Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 115
April 8, 2016
Everything Happens for a Reason: A Conversation with Kaja and Phil Foglio
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A couple of years ago, I interviewed Kaja and Phil Foglio about Girl Genius, a long and complex narrative in graphic format which I admire greatly. Specifically, I was interested in how they manage to plot such a thing while maintaining its narrative clarity.
I'm quite pleased with how the interview came out. So I'm sharing it with you now.
Everything Happens for a Reason
A Conversation with Kaja and Phil Foglio
You two have been working on Girl Genius for years. You put up three full-page comics on the Web -- written, drawn, and inked in full color – a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, week after week. So far you have thirteen compilations of the comics. Each volume is between one hundred and one hundred sixty pages. With at least another seven to go before the plot winds up.
This tells me two things. The first of which is that you believe that sleep is overrated. The second is that you are industrial-level producers and consumers of plot. So I thought I would like to interview you about plotting. Because plot is king: A badly-written story with a great plot will be loved. A well-written story with great plot will endure. It’s probably the most essential element of fiction. A lot can be said about your work, all admiring, but today I’d like to talk just about plotting.
So let me start by asking, when you began Girl Genius, did you know how it was going to end?
KAJA: No.
PHIL: No.
KAJA: Oh, I see what you mean! When we first decided we should do a thing about a female mad scientist, we didn’t know how it was going to end. When we started actually publishing it, we had an end.
How complex a sketch was it? Was it just “We start here and then Agatha learns about her heritage, and then some stuff happens, and at the end she marries the penguin and everybody’s happy?”
KAJA: It was so really great. You’ll see!
PHIL: We started out pretty much figuring out where we wanted the story to go. We had a rough idea: Ohhh, it goes from here to here to here and we wind up here. Then, once we had that rough skeleton, we started filling in and it got a lot more detailed.
KAJA: We started working on Girl Genius in 1993. At that time Phil was finishing up Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire: Gallimaufry. I was doing Magic: the Gatheringcards…
PHIL: As was I.
KAJA: …and I was sort of poking at the idea that I wanted to do something with mad scientists. Because I lovemad scientists, as I love mad science. At a certain point Phil was saying, I don’t know what to do next. I want to do adventures, but I don’t want to do Buck Godot. Maybe we should do some more Phil and Dixie, I don’t know. And a friend of ours, smart-ass that he was, said, You should do something totally new that you haven’t done before.
We were like, What a weird idea!
So Phil went to a convention and came back with the title Girl Genius and a drawing of what he said was me in a lab coat. Because he’s a darling. Once you have a picture of a character, once you have a character you like, you start asking yourself questions. Who is this person? What do they do, what do they make, what’s their problem? Who, in this case, is her boyfriend, who are her parents, who’s this, who’s that? It didn’t start taking good shape, until we said, You know, all this clunky near-future stuff isn’t really comfortable. Let’s make it kind of life among Victorians, golden age of science and adventure, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, that kind of stuff. Because we love that kind of stuff! Once you’ve got a mad scientist, you’ve got to have a castle and once you have a castle, you might as well set it in the past.
Literally, the start of it was the fun. At one point I was being a goofball and bothering Phil, saying, Oh! Oh! Oh! We have to have a British spy. Because British spies are cool and that would be fun! And we do in fact have a British spy.
It sort of accretes and builds on itself. It’s gotten kind of big. You try to keep it all in your head: Wait a minute, what did we say about this? Let’s go back and check what we’ve already said about this before we accidentally contradict ourselves or forget something cool.
I think we had an ending even before we moved it to what is now widely known as Steampunk. Although we didn’t know that word back then. That was a word that came from the Eighties, but I didn’t know it then.
When you started, when you said, Okay, we’re drawing the first page… at that point you had a roughed-out plot. Nowadays, I hear a lot from younger writers that they’re really obsessed with story arcs, all of these steps in the Hero’s Journey...
PHIL: Oh, please.
Did you do any of that? Do you have any of that stuff in there?
PHIL: No. No.
KAJA: I’ll bet we do. I’ll bet we do. Because… I can’t remember her name, so – sorry! – there’s a lady whom I meet at a lot of science fiction conventions in California, she’s a teacher, and one of the things that she wrote was something like, The Heroine’s Journey. It’s all about female characters in fiction and the female experience in stories. There’s nothing like that kind of book or TV Tropes to remind you of what tropes every symbol you had totally were. I know you say, It’s not like that. But it’s still uncomfortable. I read her book and I was howling. Oh yeah, we did that! We did that too. And that one too. Oh-kay. We didn’t mean to. But we kinda did that anyway.
I can’t speak for all writers, but going through TV Tropes and saying, Oh, yeah, we did that thing that everybody else did… It does not make one proud.
We’re not sitting down and mapping out the hero’s journey. But stories do seem to flow a certain way.
You were talking about keeping track of the details. I’ve got a series going that has four stories published and another three written, and I found I had to start a bible to keep track of all the details. So I know you must keep track of things like what color a character’s eyes are. Do you keep track of plots that you’ve begun and will return to later?
KAJA: Nooo.
PHIL: We once had a bible, because we had a license with Whiz Kids and they required a bible. So we sat down and put one together. This was when we didn’t have a lot of material out, so it wasn’t that beastly to do. But it’s so out of date. It would really be handy to put one together again, but we just haven’t had the time.
KAJA: Or the financial funding.
PHIL: But really I feel we’re always running to catch up and always scrambling to catch up and always trying to catch up and not doing things the way we “should.” I can see that shining ideal of how I would like to be doing things but we are not doing them that way. Mostly what we are relying on is my jumpiness over whether we’re making any mistakes. Because I hate retcon and I would rather tap dance around a mistake and fix it in-story than go back and change the story.
One thing I admire in the story is how a character will disappear naturally from the plot and then reappear much later. So Moloch is present when all the events are set into motion and halfway through the whole “story arc,” he pops up again in prison– which is a plausible place for him to appear, given where we saw him last – and becomes a player. Had you been planning that all along?
PHIL: Oh, yes.
KAJA: That one, yes. He was scheduled to show back up in Castle Heterodyne.
PHIL: Yep.
Do you have many like that?
PHIL: We have a number of them. One of the things we try to do… We have a rough idea of where the story is trying to go. But, this is something that drove Kaja crazy. We were working on the story, like I said we started in ’93, and we started putting out a very tight story line. We were writing stuff out…
KAJA: This was on the typing-paper story boards that I taught him.
PHIL: Right. And around about ’99, I went, All right. Enough. She said, What are you talkingabout?
KAJA: This is all I have, I don’t even watch television!
PHIL: I said, This story is huge. It’s going to change.
KAJA: And it did.
PHIL: It did. The problem with vague plotting is that when we actually started codifying things and putting them down on paper, we knew that we were going to start making changes. It just happens. It's a second draft. You build upon the ideas you've already laid down and realize, especially since you know what's going to happen in another hundred pages, that you have A Better Idea. You've got to allow yourself to use a better idea when you get one.
This is all very well, but changes ripple out, and a supposedly minor change can drastically alter the plot down the line. I call it “whip,” because a tiny change on, say, page 21 of the first volume, can warp and change entire aspects of the rest of the story, “whipping” it into an entirely new alignment.
KAJA: Klaus was supposed to die. All this stuff about Gil having to run the empire was in the first draft. That happened in the first issue! Then Gil was going to go, Well, I’m supposed to be an evil overlord but I’m the hero, you know. Which was so stereotypical. But we were having fun with stereotypes. This is why we put in the TV tropes so well. Because half the time we’re laughing out heads off. If we’ve got a mad scientist then he’s got to have messy hair! So he’s got messy hair, y’know?
I notice that periodically there’s a major surprise in the plot. Sometimes you can see it coming. I don’t think anyone who’s read the series has any serious doubts that Higgs has a revelation in the offing. Do you have these surprises carefully spaced?
PHIL: We try not to.
KAJA: They happen whenever they happen.
PHIL: They do. You try to write good characters and then figure out what they would do as the story goes along. For instance, the biggest surprise there – spoiler! – Lars, the guy in the circus who Agatha was hanging out with? He wasn’t supposed to die!
KAJA: He was actually supposed to be sort of an asshole, to go, Oh wow, you’re a spark, screw you. I thought you were cute but now, no. He was supposed to dump her hard, to just ditch it. But it didn’t work with the way the character wound up. He wouldn’t do that.
PHIL: To the point where he sacrifices himself for her.
KAJA: Then when he dies, this just feels right.
(From audience): So are you saying that you just flesh out your characters and give them their heads and let them decide what will happen?
PHIL: Absolutely.
KAJA: Absolutely. I will not say, “Absolutely right, my characters are people.” They’re not real people.
(From audience): So the people you make up create the surprises?
PHIL: Yes.
KAJA: I can only speak for myself but gut feeling plays such an important part in this. If this feels wrong, we cannot do it this way, we’ve got to think about it some more. There have been one or two times… Most of the time, when we’ve run a short story it’s because Hey, we’re going to Australia and it would be really nice if somebody else did this for a while. But one time, I remember, I said: We’ve got to talk about this more. We have got to talk about this more. Oh, my god, she’s a queen! Or whatever. But there is this kind of urgency, like no, no, no, we can’t do this the way we were planning to do this, it’s wrong.
PHIL: Yep. That’s the working part.
KAJA: Or else we’ll screw it up and They, the great They will notice.
How much are you in control, how much is the story in control, how much are the characters in control?
PHIL: We are always in control. That’s the great thing about the world, that we can always throw something in. We can change circumstances. A fine example of that is we had this big huge momentum going, then Klaus walks in and stops time! That kind of screwed everybody up. It left some stuff hanging. It allowed us to jump cut and move everything forward two and a half years. Because there was a lot happening in those two and a half years but you know what? It was boring! Yes, they could run around and chase each other for two and a half years. Or we could –
KAJA: Agatha wouldn’t have been there, because we’re following that character.
PHIL: Right.
KAJA: And you know we do actually get a lot of questions: What about that character that we haven’t seen for a while? What’s the circus doing? Well, you know what? It’s not the circus’s story. It’s Agatha’s story.
Do you ever have a moment when you go: What now? I’m knee-deep in the plot and my mind is a blank.
KAJA: Yep!
PHIL: Yes. But we have the structure, where we know where the story winds up. Every now and then the choreography is like: How did we get here again?
KAJA: Or we know where the story winds up but in the meanwhile they’re over here and they’re doing this thing and... (Shrugs.) That’s when we do some laundry and—
PHIL: – and talk about it.
KAJA: That’s where we got that spider. There’s this spider that showed up because we were folding laundry and we were laughing our heads off about some stupid joke and it just kept on going and finally you said, “Let me write this down.” While I folded the rest of the laundry.
PHIL: Art makes life better.
KAJA: But we did get a good spider out of it.
Your secondary characters, I’ve noticed, could easily step forward and be the heroes of their own stories. Is that deliberate?
PHIL: Yes. Everybody’s the hero of their own story. Kaja said something once: An easy way to make your hero cool is to make all of the people around them cool as well. And yet they are subordinate to her or are her friends.
KAJA: What I said was that I hate that they make James Bond cool by making everyone around him kind of useless. Especially in respect to Bond girls. Now they’ve gotten better about that in recent years but it used to be that Bond girls were all kind of… (Smiles) You know, if she’s really awesome and she likes him, doesn’t that make him more awesome? It makes him a more worthy hero. If everyone who thinks you’re awesome is kind of a dope…
PHIL: Sometimes having awesome secondary characters allows you to use them to do things that should be done, even though your hero wouldn’t or couldn’t do those things themselves.
