ADDENDUM: Due to comment spam on LJ, I've had to disable comments on this journal.

*Blows dust off journal* Yikes, it's been a long time since I've posted here, hasn't it? I suppose it's only fitting that the first thing I have to say here in four months is about . . . well, brevity. I've been trying to gear up for fanfic again by drabbling lately, and drabbling always makes me wonder about narrative economy and whether it's really so much of a virtue as people say. When it comes to story-telling, is less really more?

A standard piece of writing advice is to CUT DOWN ON THOSE EXTRA WORDS! For me this is advice that I need desperately, since I've never met an adverb I didn't like, and really can't be happy or content unless every noun has been adorned with at least one adjective if not five three two. Okay, so, yes, I personally need to CUT DOWN ON THOSE EXTRA WORDS. But does there come a point when a narrative short form becomes so short that it doesn't give readers enough time to relax, sit down with a fizzy beverage, and enjoy themselves -- to let the story to lull them into its fictive world?

It would be immensely comforting if the answer to this question was just plain "no," but I suspect the answer is really "yes, but only if the writer knows exactly what she is doing." Which is depressing, because this answer doesn't let us hapless drabble-writers off the hook. We have to TRY to tell a complete story, or at least evoke a complete story by depicting one of its scenes so vividly that the drabble somehow gestures toward the shadowy outlines of a much larger sequence of events.

And yikes, that task is so difficult that I for one think I've managed it, erm, once, in another fandom. But I keep drabbling anyway, because

a) attempting the almost-impossible is good for the soul even if you fail;
b) drabbling is a good writerly exercise that lets you see how much you can strip away;
c) most importantly, drabbling lets you experiment with characters you love, lets you come at them from different angles.

This kind of experimentation seems particularly useful for characters like Harry and Draco, who are so . . . hmmm, volatile. They're such a potentially explosive combination that their story could turn out a thousand different ways depending on the phase of the moon, or the wrong word at the wrong time, or the right word at the right time, or, well, anything. The possibilities are endless, and drabbles let you entertain a lot of them in a short time, so you can see which one of them wants to germinate into a full-blown fic.

That's the theory, anyway. The practice is beneath the cut, for anyone who'd like to give some mini-H/Ds a spin. All three of these 100-word drabbles were originally posted on on hd100, and since my take on the pairing can vary dramatically, I've given each of these a Degree of Fluffiness rating on a scale of Tribble (very fluffy, obviously) to Nagini (not fluffy at all).

( 1. 'Revelation' [H/D; fluffiness rating: definitely a Tribble]Collapse )

( 2. 'Enigma' [H/D; fluffiness rating: definitely Nagini]Collapse )

( 3. 'Recognition' [H/D; fluffiness rating: also Nagini]Collapse )

I'm off to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for the second time this afternoon, and it's struck me that the last few years of my adult life have been weirdly like a series of dreams come true. Well, not come true, but I can SEE them now -- that is, apparently God, in Her infinite wisdom, has decided that all my favorite childhood books are going to be made into splendid movies now that I'm no longer a child any more.

There's something very odd about this, about the way that images can seem to fulfill the promise of dearly loved texts, and yet can seem at the same time a little beside the point. When I was six years old I would have given anything -- ANYTHING -- to see Aslan. Now, mumble-mumble years later, seeing him does indeed make me gasp, and I'm mildly horrified to say that when Lucy opened that wardrobe door in the movie, I cried.

But these books -- and The Lord of the Rings is the same way -- have been in my life for so long, and are, after many rereadings over decades, so deeply intertwined with my sense of who I am, that the images, while delightful, somehow don't feel like they're mine. The stories are more to me than what they might look like. Aslan isn't just a lion, he's an idea, or a sort of accumulation of ideas that I've had about him over the years. Those ideas were always private. The weren't things you could point to on the screen and say, that's it.

I can't help wondering how different the experience must be for people whose dearest childhood books are the Harry Potter series. I'm not interested, just now, in differences among Narnia and Middle Earth and wizarding England. What interests me at the moment is that those of us who grew up with Narnia and Middle Earth grew up without seeing them, and those of you who grew up with Harry Potter grew up seeing wizarding England almost immediately. There will be no decades-long gap of repeated rereadings while you wonder and dream of what the final dual in GoF might look like. You might like or dislike the movie's version, but it's there in your head, and you won't have to live in a state where it was just an idea.

It must be cool, seeing your dreams so soon, like getting a Christmas present that's exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. For those of us who grew up when movie magic was just not up to the task of showing Aslan, seeing him at last is more like stumbling across that present in your attic, still fully wrapped, decades later. It's exactly what you wanted, but it doesn't mean quite the same thing any more. And what you got instead -- a lifetime of dreaming -- turned out to be rather nice as well.

What do you know: size really does matter. Just saw Goblet of Fire in IMAX, and:

Oooooooooooooooh.

Wow.

Hmmm. You know, this size business is one way that Movies Are Different From Books. Is there some equivalent in written narrative to the transformed experience you get when Harry is two or three stories tall and the dragon is approximately the size of Rhode Island? Hmmmm. I dunno.

It's tempting to think of this difference in visual scale as somehow analogous to the difference between a novel-length story and a short story: the novel is richer in detail, bigger in scope -- just bigger. So perhaps there's a greater chance that the novel will overwhelm you in a good way, to the extent that you lose track of the outside world and soak in the story's world. Do BIG movies work the same way as long stories? Well, yeah, kind of. As in a novel, in a BIG movie there are (or seem to be) more details: you can see the embroidery in Dumbledore's hat, and it's easier to let your eyes wander and take in elements of the background that you otherwise might not notice. You can see, too, particularly clever touches from the special effects department that make you think the magic is real: for example when ( mild visual movie spoiler.Collapse ) Wow! *gulp* It really happened, didn't it?

