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kaigouReading a great deal of visual-based stories these days -- manga, webcomics -- and sorting through how the format tells a story compared to the form/function of word-based storytelling. Since a great many of the manga have romantic plots (even when it’s not the focus, just like much of the published fiction I read does usually have some kind of romantic element, hell, even the Bourne series has a romantic subplot), I’ve been noticing more and more that it’s the tiniest things that make or break whether I ‘believe’ a romantic plotline actually works.
One thing unaddressed among many writers in the throes of editing seems to be that of emphasis, at least based on many exchanged drafts, posted-for-crit stories, and drafts of my own. I do recall reading a writerly-help book that talked about emphasis (though can’t recall which specific one it was, or I’d name it for you), and I thought it rather intriguing at the time -- if an academic question until revision point rolled around -- that the amount of time an author grants to certain topics, points of view, explanations, themes, even words/phrases can create an emphasis for the reader... even if the author didn’t intend that, at all.
I suppose it’s a similar issue to what I mentioned before: bestowing details on the audience depends entirely on the context of the character/narration laying out those details. I guess this makes the issue of repetition sort of the 201 class of info-dumping, in that an author may not necessarily be ‘dumping’ info, so much as simply repeating what may have been smoothly presented the first time... the second time... the eighth time... and so on. By that point, what was once ‘smooth’ is now obtrusive.
The worst example in recent mental history is, of course, that total waste of unresearched pixels I reviewed back in September; in that story, the author must’ve told me at least nine times in the first thirty pages that one of the protagonists came from a Samurai family. I didn’t even get past page fifty or so, and already I was beyond annoyed at the repetition. If the author’s already emphasized it that much, clearly, it must be of major importance to the story! Explain it, already, or shut up!
A la mystery novels (which may have been where I read the advice, given that plenty on my writerly shelf isn’t for SFF but mystery/suspense skills) is that the more you emphasize a detail(s), the more the reader remembers it... and thus, the more the reader expects this detail to figure in the plot. If I mention once that my protagonist used to go shooting empty beer cans with her father on the odd Sunday, then this could be foreshadowing to the astute or detail-oriented reader; it could just be characterization about her tomboyish background and her relationship with her father, for any other reader. When I mention the detail three times, it’s morphing into Chekhov’s gun. When I mention the detail nine times, the reader’s probably already got the big finale mapped out in his/her head, replete with multiple gunshots and various weaponry and possibly some artistic scattering of shotgun shells.
It does seem -- from the rare mystery novels I read (swinging between historical-based works like Ellis Peters’ Cadfael or Elizabeth Eyre’s renaissance mysteries, and the hardboiled style of Chandler) -- that emphasis is one of the most powerful weapons in a mystery or suspense novelist’s arsenal. I’m not sure, then, why other genres -- which often contain mystery or suspense to some degree -- don’t capitalize on this skill, or practice it more, or are the very least more cognizant of the impact on readers. I mean, in a mystery/suspense work, if I’m told repeatedly that a character has gorgeous red hair, I’m going to look for some reason I’m getting this information: is it a red herring? is it to distract me? is it a sign I should look for some other character with red hair? should I be looking for a bottle of hairdye, instead, and be cluing *cough* in on the fact that the red-haired character is oh-so-coincidentally the exact same age as the former mistress who disappeared under mysterious conditions ten years ago?
SFF details, on the other hand, frequently seem tossed about just to make sure I didn’t miss that Really Fabulous And Wonderful Fantasy (or SF) Detail... in particular, strange-colored eyes, fangs, computer systems, and spaceships get this the most. Oh, don’t even get me started on how many times some authors must remind me of a character’s eye color; I’d say they’ve caught the fanficcers’ love of stone eyeballs (obsidian orbs, emerald orbs, gag, etc), but that’s probably another chicken-and-egg routine.
Regardless, the notion of emphasis just doesn’t appear to ping on the radar of the average SFF author. Does a repeated detail impact those readers with stricter SFF-preferences than myself (meaning, those who don’t also have a concurrent interest in mystery/suspense or thriller genre)? Does it fade into the background, or does repeating an otherwise tiny detail a requirement for making some ‘especially fantastical’ element stand out against the madding crowd of fantastical elements in a story?
Or is it that an SFF author may be using the detail as a shorthand -- that is, in the first introduction, I get a lovely view of the protagonist’s wizardly kitchen. In later scenes, the author trims the full scene-setting paragraphs, but references it via mentioning a single part, say, the hand-wrought crucible. I can see how that might work as a sort of mnemonic, triggering the reader’s recollection of the entire kitchen setup.
On the other hand -- at least on readers like me -- it can backfire if the same detail is used as the device, every single time. It’s almost like overuse of a pet phrase in a character’s dialogue, or throwing in “yeh” for “you” in every line. What at first may have seemed like a saving play in terms of not boring the reader with the whole nine yards at every mention, might equally be read as lazy. In the latter case, past some unknown (if intuitively understood) point, that lazy singularity becomes as obtrustive in its own right as any potential plot-point like a gun.
Technically, an author who uses ‘crucible’ to reference ‘the entire alchemical setup’ is using synedoche /seh-NEK-deh-key/, and thus we segue into the irregular feature, Today’s Trivia! Aren’t you lucky?
Synecdoche, generally speaking, is the use of a part of a thing, to refer to the whole of that thing. For instance, saying, “give us this day our daily bread,” where “bread” is standing in for “the entire meal/feast”. Bread is one part of a meal; one could just as easily say, “give us this day our daily rice,” and be using synecdoche (though usually synecdoche works best where the named part is commonly known as a part of the whole). It can be an oft-used by rarely identified pattern behind a cliche: “put your shoulder into it,” where “shoulder” is read as meaning/implying “all of you”. Or, where the part is a definite limited aspect of the whole (compared to the first example, where bread could honestly be the entire meal regardless of the phrase’s use): “I can drive, I’ve got wheels.” We all know you can’t get anywhere with only four large tires piled up in your driveway, but we easily take the name of the ‘part’ and mentally insert the ‘whole’ to derive the intended meaning.