KAJA: Or after a while everyone’s rolling their eyes because it’s always the hero who’s doing all the cool stuff and isn’t she great and isn’t she wonderful and isn’t she (cough!) Mary Sue? Oh my god, was I delighted when I found that term! I laughed myself sick.
PHIL: Whereas we all know authors who produce stuff where, gosh, everything the hero does is just wonderful and he’s the most perfect person in the world. I just can’t write that
Periodically, you come to a point where you’ve got to make a major decision. How do you choose which alternative? How many alternatives do you throw out?
PHIL: (Sighs) It depends. Sometimes it can take days.
KAJA: If you’re sitting there looking at it from the character’s point of view, they could do this, they could do that, or they could do that. What makes the most sense? What would they do, and what would happen as a result of that?
PHIL: Or sometimes you’re just: Man, there isn’t anything that isn’t anticlimactic. Or this is something that should happen closer to the end of the book.
KAJA: Sometimes you have to think of a good reason why people who are supposedly clever would notthink of it or would not be able to do it. Sometimes, frankly, it comes down to what’s funny. Or what would be the most horrible. If this happens, it would be very convenient for all the characters. It would solve all their problems. Heh-heh-heh, let’s not do that!
Do you ever have a moment when you feel that you’ve lost control of the events?
KAJA: Every so often I will have a moment when I’m going, “I have no idea what’s going on now.” And then we try to catch up. They’re talking too much! Have someone attack! That attack that was going to happen in four pages, you know what? (Thumps the table.) Now! So they didn’t get to sit around talking and hashing things out as much as they would have liked.
I know that in a novel the fun part is in early stretches when things are opening up and opening out and showing more and more of the world. Then at some point you’ve got to close it down and start answering questions in order to arrive at the ending you were aiming at. So you’re currently thirteen volumes into the story. Are you into the closing it down part now or are you still opening it out?
KAJA: You know, I think we’re into the closing it down part. Except that there are places that they will be going that they haven’t been yet. But it’s still kind of like, Okay we’ve laid out the problem. Now we’re bringing it all together and here’s what’s happening.
PHIL: They will basically be going to places and finding key things. So we’ll get to see a cool place and, oh by the way, there’s the thing.
KAJA: I don’t think we’re still opening up.
PHIL: Well, but we keep introducing new stuff.
KAJA: But we haven’t been to Paris yet. I think we’ll be showing lots of new stuff while we wind things up. But it’s kind of winding things up for these characters. Not for the whole world.
I don’t want to reveal too many horrible spoilers here. But we’ve got Agatha out of the university, she’s met a lot of people, she’s got this town… She now knows what she cares about and what she’s going to be protecting. So now she has to go out figure out how she’s going to do that. She’s got the characters she’s going to work with…
Your characters are living on a continent that is at constant war during times of peace and yet worse during times of war and where literally every time you go to the closet there’s likely to be something in there that wants to kill you. Yet I have noticed that there are not a lot of deaths in your plot.
KAJA: Not a lot of on screen deaths.
Not a lot of named characters. Lars died, Moloch’s companion died… Not a lot more. Was this a deliberate strategy?
PHIL: Not really. And more people will die. It’s just that it hasn’t, uh, I think some of it is: Gosh! Kill him?
KAJA: We’re still using that one!
PHIL: We’re still using that one. Our excuse is that this is an extraordinary group of people in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time. If you put just an ordinary bunch of people there, yeah, half of them would be dead by nightfall. Yes, absolutely.
KAJA: Well, maybe. But again, what we’re doing is so goofy, they’re more likely to just get a pie in the face. I think. That’s probably just us going: You just got your foot caught in a bucket! Awwww.
(From audience): You could use a calming pie.
KAJA: Well, that was a joke. That we did. And it’s over there and we did it.
(From audience): It’s available for use if you feel it’s appropriate.
PHIL: That’s certainly true.
KAJA: For instance, Moloch von Zinzer was definitely scheduled to show up where he did in Castle Heterodyne. We have an example of one who was not scheduled, Sergeant Scorp of the Vespiary Squad. He was just a guy who was there when some stuff went down. Later on we were writing a scene where it would be really handy to have somebody who could tell the other characters, and therefore the readers, what had happened – and here he was! So good to see you back, come on with us. We were very pleased with ourselves.
(From audience): Do you find that when you’re doing a serial you tend to repeat the three-act structure?
KAJA: I think you would need to explain to me what a three-act structure is. So the answer is, no, not deliberately.
PHIL: We do have certain arcs within the story that we try to follow. Each page, it’s nice if it has a joke or something…
KAJA: Well, that’s you.
PHIL: That’s me!
KAJA: Whereas I’m going: No, it’s a thing, we’re trying to tell a story, don’t worry about it. Just make a story.
PHIL: I figured this out a long time ago. Since we’re doing this as a web comic, people hear about us all the time. “Oh, that sounds interesting, I’ll check it out.” You don’t know what page they’re going to show up on. So every single page, ideally, should have something – something interesting, something funny, something titillating.
KAJA: Yeah, titillating. Let me tell you the story of how I was so proud of myself for finally getting advertising postcards printed up. I took them to the comics club in an elementary school and I was going to give them to the kids. (We were advisors for the club at the time.) I realized that if you went to Girl Genius for the first time as a new reader, the very first thing you’d see was a big picture of Gil with no clothes on, with just a little piece of cloth across his you-know. And maybe I didn’t want all these little kids taking these postcards home and having their parents go, Okayyyy. I didn’t give out any postcards that day.
PHIL: So anyway, each day I try and fix it so there’s a joke or something. Each week has some sort of minor thing that starts on Monday and ends on Friday. And ideally, if I can end Friday on a cliffhanger, I love that! People are like: You’re a bad man. I know I’m a bad man. Then of course each volume should have a self-contained arc within in.
KAJA: What I’m looking for is a cut-off page, where I can say Done! we’re making a book now, I try to find a place that feels right.
I’m sorry, I’m all wibbly-wobbly, like, “Oh, we write a story and then we end it where it feels right, blah blah blah.” That’s really helpful if you’re interested in our process.
PHIL: And then with a graphic novel it’s nice if each set of three has a self-contained thread. Then when they get collected into omnibuses – omnibi? – it’s nice if they’re a self-contained thing for that. And then of course there’s the entire whole story. So it’s layers within layers within layers within layers. It makes my head hurt.
KAJA: The challenge we set ourselves in this latest volume… The idea we had was: Wouldn’t it be cool if we could write this – and do it well and not feel like we were pandering or betraying what we were doing – wouldn’t it be cool if we could build in a save point? Where we could say: Hey! If you were looking at fourteen volumes of oh-my-god and would like to start reading the story, here’s a nice place to start. Where you could pick up the story and get an idea of who these people are and what they’re doing and then if you want to go back and read everything that came before, great, it’s there. But here’s a nice place to jump on.
I don’t know if I’m really that wild about how we’ve done it. Because really the most important thing is to tell a story that’s solid. Before I could say whether I feel good about it, I’d have to go back and look at it.
You’ve got a large number of named characters in play currently…
PHIL: Yes. The cast list runs over twenty thousand words.
How many of them do you have to account for by the end?
PHIL: Oh gosh! Not anywhere –
KAJA: Not a whole lot, actually. Most of the ones people think are major characters – no. We’ve got a small group of main characters. We did tend to give waitresses names, because they have names! In real life, these people have names! So we throw out names all the time. A character will come through and they’ll have a name, they’ll be a person, but that doesn’t mean they’re super important to the plot. The A-list characters… it’s still bigger than the traditional five man group but…
PHIL: I’d say there are about a dozen AA-list characters and half a dozen more that people would really want to know what happens to them, and then a few swaths of raygun-carriers.
KAJA: They tend not to be generic. They tend to have something weird about them, and we tend to give them names.
PHIL: The thing we’re always pleased about is when people talk about us and say, “There’s a hundred and fifty characters and I know who all of them are!” Yes!
Here’s a question which will probably make you flinch. I can guess, having been following this story from the beginning, roughly where this is going to end. There are repeated references to the impassible quality of the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody can reach America. So…
PHIL: Well, I’ll say that you’re totally wrong.
KAJA: Not necessarily. Let’s hear.
So have you set yourself up for a sequel?
KAJA: Okay, I will fess up. Shall I fess up about America?
PHIL: Sure, go ahead.
KAJA: We didn’t feel like telling you what was going on there. So we just made it: Oh! Nobody knows. We sure don’t. Oh, we throw stuff back and forth. But we’re focusing on one part of the world. And it was kind of fun to have nobody know.
PHIL: You can’t get there from here.
KAJA: Zeetha comes from there. Wherever that may be.
From Audience: Do you have a clear idea where Mechanicsburg is on the planet?
KAJA: I do actually! I found it on the map. It really is a town called Agatha.
PHIL: It’s in Romania. Transylvania.
KAJA: We were so disappointed to discover that the Iron Gate is just a place where the river goes through. It’s not actually a big iron gate on the river with two statues going like [imitates the statues of Isildur and Anárion in The Lord of the Rings] as we had kind of hoped.
PHIL: Romania is a land of disappointment.
KAJA: We need to actually get ourselves out there sometime to poke around.
PHIL: Apparently people from Romania find our strip hilarious.
KAJA: “This is what we think Eastern Europe might be like.” Sorry!
I’m sure you’re aware that readers come to your work with certain expectations. For example, I can fearlessly predict that at the end Krosp [Agatha’s cat] is alive. Because if he died, people would come after you with pitchforks and torches.
KAJA: I really think that you can’t worry about people with pitchforks and torches or you start writing the wrong story. I have seen too many books, television shows, series, where the creators clearly started worrying about that and it changed the way they wrote. That’s a real danger. I don’t want to start going down that road. It’s one of the reasons I don’t read the comments. Because I don’t want to start worrying if the readers will hate us if we do this or that.
And I will fess up that the thing about the Americas is not the first thing that we’ve thrown in there casually because it was funny and then discovered that it was interesting to think about a lot, so that it grew into something larger than just the off-hand thing that we popped in there.
PHIL: I like to think of it as stealing fantasy.
(From audience): I find myself wondering what’s going on in Japan in your work.
KAJA: We haven’t given any thought to that. Clearly something is, because there it is. But…
I have dominated this conversation because I’m really interested in what you have to say. But I’m going to turn it over to the audience now.
(From audience): If you could ever make it possible, would you have a Japanese spark weaving his way through the background?
KAJA: This is exactly what I’m talking about. Not wanting to do fan requests. I will say that if it comes up and it hits us exactly right, we would totally do that. But it can’t be like, Oh, somebody told us to so we’re going to.
It’s like the Great Wall of Norway. It’s ancient now, but there’s a map up on Café Press that hasn’t been updated for years, a map that our colorist Cheyenne made, and it’s got stuff like the Great Wall of Norway. People want to see it, but it’s just a detail on the map.
PHIL: The map doesn’t even have Sturmhalten on it.
KAJA: Because we had to figure out where it is! The fantasy Transylvania landscape doesn’t quite match the real landscape. But it’s still nice to make an effort.
(From audience): When you come to a pressure point where there are multiple plot options, do you come to a point where you have to start drawing one of the options, where now it’s time to decide or die?
KAJA: Yep.
PHIL: All the time. Either that or say: You know what? This is a fine time to switch scenes.
