Writing About Writing About Writing
Aug. 12th, 2011 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodel I was going to talk about kids in fanfic, but this is something else I'd had on the back burner.
Anne Shirley, the beloved and iconic red-haired Canadian girl from the Anne of Green Gables books, is a writer. She never becomes a career journalist or novelist or anything like that, but that's besides the point. She's a writer.
And she starts off writing the most godawful stories imaginable, and she forms a writing club with her friends (Diana, Ruby, Jane) and they all write pulpy, melodramatic Mary Sue stories together... under dramatic nom de plumes like Rosamond Montmorency. Reading the antics of Anne and her friends was like being exposed to meta on Mary Sueism before I even knew what the concept was.
Anne dissects her little club:
"Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental. She puts too much lovemaking into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little. Jane never puts any because she says it makes her feel so silly when she had to read it out loud. Jane's stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them. I mostly always have to tell them what to write about, but that isn't hard for I've millions of ideas."
(Anne of Green Gables, pg 293)
When you started out as an amateur writer, you probably fell into one of these categories. Admit it.
Anne's own stories are like a loopy synthesis of her friends' foibles-- declarations of love, improbable events, heart-wrenching deaths and grand funerals, and penitents sent off to lunatic asylums. She, of course, doesn't see the absurdity.
"All the good people are rewarded and all the bad ones are suitably punished. I'm sure that must have a wholesome effect. The moral is the great thing. Mr. Allan says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry." (pg 294)
In short, the entire Story Club arc in Anne of Green Gables serves as pretty striking presentation of the steps a young (female) writer goes through on the way to not writing crap. And believe me, Anne's early tales, like the saga of peerless Geraldine and her violet-eyed friend Cordelia, are crap. People don't talk like people... or act like people. Everyone's an idiot. Everything from human biology to basic etiquette is mangled for the sake of the drama. Anne doesn't know she's writing crapfic (though some of the other characters try to nudge her in that direction), but the reader probably knows it and is laughing along with the Allans at the silliness.
Anne learns. Slowly. Life knocks some of the silliness out of her-- both in "romantic" mishaps like dyeing her hair green and the general change in attitude that happens in adolescence. But she's also subjected to criticism that molds her.
"Miss Stacy sometimes has us write a story for training in composition, but she won't let us write anything but what might happen in Avonlea in our own lives, and she criticizes it very sharply and makes us criticize our own too. I never thought my compositions had so many faults until I began to look for them myself. I felt so ashamed I wanted to give up altogether, but Miss Stacy said I could learn to write well if I only trained myself to be my own severest critic. And so I am trying to." (pg 356)
Anne does not toss her head and stamp her foot and accuse Miss Stacy of trying to quash her individual genius. She buckles down and pays attention and tries to learn the craft. But it does take a while. When Anne is in college, she tries to get a story published in Canadian Woman or some other respectable magazine. We see Anne wrestle with unruly characters and bounce ideas off Diana, who serves as a beta of sorts. Plot points and character names are discussed in considerable detail.
"I must have one pathetic scene in it," said Anne thoughtfully. "I might let ROBERT RAY be injured in an accident and have a death scene."
"No, you mustn't kill BOBBY off," declared Diana, laughing. "He belongs to me and I want him to live and flourish. Kill somebody else if you have to."
But the story, "Averil's Atonement," is rejected by every editor who sees it... because it's still crap!
"Now, Diana, tell me candidly, do you see any faults in my story?"
"Well," hesitated Diana, "that part where AVERIL makes the cake doesn't seem to me quite romantic enough to match the rest. It's just what anybody might do. Heroines shouldn't do cooking, _I_ think."
"Why, that is where the humor comes in, and it's one of the best parts of the whole story," said Anne. And it may be stated that in this she was quite right.
Diana prudently refrained from any further criticism, but Mr. Harrison was much harder to please. First he told her there was entirely too much description in the story.
"Cut out all those flowery passages," he said unfeelingly.
Anne had an uncomfortable conviction that Mr. Harrison was right, and she forced herself to expunge most of her beloved descriptions, though it took three re-writings before the story could be pruned down to please the fastidious Mr. Harrison.
"I've left out ALL the descriptions but the sunset," she said at last. "I simply COULDN'T let it go. It was the best of them all."
