we can't all be the goddamned Batman
Jul. 31st, 2012 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerThere's a moment in The Dark Knight Rises -- don't worry; no spoilers -- where Bruce Wayne gets from one part of the world to the other, in a very short span of time, without access to his usual resources.
How does he manage that? As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kniedzw said when I brought this up to him, "He's the goddamned Batman, that's how."
And you know, I'm fine with that as an answer. It fits the genre, and the place that scene occupies in the story; nobody wants to pause there for an extended dissertation on the logistics of international travel. Or even a short one, really. If it isn't an interesting and relevant part of the story, we should skip over it and get to the parts that are.
. . . I talk a good talk there, but the truth is that I have a damn hard time doing this in my own work. Skipping over routine things, sure. I don't do a blow-by-blow of every last action my characters take. But when something less than 100% routine happens, I have a hard time saying "my character is the goddamned Batman" and moving on. If I'd been writing The Dark Knight Rises, I would have had to figure out -- for my own edification, if nobody else's -- just how Bruce Wayne got from A to B under those circumstances. And, if it were a novel, probably looked for a place to toss in a line of narration or dialogue nodding in the direction of whatever explanation I worked out. Because however willing I am to grant other people's stories the benefit of the doubt in these cases, I have a hard time believing anybody else will do the same for me.
Obviously there are places where the benefit of the doubt falls down. If the thing being glossed over is too outrageous, I can't bridge that gap, and the stumble distracts me from the story. Or if you make too frequent a habit of doing it, I begin to feel like you're lazy, dodging all the hard stuff because you only want to have fun (and your fun gets flimsier as a result). Or if you're trying to be all realistic and crunchy about how things get done, and then you handwave past something major, I suspect you did that because you couldn't find a way to get it done, and your only answer was to cheat. I also think it's easier for movies to get away with this trick than novels. They move at their own pace, rather than the reader's, leaving less time for spotting holes; they also aren't expected to go into as much detail, lest their run time be nine hours. And some genres accommodate this trick better than others.
But we do it in novels, too, whether the extent is lesser or greater. Dorothy Dunnett spends all of a couple of sentences on telling us how half a dozen guys made their way across sixteenth-century Europe to Russia. Those sentences nod to them having a lot of trouble doing it, but it's only a nod, with no explanation; we are invited to understand that they are each the goddamned Batman, and that's how they managed it.
Sometimes it's a benefit for me to work through those things, to answer all the logistical questions for myself, if not for the reader. Sometimes, though . . . it's easy to get hung up on this, to stall forward progress because I have to nail down every last detail in my head. And sometimes I catch myself subsequently putting those details into the story, because if I don't show my math I don't trust that the reader will trust me.
It isn't just a plot issue; sometimes it's a worldbuilding one, too. For Isabella's memoirs, I'm working through a myriad of details on climate, geology, and other such details of the natural world, because my hindbrain is convinced that I can't be allowed to gloss over a single thing there. We aren't talking Tolkien's suspiciously rectangular mountain ranges here, either: I mean that if I don't set up the elevation and surrounding topography of the swamps of Mouleen precisely right for the amount of rainfall they receive, everybody will notice.
And the truth is, only some readers will. The climatologists among you. If they're paying close attention. And maybe not even then, since it isn't like I'm providing information on the exact latitude of Mouleen, or the direction of ocean currents along its shore. (Though believe you me, my brain would try to work the ocean currents out, if I didn't keep it on a leash.)
I have to do some of this for the series because it's about a scientist, and that means I need to be able to talk about the science without the whole thing falling down. But it is also supposed to be an adventure. The adventure tone is not served by me anxiously showing my math on every last detail of plot and setting. And yet I still struggle to believe that I can get away with anything, even as I let other people do it all the time.
I'd be interested in examples of authors you think have done this badly or well. What factors determine how willing you are to leap over those gaps?
How does he manage that? As
kniedzw said when I brought this up to him, "He's the goddamned Batman, that's how."And you know, I'm fine with that as an answer. It fits the genre, and the place that scene occupies in the story; nobody wants to pause there for an extended dissertation on the logistics of international travel. Or even a short one, really. If it isn't an interesting and relevant part of the story, we should skip over it and get to the parts that are.
. . . I talk a good talk there, but the truth is that I have a damn hard time doing this in my own work. Skipping over routine things, sure. I don't do a blow-by-blow of every last action my characters take. But when something less than 100% routine happens, I have a hard time saying "my character is the goddamned Batman" and moving on. If I'd been writing The Dark Knight Rises, I would have had to figure out -- for my own edification, if nobody else's -- just how Bruce Wayne got from A to B under those circumstances. And, if it were a novel, probably looked for a place to toss in a line of narration or dialogue nodding in the direction of whatever explanation I worked out. Because however willing I am to grant other people's stories the benefit of the doubt in these cases, I have a hard time believing anybody else will do the same for me.