KAJA: Hey, what’s Gil doing?
PHIL: That gives us a few days.
KAJA: And if it gets really dire? Yep – short story time! Actually, there was only one time when we really needed to take a break. But, sure, there always comes a moment where you go, I cannot mess around with this anymore, I have to pick something, life is short. Then you pick something and you run with it. And you know what? It’s a great aid to writing to realize that yes, life is short and nobody cares about the studio anyway and for pity’s sake, just do something.
(From audience): Do you ever reach a place where you decide to just leap into the dark? Something will happen and you’ll figure out why afterward?
KAJA: We’ve always done that.
PHIL: Yes. All the time.
KAJA: It’s part of the game. You’ve got to hand-wave it away.
PHIL: Both Kaja and I did theater and I did something like ten years of improvisational comedy.
KAJA: Whereas I cannot watch that stuff.
PHIL: Well, I don’t watchit, but I did it.
KAJA: It’s so self-indulgent.
PHIL: Unlike comics, of course. But, boy, it makes you think fast!
KAJA: It’s good practice. It’s not dumb. I’m just being awful because I’m awful.
PHIL: Sometimes you put something down and think: Why did we do that?!
KAJA: That was really good absinthe!
PHIL: That was totally the wrong thing to do! There’s nothing really big, but…
KAJA: There were a couple of small items where I wished we had done things a little differently.
PHIL: And what we do then is we explain it. Oh, hey. We were doing this and that.
KAJA: Here’s why that totally made sense and why we’re so awesome.
We’ve got time for exactly one more question.
(From audience): The first work of I ever saw of Phil’s was in [a collection of Star Trek cartoons titled] Startoons, which had his convention reports. I noticed that where you don’t expect to have a plot in such things, all of a sudden plot elements appeared. For example, a rivalry with another artist, or the Secret Masters of Fandom meeting behind the scenes to make sure that the convention runs properly. Are you… I don’t know, addicted to plot? Do you inject plot elements into everything? Could you do something without plot?
PHIL: One of the big things that separates humans from animals is our desperation to find a pattern in otherwise random events.
KAJA: We are pattern-seeking animals.
PHIL: We see constellations in the stars. Sirius-ly?
KAJA: Draw me a bear!
PHIL: So, yes, we find it satisfying when random events are shown to be part of a larger story. Even just hinting that it’s part of a larger story. Even if you never get the resolution.
KAJA: Everything, if you tell it right, has a plot.
PHIL: You can hint at things, even if you never explain them. People take comfort in knowing that there’s something going on..
KAJA: “Everything happens for a reason.” Yeah, sure it does.
MICHAEL SWANWICK conducted this interview as a program item at MileHiCon in October, 2014. This interview originally appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction and is copyright 2015 by Michael Swanwick.
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A couple of years ago, I interviewed Kaja and Phil Foglio about Girl Genius, a long and complex narrative in graphic format which I admire greatly. Specifically, I was interested in how they manage to plot such a thing while maintaining its narrative clarity.
I'm quite pleased with how the interview came out. So I'm sharing it with you now.
Everything Happens for a Reason
A Conversation with Kaja and Phil Foglio
You two have been working on Girl Genius for years. You put up three full-page comics on the Web -- written, drawn, and inked in full color – a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, week after week. So far you have thirteen compilations of the comics. Each volume is between one hundred and one hundred sixty pages. With at least another seven to go before the plot winds up.
This tells me two things. The first of which is that you believe that sleep is overrated. The second is that you are industrial-level producers and consumers of plot. So I thought I would like to interview you about plotting. Because plot is king: A badly-written story with a great plot will be loved. A well-written story with great plot will endure. It’s probably the most essential element of fiction. A lot can be said about your work, all admiring, but today I’d like to talk just about plotting.
So let me start by asking, when you began Girl Genius, did you know how it was going to end?
KAJA: No.
PHIL: No.
KAJA: Oh, I see what you mean! When we first decided we should do a thing about a female mad scientist, we didn’t know how it was going to end. When we started actually publishing it, we had an end.
How complex a sketch was it? Was it just “We start here and then Agatha learns about her heritage, and then some stuff happens, and at the end she marries the penguin and everybody’s happy?”
KAJA: It was so really great. You’ll see!
PHIL: We started out pretty much figuring out where we wanted the story to go. We had a rough idea: Ohhh, it goes from here to here to here and we wind up here. Then, once we had that rough skeleton, we started filling in and it got a lot more detailed.
KAJA: We started working on Girl Genius in 1993. At that time Phil was finishing up Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire: Gallimaufry. I was doing Magic: the Gatheringcards…
PHIL: As was I.
KAJA: …and I was sort of poking at the idea that I wanted to do something with mad scientists. Because I lovemad scientists, as I love mad science. At a certain point Phil was saying, I don’t know what to do next. I want to do adventures, but I don’t want to do Buck Godot. Maybe we should do some more Phil and Dixie, I don’t know. And a friend of ours, smart-ass that he was, said, You should do something totally new that you haven’t done before.
We were like, What a weird idea!
So Phil went to a convention and came back with the title Girl Genius and a drawing of what he said was me in a lab coat. Because he’s a darling. Once you have a picture of a character, once you have a character you like, you start asking yourself questions. Who is this person? What do they do, what do they make, what’s their problem? Who, in this case, is her boyfriend, who are her parents, who’s this, who’s that? It didn’t start taking good shape, until we said, You know, all this clunky near-future stuff isn’t really comfortable. Let’s make it kind of life among Victorians, golden age of science and adventure, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, that kind of stuff. Because we love that kind of stuff! Once you’ve got a mad scientist, you’ve got to have a castle and once you have a castle, you might as well set it in the past.
Literally, the start of it was the fun. At one point I was being a goofball and bothering Phil, saying, Oh! Oh! Oh! We have to have a British spy. Because British spies are cool and that would be fun! And we do in fact have a British spy.
It sort of accretes and builds on itself. It’s gotten kind of big. You try to keep it all in your head: Wait a minute, what did we say about this? Let’s go back and check what we’ve already said about this before we accidentally contradict ourselves or forget something cool.
I think we had an ending even before we moved it to what is now widely known as Steampunk. Although we didn’t know that word back then. That was a word that came from the Eighties, but I didn’t know it then.
When you started, when you said, Okay, we’re drawing the first page… at that point you had a roughed-out plot. Nowadays, I hear a lot from younger writers that they’re really obsessed with story arcs, all of these steps in the Hero’s Journey...
PHIL: Oh, please.
Did you do any of that? Do you have any of that stuff in there?
PHIL: No. No.
KAJA: I’ll bet we do. I’ll bet we do. Because… I can’t remember her name, so – sorry! – there’s a lady whom I meet at a lot of science fiction conventions in California, she’s a teacher, and one of the things that she wrote was something like, The Heroine’s Journey. It’s all about female characters in fiction and the female experience in stories. There’s nothing like that kind of book or TV Tropes to remind you of what tropes every symbol you had totally were. I know you say, It’s not like that. But it’s still uncomfortable. I read her book and I was howling. Oh yeah, we did that! We did that too. And that one too. Oh-kay. We didn’t mean to. But we kinda did that anyway.
I can’t speak for all writers, but going through TV Tropes and saying, Oh, yeah, we did that thing that everybody else did… It does not make one proud.
We’re not sitting down and mapping out the hero’s journey. But stories do seem to flow a certain way.
You were talking about keeping track of the details. I’ve got a series going that has four stories published and another three written, and I found I had to start a bible to keep track of all the details. So I know you must keep track of things like what color a character’s eyes are. Do you keep track of plots that you’ve begun and will return to later?
KAJA: Nooo.
PHIL: We once had a bible, because we had a license with Whiz Kids and they required a bible. So we sat down and put one together. This was when we didn’t have a lot of material out, so it wasn’t that beastly to do. But it’s so out of date. It would really be handy to put one together again, but we just haven’t had the time.
KAJA: Or the financial funding.
PHIL: But really I feel we’re always running to catch up and always scrambling to catch up and always trying to catch up and not doing things the way we “should.” I can see that shining ideal of how I would like to be doing things but we are not doing them that way. Mostly what we are relying on is my jumpiness over whether we’re making any mistakes. Because I hate retcon and I would rather tap dance around a mistake and fix it in-story than go back and change the story.
One thing I admire in the story is how a character will disappear naturally from the plot and then reappear much later. So Moloch is present when all the events are set into motion and halfway through the whole “story arc,” he pops up again in prison– which is a plausible place for him to appear, given where we saw him last – and becomes a player. Had you been planning that all along?
PHIL: Oh, yes.
KAJA: That one, yes. He was scheduled to show back up in Castle Heterodyne.
PHIL: Yep.
Do you have many like that?
PHIL: We have a number of them. One of the things we try to do… We have a rough idea of where the story is trying to go. But, this is something that drove Kaja crazy. We were working on the story, like I said we started in ’93, and we started putting out a very tight story line. We were writing stuff out…
KAJA: This was on the typing-paper story boards that I taught him.
PHIL: Right. And around about ’99, I went, All right. Enough. She said, What are you talkingabout?
KAJA: This is all I have, I don’t even watch television!
PHIL: I said, This story is huge. It’s going to change.
KAJA: And it did.
PHIL: It did. The problem with vague plotting is that when we actually started codifying things and putting them down on paper, we knew that we were going to start making changes. It just happens. It's a second draft. You build upon the ideas you've already laid down and realize, especially since you know what's going to happen in another hundred pages, that you have A Better Idea. You've got to allow yourself to use a better idea when you get one.
This is all very well, but changes ripple out, and a supposedly minor change can drastically alter the plot down the line. I call it “whip,” because a tiny change on, say, page 21 of the first volume, can warp and change entire aspects of the rest of the story, “whipping” it into an entirely new alignment.
KAJA: Klaus was supposed to die. All this stuff about Gil having to run the empire was in the first draft. That happened in the first issue! Then Gil was going to go, Well, I’m supposed to be an evil overlord but I’m the hero, you know. Which was so stereotypical. But we were having fun with stereotypes. This is why we put in the TV tropes so well. Because half the time we’re laughing out heads off. If we’ve got a mad scientist then he’s got to have messy hair! So he’s got messy hair, y’know?
I notice that periodically there’s a major surprise in the plot. Sometimes you can see it coming. I don’t think anyone who’s read the series has any serious doubts that Higgs has a revelation in the offing. Do you have these surprises carefully spaced?
PHIL: We try not to.
KAJA: They happen whenever they happen.
PHIL: They do. You try to write good characters and then figure out what they would do as the story goes along. For instance, the biggest surprise there – spoiler! – Lars, the guy in the circus who Agatha was hanging out with? He wasn’t supposed to die!
KAJA: He was actually supposed to be sort of an asshole, to go, Oh wow, you’re a spark, screw you. I thought you were cute but now, no. He was supposed to dump her hard, to just ditch it. But it didn’t work with the way the character wound up. He wouldn’t do that.
PHIL: To the point where he sacrifices himself for her.
KAJA: Then when he dies, this just feels right.
(From audience): So are you saying that you just flesh out your characters and give them their heads and let them decide what will happen?
PHIL: Absolutely.
KAJA: Absolutely. I will not say, “Absolutely right, my characters are people.” They’re not real people.
(From audience): So the people you make up create the surprises?
PHIL: Yes.