"It hasn't anything to do with the story," said Mr. Harrison, "and you shouldn't have laid the scene among rich city people. What do you know of them? Why didn't you lay it right here in Avonlea -- changing the name, of course, or else Mrs. Rachel Lynde would probably think she was the heroine."
(Anne of the Island, Ch 12)
Seriously. This is one of the most unsparing critiques of a developing writer in all of kiddie lit. Anne makes every damned mistake we all did, do, and will make in an attempt to be writers-- except for fangirl Japanese. Wrong era.
The story eventually gets published... after Diana secretly refashions it as an advertisement for baking powder! This dash of marketplace reality sobers Anne greatly, and I don't recall any instances of literary silliness later. I wish I could report on the sort of things Anne wrote as a matured writer, but I think that took place in one of the later, boring Anne books, which I have completely forgotten. The silliness made much more of an impact on me, clearly.
Maybe there's a lesson in that!
In closing:
"No, I shall never try to write a story again," declared Anne, with the hopeless finality of nineteen when a door is shut in its face.
"I wouldn't give up altogether," said Mr. Harrison reflectively. "I'd write a story once in a while, but I wouldn't pester editors with it. I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne -- I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men in the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them -- though Mrs. Lynde believes we're all bad. But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne."
Montgomery had even more to say about writing in the Emily of New Moon books, but I didn't much care for that series.
Anne Shirley, the beloved and iconic red-haired Canadian girl from the Anne of Green Gables books, is a writer. She never becomes a career journalist or novelist or anything like that, but that's besides the point. She's a writer.
And she starts off writing the most godawful stories imaginable, and she forms a writing club with her friends (Diana, Ruby, Jane) and they all write pulpy, melodramatic Mary Sue stories together... under dramatic nom de plumes like Rosamond Montmorency. Reading the antics of Anne and her friends was like being exposed to meta on Mary Sueism before I even knew what the concept was.
Anne dissects her little club:
"Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental. She puts too much lovemaking into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little. Jane never puts any because she says it makes her feel so silly when she had to read it out loud. Jane's stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them. I mostly always have to tell them what to write about, but that isn't hard for I've millions of ideas."
(Anne of Green Gables, pg 293)
When you started out as an amateur writer, you probably fell into one of these categories. Admit it.
Anne's own stories are like a loopy synthesis of her friends' foibles-- declarations of love, improbable events, heart-wrenching deaths and grand funerals, and penitents sent off to lunatic asylums. She, of course, doesn't see the absurdity.
"All the good people are rewarded and all the bad ones are suitably punished. I'm sure that must have a wholesome effect. The moral is the great thing. Mr. Allan says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry." (pg 294)
In short, the entire Story Club arc in Anne of Green Gables serves as pretty striking presentation of the steps a young (female) writer goes through on the way to not writing crap. And believe me, Anne's early tales, like the saga of peerless Geraldine and her violet-eyed friend Cordelia, are crap. People don't talk like people... or act like people. Everyone's an idiot. Everything from human biology to basic etiquette is mangled for the sake of the drama. Anne doesn't know she's writing crapfic (though some of the other characters try to nudge her in that direction), but the reader probably knows it and is laughing along with the Allans at the silliness.
Anne learns. Slowly. Life knocks some of the silliness out of her-- both in "romantic" mishaps like dyeing her hair green and the general change in attitude that happens in adolescence. But she's also subjected to criticism that molds her.
"Miss Stacy sometimes has us write a story for training in composition, but she won't let us write anything but what might happen in Avonlea in our own lives, and she criticizes it very sharply and makes us criticize our own too. I never thought my compositions had so many faults until I began to look for them myself. I felt so ashamed I wanted to give up altogether, but Miss Stacy said I could learn to write well if I only trained myself to be my own severest critic. And so I am trying to." (pg 356)
Anne does not toss her head and stamp her foot and accuse Miss Stacy of trying to quash her individual genius. She buckles down and pays attention and tries to learn the craft. But it does take a while. When Anne is in college, she tries to get a story published in Canadian Woman or some other respectable magazine. We see Anne wrestle with unruly characters and bounce ideas off Diana, who serves as a beta of sorts. Plot points and character names are discussed in considerable detail.