(Wow, it’s like creating variables in a computer syntax. Hey, there, we’re all secretly code monkeys after all.)
Synecdoche is often confused with metonymy /meh-TAHN-nee-mee/, which is sort of related but a little different (this is cousin of the simile-metaphor confuzzlement, you could say). Metonymy is where the two things are related/connected (if on a social/cultural level), but the named part is not necessarily a part of the actual whole. When you say, “the Hill announced”, you actually mean “the United States Congress”, which happens to meet on the Hill, but it isn’t the hill. Congress, after all, being a group of people and not a geological phenomenon, though I suppose that may be debatable for some. (Hasn’t Senator Pell retired by now? He’s certainly as old as the average hill.)
Or, if you referred to “the press” -- where once that might’ve meant the actual printing press (for a newspaper), now it means “the entire news media.” Metonymy is most common in using addresses to represent what’s associated with that address, like Hollywood (for the entire film industry), Wall Street (for the entire stock market), Moscow (for the Russian government), etc.
When I learned this, I had a classmate from Schenectady (New York), a town with a very similar pronuncation: skah-NEK-tah-dee. (This is why, unfortunately, I often mispronounce ‘synecdoche’ as the town’s name before getting it right, but at least I don’t confuse the two literary tools anymore.) His recommended mnemonic is that to say “Schenectady” and mean “New York State” is synecdoche because the town is part of the state.
In a novel, it’s a lot harder to gauge emphasis. It’s especially hard for authors (I know this quite well myself) because after a certain number of read-throughs, you just can’t unpack the story in your head anymore. Hell, sometimes in discussing it or revising it, you can’t even remember which scenes are in, or excised from, this version, or did you add that back in, no, wait, you cut that... didn’t you? So knowing how many times you repeated yourself can be really hard; the world of tech does help to some degree in that now you can search for phrases or words, and in some programs you can even get a ‘repeated word’ count (that is, a complete list of every word used in a document and the number of time used). Until the development of technology that can compare meaning of a phrase or paragraph and search for related/somewhat similar instances elsewhere -- fuzzy logic, I suppose? -- I guess writers must rely on editors and beta-readers to point out when something got mentioned over and over... and over.
Which in turn depends on whether the editor/beta knows to look for repetition in the first place, or whether the person can track it. A big part of that is also whether the story is read start-to-finish, which is tangential but does matter when critiquing. I know for a fact that when I read serialized works -- stories written over a stretch of time and released in parts, like multi-novel stories, or chapters in a comic book, or even web-printed fanfic and original fiction -- that when I begin reading after the work is completed, I often have to wade through at least a page (or more) of backstory.
When this occurs every single chapter, it can get annoying, but it’s not noticeable to the reader if the break between chapter-reading is more than a week or two. In that case, the reader does require some kind of refresher (however minor or passing); the drawback is that if someone is reading to critique and has a break between chapters, repetition abruptly disappears. It’s no longer a ‘repetition’ from a previous chapter; it now falls into the category of ‘useful backstory that rings a faint bell but at the same time cleverly reminds the reader of important details’...
That works, until you come along and read it start-to-finish in one night, and in that instance, suddenly those chapterly refreshers get really freaking annoying.
In other words: don’t dump a story on your beta/editor until it’s complete. Obvious, yes, but still.
The other function of emphasis is to create belief. I’m not sure how else I can put it, but that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn (err, so to speak) from reading visual-based stories. Okay, this is both what I was saying above, and expanding beyond that to a positive thing. Hrm, if my comments above are saying that ‘repetition becomes obtrusive in a PUT UP OR SHUT UP AUTHOR kinda aggravation,’ here I’m saying that without repetition, I won’t believe that seeing a starting point necessarily means the ending point has arrived.
I mention this because while it seems authors are -- understandably so, sometimes -- blind to the subtler repetition, it’s the major repetition that they jump to cut when they’re over a word limit. A story won’t take a huge hit if you balance out the differing emphases to purposefully highlight what is of actual importance/impact on the plot, but it will take a huge hit if you remove some types of emphatic repetition.
Best example off the top of my head is this: you’re watching a movie in which two characters decide to drive from Boston to Atlanta, and that the trip has some bearing on the plot development. That’s easily a sixteen-hour drive, if you don’t hit traffic. Chances are the movie won’t show them getting in the car, then jump-cut to them getting out in front of their friend’s house unless the time they spent will produce no shift in their relationship (IOW, not plot-impact). Even the shortest of “from here to there” segments will have some kind of repetition, which indicates the passage of time (and may infer conflict or resolution development hints, as well): road signs flash past, more road signs, more road signs, and we always see the same person at the wheel. Entire passage takes maybe two, three minutes.
Or, the car pulls up at a rest stop that says “welcome to New York,” then another for New Jersey, then one for Delaware: you’re going to conclude from the close repetition that this pattern continued, but you couldn’t have concluded that without seeing the first two or three instances in the set.
I know, I know, it’s the concept of showing, not telling, but what I’m getting at is that sometimes, what you show must repeat a specific item, in order to emphasize it and its connotations... if the most likely conclusion from the emphasis bears on the plot or conflict. Consider the case of a roadtrip where the first scene shows A driving out of Boston (plus road signs), then B driving while A sleeps, and B pays the toll, then A driving while they stop at a North Carolina rest stop for B to use the bathroom. There’s no consistency nor repetition, and the emphasis of giving the roadtrip segment even just five minutes becomes an emphasis far more open to interpretation. (I think it was When Harry Met Sally, in the beginning of the movie when the characters roadtrip together to NYC, that demonstrates how a short travelling segment can use repetition to emphasize character interaction and potential conflict.)