Well, maybe. The analogy between BIG MOVIE and LONG STORY seems a bit fishy to me, in a way I can't quite pin down at the moment. Possibly my brain is not working well because in the case of this particular movie you can make the case that the size of the image does matter. So much of GoF, book and movie, is about the uniquely teenaged horror of being looked at. Harry doesn't want to be a spectacle, but time and time again, he is. He's constantly being stared at: by the other students when they think he cheated, by the readers of the Daily Prophet, by EVERYONE when he has to dance at the ball, by Myrtle in the bath scene, by the spectators at the various tasks -- and finally and most invasively, by Voldemort, who can see Harry in Harry's dreams, and who finally can not only see him, but touch him, take his blood, invade him.

GoF is haunted by a terror of exposure -- and maybe this is why the apparently incongruous ball scene makes perfect emotional sense: being put on display at a party is just as much of a trial, if not more of one, than anything else Harry faces. He's a spectacle, and for Harry Potter that horrible realization is an inevitable part of his growth into his role as a hero (heroes, by their nature, are always on display).

"I'm not READY for this," Harry says to Sirius at one point. Who would be? And maybe the BIG movie helps make that point. When Harry is two stories tall, and when his every pore, every drop of sweat, every tear is exposed to a curious audience, somehow his terror seems even more heart-wrenching, and even more justified, than ever.

 

Title: Changeling
Author: lydiabennet
Summary: Fred wants a dog more than anything, and he'll do anything to get one. Anything at all.
Rating, Length: PG, 2060 words
Author's notes: Speculates on how much magic wizarding children can perform; I'm assuming that Fred, being Fred, is a bit precocious, and not always pleasantly so. No dogs were harmed in the making of this fic; I did, however, harm four lines from SS/PS by shamelessly stealing them and putting them to uses they were never intended to serve. Written for jamie2109 and nocturnali's AWDT challenge.

Changeling

(  Fred's first dog was a bit of a mess. Even Fred had to admit that. It could run -- mostly, and it even barked once, but still, you could tell it had been magicked out of mud by someone with a lot of ideas.Collapse )

 

Back in the Olden Days, if you were interested in say, Star Trek, you had to WORK for it. If you wanted to buy a Phantasy Fur Tribble, you had to go to a con or maybe travel hundreds of miles barefoot through the snow to a seedy little store, where you and your pale, shell-shocked fellow addicts would clutch the tribbles in trembling fingers and gasp with memorabilia lust.

Then you'd go home and put your addict-self in a box, and resume your normal life until the next weekend. It was frustrating, but the difficulty was part of the thrill. You felt you were doing something secret and illicit and subversively cool. Once in blue moon there would be a movie, but it was one movie among many others and relatively easy to miss.

HP is different. It's impossible to turn on the TV or go to a bookstore without running across some HP reference. This is an improvement, in a way, because the object of desire is always there, but it's also inconvenient, again because the object of desire is always there.

So, there you are, walking down the street, thinking about insurance or something, and Harry floats by on the bus (well, on a poster on the bus). And you think, "HI HARRY!" and all your productive thoughts about insurance are gone. In a funny way, so is the thrill. I'm looking forward to the movie, but maybe I'd be happier if the movie were harder to get at. HP is so universally available that an obsession with it no longer feels quite so secret. Which is great. But somehow not.

Title: World enough and time
Author: lydiabennet
Pairing/rating: H/D with others mentioned; PG-13
Summary: Harry has a job to do, but wants more. Angsty.
Notes: Inspired by jamie2109 and nocturnali's AWDT challenge.
Length: 2700 words
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters and settings belong to J.K. Rowling, and neither I nor anyone else in the universe has ever benefited financially from writing fanfic.

( Harry had forgotten how dark winter could be.Collapse )

So, in the next month or so, the following fannish things will explode in a theater/bookstore near me:

• The next volume of A Song of Ice and Fire will be released, and have I reread the others? Why, no. I have been a fannish grasshopper, staring at the impending publication date and frantically reading boysex on the net rather than reminding myself of the 5,627,832 plot threads in this glorious series.
• The new HP movie will come out, and have I reread Goblet of Fire? Why, no; I was reading boysex on the net. There seems to be a pattern here.
• Brokeback Mountain will come out, so to speak, and while I've reread the fantastic twenty-page gay cowboy story on which this is based, and have prepared myself mentally by watching The Wedding Banquet twice, especially that scene where the guys chase each other up the stairs, I'm not sure how I'll fit 9,623 viewings of this new movie in with all the other things I have to do.
• The first movie in The Chronicles of Narnia will come out, and I don't need to reread that because it's engraved in my soul, but still, seeing that in the same multiplex with Brokeback Mountain will be a bit jarring, to say the least.
• King Kong will come out, and about that I'm dubious except, Peter Jackson. At least this one requires no preparation, unless I should be going to the zoo and taking notes there.

There should be a law against too many good things happening at once. Fannish monuments should be rationed out over the year, like flu shots. At the very least they should be clustered in February, when everyone is depressed and there's no holiday entertaining to do.

All the good Harry Potter names seem to have been taken in 1999, so my user name is from Pride and Prejudice. Lydia was the foolish sister, and I've always liked her in a sneaky sort of way. True, she had all the common sense of a ball of yarn, but she was lively, to say the least.

If you're here because I friended you, hi! I hope I had the nerve to comment before I friended you, but nerve is usually in short supply with me, so it's possible that my journal appeared on your flist like a mysterious stain. Sorry! I love to read fanfic in general, and friended you because I love yours in particular.