KAJA: I can only speak for myself but gut feeling plays such an important part in this. If this feels wrong, we cannot do it this way, we’ve got to think about it some more. There have been one or two times… Most of the time, when we’ve run a short story it’s because Hey, we’re going to Australia and it would be really nice if somebody else did this for a while. But one time, I remember, I said: We’ve got to talk about this more. We have got to talk about this more. Oh, my god, she’s a queen! Or whatever. But there is this kind of urgency, like no, no, no, we can’t do this the way we were planning to do this, it’s wrong.
PHIL: Yep. That’s the working part.
KAJA: Or else we’ll screw it up and They, the great They will notice.
How much are you in control, how much is the story in control, how much are the characters in control?
PHIL: We are always in control. That’s the great thing about the world, that we can always throw something in. We can change circumstances. A fine example of that is we had this big huge momentum going, then Klaus walks in and stops time! That kind of screwed everybody up. It left some stuff hanging. It allowed us to jump cut and move everything forward two and a half years. Because there was a lot happening in those two and a half years but you know what? It was boring! Yes, they could run around and chase each other for two and a half years. Or we could –
KAJA: Agatha wouldn’t have been there, because we’re following that character.
PHIL: Right.
KAJA: And you know we do actually get a lot of questions: What about that character that we haven’t seen for a while? What’s the circus doing? Well, you know what? It’s not the circus’s story. It’s Agatha’s story.
Do you ever have a moment when you go: What now? I’m knee-deep in the plot and my mind is a blank.
KAJA: Yep!
PHIL: Yes. But we have the structure, where we know where the story winds up. Every now and then the choreography is like: How did we get here again?
KAJA: Or we know where the story winds up but in the meanwhile they’re over here and they’re doing this thing and... (Shrugs.) That’s when we do some laundry and—
PHIL: – and talk about it.
KAJA: That’s where we got that spider. There’s this spider that showed up because we were folding laundry and we were laughing our heads off about some stupid joke and it just kept on going and finally you said, “Let me write this down.” While I folded the rest of the laundry.
PHIL: Art makes life better.
KAJA: But we did get a good spider out of it.
Your secondary characters, I’ve noticed, could easily step forward and be the heroes of their own stories. Is that deliberate?
PHIL: Yes. Everybody’s the hero of their own story. Kaja said something once: An easy way to make your hero cool is to make all of the people around them cool as well. And yet they are subordinate to her or are her friends.
KAJA: What I said was that I hate that they make James Bond cool by making everyone around him kind of useless. Especially in respect to Bond girls. Now they’ve gotten better about that in recent years but it used to be that Bond girls were all kind of… (Smiles) You know, if she’s really awesome and she likes him, doesn’t that make him more awesome? It makes him a more worthy hero. If everyone who thinks you’re awesome is kind of a dope…
PHIL: Sometimes having awesome secondary characters allows you to use them to do things that should be done, even though your hero wouldn’t or couldn’t do those things themselves.
KAJA: Or after a while everyone’s rolling their eyes because it’s always the hero who’s doing all the cool stuff and isn’t she great and isn’t she wonderful and isn’t she (cough!) Mary Sue? Oh my god, was I delighted when I found that term! I laughed myself sick.
PHIL: Whereas we all know authors who produce stuff where, gosh, everything the hero does is just wonderful and he’s the most perfect person in the world. I just can’t write that
Periodically, you come to a point where you’ve got to make a major decision. How do you choose which alternative? How many alternatives do you throw out?
PHIL: (Sighs) It depends. Sometimes it can take days.
KAJA: If you’re sitting there looking at it from the character’s point of view, they could do this, they could do that, or they could do that. What makes the most sense? What would they do, and what would happen as a result of that?
PHIL: Or sometimes you’re just: Man, there isn’t anything that isn’t anticlimactic. Or this is something that should happen closer to the end of the book.
KAJA: Sometimes you have to think of a good reason why people who are supposedly clever would notthink of it or would not be able to do it. Sometimes, frankly, it comes down to what’s funny. Or what would be the most horrible. If this happens, it would be very convenient for all the characters. It would solve all their problems. Heh-heh-heh, let’s not do that!
Do you ever have a moment when you feel that you’ve lost control of the events?
KAJA: Every so often I will have a moment when I’m going, “I have no idea what’s going on now.” And then we try to catch up. They’re talking too much! Have someone attack! That attack that was going to happen in four pages, you know what? (Thumps the table.) Now! So they didn’t get to sit around talking and hashing things out as much as they would have liked.
I know that in a novel the fun part is in early stretches when things are opening up and opening out and showing more and more of the world. Then at some point you’ve got to close it down and start answering questions in order to arrive at the ending you were aiming at. So you’re currently thirteen volumes into the story. Are you into the closing it down part now or are you still opening it out?
KAJA: You know, I think we’re into the closing it down part. Except that there are places that they will be going that they haven’t been yet. But it’s still kind of like, Okay we’ve laid out the problem. Now we’re bringing it all together and here’s what’s happening.
PHIL: They will basically be going to places and finding key things. So we’ll get to see a cool place and, oh by the way, there’s the thing.
KAJA: I don’t think we’re still opening up.
PHIL: Well, but we keep introducing new stuff.
KAJA: But we haven’t been to Paris yet. I think we’ll be showing lots of new stuff while we wind things up. But it’s kind of winding things up for these characters. Not for the whole world.
I don’t want to reveal too many horrible spoilers here. But we’ve got Agatha out of the university, she’s met a lot of people, she’s got this town… She now knows what she cares about and what she’s going to be protecting. So now she has to go out figure out how she’s going to do that. She’s got the characters she’s going to work with…
Your characters are living on a continent that is at constant war during times of peace and yet worse during times of war and where literally every time you go to the closet there’s likely to be something in there that wants to kill you. Yet I have noticed that there are not a lot of deaths in your plot.
KAJA: Not a lot of on screen deaths.
Not a lot of named characters. Lars died, Moloch’s companion died… Not a lot more. Was this a deliberate strategy?
PHIL: Not really. And more people will die. It’s just that it hasn’t, uh, I think some of it is: Gosh! Kill him?
KAJA: We’re still using that one!
PHIL: We’re still using that one. Our excuse is that this is an extraordinary group of people in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time. If you put just an ordinary bunch of people there, yeah, half of them would be dead by nightfall. Yes, absolutely.
KAJA: Well, maybe. But again, what we’re doing is so goofy, they’re more likely to just get a pie in the face. I think. That’s probably just us going: You just got your foot caught in a bucket! Awwww.
(From audience): You could use a calming pie.
KAJA: Well, that was a joke. That we did. And it’s over there and we did it.
(From audience): It’s available for use if you feel it’s appropriate.
PHIL: That’s certainly true.
KAJA: For instance, Moloch von Zinzer was definitely scheduled to show up where he did in Castle Heterodyne. We have an example of one who was not scheduled, Sergeant Scorp of the Vespiary Squad. He was just a guy who was there when some stuff went down. Later on we were writing a scene where it would be really handy to have somebody who could tell the other characters, and therefore the readers, what had happened – and here he was! So good to see you back, come on with us. We were very pleased with ourselves.
(From audience): Do you find that when you’re doing a serial you tend to repeat the three-act structure?
KAJA: I think you would need to explain to me what a three-act structure is. So the answer is, no, not deliberately.
PHIL: We do have certain arcs within the story that we try to follow. Each page, it’s nice if it has a joke or something…
KAJA: Well, that’s you.
PHIL: That’s me!
KAJA: Whereas I’m going: No, it’s a thing, we’re trying to tell a story, don’t worry about it. Just make a story.
PHIL: I figured this out a long time ago. Since we’re doing this as a web comic, people hear about us all the time. “Oh, that sounds interesting, I’ll check it out.” You don’t know what page they’re going to show up on. So every single page, ideally, should have something – something interesting, something funny, something titillating.
KAJA: Yeah, titillating. Let me tell you the story of how I was so proud of myself for finally getting advertising postcards printed up. I took them to the comics club in an elementary school and I was going to give them to the kids. (We were advisors for the club at the time.) I realized that if you went to Girl Genius for the first time as a new reader, the very first thing you’d see was a big picture of Gil with no clothes on, with just a little piece of cloth across his you-know. And maybe I didn’t want all these little kids taking these postcards home and having their parents go, Okayyyy. I didn’t give out any postcards that day.
PHIL: So anyway, each day I try and fix it so there’s a joke or something. Each week has some sort of minor thing that starts on Monday and ends on Friday. And ideally, if I can end Friday on a cliffhanger, I love that! People are like: You’re a bad man. I know I’m a bad man. Then of course each volume should have a self-contained arc within in.
KAJA: What I’m looking for is a cut-off page, where I can say Done! we’re making a book now, I try to find a place that feels right.
I’m sorry, I’m all wibbly-wobbly, like, “Oh, we write a story and then we end it where it feels right, blah blah blah.” That’s really helpful if you’re interested in our process.
PHIL: And then with a graphic novel it’s nice if each set of three has a self-contained thread. Then when they get collected into omnibuses – omnibi? – it’s nice if they’re a self-contained thing for that. And then of course there’s the entire whole story. So it’s layers within layers within layers within layers. It makes my head hurt.
KAJA: The challenge we set ourselves in this latest volume… The idea we had was: Wouldn’t it be cool if we could write this – and do it well and not feel like we were pandering or betraying what we were doing – wouldn’t it be cool if we could build in a save point? Where we could say: Hey! If you were looking at fourteen volumes of oh-my-god and would like to start reading the story, here’s a nice place to start. Where you could pick up the story and get an idea of who these people are and what they’re doing and then if you want to go back and read everything that came before, great, it’s there. But here’s a nice place to jump on.
I don’t know if I’m really that wild about how we’ve done it. Because really the most important thing is to tell a story that’s solid. Before I could say whether I feel good about it, I’d have to go back and look at it.
You’ve got a large number of named characters in play currently…
PHIL: Yes. The cast list runs over twenty thousand words.
How many of them do you have to account for by the end?
PHIL: Oh gosh! Not anywhere –
KAJA: Not a whole lot, actually. Most of the ones people think are major characters – no. We’ve got a small group of main characters. We did tend to give waitresses names, because they have names! In real life, these people have names! So we throw out names all the time. A character will come through and they’ll have a name, they’ll be a person, but that doesn’t mean they’re super important to the plot. The A-list characters… it’s still bigger than the traditional five man group but…
PHIL: I’d say there are about a dozen AA-list characters and half a dozen more that people would really want to know what happens to them, and then a few swaths of raygun-carriers.
KAJA: They tend not to be generic. They tend to have something weird about them, and we tend to give them names.
PHIL: The thing we’re always pleased about is when people talk about us and say, “There’s a hundred and fifty characters and I know who all of them are!” Yes!
Here’s a question which will probably make you flinch. I can guess, having been following this story from the beginning, roughly where this is going to end. There are repeated references to the impassible quality of the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody can reach America. So…
PHIL: Well, I’ll say that you’re totally wrong.
KAJA: Not necessarily. Let’s hear.
So have you set yourself up for a sequel?
KAJA: Okay, I will fess up. Shall I fess up about America?
PHIL: Sure, go ahead.
KAJA: We didn’t feel like telling you what was going on there. So we just made it: Oh! Nobody knows. We sure don’t. Oh, we throw stuff back and forth. But we’re focusing on one part of the world. And it was kind of fun to have nobody know.
PHIL: You can’t get there from here.
KAJA: Zeetha comes from there. Wherever that may be.
