beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2014-04-26 01:59 pm
beccaelizabeth) wrote2014-04-26 01:59 pm
Flashbacks, character, and worldbuilding.
My first fandom, with conventions, mailing lists, and fanfic, was Highlander. That's where I got both my icon and my tattoo. I haven't rewatched it for a while, partly on the sneaking suspicion it might not be as good as the good bits version in my head, but it did shape me.
I build a character by choosing their weapon. It don't have to be a sword, or even a tool of violence, but whatever it is, it will be very specific. Each weapon has a specific use, a culture and community who used it, a history, a heritage. Their use was learned somewhere, and perfected over time as that particular tool seemed suited for that character's tasks.
Highlander was big on flashbacks. You don't see them so much in most TV, but they were half of any episode on Highlander. They had the whole of history to play with, and used it consistently. It wasn't quite like the time travel show the TV guide so often mistook it for. It didn't take observers from the present into the past. It showed how the past is always with us.
Highlander has been called 'romantic talmudic discussion with swords'. It's about relationships, and ethics; how people's choices bring them together and take them apart. Each episode had at least two plots, past and present, but (at least when the writing was on form) one ethical dilemma. The same problem could be confronted by two characters shaped by growing up in different points in history, or it could be the same character at two points in their life, highlighting their changes or continuities. Flashbacks weren't just a tour of the costume eras, they were the choices and consequences a character was bringing to the present moment. The things they'd learned somewhere, the skills they'd perfected, the gambits suited to that person's character.
In Highlander the choices lead inevitably to a sword fight. Thesis and antithesis hacked away at each other, ending in a Quickening where the winner takes the enemy's strengths, and sometimes their flaws. The tag line, well enough known to be mangled in the papers even now, was 'There can be only one': in the logic of the Game, only one ethic would prove itself through repeated trial by combat, and rule thereafter. Yet the show was also about clan, about found family and the protagonist's tendency to gather up strays. Friendships that struggled against the temptations and pressures of the Game came out stronger, and a shared history could go back hundreds or thousands of years... making it all the more heart wrenching when their paths diverged far enough it finally came down to swords. Almost every week the protagonist met another old friend, but you didn't know if they'd make it to the end of the episode, or crash into some irreconcilable difference.
So I learned from Highlander that every character has history. Which seems pretty obvious. But a lot of shows, just by only telling the present, they make it seem like a character's life started in the pilot episode, or at least the interesting bit. Science fiction especially, charging ahead to the future, can leave a little something to be desired in terms of historical depth. But Highlander also highlighted how much every character can change. The protagonist 400 years ago in the time of his birth probably would not have got along with the man of the late 20th century. He had a pretty consistent timeline, with study, experience, friendships and enmities shaping him. And every character he met had similar depth of time, the same capacity for change, for good or ill. They lived through very specific historical events, and any episode was using those events to make some argument about the correct course of action. But it gave you some idea of how rapid change has been.
It drives me nuts now looking at fantasy or SF timelines where things stayed pretty much the same for thousands of years. At any given point in real world history there are developments in politics and technology, weapons and tactics, relationships among the powerful forming and shattering and taking their countries with them. Fantasy worlds throw knights in armour on horseback alongside longbowmen on foot and in some cases stick them in a holding pattern for centuries, when in the real world that moment passed in about a century and was characterised by changes in armour and weapon tech that can be dated to the decade, and not just for reasons of fashion. I've been reading some David Gemmell books, and he stresses this: at any given moment, every warrior is looking for an edge. So people with bronze swords meet people with iron, longswords meet shortswords and shields, infantry meet mounted archers, gunpowder changes everything. Martial arts movies have a lot of this, where the new technology comes in to confront the old ways. It's a very SF moment, the realisation that new tech or new knowledge will change the whole landscape. And every moment is like this. The old meets the new in the now. Every now, everywhere.