"I must have one pathetic scene in it," said Anne thoughtfully. "I might let ROBERT RAY be injured in an accident and have a death scene."
"No, you mustn't kill BOBBY off," declared Diana, laughing. "He belongs to me and I want him to live and flourish. Kill somebody else if you have to."
But the story, "Averil's Atonement," is rejected by every editor who sees it... because it's still crap!
"Now, Diana, tell me candidly, do you see any faults in my story?"
"Well," hesitated Diana, "that part where AVERIL makes the cake doesn't seem to me quite romantic enough to match the rest. It's just what anybody might do. Heroines shouldn't do cooking, _I_ think."
"Why, that is where the humor comes in, and it's one of the best parts of the whole story," said Anne. And it may be stated that in this she was quite right.
Diana prudently refrained from any further criticism, but Mr. Harrison was much harder to please. First he told her there was entirely too much description in the story.
"Cut out all those flowery passages," he said unfeelingly.
Anne had an uncomfortable conviction that Mr. Harrison was right, and she forced herself to expunge most of her beloved descriptions, though it took three re-writings before the story could be pruned down to please the fastidious Mr. Harrison.
"I've left out ALL the descriptions but the sunset," she said at last. "I simply COULDN'T let it go. It was the best of them all."
"It hasn't anything to do with the story," said Mr. Harrison, "and you shouldn't have laid the scene among rich city people. What do you know of them? Why didn't you lay it right here in Avonlea -- changing the name, of course, or else Mrs. Rachel Lynde would probably think she was the heroine."
(Anne of the Island, Ch 12)
Seriously. This is one of the most unsparing critiques of a developing writer in all of kiddie lit. Anne makes every damned mistake we all did, do, and will make in an attempt to be writers-- except for fangirl Japanese. Wrong era.
The story eventually gets published... after Diana secretly refashions it as an advertisement for baking powder! This dash of marketplace reality sobers Anne greatly, and I don't recall any instances of literary silliness later. I wish I could report on the sort of things Anne wrote as a matured writer, but I think that took place in one of the later, boring Anne books, which I have completely forgotten. The silliness made much more of an impact on me, clearly.
Maybe there's a lesson in that!
In closing:
"No, I shall never try to write a story again," declared Anne, with the hopeless finality of nineteen when a door is shut in its face.
"I wouldn't give up altogether," said Mr. Harrison reflectively. "I'd write a story once in a while, but I wouldn't pester editors with it. I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne -- I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men in the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them -- though Mrs. Lynde believes we're all bad. But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne."
Montgomery had even more to say about writing in the Emily of New Moon books, but I didn't much care for that series.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-12 11:10 pm (UTC)also eagerly awaiting kid post. *^*
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 05:59 pm (UTC)Yeah, kid post will be tonight, maybe?
no subject
Date: 2011-08-12 11:29 pm (UTC)I think I was Ruby Gillis.
Yes, definitely. Maybe I still am.
That's disheartening.
Now I really do want to read the original novels. I think I'll put them on my list. (Like my reading list ever gets done; as soon as I finish one book, I add three more.) If only I'd read this when I was younger.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 06:01 pm (UTC)Hah!
Now I really do want to read the original novels.
They hold up pretty well, IMO. Maybe it was the nostalgia, but just digging for quotes led me to skim several chapters. I think it helps that Montgomery does give the reader a chance to sympathize with a number of the adult characters.
I used to be so bad with the overdone descriptions... it was actually a fanfic that broke me of it. "No, we DON'T need to know the color of the soap in every bathroom of this hotel! ARGH!!!"
no subject
Date: 2011-08-12 11:32 pm (UTC)I acutely remember, in fact, a very early conversation in which I admitted that I killed a few more characters than I would've liked because they were crowding the set. My correspondent very seriously said that she had hers run off to Canada instead.
A few years later I was killing them just because I enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'm out of that phase yet. Maybe I've just gotten better at masking that fact.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 06:02 pm (UTC)The books really do stand up to time quite well. The human insight there is... above average, at the least.
A few years later I was killing them just because I enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'm out of that phase yet. Maybe I've just gotten better at masking that fact.
Yeah. I was definitely there. Still am, deep down inside.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 01:51 am (UTC)Okay lemme see.