From Audience: Do you have a clear idea where Mechanicsburg is on the planet?
KAJA: I do actually! I found it on the map. It really is a town called Agatha.
PHIL: It’s in Romania. Transylvania.
KAJA: We were so disappointed to discover that the Iron Gate is just a place where the river goes through. It’s not actually a big iron gate on the river with two statues going like [imitates the statues of Isildur and Anárion in The Lord of the Rings] as we had kind of hoped.
PHIL: Romania is a land of disappointment.
KAJA: We need to actually get ourselves out there sometime to poke around.
PHIL: Apparently people from Romania find our strip hilarious.
KAJA: “This is what we think Eastern Europe might be like.” Sorry!
I’m sure you’re aware that readers come to your work with certain expectations. For example, I can fearlessly predict that at the end Krosp [Agatha’s cat] is alive. Because if he died, people would come after you with pitchforks and torches.
KAJA: I really think that you can’t worry about people with pitchforks and torches or you start writing the wrong story. I have seen too many books, television shows, series, where the creators clearly started worrying about that and it changed the way they wrote. That’s a real danger. I don’t want to start going down that road. It’s one of the reasons I don’t read the comments. Because I don’t want to start worrying if the readers will hate us if we do this or that.
And I will fess up that the thing about the Americas is not the first thing that we’ve thrown in there casually because it was funny and then discovered that it was interesting to think about a lot, so that it grew into something larger than just the off-hand thing that we popped in there.
PHIL: I like to think of it as stealing fantasy.
(From audience): I find myself wondering what’s going on in Japan in your work.
KAJA: We haven’t given any thought to that. Clearly something is, because there it is. But…
I have dominated this conversation because I’m really interested in what you have to say. But I’m going to turn it over to the audience now.
(From audience): If you could ever make it possible, would you have a Japanese spark weaving his way through the background?
KAJA: This is exactly what I’m talking about. Not wanting to do fan requests. I will say that if it comes up and it hits us exactly right, we would totally do that. But it can’t be like, Oh, somebody told us to so we’re going to.
It’s like the Great Wall of Norway. It’s ancient now, but there’s a map up on Café Press that hasn’t been updated for years, a map that our colorist Cheyenne made, and it’s got stuff like the Great Wall of Norway. People want to see it, but it’s just a detail on the map.
PHIL: The map doesn’t even have Sturmhalten on it.
KAJA: Because we had to figure out where it is! The fantasy Transylvania landscape doesn’t quite match the real landscape. But it’s still nice to make an effort.
(From audience): When you come to a pressure point where there are multiple plot options, do you come to a point where you have to start drawing one of the options, where now it’s time to decide or die?
KAJA: Yep.
PHIL: All the time. Either that or say: You know what? This is a fine time to switch scenes.
KAJA: Hey, what’s Gil doing?
PHIL: That gives us a few days.
KAJA: And if it gets really dire? Yep – short story time! Actually, there was only one time when we really needed to take a break. But, sure, there always comes a moment where you go, I cannot mess around with this anymore, I have to pick something, life is short. Then you pick something and you run with it. And you know what? It’s a great aid to writing to realize that yes, life is short and nobody cares about the studio anyway and for pity’s sake, just do something.
(From audience): Do you ever reach a place where you decide to just leap into the dark? Something will happen and you’ll figure out why afterward?
KAJA: We’ve always done that.
PHIL: Yes. All the time.
KAJA: It’s part of the game. You’ve got to hand-wave it away.
PHIL: Both Kaja and I did theater and I did something like ten years of improvisational comedy.
KAJA: Whereas I cannot watch that stuff.
PHIL: Well, I don’t watchit, but I did it.
KAJA: It’s so self-indulgent.
PHIL: Unlike comics, of course. But, boy, it makes you think fast!
KAJA: It’s good practice. It’s not dumb. I’m just being awful because I’m awful.
PHIL: Sometimes you put something down and think: Why did we do that?!
KAJA: That was really good absinthe!
PHIL: That was totally the wrong thing to do! There’s nothing really big, but…
KAJA: There were a couple of small items where I wished we had done things a little differently.
PHIL: And what we do then is we explain it. Oh, hey. We were doing this and that.
KAJA: Here’s why that totally made sense and why we’re so awesome.
We’ve got time for exactly one more question.
(From audience): The first work of I ever saw of Phil’s was in [a collection of Star Trek cartoons titled] Startoons, which had his convention reports. I noticed that where you don’t expect to have a plot in such things, all of a sudden plot elements appeared. For example, a rivalry with another artist, or the Secret Masters of Fandom meeting behind the scenes to make sure that the convention runs properly. Are you… I don’t know, addicted to plot? Do you inject plot elements into everything? Could you do something without plot?
PHIL: One of the big things that separates humans from animals is our desperation to find a pattern in otherwise random events.
KAJA: We are pattern-seeking animals.
PHIL: We see constellations in the stars. Sirius-ly?
KAJA: Draw me a bear!
PHIL: So, yes, we find it satisfying when random events are shown to be part of a larger story. Even just hinting that it’s part of a larger story. Even if you never get the resolution.
KAJA: Everything, if you tell it right, has a plot.
PHIL: You can hint at things, even if you never explain them. People take comfort in knowing that there’s something going on..
KAJA: “Everything happens for a reason.” Yeah, sure it does.
MICHAEL SWANWICK conducted this interview as a program item at MileHiCon in October, 2014. This interview originally appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction and is copyright 2015 by Michael Swanwick.
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April 6, 2016
Wild Minds and Discognition
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Look what arrived in the mail yesterday!
I suppose this requires some explanation. Steven Shaviro (it says on the back cover) is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He has a particular interest in the philosophy of thought and admires science fiction. Discognition is an exploration of sentience through the medium of several science fiction texts.
Why science fiction? Because in matters regarding consciousness, awareness, feeling, knowing, and the like, there is consensus on pretty much nothing. SF, which has the freedom of doing without things like evidence or proof, is free to speculate wildly. And thus, for those who wish to think about such matters, it provides a means of thinking beyond the boundaries of what is known.
Back in 1995, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. I was staying in a cheap B&B on Renfrew Street at the highest point of the city and from there could look down on its streets and byways. I saw how the M8 Motorway cut through a vibrant city and how it was lined by vacant buildings for a block to either side. This wasn't supposed to happen when the road was built. It was an unforeseen consequence nonetheless.
Later, I was on a panel on neural enhancement. It went well. We all said interesting things. At the end we were asked to sum up our thoughts and I said that the advantages of neural enhancement were so great that it was going to be inevitable. "But," I said, "we have to be extremely cautious and careful in its adaption, or we'll end up driving an M8 Motorway right up the center of our minds."
This insight stayed with me. I mused over it for a couple of years and then I wrote "Wild Minds," a story that still pleases me today.
Some time later, Shaviro wrote about my story on his blog, putting its issues in context. This became the core of chapter 5 of his book.
You can read that post here.
I haven't read all of the book yet, but the chapter Shaviro dedicates to Peter Watts' Blindsight is good enough that I rather wish it had been extended to include Echopraxia , the sequel-or-maybe-second-half-I'm-not-sure-which to the first book.
So it's a good book, I think, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.
As for the chapter dedicated to my story... it's always a pleasant surprise to have somebody take one's thoughts seriously.
And for new writers...
Here's something I didn't know until I sold "Wild Minds" to Sheila Williams at Asimov's . I'll start by giving you the opening of the story:
Which was the fist I knew about that. But I know it now and so, too, do you.
*
Look what arrived in the mail yesterday!
I suppose this requires some explanation. Steven Shaviro (it says on the back cover) is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He has a particular interest in the philosophy of thought and admires science fiction. Discognition is an exploration of sentience through the medium of several science fiction texts.
Why science fiction? Because in matters regarding consciousness, awareness, feeling, knowing, and the like, there is consensus on pretty much nothing. SF, which has the freedom of doing without things like evidence or proof, is free to speculate wildly. And thus, for those who wish to think about such matters, it provides a means of thinking beyond the boundaries of what is known.
Back in 1995, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. I was staying in a cheap B&B on Renfrew Street at the highest point of the city and from there could look down on its streets and byways. I saw how the M8 Motorway cut through a vibrant city and how it was lined by vacant buildings for a block to either side. This wasn't supposed to happen when the road was built. It was an unforeseen consequence nonetheless.
Later, I was on a panel on neural enhancement. It went well. We all said interesting things. At the end we were asked to sum up our thoughts and I said that the advantages of neural enhancement were so great that it was going to be inevitable. "But," I said, "we have to be extremely cautious and careful in its adaption, or we'll end up driving an M8 Motorway right up the center of our minds."
This insight stayed with me. I mused over it for a couple of years and then I wrote "Wild Minds," a story that still pleases me today.
Some time later, Shaviro wrote about my story on his blog, putting its issues in context. This became the core of chapter 5 of his book.
You can read that post here.
I haven't read all of the book yet, but the chapter Shaviro dedicates to Peter Watts' Blindsight is good enough that I rather wish it had been extended to include Echopraxia , the sequel-or-maybe-second-half-I'm-not-sure-which to the first book.
So it's a good book, I think, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.
As for the chapter dedicated to my story... it's always a pleasant surprise to have somebody take one's thoughts seriously.
And for new writers...
Here's something I didn't know until I sold "Wild Minds" to Sheila Williams at Asimov's . I'll start by giving you the opening of the story:
I met her at a businesspersons' orgy in London. The room was in the back of a pub that was all brass and beveled glass, nostalgia and dark oak. The doorkeeper hesitated when it saw how many times I'd attended in the last month. But then I suggested it scroll up my travel schedule, and it saw that I wasn't acting out a sex-addiction script, but properly maintaining my forebrain and hindbrain balances. So it let me in.
Inside, the light was dimly textured and occasionally mirrored. Friendly hands helped me off with my clothing. "I'm Thom," I murmured, and "Annalouise . . . Enoch . . . Abdul . . . Magdalena . . . Claire," those nearest quietly replied. Time passed.
I noticed Hellene not because she was beautiful – who pays attention to beauty after the first hour? – but because it took her so long to find release. By the time she was done, there was a whole new crowd; only she and I remained of all who had been in the room when I entered.
In the halfway room, we talked.When next I saw her after selling the story, Sheila looked amused. "You know, Michael," she said, "I don't normally buy a story that opens with a sex scene. That's almost invariably the mark of amateur writing."
Which was the fist I knew about that. But I know it now and so, too, do you.
*
April 4, 2016
This Glitterati Life: Part 6,788
.
I went to a pre-opening party at the Stanek Gallery last Thursday. It was for a group showing of Philadelphia artists, including Kyle Cassidy. That's him up above, posing before one of the photos from his book Armed America . He tells me that the dog in the foreground with the anxious look on his face actually wanted to leap up on him. So he'd line up the shot, get the dog down and in place, and then would have a window of one full second before the dog leaped up on him again.
Ah, the glamorous life of an artist!
*
I went to a pre-opening party at the Stanek Gallery last Thursday. It was for a group showing of Philadelphia artists, including Kyle Cassidy. That's him up above, posing before one of the photos from his book Armed America . He tells me that the dog in the foreground with the anxious look on his face actually wanted to leap up on him. So he'd line up the shot, get the dog down and in place, and then would have a window of one full second before the dog leaped up on him again.
Ah, the glamorous life of an artist!
*
March 31, 2016
Spilling Sunflower Oil at Roscon
.
«Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place...»