Old ideas do the same. Cultural studies uses words like dominant, emergent and residual. New ideas try and make space, old ideas hold on for grim death. They linger longer than you'd think. Trial by combat doesn't seem like a very respectable idea in mainstream discourse, but Highlander gotsix five years, a spin off, and some movies out of it. Any society, fantasy or otherwise, will have a cultural dominant that most people most of the time won't question, some ideas they'll recognise as old fashioned but are still nudged by, and the newest crop of 'hang on, what if?'
A character's journey, historic and geographic, will influence which ideas they carry as well as the tools they use. And it can be very, very specific. People a year older or younger than you remember different pop music, different styles, different first things they cared about on the news. They also might be on different sides of a law being made. People that started drinking before prohibition, or having a particular kind of sex when it was illegal, probably have a different attitude to law than those who never had their everyday legislated like that. People lived before and after getting to vote, or go to college, or join the military. Highlander showed people raised in laws and cultures centuries different from our own, and at least had a go at showing how very different that made their basic mindsets. To me it highlighted how the same thing happens now, between generations, or between different school years sometimes. Getting through university before or after the fee changes probably changes your values somewhat, for instance.
And that kind of depth and detail is an absolute bugger to build into a created 'verse, fantasy or SF. It's hard enough to show what a world is like now, but it'll feel like a paper backdrop until it can give the impression it had a journey to get that way.
It's tempting to leave an individual in a holding pattern before the story gets started. Just figure they had a normal life up until 1.01. But there's a character lately I've been being annoyed at because he's acting surprised that his job and boss and co-workers are acting in the ways that, all other evidence suggests, they always act, and this character is older than me. How did he get to his age and only now start caring about these things? He's got some reasons to change, but since the top of the heap reason is that now things are happening to him rather than being done by him, they're somewhat unsympathetic reasons. Hence my annoyance. So, the older a character is, the more important it gets to know how they got where they're standing. Which probably applies to civilisations too. How did they fund their great leap into the universe? Who paid for it, and how much do they still owe? Did they have a military phase before the civilian one, or vice versa? What's their idea of a pleasant retirement? Civilisations probably don't plan for retirement per se, but they can be expanding their role and territories, or stepping back.
I sat down to write this just to say that I think the space colony series I've been planning could benefit from flashbacks. Not just backstory, but spending a B plot in the old world every week. Because it's tempting to see a new colony as a new beginning, but every single person there brought their baggage, personal and political. Every argument, every approach, every tool and every weapon, they'll all come from the old world. The past is always present. So the challenge is how anything can really be new, given all that? And the new setting simply ups the pressure, since if they cannot overcome the old problems, they're not going to make it there.
Buuuuuut, presence of extensive flashbacks does not automatically endear a show to me. And even shows I like can have (interminable) flashbacks I could do without. I think the tricky bit is to keep it both relevant and fresh, despite it being the past. If the same thing happens in every flashback, bored now. And it's nice to see what made a character the person they are today, but it's tricky to get the right speed of revelation and to keep it tied to the plot of the week.
I'm also thinking about arc vs self contained stories. If one timeframe is arc and the other is self contained, does that compliment or drag at each other? If the main plot in the present is wrapped every week and the flashback plot has a long term slow reveal arc then I reckon that's going to make the flashbacks feel less relevant and less satisfying. If it's the other way around though, if the flashbacks are all tidy but the present day keeps going a tiny open ended piece at a time, what does that do? And using them like Highlander did, the intro/outro thing where a new character slots in to the protagonist's backstory and then you see their relationship in the present day and usually how it ends, that's kind of an acquired taste. New old friends every week are kind of like making us care about every new guy twice over. It's got potential but it's tricky.