Now, to bring that around to the notion of emphasis in the manner of how much time is alloted -- words on a page, or pictures on a screen -- and how the lack thereof can really deal a blow to a romantic plotline being believeable: I’m posting a single page from Lovers in 1k Apartment by Hyouta Fujimaya, one of my absolute favorite mangaka. (I think the licensed American title is Lovers Flat, but I’m not positive.)
Fujimaya writes stories of gay love, yes, but she’s a lot less focused on the smex (hell, she's practically PG by her counterpart's standards, doing a lot more implying than showing) and far more focused on the complexities and realities of relationships. The first story I read by her, Dear Green, wasn’t about a break-up or get-together, but just a series of shorts about a couple in their late twenties; her author’s note at the end said she knew it wasn’t the high-intensity kind of story that’s really popular, but that when gay friends told her how much they loved that the story is about a quite-married-like couple who are just plain regular people, that’s what mattered most to her. I can respect that.
Anyway, in this particular story, there are two couples, both of which are struggling with the ramifications of being attracted to the same sex, along with their culture’s views/prejudices about it, and for one of the characters, his belief that it just couldn’t ever be “love” between men, not in the “real” sense.
Context complete, this page made me stop, back up, and take a second look, then step back and take a larger look at the overall story. It’s the best example of illustrating emphasis, pun not necessarily intended. The six-chapter story contains two separate plotlines, with the final two chapters weaving the four characters (neighbors in the complex) together. At about 155 pages total (not counting cover page and closing pages for each), each chapter averages 25 pages, roughly. That means Fujimaya had fifty pages to get the first couple together, another fifty for the second couple, and the last fifty to contrast them as each couple irons out the last of their conflicts/issues.
As far as I’m concerned, in her mangaka-world, fifty pages for a storyline is equivalent to what’s covered in the first published novel of a romance three-parter... which means fifty drawn pages is about equal to 300 pages, or approximately 75K words. That means that for a single page, Fujiyama is covering about the same ground a novelist would cover in 1500 words, or six full pages in a paperback book.
That means, when you get a page like the one below, it’s holding massive significance. [NOTE: it’s originally Japanese-language, so if you’re not used to reading right-to-left, I put blue numbers to indicate the reading order.]
When you’re writing with words, it’s a bit easier to spit them out, revise them, go back and edit or tweak. With drawing, I’d expect revisions to be a bit more of an issue because too much revision of one frame can impact the rest of the page -- and beyond that, the layout and flow of all the pages after that. (I mean, what if you realize you could cut out two of the three rows, above? Big honking blank space, then, which in itself can call attention to what’s above it or below it, or what’s within it, if text; if you’re looking to remove an emphatic section, the white space would cause this to backfire on you, based on everything I’ve read, at least. A reader notices the white space just as much as the black, but I’ll get to that in below.)
The reason I bring up the ease of revision is that it matches what I’ve read in interviews with comic/manga artists, that they must storyboard each page, in a rough sketch, to make sure the layout and flow -- visually -- matches what they want to illustrate/emphasize within the story’s development itself. What gets shown is as important to them as what a word-artist ‘shows’ you on the page, after all. They’re just more literal about their ‘show’, is all.
Gary Provost’s point was to make every word count, and to cut the ones that don’t. Reading comics and manga have really driven home to me that when you have limited space be that magazine limits or publisher word count maxes, that not only must every word count, but every scene must count twice. Looking back at the context of the story, and the excerpted page above, you can see the single page gets that much emphasis and time on a relatively inane interaction because it’s doing double-time, and that makes it worth the space. It’s the first time the neighbors have come face to face while the boyfriend of one is present; it’s demonstrating a friendship/relationship between the couple as an educational moment for the prejudiced neighbor struggling with his own illusions of ‘what happens after you become a couple’.
It’s also -- as Fujimaya goes on in the next page to have the delivering-neighbor apologize for his startled reaction and explain it away as due to his sudden thought of “wow, they’re just like any married couple,” that the couple, in turn, must stop and look at their own interaction to see the comfort level that had developed between them without them realizing it.
We wouldn’t have gotten any of that, if we’d not seen the original interaction, so it was worth granting what comes to -- over this page, and the two that ‘close out’ the delivery and the small-if-significant revelation -- what’s probably the equivalent of an entire chapter in a novel. Imagine that: if you were reading a 75K novel that had eighteen pages to cover delivering a pizza. (Then again, what’s that about a picture and a thousand words?) Now, imagine if you got this type of friendship/relationship behavior illustration twice; you’d probably believe the same as me, that this couple has very a comfortable, solid (if not perfect or perfectly happy), positive kind of relationship.
You know as well as I do that a good writer could cover this scene -- showing, not telling -- in about 1500 words or so. There’d be no reason to bestow an entire chapter on it, but I raised that correlation not as a realistic value but to demonstrate how important it is that despite limited space, Fujimaya knew the readers would need to see the details, however minute, before the relationship could honestly be believed.
It always amazes me just how many novelists forget this, in their romantic plots/subplots.
In Dear Green, the series of short stories focused on one [damn near married] couple, Fujiyama explores the conflicts that occur even when one is in an established relationship (and particularly while in a society that frowns on such things). The majority of the conflicts, then, arise due to the couple doing their best to appear as nothing more than two high school friends who’d attended the same university and then ended up rooming together to save money; for the context of the following excerpt, I should add that the couple lives in the apartment upstairs from the cafe that one of them owns (which means Otoumi is clearly entering the cafe from the upstairs apartment). Since the bubbles jump around a bit more, I numbered them in per Asian-order reverse reading, in case you’re not used to that.