Media cons are new to Russia -- the media half of Roscon is only the second such convention in that country, I was told. But the fans took to it immediately, and the costumes were as good as any I've seen anywhere.
And then there's Annushka (above), who introduced herself to me by asking if I'd read The Master and Margarita .
Have I read Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece? On my first stay in Moscow, immediately after unpacking our bags in our Garden Ring flat, the first thing Marianne and I went to see was Red Square. Then we went to Patriarch's Ponds, the city park where the novel opens. The editor Berlioz is talking with the young poet Ponyrev when the Devil walks up and deals himself into the conversation, casually mentioning that on of them will soon be decapitated.
Offended, Berlioz hurries away and, as was obliquely predicted, slips on the sunflower oil that Annushka had spilled and falls headfirst in front of an oncoming trolley.
Thus begins the wild ride that is one of the great fantasies of the Twentieth Century.
The woman who was Annushka, it turned out, belongs to a fan group dedicated to promoting the novel and its author. In addition to which, they engage in a certain amount of cosplay as its characters.
This is yet another reason why Russia is a great country.
And on the way back to our flat...
We arrived in Moscow late in the afternoon and after visiting Red Square and Patriarch's Ponds, it was time to buy some food for supper in our flat. But rather than head back directly, Marianne and I took a roundabout way, so we wouldn't be traveling on the same streets over and over. As we went, we consulted our guidebook to see what we were passing. One thing we saw was the Tunisian Embassy, which had formerly been Lavrentiy Beria's house. Beria was a very bad man. According to the book, when the yard was dug up to replace some plumbing, human bones were found. When a basement wall was knocked down to renovate the area, it was found to be filled with... more human bones.
Midway back to our flat, we passed Bulgakov's apartment. Which meant that all the time he was writing about the Devil in Moscow, he was only a short walk from where Beria lived.
This is yet another reason why the Soviet Union was a terrifying place.
*
«Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place...»
Media cons are new to Russia -- the media half of Roscon is only the second such convention in that country, I was told. But the fans took to it immediately, and the costumes were as good as any I've seen anywhere.
And then there's Annushka (above), who introduced herself to me by asking if I'd read The Master and Margarita .
Have I read Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece? On my first stay in Moscow, immediately after unpacking our bags in our Garden Ring flat, the first thing Marianne and I went to see was Red Square. Then we went to Patriarch's Ponds, the city park where the novel opens. The editor Berlioz is talking with the young poet Ponyrev when the Devil walks up and deals himself into the conversation, casually mentioning that on of them will soon be decapitated.
Offended, Berlioz hurries away and, as was obliquely predicted, slips on the sunflower oil that Annushka had spilled and falls headfirst in front of an oncoming trolley.
Thus begins the wild ride that is one of the great fantasies of the Twentieth Century.
The woman who was Annushka, it turned out, belongs to a fan group dedicated to promoting the novel and its author. In addition to which, they engage in a certain amount of cosplay as its characters.
This is yet another reason why Russia is a great country.
And on the way back to our flat...
We arrived in Moscow late in the afternoon and after visiting Red Square and Patriarch's Ponds, it was time to buy some food for supper in our flat. But rather than head back directly, Marianne and I took a roundabout way, so we wouldn't be traveling on the same streets over and over. As we went, we consulted our guidebook to see what we were passing. One thing we saw was the Tunisian Embassy, which had formerly been Lavrentiy Beria's house. Beria was a very bad man. According to the book, when the yard was dug up to replace some plumbing, human bones were found. When a basement wall was knocked down to renovate the area, it was found to be filled with... more human bones.
Midway back to our flat, we passed Bulgakov's apartment. Which meant that all the time he was writing about the Devil in Moscow, he was only a short walk from where Beria lived.
This is yet another reason why the Soviet Union was a terrifying place.
*
March 28, 2016
My Story -- and What's Wrong With It
.
What do people do for fun in Russia?
How about write a story in an hour? I am not making this up. At Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention, I saw a line of serious young people tapping away at a line of laptops. They were given a list of five themes created by writer Eugeny Lukin, pulled a number out of a hat to see which one they had to write on, and set to work. There were more people involved than the photo above suggests, too. When one group finished, the next group stepped in.
I didn't exactly volunteer to take part in the competition. But somehow I found myself behind a laptop.
The theme I was given was "The End of the World 2." Which, it was explained to me, was the apocalypse that occurs after the world has already ended.
I've got to say that apocalypse fiction is no longer my cup of meat. That's a theme for young writers, I think. But I set to work. And I finished my story in the hour given me. It began:
By the time Mars was done, Earth was uninhabitable.
You can read the entire story in English or Russian here.
So what are the story's major deficiencies? Well...
1. The opening paragraphs. You're expecting me to say that opening with an info-dump is wrong. Not so! You need only look at Larry Niven's early short stories, which often began with a brief science lesson necessary for the reader to understand what follows, and which worked just fine. Or at the way Rod Serling opened each Twilight Zone episode with a short chat that cut out twenty minutes narrative exposition so the show could cut straight to the exciting parts. Info-dumps are a useful, if commonly maligned, tool.
No, what's wrong is that, not having looked into terraforming for several decades, I have only the haziest sense of of how it would work. Eukaryotes are involved, I believe, but how and at what stage are beyond me. And since there was no public wi-fi at the convention hotel, I couldn't look it up online. So the first significant flaw is: insufficient research.
If I were going to try to sell the story, I'd do the research and rewrite it first. Sometimes a story will come to you so fast that there's not the time to do the research. But there's always the time to retrofit it.
2. The time-span. Originally, I had the terraforming take fifty thousand years, which I suspect is pretty fast for completely altering an entire planet. But then I realized that fifty thousand years was too long a period to have people similar to contemporary humans and one hour was too short a time to write something long enough to establish a radically different society. So I cheated and cut the time scale down by an order of magnitude.
If you've got a good enough story going, the reader will forgive this sort of thing. But, really, it's playing with the net down.
3. The immortals. To dramatize the predicament these people are caught in, I had to have one of them recently come to realize with despair that Earth could not be terraformed. But if they've been working on this for thousands of years and human lifespans are still what they are now, the characters would have been born into a hopeless situation and know it already. I made them immortals who had been caught up in the details of their work for too long. This is kind of a cheat, since it's not implicit in the original idea.
The characters are also ciphers. But that's okay for this kind of story. Not every work of fiction needs to be Remembrance of Times Past.
4. The ending. I pulled in an aliens ex machina there, simply because the clock was ticking and I could think of no other way to come up with an interesting ending. Or, rather, to do so would have required a much longer story and there simply wasn't the time.
You can get away with this sort of thing if the story is entertaining enough. Someone will buy it, readers will enjoy it well enough, and then it will be forgotten. But if you aspire to "honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women," as Freud put it (substitute "men" for "women," if you wish), then you have to aim higher and try harder.
I came in second in the competition, by the way, which is an honorable rank. I don't think anybody -- myself included -- would have been happy if an outsider had walked away with first place.
*
What do people do for fun in Russia?
How about write a story in an hour? I am not making this up. At Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention, I saw a line of serious young people tapping away at a line of laptops. They were given a list of five themes created by writer Eugeny Lukin, pulled a number out of a hat to see which one they had to write on, and set to work. There were more people involved than the photo above suggests, too. When one group finished, the next group stepped in.
I didn't exactly volunteer to take part in the competition. But somehow I found myself behind a laptop.
The theme I was given was "The End of the World 2." Which, it was explained to me, was the apocalypse that occurs after the world has already ended.
I've got to say that apocalypse fiction is no longer my cup of meat. That's a theme for young writers, I think. But I set to work. And I finished my story in the hour given me. It began:
By the time Mars was done, Earth was uninhabitable.
You can read the entire story in English or Russian here.
So what are the story's major deficiencies? Well...
1. The opening paragraphs. You're expecting me to say that opening with an info-dump is wrong. Not so! You need only look at Larry Niven's early short stories, which often began with a brief science lesson necessary for the reader to understand what follows, and which worked just fine. Or at the way Rod Serling opened each Twilight Zone episode with a short chat that cut out twenty minutes narrative exposition so the show could cut straight to the exciting parts. Info-dumps are a useful, if commonly maligned, tool.
No, what's wrong is that, not having looked into terraforming for several decades, I have only the haziest sense of of how it would work. Eukaryotes are involved, I believe, but how and at what stage are beyond me. And since there was no public wi-fi at the convention hotel, I couldn't look it up online. So the first significant flaw is: insufficient research.
If I were going to try to sell the story, I'd do the research and rewrite it first. Sometimes a story will come to you so fast that there's not the time to do the research. But there's always the time to retrofit it.
2. The time-span. Originally, I had the terraforming take fifty thousand years, which I suspect is pretty fast for completely altering an entire planet. But then I realized that fifty thousand years was too long a period to have people similar to contemporary humans and one hour was too short a time to write something long enough to establish a radically different society. So I cheated and cut the time scale down by an order of magnitude.
If you've got a good enough story going, the reader will forgive this sort of thing. But, really, it's playing with the net down.
3. The immortals. To dramatize the predicament these people are caught in, I had to have one of them recently come to realize with despair that Earth could not be terraformed. But if they've been working on this for thousands of years and human lifespans are still what they are now, the characters would have been born into a hopeless situation and know it already. I made them immortals who had been caught up in the details of their work for too long. This is kind of a cheat, since it's not implicit in the original idea.
The characters are also ciphers. But that's okay for this kind of story. Not every work of fiction needs to be Remembrance of Times Past.
4. The ending. I pulled in an aliens ex machina there, simply because the clock was ticking and I could think of no other way to come up with an interesting ending. Or, rather, to do so would have required a much longer story and there simply wasn't the time.
You can get away with this sort of thing if the story is entertaining enough. Someone will buy it, readers will enjoy it well enough, and then it will be forgotten. But if you aspire to "honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women," as Freud put it (substitute "men" for "women," if you wish), then you have to aim higher and try harder.
I came in second in the competition, by the way, which is an honorable rank. I don't think anybody -- myself included -- would have been happy if an outsider had walked away with first place.
*
March 25, 2016
A Woman, Weeping . . .
.
Long airline flights offer the opportunity to catch up on movies one really ought to have seen but couldn’t manage the enthusiasm to travel all the way to the multiplex for. Recently, I went to Russia. On the way back, I saw Saving Mr. Banks. This is my belated review.
A Woman, Weeping . . .
Saving Mr. Banksbegins in Heaven – or so the sunlit clouds would suggest. The camera descends to Earth to show a happy little girl with her loving father in the middle of an impossibly idyllic childhood. Then it cuts to the profoundly unhappy woman she will become.
The hatchet job has begun.
P. L. Travers, the revered author of the Mary Poppins books, is in this accounting in desperate need of scratch. Nevertheless, she resists the largess offered by Disney Studio for the right to make a movie of her life’s work. “Don’t say money! It’s a filthy, disgusting word!” she tells her lawyer. Who, like virtually every other person in this movie, is firmly on Disney’s side.
Looming poverty, however, is in the saddle and Travers must go where it drives her. She accepts a consulting fee for the script, while withholding the right to make the movie.
When Travers arrives in Los Angeles, she thinks it ugly. She hates the chlorine smell of its swimming pools. She does not tolerate fools gladly. She doesn’t want to see Disneyland. She won’t let people call her by her first name. She crams the stuffed toys and corporate kitsch thronging her hotel room out of sight in the closet. She demands script approval. She uses big words. She has a mind and a will of her own. She is everything that can be wrong about a woman.