The thing with my space colony though, I was going to use fanfic characters to give it depth of background, only to adapt them to this setting which is kind of a fusion or AU then I'd need to retell the most significant bits of their lives. New old friends, yes? Even if I used familiar names we'd need to get to know them twice, who they were in the fusion backstory and who they are in the ongoing plot. Only as fanfic it's awkward and poorly formed since I want to do OCish things with them and not so much worry about them wandering out of character if it serves my plot. I just wanted to steal 'Doctor with a disability and both friends and enemies in cryo' or 'ex mind controlled soldier wrestling with his guilt' or whatever. So I know what everyone's deal is, away in the background, and I know how they all connect up and why they'd join this colony at this point in their lives. But I can't just dump it out into the first episode. That would drag interminably. So, flashbacks. And Highlander shows what they're good for, highlighting a choice and what experiences and emotional pressures are being brought to that choice. So then you structure each episode around an ethical dilemma, and if there's an a and b plot that's the present and the flashback, but if you pull another thread into it then there's a second character with a contrasting experience. Probably a younger person, so it's all new to them and they don't get flashbacks. (Richie was my favourite, back when. Methos is now.)
I keep telling myself that I haven't started writing this thing because if I just let it stew a bit longer it might be possible to file serial numbers off and make it proper original. Actually at the moment I have two slightly different offworld colony stories that just don't mesh, one with capertillers and Welsh stone circles and a very British cast, the other with a straight up Stargate setting. The Stargate one is always going to be fanfic, but right now it's merely a mess of a multi fandom fusion that I can't imagine anyone would read, and with a bit of polish it might be spin off series level original. The two series don't quite mesh, but they do both deal with disability and some magic cures. And I know that nobody hesitates to write different Being Masculine On a Starship stories, but I'm hesitating over different Being Disabled in a Space Colony stories, even though the differences are not things I could smush together. One is a low character point low resources ordinary people story, the other a high power vast resources big politics tale that draws on comic book characters and Star Trek level competence. They don't match, they don't go the same places, I kind of want to tell both, I stall on telling either.
I stall on putting one word next to another, and whenever I notice that, instead of opening a file and trying it, I just talk myself into a woe spiral about how maybe I'm not a writer after all. Blergh.
Or, as you may notice, pontificate at length in meta.
i'm going to post this and get breakfast. it's only 1530, i've been up since 0730, that's a totally reasonable interval before breakfast...
I build a character by choosing their weapon. It don't have to be a sword, or even a tool of violence, but whatever it is, it will be very specific. Each weapon has a specific use, a culture and community who used it, a history, a heritage. Their use was learned somewhere, and perfected over time as that particular tool seemed suited for that character's tasks.
Highlander was big on flashbacks. You don't see them so much in most TV, but they were half of any episode on Highlander. They had the whole of history to play with, and used it consistently. It wasn't quite like the time travel show the TV guide so often mistook it for. It didn't take observers from the present into the past. It showed how the past is always with us.
Highlander has been called 'romantic talmudic discussion with swords'. It's about relationships, and ethics; how people's choices bring them together and take them apart. Each episode had at least two plots, past and present, but (at least when the writing was on form) one ethical dilemma. The same problem could be confronted by two characters shaped by growing up in different points in history, or it could be the same character at two points in their life, highlighting their changes or continuities. Flashbacks weren't just a tour of the costume eras, they were the choices and consequences a character was bringing to the present moment. The things they'd learned somewhere, the skills they'd perfected, the gambits suited to that person's character.
In Highlander the choices lead inevitably to a sword fight. Thesis and antithesis hacked away at each other, ending in a Quickening where the winner takes the enemy's strengths, and sometimes their flaws. The tag line, well enough known to be mangled in the papers even now, was 'There can be only one': in the logic of the Game, only one ethic would prove itself through repeated trial by combat, and rule thereafter. Yet the show was also about clan, about found family and the protagonist's tendency to gather up strays. Friendships that struggled against the temptations and pressures of the Game came out stronger, and a shared history could go back hundreds or thousands of years... making it all the more heart wrenching when their paths diverged far enough it finally came down to swords. Almost every week the protagonist met another old friend, but you didn't know if they'd make it to the end of the episode, or crash into some irreconcilable difference.
So I learned from Highlander that every character has history. Which seems pretty obvious. But a lot of shows, just by only telling the present, they make it seem like a character's life started in the pilot episode, or at least the interesting bit. Science fiction especially, charging ahead to the future, can leave a little something to be desired in terms of historical depth. But Highlander also highlighted how much every character can change. The protagonist 400 years ago in the time of his birth probably would not have got along with the man of the late 20th century. He had a pretty consistent timeline, with study, experience, friendships and enmities shaping him. And every character he met had similar depth of time, the same capacity for change, for good or ill. They lived through very specific historical events, and any episode was using those events to make some argument about the correct course of action. But it gave you some idea of how rapid change has been.