I guess this is the comic-book variant on the throwaway line, but it’s a throwaway gesture. In the bottom right, below the #7 speech bubble, Yukari (the cafe owner) hands Otoumi a cup of tea. There’s no comment made, no request, no notice is even drawn to it. It’s the same gesture couples make the world over, when used to a partner’s pattern; friends will do this, true, but the no-words-needed behavior is most often associated with “been together a long, long time” of coupledom. Like the previous example, Fujiyama chooses to have an onlooker remark on the behavior; unlike the previous version, the observer doesn’t specify what made him say, “you’re just like a married couple.” He simply drops the comment (a definite bombshell in that society) but it’s left up to the astute reader to notice the exact moment that would prompt someone to draw this conclusion.
But to my point, it’s that Fujiyama knows to illustrate -- even as a ‘throwaway’ gesture -- something that is such a crucial aspect of the average reader’s expectations of ‘how a long-time couple acts’. Rather than tell us that the couple’s been together for five years, or even rather than show us that they’re celebrating their fifth anniversary, she chooses to show in the most subtle of acts, knowing that it’s the tiny, subtle details that -- when repeated, like the variations in a canon -- together create a huge emphasis but without ever being obtrusive. Much of the time she doesn’t really call attention to it, if the scene has no third party to observe.
There’s one bit (that naturally I can’t find in the Dear Green series) where Yukari walks into Otoumi’s study to see how work is coming along, and Otoumi’s fallen asleep at his drafting table (again). The first shot is Yukari looking into the room, with an expression somewhere between ‘what? again?’ and ‘go figure’. The next shot, we see him coming out of the room, thinking about what he needs to do in the cafe -- and behind him, Otoumi continues to sleep, but now he’s got a blanket draped over his shoulders.
That’s what I mean when I say, to make me believe that a situation exists between two characters, I need the emphasis of repetition: to believe they’re growing attracted, to believe they’ve come to care for each other, and most importantly to believe that they genuinely like the other person, and genuinely want to be around the other person. If I never see two characters laugh together over something, I have a hard time believing they’ve got much more than one-night-stand lust, or at best, a series of nights but little more. It’s a complaint most often leveled at Hollywood romances that rush the romance to get to the stakes, when the best way to describe the situation is simply, “I couldn’t figure out what he saw in her” or vice versa, or for both, even. How many lovers do you know, when asked why they love someone, say, “oh, I don’t know, it’s all the little things...”
Lastly, the other type of little things that really do count, but this one is rather bizarre (to me, at least). Recently I’ve been playing a lot with Final Cut, thanks to now having a computer that can handle the size of the program and has enough drive-space free for the source material. A lot of what I’ve been doing is mostly fiddling: here’s a short passage of music, what happens when I edit in this way, versus that way, what does this kind of cut do, what does that do... it’s almost like a moving-pictures form of storytelling, wait, it is a visual storytelling mode, even if it’s using someone else’s pictures (an anime series) and someone else’s sound (old Brit band).
I’ve been realizing the visual expression, via manipulation, plays a big role in what I conclude an image means. Yeah, yeah, so I knew that already but it’s one thing to know it, another to grok it.
Anyway, every now and then while editing, I’ll come up against a passage where the lyrics and beat call for an image or series of images that are a set value. Need something that fits visually and thematically, but is no more than seventy-nine frames, except that this is of course (murphy, damn you!) where the perfect image is closer to ninety-nine frames. Ugh! Well, I could trim it on either end, but then the merge from the previous image to this one doesn’t work quite so neatly, or maybe that makes the jump at the end too abrupt, so I’ll count frames. Hmmm, what a fascinating thing to realize.
[LJ won’t let me embed video, uh, or I’m just slow today, so you’ll have to d/l directly, sorry. Hopefully ya’ll won’t crash my server or something.]
original version
That’s the original clip, at forty frames in length. I did them as two separate (assuming this works) so you can see them side-by-side, erm, sort of. Anyway, if I break that clip down and go through it frame by frame, each individual image is not completely unique, nor are they regular. (The background moves continously but minutely, since I think that’s computer-generated to auto-layer behind the image as part of the production, so ignore that; I just mean the character in the foreground.) In fact, the pattern is 2 frames for an image, then 3 frames for the next shot, then 2 frames for the 3rd image, then 3 frames for the 4th, and so on. It’s 2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3 to the end of the forty frames. Most of the sequences I’ve broken down follow a variant of this pattern, and in a lot of the action shots it actually expands to be 3-4-3-4-3-4 with a few 5-frame images thrown in every now and then.
Naturally, being me, I said: hey, if I just get rid of all those 3rd frames, then I’d have an image that begins and ends where I want, and is the length I want. Perfect! So I did, and I got this.
edited version
Watch it, then watch it a second time. Now, go watch the first, then the second. That’s what I had to do, at least, because after creating a series of action shots edited in this manner -- trying to figure out how to identify the high point of an action or gesture and then match it to each beat of a high-hat -- I sat down and watched the rendered rough draft... and it felt like I couldn’t register the action, somehow. It felt like it went by too fast, that I kept missing something. The edited version isn’t choppy, or unweildly, and it’s only about 15% shorter than the original (34 frames). But do you watch it and feel like it just zipped by, compared to the first one? I certainly do.
This is where we come back to writing (as usual): y’know how teachers/experienced writers often have to explain to new writers that using “said” is not a crime, and that using it all the time isn’t a crime either, and that you don’t have to say “the doctor” and “the redheaded boy” but can just say “Jane” and “John,” and readers won’t ‘see’ either the same way they don’t ‘see’ the verb “said”?
I think that’s what the extra beats are, in the animation clip. They’re the ‘said’ of the visual world. It’s one-thirtieth of a second -- which now that I think about it is probably all the time we really apply to the verb ‘said’ when reading at a regular pace? -- but it’s required. It’s just the slightest amount of a pause, just the barest breath, that lets us process what we’ve seen up to then, before the story/image speeds onto the next. Or maybe those extra frames are the periods at the ends of a sentence, and that’s why watching the edited version without them makes me feel like I’m watching a run-on sentence in pictures.
On the other hand, maybe it’s just me. Not an uncommon conclusion, but I remain hopeful that someday it won’t be.