Obviously there are places where the benefit of the doubt falls down. If the thing being glossed over is too outrageous, I can't bridge that gap, and the stumble distracts me from the story. Or if you make too frequent a habit of doing it, I begin to feel like you're lazy, dodging all the hard stuff because you only want to have fun (and your fun gets flimsier as a result). Or if you're trying to be all realistic and crunchy about how things get done, and then you handwave past something major, I suspect you did that because you couldn't find a way to get it done, and your only answer was to cheat. I also think it's easier for movies to get away with this trick than novels. They move at their own pace, rather than the reader's, leaving less time for spotting holes; they also aren't expected to go into as much detail, lest their run time be nine hours. And some genres accommodate this trick better than others.
But we do it in novels, too, whether the extent is lesser or greater. Dorothy Dunnett spends all of a couple of sentences on telling us how half a dozen guys made their way across sixteenth-century Europe to Russia. Those sentences nod to them having a lot of trouble doing it, but it's only a nod, with no explanation; we are invited to understand that they are each the goddamned Batman, and that's how they managed it.
Sometimes it's a benefit for me to work through those things, to answer all the logistical questions for myself, if not for the reader. Sometimes, though . . . it's easy to get hung up on this, to stall forward progress because I have to nail down every last detail in my head. And sometimes I catch myself subsequently putting those details into the story, because if I don't show my math I don't trust that the reader will trust me.
It isn't just a plot issue; sometimes it's a worldbuilding one, too. For Isabella's memoirs, I'm working through a myriad of details on climate, geology, and other such details of the natural world, because my hindbrain is convinced that I can't be allowed to gloss over a single thing there. We aren't talking Tolkien's suspiciously rectangular mountain ranges here, either: I mean that if I don't set up the elevation and surrounding topography of the swamps of Mouleen precisely right for the amount of rainfall they receive, everybody will notice.
And the truth is, only some readers will. The climatologists among you. If they're paying close attention. And maybe not even then, since it isn't like I'm providing information on the exact latitude of Mouleen, or the direction of ocean currents along its shore. (Though believe you me, my brain would try to work the ocean currents out, if I didn't keep it on a leash.)
I have to do some of this for the series because it's about a scientist, and that means I need to be able to talk about the science without the whole thing falling down. But it is also supposed to be an adventure. The adventure tone is not served by me anxiously showing my math on every last detail of plot and setting. And yet I still struggle to believe that I can get away with anything, even as I let other people do it all the time.
I'd be interested in examples of authors you think have done this badly or well. What factors determine how willing you are to leap over those gaps?
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no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 05:58 pm (UTC)That was a few years back, and in another country. Living where I do now, I can go to SETI lectures about planetary geology; I can meet people who could answer that question; I can sit through lectures with it still trembling on my tongue before I remember that I still don't need to know.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 06:16 pm (UTC)Nor is it the only thing we get hung up on that readers don't pay nearly as much attention to as we think they do. The more I write, the more hyper-aware I become of how few sentence structures there are, how often I use particular (entirely common and invisible) phrasings, etc. It's a professional hazard.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 08:52 pm (UTC)I'd posit readers notice people things: who does what when and where. "How" is probably a distant second. Science how is a fringe outside of stuff marketed as hard SF and probably a minority (but vocal) there. The mechanics of writing are probably noted by an equally tiny minority... one which stands out more if you hang out with writers, rather than staying home writing.
As for planet stuff, I don't think we know that much; planetary science has been a continual treadmill of surprise. Even where we do, the details are so chaotically (legitimate invocation of chaos) complicated that someone saying you're wrong is probably speaking with unwarranted confidence. The Sahara had a wet period some thousands of years ago, which I'm told doesn't even correlate tightly with the Ice Age. Do we know why? If we do, how many books are such that it comes up or would matter? How many readers can say why the Southwest was wet during the Ice Age?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 09:10 pm (UTC)One reason not to have maps in your fantasy: then it's harder for your readers to call you on bad geography. <g>
I'd go one step further on your "readers notice people things" argument, and say readers most directly notice small-scale people things. Characterization, or relationship writing: we have lots of experience with those things, and are therefore the most likely to notice where they go wrong. (As a general rule. A reader with bad social skills may well cruise on by without a hitch.) Once you get to larger-scale things, like politics or social structures, you'll still have a non-trivial subset of readers who notice, but it'll be smaller. And then there are the specialty fields, which very few people indeed will notice.
