into conflict. This is why it would've been hard for Lord of the Rings to contain conflicted characters without becoming an entirely different story, though as Robin Hanson has just remarked, LotR is a Mileu story, not a Character story. Conflicts between evil and evil are even shallower than conflicts between good and evil, which is why what passes for 'maturity' in some literature is so uninteresting. There's nothing to choose there, no decision to await with bated breath, just an author showing off their disillusionment as a claim of sophistication.
I was wondering if we could apply this process to older fiction, Great Literature that is historically praised, and excellent by its own time's standards, but which, if published by a modern author, would seem substandard or inappropriate in one way or another.
Given our community's propensity for challenging sacred cows, and the unique tool-set available to us, I am sure we could take some great works of the past and turn them into awesome works of the present.
Of course, it doesn't have to be a laboratory where we rewrite the whole damn things. Just proprely-grounded suggestions on how to improve this or that work would be great.
P.S. This post is itself a work in progress, and will update and improve as comments come. It's been a long time since I've last posted on LW, so advice is quite welcome. Our work is never over.
EDIT: Well, I like that this thread has turned out so lively, but I've got finals to prepare for and I can't afford to keep participating in the discussion to my satisfaction. I'll be back in July, and apologize in advance for being such a poor OP. That said, cheers!