One thing unaddressed among many writers in the throes of editing seems to be that of emphasis, at least based on many exchanged drafts, posted-for-crit stories, and drafts of my own. I do recall reading a writerly-help book that talked about emphasis (though can’t recall which specific one it was, or I’d name it for you), and I thought it rather intriguing at the time -- if an academic question until revision point rolled around -- that the amount of time an author grants to certain topics, points of view, explanations, themes, even words/phrases can create an emphasis for the reader... even if the author didn’t intend that, at all.
I suppose it’s a similar issue to what I mentioned before: bestowing details on the audience depends entirely on the context of the character/narration laying out those details. I guess this makes the issue of repetition sort of the 201 class of info-dumping, in that an author may not necessarily be ‘dumping’ info, so much as simply repeating what may have been smoothly presented the first time... the second time... the eighth time... and so on. By that point, what was once ‘smooth’ is now obtrusive.
The worst example in recent mental history is, of course, that total waste of unresearched pixels I reviewed back in September; in that story, the author must’ve told me at least nine times in the first thirty pages that one of the protagonists came from a Samurai family. I didn’t even get past page fifty or so, and already I was beyond annoyed at the repetition. If the author’s already emphasized it that much, clearly, it must be of major importance to the story! Explain it, already, or shut up!
A la mystery novels (which may have been where I read the advice, given that plenty on my writerly shelf isn’t for SFF but mystery/suspense skills) is that the more you emphasize a detail(s), the more the reader remembers it... and thus, the more the reader expects this detail to figure in the plot. If I mention once that my protagonist used to go shooting empty beer cans with her father on the odd Sunday, then this could be foreshadowing to the astute or detail-oriented reader; it could just be characterization about her tomboyish background and her relationship with her father, for any other reader. When I mention the detail three times, it’s morphing into Chekhov’s gun. When I mention the detail nine times, the reader’s probably already got the big finale mapped out in his/her head, replete with multiple gunshots and various weaponry and possibly some artistic scattering of shotgun shells.
It does seem -- from the rare mystery novels I read (swinging between historical-based works like Ellis Peters’ Cadfael or Elizabeth Eyre’s renaissance mysteries, and the hardboiled style of Chandler) -- that emphasis is one of the most powerful weapons in a mystery or suspense novelist’s arsenal. I’m not sure, then, why other genres -- which often contain mystery or suspense to some degree -- don’t capitalize on this skill, or practice it more, or are the very least more cognizant of the impact on readers. I mean, in a mystery/suspense work, if I’m told repeatedly that a character has gorgeous red hair, I’m going to look for some reason I’m getting this information: is it a red herring? is it to distract me? is it a sign I should look for some other character with red hair? should I be looking for a bottle of hairdye, instead, and be cluing *cough* in on the fact that the red-haired character is oh-so-coincidentally the exact same age as the former mistress who disappeared under mysterious conditions ten years ago?
SFF details, on the other hand, frequently seem tossed about just to make sure I didn’t miss that Really Fabulous And Wonderful Fantasy (or SF) Detail... in particular, strange-colored eyes, fangs, computer systems, and spaceships get this the most. Oh, don’t even get me started on how many times some authors must remind me of a character’s eye color; I’d say they’ve caught the fanficcers’ love of stone eyeballs (obsidian orbs, emerald orbs, gag, etc), but that’s probably another chicken-and-egg routine.
Regardless, the notion of emphasis just doesn’t appear to ping on the radar of the average SFF author. Does a repeated detail impact those readers with stricter SFF-preferences than myself (meaning, those who don’t also have a concurrent interest in mystery/suspense or thriller genre)? Does it fade into the background, or does repeating an otherwise tiny detail a requirement for making some ‘especially fantastical’ element stand out against the madding crowd of fantastical elements in a story?
Or is it that an SFF author may be using the detail as a shorthand -- that is, in the first introduction, I get a lovely view of the protagonist’s wizardly kitchen. In later scenes, the author trims the full scene-setting paragraphs, but references it via mentioning a single part, say, the hand-wrought crucible. I can see how that might work as a sort of mnemonic, triggering the reader’s recollection of the entire kitchen setup.
On the other hand -- at least on readers like me -- it can backfire if the same detail is used as the device, every single time. It’s almost like overuse of a pet phrase in a character’s dialogue, or throwing in “yeh” for “you” in every line. What at first may have seemed like a saving play in terms of not boring the reader with the whole nine yards at every mention, might equally be read as lazy. In the latter case, past some unknown (if intuitively understood) point, that lazy singularity becomes as obtrustive in its own right as any potential plot-point like a gun.
Technically, an author who uses ‘crucible’ to reference ‘the entire alchemical setup’ is using synedoche /seh-NEK-deh-key/, and thus we segue into the irregular feature, Today’s Trivia! Aren’t you lucky?
Synecdoche, generally speaking, is the use of a part of a thing, to refer to the whole of that thing. For instance, saying, “give us this day our daily bread,” where “bread” is standing in for “the entire meal/feast”. Bread is one part of a meal; one could just as easily say, “give us this day our daily rice,” and be using synecdoche (though usually synecdoche works best where the named part is commonly known as a part of the whole). It can be an oft-used by rarely identified pattern behind a cliche: “put your shoulder into it,” where “shoulder” is read as meaning/implying “all of you”. Or, where the part is a definite limited aspect of the whole (compared to the first example, where bread could honestly be the entire meal regardless of the phrase’s use): “I can drive, I’ve got wheels.” We all know you can’t get anywhere with only four large tires piled up in your driveway, but we easily take the name of the ‘part’ and mentally insert the ‘whole’ to derive the intended meaning.
(Wow, it’s like creating variables in a computer syntax. Hey, there, we’re all secretly code monkeys after all.)