But, as you say, that minority is often very vocal. And even if they don't give direct feedback to the author about holes or mistakes, such things may well kick them out of the story -- which I want to avoid. At that point, my choices are: 1) show the math and hope I get it right, 2) work the math out, but don't show it, and hope that anybody who tries to fill in the blank feels they can do so plausibly, or 3) be entertaining enough that they either don't notice the hole or don't particularly care.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 09:26 pm (UTC)Oh, I forgot to note: various readers wonder what dwarves and elves eat. Fewer, but still many, wonder about that particularly for pre-Sun period in the Silmarilion (especially for the trees) since the Sun rising is a historical event.
I'm the only one I know of to wonder why Gondor and the Grey Havens didn't keep up naval contact. Okay, so the middle lands were depopulated by plagues with the survivors being indigenes with legitimate grudges. Coastal travel, nice and easy! I guess there were Corsairs. But I've never seen anyone ask.
OTOH, AIUI Mordor looks artificially rectangular because it is in fact an artificial fortress. "A god did it." Depending on fantasy level, "bad geography" isn't well defined short of rivers flowing uphill, and sometimes even then...
Oh, and being able to guess the Southwest is quite cool. You just don't need it for writing. :)
(I'm amused to remember my challenging you about the isolated small island of Doppleganger, and you having a bunch of rejoinders like "how do you know it's even a planet?")
no subject
Date: 2012-08-03 07:34 am (UTC)True, and the mountains in the north of the Wheel of Time map are similarly artificial (having been created during the Breaking of the World -- that and corruption by the Dark One also explain why it's hot up there, despite the cold climate immediately to the south). But man, there's a lot of bad geography in fantasy that owes its existence to bad understanding on the part of the author . . .
. . . and yes, I do include the Doppelganger setting in that statement. :-) I did better there than I did with some of my earlier maps, to stories that have not been published, but in the end -- smart-ass answers aside -- I invented that setting when I was seventeen, and didn't yet know or care about a lot of the things I do now.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-03 07:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 08:37 pm (UTC)What this says to me is that readers and viewers evaluate the fundamental logics of fantasy media very differently. For some people, a journey across the world is an obstacle in the way of the story, and they're very pleased that Batman can Bat-wave his hands and skip to the good parts. Some people think that a jump like that is a flaw in the internal logic, but not a big one (I'm in this camp, since I think it's possible for the viewer to fill in what happened). And some people want you to do the math. What that math is, of course, depends on how much that math has been valued in other places in the book.
A good example of doing the math, I think, is The Matrix (which I am now about to spoil, for all two of you who have never seen it). The math I'm interested in here is the fact that in the first movie, getting out of the matrix is always hard. It never gets easier to escape, even when the narrative might like to jump back to the real world. That means that every time someone needs to leave the matrix, they show the math. It's part of what makes the first movie so tense and real (and it falls a little by the wayside in later movies... but I digress).
TL;DR: I think what matters is less whether you show the math, but whether you've already established that Batman can do his Bat-math and make it go away or not.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 08:56 pm (UTC)I think The Matrix is a useful comparison. In that movie, the logistics of getting in and out of the Matrix are a major source of tension. Also, the characters are established as being resourceful, but still in very great danger from agents. Hand-wave past their exit from the Matrix, and you not only lose tension, you screw up your characterization. Whereas in TDKR, the source of tension comes before that trip -- and we do indeed see the math on how it gets resolved. What comes after is trivial by comparison, thematically and emotionally, and going into it would undercut the effect of Bruce's arrival. Furthermore -- and, as you say, this is generally the most important part -- the character is firmly established as the kind of guy who can do something like that. We'd be terribly disappointed if Batman ran into trouble with a border guard.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 11:27 pm (UTC)Having had time to reflect, clearly the real answer is that he caught a ride in a passing TARDIS.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 12:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-31 11:37 pm (UTC)Once in the comics, he got to JLA tower without teleporting or using a shuttle.
The JLA tower was, at the time, on the moon.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 12:42 am (UTC)Maybe he's actually the Catman? God knows cats manage to get into the most inexplicable places . . . .
August 1, 2012 Links and Plugs
Date: 2012-07-31 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 02:11 am (UTC)I'm pretty flexible about leaping gaps, as long as I think the character I'm seeing events through wouldn't be bothered by them. I can hand wave a lot based on the idea that there probably is a rationale, but the character doesn't care, so it won't be explained.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-03 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-05 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 08:40 pm (UTC)