She is, in short, badly in need of a man who’ll tell her what to do.
Luckily, Walt is on the job. He begins the seduction by holding Travers’ hands and calling her Pamela. There is a devilish gleam in his eyes.
Travers and the writers proceed to make each others’ lives unbearable. The Banks home as they envision it is far too palatial. She doesn’t approve of the suggestion that Bert and Mary Poppins might be romantically involved. She’s gone off the color red and won’t have it in the movie at all. She is in every instance perfectly unreasonable.
Save for the one aspect of the conflict which is never mentioned: That Mary Poppins as conceived by Travers and Mary Poppins as Disney wishes her to be are not only different people but entirely different creatures. Disney envisions a chipper magical fixer-upper of broken middle class families. Travers’ creation is something deeper, profounder, more mythic.
Meanwhile, back in the past, the father, at first as charming as only a scripted actor can be, begins to fall apart, prey to the twin scourges of alcohol and whimsy. These sections grow increasingly awful and correspondingly more painful to watch. Until finally the point has been bludgeoned home: P. L. Travers has father issues and that is why she is such a miserable old hag.
It is hard to see why anybody would want to watch such a sour, unpleasant movie, seesawing as it does between the growing misery of a child and the slow and cynical bullying of her adult self. But then comes a hint: In the back-story it is deftly shown that Travers’ greatest creation is based on her own nanny, thus implying she doesn’t much deserve credit for a character who was as good as dumped into her lap. Further, the nanny is much more like Disney’s Mary Poppins than the one in the books. P. L. Travers got the character wrong! Disney got it right!
Because there must be character growth, Travers begins to bend. She mounts a carousel horse in Disneyland. She sings and dances along with one of the songs. She allows Walt to call her Pamela and then Pam. She agrees that Los Angeles is beautiful. All this can only be the result of Disney magic. That, or Stockholm Syndrome.
At last, Travers has no choice but to flee back home or lose her soul.
Walt, who admits that he “pretty much” always gets what he wants, pursues her back to London. He invites himself into her house. He calls her a dame. He shares his past with her. He moves in close and calls her Mrs. Travers for the first time. He promises to bring her father back to life, whole, healed, and redeemed.
Sitting on a chair opposite the stuffed Mickey which she has taken into her life as her own personal savior, P. L. Travers sells Mary Poppins down the river.
And they all live happily ever after.
Only… not so much.
It’s become legend by now that when the audience left the Hollywood premiere of Mary Poppins, an event to which Travers was not invited but which she managed to get into anyway, she was left weeping in the theater, and not for joy. Walt Disney had made the movie he wanted. His studio raked in a great deal of money. And Julie Andrews, perky and simplistically moral, became Mary Poppins for all but a dedicated minority of readers. Walt’s triumph was all but absolute.
Save for that lone, victimized woman, weeping in the dark.
Saving Mr. Banksresolves that unpleasant image by turning Travers’ tears into a cathartic cleansing of her past. Walt (who has fled her presence with the unseemly haste of a man with a guilty conscience), has made something she lacked the imagination to create herself – a fantasy that reconciles her with her father.
Whatever can be the purpose of this sour and not at all entertaining movie if it is not revenge for Travers spoiling the absoluteness of Disney’s victory over her? I suppose a more generous viewer might see it not as pissing on Travers’ grave but as a corporate act of filial piety toward the studio’s founding father. Either way, it is ruthless.
Did you know that P. L. Travers was a journalist? That she was friends with William Butler Yeats? That she lived for two years on a Navajo reservation? Or that she studied with Gurdjieff? It took me three minutes on Google to discover these facts. Emma Thompson did a marvelous job of portraying the woman she was told to portray (there are no bad performances in this movie) but the woman she portrayed could have done none of these things. She was simply a problem to be solved.
And solved she was. As will be all who get between the Mouse and its appetites.
*
Long airline flights offer the opportunity to catch up on movies one really ought to have seen but couldn’t manage the enthusiasm to travel all the way to the multiplex for. Recently, I went to Russia. On the way back, I saw Saving Mr. Banks. This is my belated review.
A Woman, Weeping . . .
Saving Mr. Banksbegins in Heaven – or so the sunlit clouds would suggest. The camera descends to Earth to show a happy little girl with her loving father in the middle of an impossibly idyllic childhood. Then it cuts to the profoundly unhappy woman she will become.
The hatchet job has begun.
P. L. Travers, the revered author of the Mary Poppins books, is in this accounting in desperate need of scratch. Nevertheless, she resists the largess offered by Disney Studio for the right to make a movie of her life’s work. “Don’t say money! It’s a filthy, disgusting word!” she tells her lawyer. Who, like virtually every other person in this movie, is firmly on Disney’s side.
Looming poverty, however, is in the saddle and Travers must go where it drives her. She accepts a consulting fee for the script, while withholding the right to make the movie.
When Travers arrives in Los Angeles, she thinks it ugly. She hates the chlorine smell of its swimming pools. She does not tolerate fools gladly. She doesn’t want to see Disneyland. She won’t let people call her by her first name. She crams the stuffed toys and corporate kitsch thronging her hotel room out of sight in the closet. She demands script approval. She uses big words. She has a mind and a will of her own. She is everything that can be wrong about a woman.
She is, in short, badly in need of a man who’ll tell her what to do.
Luckily, Walt is on the job. He begins the seduction by holding Travers’ hands and calling her Pamela. There is a devilish gleam in his eyes.
Travers and the writers proceed to make each others’ lives unbearable. The Banks home as they envision it is far too palatial. She doesn’t approve of the suggestion that Bert and Mary Poppins might be romantically involved. She’s gone off the color red and won’t have it in the movie at all. She is in every instance perfectly unreasonable.
Save for the one aspect of the conflict which is never mentioned: That Mary Poppins as conceived by Travers and Mary Poppins as Disney wishes her to be are not only different people but entirely different creatures. Disney envisions a chipper magical fixer-upper of broken middle class families. Travers’ creation is something deeper, profounder, more mythic.
Meanwhile, back in the past, the father, at first as charming as only a scripted actor can be, begins to fall apart, prey to the twin scourges of alcohol and whimsy. These sections grow increasingly awful and correspondingly more painful to watch. Until finally the point has been bludgeoned home: P. L. Travers has father issues and that is why she is such a miserable old hag.
It is hard to see why anybody would want to watch such a sour, unpleasant movie, seesawing as it does between the growing misery of a child and the slow and cynical bullying of her adult self. But then comes a hint: In the back-story it is deftly shown that Travers’ greatest creation is based on her own nanny, thus implying she doesn’t much deserve credit for a character who was as good as dumped into her lap. Further, the nanny is much more like Disney’s Mary Poppins than the one in the books. P. L. Travers got the character wrong! Disney got it right!
Because there must be character growth, Travers begins to bend. She mounts a carousel horse in Disneyland. She sings and dances along with one of the songs. She allows Walt to call her Pamela and then Pam. She agrees that Los Angeles is beautiful. All this can only be the result of Disney magic. That, or Stockholm Syndrome.
At last, Travers has no choice but to flee back home or lose her soul.
Walt, who admits that he “pretty much” always gets what he wants, pursues her back to London. He invites himself into her house. He calls her a dame. He shares his past with her. He moves in close and calls her Mrs. Travers for the first time. He promises to bring her father back to life, whole, healed, and redeemed.
Sitting on a chair opposite the stuffed Mickey which she has taken into her life as her own personal savior, P. L. Travers sells Mary Poppins down the river.
And they all live happily ever after.
Only… not so much.
It’s become legend by now that when the audience left the Hollywood premiere of Mary Poppins, an event to which Travers was not invited but which she managed to get into anyway, she was left weeping in the theater, and not for joy. Walt Disney had made the movie he wanted. His studio raked in a great deal of money. And Julie Andrews, perky and simplistically moral, became Mary Poppins for all but a dedicated minority of readers. Walt’s triumph was all but absolute.
Save for that lone, victimized woman, weeping in the dark.
Saving Mr. Banksresolves that unpleasant image by turning Travers’ tears into a cathartic cleansing of her past. Walt (who has fled her presence with the unseemly haste of a man with a guilty conscience), has made something she lacked the imagination to create herself – a fantasy that reconciles her with her father.
Whatever can be the purpose of this sour and not at all entertaining movie if it is not revenge for Travers spoiling the absoluteness of Disney’s victory over her? I suppose a more generous viewer might see it not as pissing on Travers’ grave but as a corporate act of filial piety toward the studio’s founding father. Either way, it is ruthless.
Did you know that P. L. Travers was a journalist? That she was friends with William Butler Yeats? That she lived for two years on a Navajo reservation? Or that she studied with Gurdjieff? It took me three minutes on Google to discover these facts. Emma Thompson did a marvelous job of portraying the woman she was told to portray (there are no bad performances in this movie) but the woman she portrayed could have done none of these things. She was simply a problem to be solved.
And solved she was. As will be all who get between the Mouse and its appetites.
*
March 23, 2016
Four Days in Russia
.
I promised to write a little about my four days in Rublevka and Moscow, where Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention, was held, and though I'm still a little jet-lagged, I'll do my best. It was a great experience for me. The Russian fans and pros were all warm and welcoming The parties were fun. I won an award (see yesterday's post). And they made such a big fuss over me that I'm going to have to lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth over my ego until the swelling goes down.
Roscon is divided into two separate conventions. Thursday and Friday there was a literary convention of writers, editors, and serious fans, very much focused on the written word. This half was held in a hotel in Rublevka, which is where the wealthy and powerful lived in gated communities. Saturday and Sunday there was a more populist media con held in Moscow. This is a new but very successful addition to the original conference.
Here, off the top of my head are a few of the highlights:
Shish-kabobs on Thursday evening. This event was held in an open-air pavilion surrounded by birch trees and snow. The meat was grilled to perfection and there were drinks on hand. Boy, were there drinks on hand. Whiskey appears to be almost as popular as vodka and there was, of course, kvass. Like any science fiction event anywhere, the focus was on conversation. Imagine a torrent, a tumult, a babel of voices. Then add alcohol. Quite enjoyable.
The Friday night whiskey tasting. Actually, it wasn't just a tasting but a lecture as well. Andrei Sinitsyn explained the qualities and merits of each bottle before samples were poured. This has become a tradition at Roscon in recent years. In addition to the single-malts that are the backbone of the series, they one Irish whiskey, Writers' Tears, and a bottle of Rittenhouse Rye. Which I don't have to tell you is made in Philadelphia.
Interviewing Sergei Lukyanenko. Sergei is best known in America for his six Night Watch books, but he's written a great deal more as well. Also, he's one hell of a likable guy. Alas, our schedules were so crowded that the only chance I had to interview him was in a very noisy room. I'm hoping I'll be able to transcribe the results without too much difficulty. "How long did it take you to get published from when you started writing?" I asked him.
"Six months," he replied.
Meeting Annushka, who spilled the sunflower oil. The media-focused part of the con had, of course, many young people in really good costumes. I was wandering among them when a young woman carrying a pitcher and several packets of sunflower seeds asked if I was familiar with Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, The Master and Margarita . Then she explained that she was Annushka, the woman who spills the sunflower oil upon which the editor Berlioz slips, sending him under the wheels of an oncoming trolley. Just minutes after the devil predicted his imminent decapitation, at the beginning of the novel.
It turns out that there is a Moscow group of M&M fans and cosplayers dedicated to that great work of literature and they had a display set up at the con. As if I needed another reason to love Russians!
