Day 49: another of those not terribly useful personal epiphanies

[truepenny]

I woke up this morning from a confused dream about visiting heresluck and understood something about my fiction block and its relationship to the serial narratives currently en vogue in the medium of television.

I'm going to use Buffy as my type example; I don't think it's uniquely or especially awful in this regard (The X-Files became infinitely worse in its later seasons), but it happens to be the easiest demonstration piece to show what I mean because of the way I watched it.

ObDisclaimer: This is 100% personal and subjective and about a problem that I've been wrestling with for years. I'm not saying that anyone should feel about Buffy the way I do, nor am I saying that everyone should think about narrative the way I do, or that I am somehow more enlightened or superior or something because I think about narrative this way. In fact, I'd love to be able to turn this thing off.

In other words, what follows is descriptive of my situation and is not meant to apply to anyone else.


I came to Buffy in the middle of Season 6. In order for me to catch up, heresluck (at that time my upstairs neighbor) loaned me Seasons 1-5, which I marathoned in a matter of weeks, watching two or three episodes daily. Then I watched the rest of Season 6 and subsequently all of Season 7 in real time, one episode a week.

My liking for Season 6 is based on my own narrative kinks, but I think my emphatic dislike for Season 7, as compared to my tolerance--even appreciation--of Seasons 4 & 5, has to do with viewing conditions.

What serial narrative on television does, if you're watching it as the show airs, is it slows down the narrative process to a point that (apparently) I find intolerable. The audience has a week (or frequently more) to think about each of the show's narrative choices and--what's worse for a writer--to think about alternatives: other choices the show could have made. If you disliked the narrative choice made in one episode, you have a whole week to anticipate, without pleasure, seeing that choice followed through in the next episode; if, on the other hand, you liked the narrative choice(s) of one episode, you have a whole week to dread the possibility that next week's episode will fall on its face. The final season of Buffy disappointed me terribly, and I think I find that insurmountable--as I did not find Season 4 insurmountable--partly because it was the final season and partly because I had too much time to analyze the train wreck (from my point of view, of course--I know not everyone feels that way about Season 7, just as not everyone likes Season 6, and the point I want to make is not the FACTUAL AWFULNESS of Season 7, when that awfulness is purely subjective on my part, but the way my perception was reinforced by the conditions of viewing) and to see all the ways in which it could have been averted, all the places where we could have taken a different track.

I'm watching I Spy on Hulu right now, and it's, for me, a blessing. There are bad episodes, just as there are bad episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but when you hit the credits, the bad episode is over. It has no consequences, no bearing on whether the next episode will be any good. The only things that carry over are Kelly and Scotty and the show's basic premise.

Obviously, this is a less sophisticated kind of story telling, and it has that specific every-installment-is-an-entry-point quality that I've inveighed against bitterly in relation to fantasy series. (Believe me, I'm aware of the irony that I write densely interwoven narratives in which each narrative choice does in fact have consequences all down the line--exactly the thing I'm saying in this post I can't stand.) But for me, at this time, that giant reset button that we hit every time the credits roll, that button is a blessing. It means I don't have to look forward to the next episode with dread: either the dread of watching a choice I dislike unfold or the dread that the next episode will produce such a choice.

And I think one of the reasons I can't read (new) fiction (I reread like crazy, but that's not the same thing) is that dread of bad narrative choices, the dread that either the book will be bad from the start, or it will start out good and seduce me, and then turn bad. Because that bad narrative choice can happen AT ANY TIME (Dogma, I am so looking at you and your last three minutes.) I think if I were taking a class, or if I had a job as a reviewer, I wouldn't have any problem reading the books assigned, because that's reading for business. But reading on my own should theoretically be for pleasure, and I've lost the knack.

I don't blame Buffy for this, by the way. Buffy is merely the place where, when I woke up this morning, I realized I can see it happening in my own personal evolution, the place where my awareness of narrative as a series of choices on the part of the author becomes disruptive of my ability to enjoy the experience of being a reader/watcher. I could give you a list of the shows I stopped watching for exactly this reason, likewise a list of the books I stopped reading, or never even started. But that's just going to make me even sadder, so I think I won't.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating, because I was just realizing that one of the reasons I find watching broadcast TV with timprov so frustrating is that it interferes with our ability to collaboratively do this as a spectator sport and/or art form.