Synecdoche is often confused with metonymy /meh-TAHN-nee-mee/, which is sort of related but a little different (this is cousin of the simile-metaphor confuzzlement, you could say). Metonymy is where the two things are related/connected (if on a social/cultural level), but the named part is not necessarily a part of the actual whole. When you say, “the Hill announced”, you actually mean “the United States Congress”, which happens to meet on the Hill, but it isn’t the hill. Congress, after all, being a group of people and not a geological phenomenon, though I suppose that may be debatable for some. (Hasn’t Senator Pell retired by now? He’s certainly as old as the average hill.)
Or, if you referred to “the press” -- where once that might’ve meant the actual printing press (for a newspaper), now it means “the entire news media.” Metonymy is most common in using addresses to represent what’s associated with that address, like Hollywood (for the entire film industry), Wall Street (for the entire stock market), Moscow (for the Russian government), etc.
When I learned this, I had a classmate from Schenectady (New York), a town with a very similar pronuncation: skah-NEK-tah-dee. (This is why, unfortunately, I often mispronounce ‘synecdoche’ as the town’s name before getting it right, but at least I don’t confuse the two literary tools anymore.) His recommended mnemonic is that to say “Schenectady” and mean “New York State” is synecdoche because the town is part of the state.
In a novel, it’s a lot harder to gauge emphasis. It’s especially hard for authors (I know this quite well myself) because after a certain number of read-throughs, you just can’t unpack the story in your head anymore. Hell, sometimes in discussing it or revising it, you can’t even remember which scenes are in, or excised from, this version, or did you add that back in, no, wait, you cut that... didn’t you? So knowing how many times you repeated yourself can be really hard; the world of tech does help to some degree in that now you can search for phrases or words, and in some programs you can even get a ‘repeated word’ count (that is, a complete list of every word used in a document and the number of time used). Until the development of technology that can compare meaning of a phrase or paragraph and search for related/somewhat similar instances elsewhere -- fuzzy logic, I suppose? -- I guess writers must rely on editors and beta-readers to point out when something got mentioned over and over... and over.
Which in turn depends on whether the editor/beta knows to look for repetition in the first place, or whether the person can track it. A big part of that is also whether the story is read start-to-finish, which is tangential but does matter when critiquing. I know for a fact that when I read serialized works -- stories written over a stretch of time and released in parts, like multi-novel stories, or chapters in a comic book, or even web-printed fanfic and original fiction -- that when I begin reading after the work is completed, I often have to wade through at least a page (or more) of backstory.
When this occurs every single chapter, it can get annoying, but it’s not noticeable to the reader if the break between chapter-reading is more than a week or two. In that case, the reader does require some kind of refresher (however minor or passing); the drawback is that if someone is reading to critique and has a break between chapters, repetition abruptly disappears. It’s no longer a ‘repetition’ from a previous chapter; it now falls into the category of ‘useful backstory that rings a faint bell but at the same time cleverly reminds the reader of important details’...
That works, until you come along and read it start-to-finish in one night, and in that instance, suddenly those chapterly refreshers get really freaking annoying.
In other words: don’t dump a story on your beta/editor until it’s complete. Obvious, yes, but still.
The other function of emphasis is to create belief. I’m not sure how else I can put it, but that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn (err, so to speak) from reading visual-based stories. Okay, this is both what I was saying above, and expanding beyond that to a positive thing. Hrm, if my comments above are saying that ‘repetition becomes obtrusive in a PUT UP OR SHUT UP AUTHOR kinda aggravation,’ here I’m saying that without repetition, I won’t believe that seeing a starting point necessarily means the ending point has arrived.
I mention this because while it seems authors are -- understandably so, sometimes -- blind to the subtler repetition, it’s the major repetition that they jump to cut when they’re over a word limit. A story won’t take a huge hit if you balance out the differing emphases to purposefully highlight what is of actual importance/impact on the plot, but it will take a huge hit if you remove some types of emphatic repetition.
Best example off the top of my head is this: you’re watching a movie in which two characters decide to drive from Boston to Atlanta, and that the trip has some bearing on the plot development. That’s easily a sixteen-hour drive, if you don’t hit traffic. Chances are the movie won’t show them getting in the car, then jump-cut to them getting out in front of their friend’s house unless the time they spent will produce no shift in their relationship (IOW, not plot-impact). Even the shortest of “from here to there” segments will have some kind of repetition, which indicates the passage of time (and may infer conflict or resolution development hints, as well): road signs flash past, more road signs, more road signs, and we always see the same person at the wheel. Entire passage takes maybe two, three minutes.
Or, the car pulls up at a rest stop that says “welcome to New York,” then another for New Jersey, then one for Delaware: you’re going to conclude from the close repetition that this pattern continued, but you couldn’t have concluded that without seeing the first two or three instances in the set.
I know, I know, it’s the concept of showing, not telling, but what I’m getting at is that sometimes, what you show must repeat a specific item, in order to emphasize it and its connotations... if the most likely conclusion from the emphasis bears on the plot or conflict. Consider the case of a roadtrip where the first scene shows A driving out of Boston (plus road signs), then B driving while A sleeps, and B pays the toll, then A driving while they stop at a North Carolina rest stop for B to use the bathroom. There’s no consistency nor repetition, and the emphasis of giving the roadtrip segment even just five minutes becomes an emphasis far more open to interpretation. (I think it was When Harry Met Sally, in the beginning of the movie when the characters roadtrip together to NYC, that demonstrates how a short travelling segment can use repetition to emphasize character interaction and potential conflict.)
Now, to bring that around to the notion of emphasis in the manner of how much time is alloted -- words on a page, or pictures on a screen -- and how the lack thereof can really deal a blow to a romantic plotline being believeable: I’m posting a single page from Lovers in 1k Apartment by Hyouta Fujimaya, one of my absolute favorite mangaka. (I think the licensed American title is Lovers Flat, but I’m not positive.)