First, the quote (Gil, right?) from your LJ Cut. One of my favorites, and the movie followed it really well. I desperately need to find my copies of those books to read because I think part of what always drew me to Anne of Green Gables (and et cetera) was the fact that she was something of a writer at heart. I'd always had SOMETHING of an imagination even though I'm quite down to earth most of the time.
Anne's way of doing things reminds me of my start in writing a little bit. Though perhaps I was more of a Jane-- writing only G rated 'fics that centered mostly on friendship/family and the "how they got together" moreso than anything especially romantic (because I did feel silly even thinking of writing it, yes). Toward my re-entry into FE fandom, though, I might have turned more toward Ruby or Anne's way of writing: overdramatic, overly-emotional pieces. XD
This was a really thoughtful piece you put together here. I think I WILL find those books. And put them on my next-to-read list. I think the fact that Anne was a shitty author endeared me to her. She did some terrible things, but she wasn't a bad person. I think that's realistic for the most part.
Then again, I think one of my favorite scenes in the movies is when she gets her tales of Avonlea published and brings them to Gilbert when he's dying of TB (IIRC, it's TB. I hope I am not remembering wrong). Good acting, there, imo.
And maybe as a kid, seeing that line-- about writing about people who "Speak every-day English"-- has always pushed me in that direction. Because I've seen those movies hundreds of times, and that bit of dialogue (which I got to earlier today watching the movies again) always, ALWAYS struck a chord with me.
Even in a FANDOM like Fire Emblem, making the characters relate-able is important to me. But like all amateur writers, I tend to fail at doing it correctly. But trying is all that matters.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 06:10 pm (UTC)No, in the books it was cranky old Mr. Harrison... one of my favorite characters, really. Montgomery has such convincing adults.
This was a really thoughtful piece you put together here
Thanks. It'd been percolating in the brain for sometime, and it surprised me a little that nobody in this circle had done it yet. But I guess fewer people read the Anne books than I'd imagined.
She did some terrible things, but she wasn't a bad person.
I don't see the Mary Sueness of a character who's so often wrong-- sometimes humorously, sometimes bitterly-- and who actually learns from it. Sues don't learn! Emily, OTOH, creeped me out. I think the pointed ears had something to do with it. Pointed ears!
and brings them to Gilbert when he's dying of TB
!
Gilbert died?
GILBERT DIES?!?
NOOOOOOOOOO. He never died in the books! Evil cruel movie adaptation!
But trying is all that matters.
Trying and paying attention to at least some of the people who are trying to help you! Which is something wonderful about Anne. She's headstrong, but she learns the advice to take... and the advice to ignore, and that sometimes one is embedded in the other.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 08:06 pm (UTC)And no, Gilbert doesn't die! But they think he's going to. iirc, Montgomery wrote about TB quite a bit, as it was being learned about more and more as she was writing books.
But yeah, if Gilbert died I wouldn't like the series at all. LMAO. He's too awesome to die. D:
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 08:31 pm (UTC)Oh, maybe that was based on the scene from the books where he nearly kicks it from typhoid fever, then. That's OK.
Montgomery wrote about TB quite a bit, as it was being learned about more and more as she was writing books.
Yeah, there's a really good examination of it that you can get through Google books. Fascinating.
He's too awesome to die. D:
Indeed.
You know, I think the Anne books left me with a lasting distaste for the name "Roy." ;P
Not that Roy Gardner was a bad guy. He just wasn't Gilbert!
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 01:09 am (UTC)Haha NOBODY could match up to Gil. :D
But the Anne books really made me like his name.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 02:25 am (UTC)Definitely wrote a lot of Mary Sues though >.>
"I wouldn't give up altogether," said Mr. Harrison reflectively. "I'd write a story once in a while, but I wouldn't pester editors with it. I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne -- I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men in the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them -- though Mrs. Lynde believes we're all bad. But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne."
I do believe that is the best critique you can get. Don't give up writing entirely, but constantly work on it to improve. And keep improving.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 06:03 pm (UTC)They're very sensible books. Which makes me wonder how much of Anne's journey was a self-critique on the part of the author.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 06:06 pm (UTC)And that not everything you write has to be shown to the people at large, too.
I wouldn't be surprised if Anne's journey was the author going, "Hey, these are actually my experiences and what I did wrong when I first started out."