It drives me nuts now looking at fantasy or SF timelines where things stayed pretty much the same for thousands of years. At any given point in real world history there are developments in politics and technology, weapons and tactics, relationships among the powerful forming and shattering and taking their countries with them. Fantasy worlds throw knights in armour on horseback alongside longbowmen on foot and in some cases stick them in a holding pattern for centuries, when in the real world that moment passed in about a century and was characterised by changes in armour and weapon tech that can be dated to the decade, and not just for reasons of fashion. I've been reading some David Gemmell books, and he stresses this: at any given moment, every warrior is looking for an edge. So people with bronze swords meet people with iron, longswords meet shortswords and shields, infantry meet mounted archers, gunpowder changes everything. Martial arts movies have a lot of this, where the new technology comes in to confront the old ways. It's a very SF moment, the realisation that new tech or new knowledge will change the whole landscape. And every moment is like this. The old meets the new in the now. Every now, everywhere.
Old ideas do the same. Cultural studies uses words like dominant, emergent and residual. New ideas try and make space, old ideas hold on for grim death. They linger longer than you'd think. Trial by combat doesn't seem like a very respectable idea in mainstream discourse, but Highlander got
A character's journey, historic and geographic, will influence which ideas they carry as well as the tools they use. And it can be very, very specific. People a year older or younger than you remember different pop music, different styles, different first things they cared about on the news. They also might be on different sides of a law being made. People that started drinking before prohibition, or having a particular kind of sex when it was illegal, probably have a different attitude to law than those who never had their everyday legislated like that. People lived before and after getting to vote, or go to college, or join the military. Highlander showed people raised in laws and cultures centuries different from our own, and at least had a go at showing how very different that made their basic mindsets. To me it highlighted how the same thing happens now, between generations, or between different school years sometimes. Getting through university before or after the fee changes probably changes your values somewhat, for instance.
And that kind of depth and detail is an absolute bugger to build into a created 'verse, fantasy or SF. It's hard enough to show what a world is like now, but it'll feel like a paper backdrop until it can give the impression it had a journey to get that way.
It's tempting to leave an individual in a holding pattern before the story gets started. Just figure they had a normal life up until 1.01. But there's a character lately I've been being annoyed at because he's acting surprised that his job and boss and co-workers are acting in the ways that, all other evidence suggests, they always act, and this character is older than me. How did he get to his age and only now start caring about these things? He's got some reasons to change, but since the top of the heap reason is that now things are happening to him rather than being done by him, they're somewhat unsympathetic reasons. Hence my annoyance. So, the older a character is, the more important it gets to know how they got where they're standing. Which probably applies to civilisations too. How did they fund their great leap into the universe? Who paid for it, and how much do they still owe? Did they have a military phase before the civilian one, or vice versa? What's their idea of a pleasant retirement? Civilisations probably don't plan for retirement per se, but they can be expanding their role and territories, or stepping back.
I sat down to write this just to say that I think the space colony series I've been planning could benefit from flashbacks. Not just backstory, but spending a B plot in the old world every week. Because it's tempting to see a new colony as a new beginning, but every single person there brought their baggage, personal and political. Every argument, every approach, every tool and every weapon, they'll all come from the old world. The past is always present. So the challenge is how anything can really be new, given all that? And the new setting simply ups the pressure, since if they cannot overcome the old problems, they're not going to make it there.
Buuuuuut, presence of extensive flashbacks does not automatically endear a show to me. And even shows I like can have (interminable) flashbacks I could do without. I think the tricky bit is to keep it both relevant and fresh, despite it being the past. If the same thing happens in every flashback, bored now. And it's nice to see what made a character the person they are today, but it's tricky to get the right speed of revelation and to keep it tied to the plot of the week.