Fujimaya writes stories of gay love, yes, but she’s a lot less focused on the smex (hell, she's practically PG by her counterpart's standards, doing a lot more implying than showing) and far more focused on the complexities and realities of relationships. The first story I read by her, Dear Green, wasn’t about a break-up or get-together, but just a series of shorts about a couple in their late twenties; her author’s note at the end said she knew it wasn’t the high-intensity kind of story that’s really popular, but that when gay friends told her how much they loved that the story is about a quite-married-like couple who are just plain regular people, that’s what mattered most to her. I can respect that.
Anyway, in this particular story, there are two couples, both of which are struggling with the ramifications of being attracted to the same sex, along with their culture’s views/prejudices about it, and for one of the characters, his belief that it just couldn’t ever be “love” between men, not in the “real” sense.
Context complete, this page made me stop, back up, and take a second look, then step back and take a larger look at the overall story. It’s the best example of illustrating emphasis, pun not necessarily intended. The six-chapter story contains two separate plotlines, with the final two chapters weaving the four characters (neighbors in the complex) together. At about 155 pages total (not counting cover page and closing pages for each), each chapter averages 25 pages, roughly. That means Fujimaya had fifty pages to get the first couple together, another fifty for the second couple, and the last fifty to contrast them as each couple irons out the last of their conflicts/issues.
As far as I’m concerned, in her mangaka-world, fifty pages for a storyline is equivalent to what’s covered in the first published novel of a romance three-parter... which means fifty drawn pages is about equal to 300 pages, or approximately 75K words. That means that for a single page, Fujiyama is covering about the same ground a novelist would cover in 1500 words, or six full pages in a paperback book.
That means, when you get a page like the one below, it’s holding massive significance. [NOTE: it’s originally Japanese-language, so if you’re not used to reading right-to-left, I put blue numbers to indicate the reading order.]
When you’re writing with words, it’s a bit easier to spit them out, revise them, go back and edit or tweak. With drawing, I’d expect revisions to be a bit more of an issue because too much revision of one frame can impact the rest of the page -- and beyond that, the layout and flow of all the pages after that. (I mean, what if you realize you could cut out two of the three rows, above? Big honking blank space, then, which in itself can call attention to what’s above it or below it, or what’s within it, if text; if you’re looking to remove an emphatic section, the white space would cause this to backfire on you, based on everything I’ve read, at least. A reader notices the white space just as much as the black, but I’ll get to that in below.)
The reason I bring up the ease of revision is that it matches what I’ve read in interviews with comic/manga artists, that they must storyboard each page, in a rough sketch, to make sure the layout and flow -- visually -- matches what they want to illustrate/emphasize within the story’s development itself. What gets shown is as important to them as what a word-artist ‘shows’ you on the page, after all. They’re just more literal about their ‘show’, is all.
Gary Provost’s point was to make every word count, and to cut the ones that don’t. Reading comics and manga have really driven home to me that when you have limited space be that magazine limits or publisher word count maxes, that not only must every word count, but every scene must count twice. Looking back at the context of the story, and the excerpted page above, you can see the single page gets that much emphasis and time on a relatively inane interaction because it’s doing double-time, and that makes it worth the space. It’s the first time the neighbors have come face to face while the boyfriend of one is present; it’s demonstrating a friendship/relationship between the couple as an educational moment for the prejudiced neighbor struggling with his own illusions of ‘what happens after you become a couple’.
It’s also -- as Fujimaya goes on in the next page to have the delivering-neighbor apologize for his startled reaction and explain it away as due to his sudden thought of “wow, they’re just like any married couple,” that the couple, in turn, must stop and look at their own interaction to see the comfort level that had developed between them without them realizing it.
We wouldn’t have gotten any of that, if we’d not seen the original interaction, so it was worth granting what comes to -- over this page, and the two that ‘close out’ the delivery and the small-if-significant revelation -- what’s probably the equivalent of an entire chapter in a novel. Imagine that: if you were reading a 75K novel that had eighteen pages to cover delivering a pizza. (Then again, what’s that about a picture and a thousand words?) Now, imagine if you got this type of friendship/relationship behavior illustration twice; you’d probably believe the same as me, that this couple has very a comfortable, solid (if not perfect or perfectly happy), positive kind of relationship.
You know as well as I do that a good writer could cover this scene -- showing, not telling -- in about 1500 words or so. There’d be no reason to bestow an entire chapter on it, but I raised that correlation not as a realistic value but to demonstrate how important it is that despite limited space, Fujimaya knew the readers would need to see the details, however minute, before the relationship could honestly be believed.
It always amazes me just how many novelists forget this, in their romantic plots/subplots.
In Dear Green, the series of short stories focused on one [damn near married] couple, Fujiyama explores the conflicts that occur even when one is in an established relationship (and particularly while in a society that frowns on such things). The majority of the conflicts, then, arise due to the couple doing their best to appear as nothing more than two high school friends who’d attended the same university and then ended up rooming together to save money; for the context of the following excerpt, I should add that the couple lives in the apartment upstairs from the cafe that one of them owns (which means Otoumi is clearly entering the cafe from the upstairs apartment). Since the bubbles jump around a bit more, I numbered them in per Asian-order reverse reading, in case you’re not used to that.
I guess this is the comic-book variant on the throwaway line, but it’s a throwaway gesture. In the bottom right, below the #7 speech bubble, Yukari (the cafe owner) hands Otoumi a cup of tea. There’s no comment made, no request, no notice is even drawn to it. It’s the same gesture couples make the world over, when used to a partner’s pattern; friends will do this, true, but the no-words-needed behavior is most often associated with “been together a long, long time” of coupledom. Like the previous example, Fujiyama chooses to have an onlooker remark on the behavior; unlike the previous version, the observer doesn’t specify what made him say, “you’re just like a married couple.” He simply drops the comment (a definite bombshell in that society) but it’s left up to the astute reader to notice the exact moment that would prompt someone to draw this conclusion.