A panel with Sally Green and Nick Perumov. Ms Green is the author of the very popular Half Bad YA series and Nick's books have sold millions of copies worldwide, though only one title has been published in English. It was held in English and about half of the audience knew the language well enough that they didn't need wait for the translator to have a full understanding of what we all said. Nick, oddly enough, was made the moderator/interviewer, but he managed to slip in some of his own ideas via the questions.
The room was pretty much full -- and this during the media half of the con. The Russians remain ahead of us on the reading front. Our government should probably fund a massive program for us to catch up.
Fiction Writing Contests. There were several. I was volunteered to enter the Write a Story in an Hour contest, and I managed to do so -- just barely. When the story is posted online, I'll blog about it in more detail.
Hanging With the Esli Editorial Staff. I've had a number of stories published in Esli (the name means "If") over the years, and it's always been a pleasure. The magazine closed in 2012, due to distribution problems, but re-opened last year and looks to be going strong. This is a good thing. Every time I receive a contributor's copy of the magazine, I look over the stories I cannot read and sigh with longing.
The Sunday night banquet. It was zakuski, basically. Lots and lots of little plates of favorite foods, the sort of things that Russians eat at home. Accompanied, of course, with conversation. Among the many people I met there was a professional sports-fisherman -- the best in the world, his friend said proudly. I, being quite possibly the worst fisherman in the world, experienced a moment of fear when we shook hands, that physical contact would cause us both to cancel each other out.
And there was much, much more. I'll most likely write more here soon. Right now I have to see if I can do something about this jet lag. A nap may well be involved.
Above: GUM Department Store as seen from Red Square. I was fortunate enough to walk through the Resurrection Gates at the exact moment when the light was perfect. The airship is by the quite wonderful Tom Kidd. It was photoshopped in by Sarah Smith. The image is posted here with their permission. my own, of course.
*
I promised to write a little about my four days in Rublevka and Moscow, where Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention, was held, and though I'm still a little jet-lagged, I'll do my best. It was a great experience for me. The Russian fans and pros were all warm and welcoming The parties were fun. I won an award (see yesterday's post). And they made such a big fuss over me that I'm going to have to lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth over my ego until the swelling goes down.
Roscon is divided into two separate conventions. Thursday and Friday there was a literary convention of writers, editors, and serious fans, very much focused on the written word. This half was held in a hotel in Rublevka, which is where the wealthy and powerful lived in gated communities. Saturday and Sunday there was a more populist media con held in Moscow. This is a new but very successful addition to the original conference.
Here, off the top of my head are a few of the highlights:
Shish-kabobs on Thursday evening. This event was held in an open-air pavilion surrounded by birch trees and snow. The meat was grilled to perfection and there were drinks on hand. Boy, were there drinks on hand. Whiskey appears to be almost as popular as vodka and there was, of course, kvass. Like any science fiction event anywhere, the focus was on conversation. Imagine a torrent, a tumult, a babel of voices. Then add alcohol. Quite enjoyable.
The Friday night whiskey tasting. Actually, it wasn't just a tasting but a lecture as well. Andrei Sinitsyn explained the qualities and merits of each bottle before samples were poured. This has become a tradition at Roscon in recent years. In addition to the single-malts that are the backbone of the series, they one Irish whiskey, Writers' Tears, and a bottle of Rittenhouse Rye. Which I don't have to tell you is made in Philadelphia.
Interviewing Sergei Lukyanenko. Sergei is best known in America for his six Night Watch books, but he's written a great deal more as well. Also, he's one hell of a likable guy. Alas, our schedules were so crowded that the only chance I had to interview him was in a very noisy room. I'm hoping I'll be able to transcribe the results without too much difficulty. "How long did it take you to get published from when you started writing?" I asked him.
"Six months," he replied.
Meeting Annushka, who spilled the sunflower oil. The media-focused part of the con had, of course, many young people in really good costumes. I was wandering among them when a young woman carrying a pitcher and several packets of sunflower seeds asked if I was familiar with Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, The Master and Margarita . Then she explained that she was Annushka, the woman who spills the sunflower oil upon which the editor Berlioz slips, sending him under the wheels of an oncoming trolley. Just minutes after the devil predicted his imminent decapitation, at the beginning of the novel.
It turns out that there is a Moscow group of M&M fans and cosplayers dedicated to that great work of literature and they had a display set up at the con. As if I needed another reason to love Russians!
A panel with Sally Green and Nick Perumov. Ms Green is the author of the very popular Half Bad YA series and Nick's books have sold millions of copies worldwide, though only one title has been published in English. It was held in English and about half of the audience knew the language well enough that they didn't need wait for the translator to have a full understanding of what we all said. Nick, oddly enough, was made the moderator/interviewer, but he managed to slip in some of his own ideas via the questions.
The room was pretty much full -- and this during the media half of the con. The Russians remain ahead of us on the reading front. Our government should probably fund a massive program for us to catch up.
Fiction Writing Contests. There were several. I was volunteered to enter the Write a Story in an Hour contest, and I managed to do so -- just barely. When the story is posted online, I'll blog about it in more detail.
Hanging With the Esli Editorial Staff. I've had a number of stories published in Esli (the name means "If") over the years, and it's always been a pleasure. The magazine closed in 2012, due to distribution problems, but re-opened last year and looks to be going strong. This is a good thing. Every time I receive a contributor's copy of the magazine, I look over the stories I cannot read and sigh with longing.
The Sunday night banquet. It was zakuski, basically. Lots and lots of little plates of favorite foods, the sort of things that Russians eat at home. Accompanied, of course, with conversation. Among the many people I met there was a professional sports-fisherman -- the best in the world, his friend said proudly. I, being quite possibly the worst fisherman in the world, experienced a moment of fear when we shook hands, that physical contact would cause us both to cancel each other out.
And there was much, much more. I'll most likely write more here soon. Right now I have to see if I can do something about this jet lag. A nap may well be involved.
Above: GUM Department Store as seen from Red Square. I was fortunate enough to walk through the Resurrection Gates at the exact moment when the light was perfect. The airship is by the quite wonderful Tom Kidd. It was photoshopped in by Sarah Smith. The image is posted here with their permission. my own, of course.
*
March 22, 2016
The Grand Roscon Award
.
Strange but happy news. I'm just returned from Moscow, where I attended Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention. One thing they do at national science fiction conventions is to give out awards. In Russia, it's the Roscon Award... for Best Novel, Best Short Story, and so on. I'll be sharing those results as soon as a friend forwards them to me.
One of them I know already, however. It's the Grand Roscon Award for achievement in science fiction. Which this year went to... me.
You have no idea how humbling it is to receive such a thing in a country that is home to Isaac Babel, Victor Pelevin, Anna Akhmatova, and the Strugatsky Brothers.
And now back to battling jet-lag. I'll have more to say about Roscon in the coming week.
*
Strange but happy news. I'm just returned from Moscow, where I attended Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention. One thing they do at national science fiction conventions is to give out awards. In Russia, it's the Roscon Award... for Best Novel, Best Short Story, and so on. I'll be sharing those results as soon as a friend forwards them to me.
One of them I know already, however. It's the Grand Roscon Award for achievement in science fiction. Which this year went to... me.
You have no idea how humbling it is to receive such a thing in a country that is home to Isaac Babel, Victor Pelevin, Anna Akhmatova, and the Strugatsky Brothers.
And now back to battling jet-lag. I'll have more to say about Roscon in the coming week.
*
March 16, 2016
Russia!
.As always, I'm on the road again. This time, I'm off to Moscow, for Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention. I'll be blogging if I can, but if circumstances don't permit... Well, then I won't. We'll see.
This will be an adventure for me. Wish me luck. And check this blog periodically, to see how things are going.
*
March 14, 2016
One Last Plug and I'm off to Russia!
.
There's a certain irony to packing for Russia so soon after my episode for The Witch Who Came In From the Cold was published. All I can say in my behalf is that Tanya, the Russian magic-wielder and KGB agent who is indisputably the hero of this series (sorry, Gabe!), is also the closest thing there is to a Good Guy in this battle of ideologies-and-sorcery. So at least I'll arrive in Moscow with clean hands.
Over at the Serial Box blog, Ian Tregillis has some kind things to say about me. Apparently he was worried about what I might do in my episode. And I understand that perfectly. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to bring in something unexpected, something disruptive, something that would be a real pain in the butt for him to deal with... But that's not the way this sort of game is played. Each episode builds on the previous ones and builds toward the next.
Anyway, the other writers are all likable guys. I got a kick out of working with them. So, no, I played nice.
More importantly, as Ian says in his post, episode 6 was basically the last of the set-up episodes. By the end of it, you know who everybody is, what kind of people they are, what powers are in play, and what's at stake. So now the game begins for real. As Ian wrote:
At this point we’re transitioning into the second half of the season: we’ve almost pushed the boulder all the way to the top of the mountain. A few more nudges, and that sucker will be unstoppable. So my job in “Radio Free Trismegistus” was to clear the path for the avalanche by kicking a few pebbles down the hill.
This is a crucial moment in a plot-driven story. It's the still moment of equipoise when the reader has put together what's going on and can begin to anticipate how things are going to fall together -- or, as may very well be the case, apart.
From this point on, the series depends on how well the writers can satisfy the readers' expectations while simultaneously confounding them with surprising developments.
Can the Cold Witch gang do it? My money says yes.
And speaking of Russia . . .
On Wednesday I fly to Moscow for Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention. I speak no Russian, alas, but I'll have a friend with me who can translate.
So if you're going to be there, be sure to say hello. I'd be delighted to meet you.
*
There's a certain irony to packing for Russia so soon after my episode for The Witch Who Came In From the Cold was published. All I can say in my behalf is that Tanya, the Russian magic-wielder and KGB agent who is indisputably the hero of this series (sorry, Gabe!), is also the closest thing there is to a Good Guy in this battle of ideologies-and-sorcery. So at least I'll arrive in Moscow with clean hands.
Over at the Serial Box blog, Ian Tregillis has some kind things to say about me. Apparently he was worried about what I might do in my episode. And I understand that perfectly. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to bring in something unexpected, something disruptive, something that would be a real pain in the butt for him to deal with... But that's not the way this sort of game is played. Each episode builds on the previous ones and builds toward the next.
Anyway, the other writers are all likable guys. I got a kick out of working with them. So, no, I played nice.
More importantly, as Ian says in his post, episode 6 was basically the last of the set-up episodes. By the end of it, you know who everybody is, what kind of people they are, what powers are in play, and what's at stake. So now the game begins for real. As Ian wrote:
At this point we’re transitioning into the second half of the season: we’ve almost pushed the boulder all the way to the top of the mountain. A few more nudges, and that sucker will be unstoppable. So my job in “Radio Free Trismegistus” was to clear the path for the avalanche by kicking a few pebbles down the hill.
This is a crucial moment in a plot-driven story. It's the still moment of equipoise when the reader has put together what's going on and can begin to anticipate how things are going to fall together -- or, as may very well be the case, apart.
From this point on, the series depends on how well the writers can satisfy the readers' expectations while simultaneously confounding them with surprising developments.
Can the Cold Witch gang do it? My money says yes.
And speaking of Russia . . .
On Wednesday I fly to Moscow for Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention. I speak no Russian, alas, but I'll have a friend with me who can translate.
So if you're going to be there, be sure to say hello. I'd be delighted to meet you.
*
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