I'm also thinking about arc vs self contained stories. If one timeframe is arc and the other is self contained, does that compliment or drag at each other? If the main plot in the present is wrapped every week and the flashback plot has a long term slow reveal arc then I reckon that's going to make the flashbacks feel less relevant and less satisfying. If it's the other way around though, if the flashbacks are all tidy but the present day keeps going a tiny open ended piece at a time, what does that do? And using them like Highlander did, the intro/outro thing where a new character slots in to the protagonist's backstory and then you see their relationship in the present day and usually how it ends, that's kind of an acquired taste. New old friends every week are kind of like making us care about every new guy twice over. It's got potential but it's tricky.
The thing with my space colony though, I was going to use fanfic characters to give it depth of background, only to adapt them to this setting which is kind of a fusion or AU then I'd need to retell the most significant bits of their lives. New old friends, yes? Even if I used familiar names we'd need to get to know them twice, who they were in the fusion backstory and who they are in the ongoing plot. Only as fanfic it's awkward and poorly formed since I want to do OCish things with them and not so much worry about them wandering out of character if it serves my plot. I just wanted to steal 'Doctor with a disability and both friends and enemies in cryo' or 'ex mind controlled soldier wrestling with his guilt' or whatever. So I know what everyone's deal is, away in the background, and I know how they all connect up and why they'd join this colony at this point in their lives. But I can't just dump it out into the first episode. That would drag interminably. So, flashbacks. And Highlander shows what they're good for, highlighting a choice and what experiences and emotional pressures are being brought to that choice. So then you structure each episode around an ethical dilemma, and if there's an a and b plot that's the present and the flashback, but if you pull another thread into it then there's a second character with a contrasting experience. Probably a younger person, so it's all new to them and they don't get flashbacks. (Richie was my favourite, back when. Methos is now.)
I keep telling myself that I haven't started writing this thing because if I just let it stew a bit longer it might be possible to file serial numbers off and make it proper original. Actually at the moment I have two slightly different offworld colony stories that just don't mesh, one with capertillers and Welsh stone circles and a very British cast, the other with a straight up Stargate setting. The Stargate one is always going to be fanfic, but right now it's merely a mess of a multi fandom fusion that I can't imagine anyone would read, and with a bit of polish it might be spin off series level original. The two series don't quite mesh, but they do both deal with disability and some magic cures. And I know that nobody hesitates to write different Being Masculine On a Starship stories, but I'm hesitating over different Being Disabled in a Space Colony stories, even though the differences are not things I could smush together. One is a low character point low resources ordinary people story, the other a high power vast resources big politics tale that draws on comic book characters and Star Trek level competence. They don't match, they don't go the same places, I kind of want to tell both, I stall on telling either.
I stall on putting one word next to another, and whenever I notice that, instead of opening a file and trying it, I just talk myself into a woe spiral about how maybe I'm not a writer after all. Blergh.
Or, as you may notice, pontificate at length in meta.
i'm going to post this and get breakfast. it's only 1530, i've been up since 0730, that's a totally reasonable interval before breakfast...
no subject
I don't know how long a series you're thinking about, but what would happen if some of the time the flashbacks were contained stories and some of the time they were building arc, and the same for the present? Keep it flexible and a little unpredictable structurally?
I think that to some degree it's the unresolved stuff that keeps people coming back and interested, so perhaps weigh it unevenly, with more unresolved arc-type stuff in the main timeline?
Or maybe if you want to get really fancy, it could be the same arc, i.e. the arc moves from the past to the present at some point, or jumps around... (I have no idea how to do that, it just sounds cool.)
I've noticed that you frequently have really interesting thoughts, would it be okay if I added your journal to my reading list?
no subject
I was thinking an American TV series, with a big mid season twist and a steady supply of new characters. That's a lot of time to do a lot of things with story.
It would probably be most satisfying for a character to form a goal in flashback and achieve it in the present timeline, and just interweave those to make the season arc lead up to the goals of the whole colony.
Readers are always welcome :)
no subject
That sounds like a pretty cool thing to do.
And thanks!
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