But to my point, it’s that Fujiyama knows to illustrate -- even as a ‘throwaway’ gesture -- something that is such a crucial aspect of the average reader’s expectations of ‘how a long-time couple acts’. Rather than tell us that the couple’s been together for five years, or even rather than show us that they’re celebrating their fifth anniversary, she chooses to show in the most subtle of acts, knowing that it’s the tiny, subtle details that -- when repeated, like the variations in a canon -- together create a huge emphasis but without ever being obtrusive. Much of the time she doesn’t really call attention to it, if the scene has no third party to observe.
There’s one bit (that naturally I can’t find in the Dear Green series) where Yukari walks into Otoumi’s study to see how work is coming along, and Otoumi’s fallen asleep at his drafting table (again). The first shot is Yukari looking into the room, with an expression somewhere between ‘what? again?’ and ‘go figure’. The next shot, we see him coming out of the room, thinking about what he needs to do in the cafe -- and behind him, Otoumi continues to sleep, but now he’s got a blanket draped over his shoulders.
That’s what I mean when I say, to make me believe that a situation exists between two characters, I need the emphasis of repetition: to believe they’re growing attracted, to believe they’ve come to care for each other, and most importantly to believe that they genuinely like the other person, and genuinely want to be around the other person. If I never see two characters laugh together over something, I have a hard time believing they’ve got much more than one-night-stand lust, or at best, a series of nights but little more. It’s a complaint most often leveled at Hollywood romances that rush the romance to get to the stakes, when the best way to describe the situation is simply, “I couldn’t figure out what he saw in her” or vice versa, or for both, even. How many lovers do you know, when asked why they love someone, say, “oh, I don’t know, it’s all the little things...”
Lastly, the other type of little things that really do count, but this one is rather bizarre (to me, at least). Recently I’ve been playing a lot with Final Cut, thanks to now having a computer that can handle the size of the program and has enough drive-space free for the source material. A lot of what I’ve been doing is mostly fiddling: here’s a short passage of music, what happens when I edit in this way, versus that way, what does this kind of cut do, what does that do... it’s almost like a moving-pictures form of storytelling, wait, it is a visual storytelling mode, even if it’s using someone else’s pictures (an anime series) and someone else’s sound (old Brit band).
I’ve been realizing the visual expression, via manipulation, plays a big role in what I conclude an image means. Yeah, yeah, so I knew that already but it’s one thing to know it, another to grok it.
Anyway, every now and then while editing, I’ll come up against a passage where the lyrics and beat call for an image or series of images that are a set value. Need something that fits visually and thematically, but is no more than seventy-nine frames, except that this is of course (murphy, damn you!) where the perfect image is closer to ninety-nine frames. Ugh! Well, I could trim it on either end, but then the merge from the previous image to this one doesn’t work quite so neatly, or maybe that makes the jump at the end too abrupt, so I’ll count frames. Hmmm, what a fascinating thing to realize.
[LJ won’t let me embed video, uh, or I’m just slow today, so you’ll have to d/l directly, sorry. Hopefully ya’ll won’t crash my server or something.]
original version
That’s the original clip, at forty frames in length. I did them as two separate (assuming this works) so you can see them side-by-side, erm, sort of. Anyway, if I break that clip down and go through it frame by frame, each individual image is not completely unique, nor are they regular. (The background moves continously but minutely, since I think that’s computer-generated to auto-layer behind the image as part of the production, so ignore that; I just mean the character in the foreground.) In fact, the pattern is 2 frames for an image, then 3 frames for the next shot, then 2 frames for the 3rd image, then 3 frames for the 4th, and so on. It’s 2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3 to the end of the forty frames. Most of the sequences I’ve broken down follow a variant of this pattern, and in a lot of the action shots it actually expands to be 3-4-3-4-3-4 with a few 5-frame images thrown in every now and then.
Naturally, being me, I said: hey, if I just get rid of all those 3rd frames, then I’d have an image that begins and ends where I want, and is the length I want. Perfect! So I did, and I got this.
edited version
Watch it, then watch it a second time. Now, go watch the first, then the second. That’s what I had to do, at least, because after creating a series of action shots edited in this manner -- trying to figure out how to identify the high point of an action or gesture and then match it to each beat of a high-hat -- I sat down and watched the rendered rough draft... and it felt like I couldn’t register the action, somehow. It felt like it went by too fast, that I kept missing something. The edited version isn’t choppy, or unweildly, and it’s only about 15% shorter than the original (34 frames). But do you watch it and feel like it just zipped by, compared to the first one? I certainly do.
This is where we come back to writing (as usual): y’know how teachers/experienced writers often have to explain to new writers that using “said” is not a crime, and that using it all the time isn’t a crime either, and that you don’t have to say “the doctor” and “the redheaded boy” but can just say “Jane” and “John,” and readers won’t ‘see’ either the same way they don’t ‘see’ the verb “said”?
I think that’s what the extra beats are, in the animation clip. They’re the ‘said’ of the visual world. It’s one-thirtieth of a second -- which now that I think about it is probably all the time we really apply to the verb ‘said’ when reading at a regular pace? -- but it’s required. It’s just the slightest amount of a pause, just the barest breath, that lets us process what we’ve seen up to then, before the story/image speeds onto the next. Or maybe those extra frames are the periods at the ends of a sentence, and that’s why watching the edited version without them makes me feel like I’m watching a run-on sentence in pictures.
On the other hand, maybe it’s just me. Not an uncommon conclusion, but I remain hopeful that someday it won’t be.
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no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2008 02:38 am (UTC)Ah, well.
Fujiyama, huh? Sounds delightful, and I've had a hankering for good love stories lately. *goes off to see what she can find*
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Date: 21 Jan 2008 06:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2008 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2008 06:59 am (UTC)Anyone who braves the post office on a Monday morning needs one. A Tuesday after a Monday holiday needs a very special one. Double thanks.