Which is to say that I do this and I like it.

We have been watching Eureka as it comes out, which is not our wont; usually we wait for DVD on the shows we watch. But watching it Saturday morning or later on our cable's free on-demand is so much more satisfying than watching it Friday night on broadcast because we can pause it, analyze the shit out of it, and say where they have gone wrong and what they should have done instead. Sometimes for, like, months and years worth of show plot time.

But for me/us this has only once interfered with hitting play and watching what they actually did instead, and that was in a Veronica Mars episode. In the first Tritons episode of VM, in season one, we liked our version so much better that we honestly forgot how they had resolved theirs, so when the Tritons came around again in the third season, we were mightily confused and had to go re-watch the first one, because it made no sense to us in the context of the structure we had collaboratively built. Which was not the one they had filmed and aired. And we had forgotten that. But mostly we don't do that; mostly, even though we like our stuff better, we have no difficulty with going on and watching their worse thing and making all sorts of jokes or sighing about what might have been.

I mean, there are ways for the narrative to go wrong that really will be too wrong for me. But compulsively coming up with a better way is not inherently a problem for me.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ironically, I can do that, and enjoy it mightily, with shows I don't like. (mirrorthaw and I used to do it with Star Trek: Voyager all the time.) But when I have an investment in the show, one way or another, the missed opportunities and bad choices just make me miserable.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. How new is this? Is this something you've been doing to some extent with narrative your whole life, or is it fairly new or more intense now that you're working a lot more professionally with narrative? Or is it that you've always done some of it, but the quality differential bothers you more now? Or something else completely?

Or would you prefer not to poke at it in that direction? Because that's fine too, of course.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, I've always done it. One of my earliest juvenilia is a story I wrote because I wanted The Tombs of Atuan to be doing something different, and that's only one example.

Finishing my dissertation made it impossible for me to read anything new for a long time, and I was incredibly grateful when I started being able to read nonfiction (ironically, I'd never liked nonfiction before, but now I love it). But the fiction thing hasn't come back properly. Maybe that's because of the busman's holiday element--I don't know.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

To fall back on Real Genius as I so often do, I am happy and sad for you.

Happy because I could not figure out how someone becomes an author and an interesting person (and clearly you are both) without doing this.

Sad because if it was new, I could say, "Oh, well, perhaps she is just not used to this! And my model for how one becomes an author and an interesting person is wrong*, and truepenny will take several deep breaths, possibly lasting months or years, and become used to this and then go on to be able to enjoy this sort of thing despite the Great Potential For Suckage (Often Realized)." But no, it is a preexisting condition, and you are used to the GPFS(OR), and so I don't know what, and I'm sorry.

Because the GPFS(OR): it is a hard thing.

*It may still be wrong; that'd be fine. Other counterexamples welcome.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Your time to think about the choices isn't exactly the same as my "data rate"; but they're a little related I think. I recognize your "too much time to think" as a consequence of low data rate, from the enforced spreading out of the episodes as they came out new.

One of the problems of media story-telling (from books on tape all the way through full-blown TV / movie story-telling) is that the data rate is not much under the control of the reader. Today a too-fast data rate can be slowed down with the pause control (a friend yesterday was reporting watching a movie slower than real-time with his child, explaining things, and having the child enjoy all of a movie he would have bounced off of otherwise); but there's little to be done with a too-slow data rate within an episode (it's usually not as simple as just wanting to completely skip a section; fast-forward can do that). (For between episodes, one can gather them all and watch at your own pace again.)

Also books are nearly always read solo, not in company; so there aren't social constraints on when you can pause and when you can skim.

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

This is exactly the reason I usually can't watch TV as it airs, but prefer to get a big chunk of it all at once to plow through: I can deal with poor narrative choices when they get spun out and dealt with in the next couple of hours, but if it's going to take months, I'm just going to get angry and give up all together. (With particularly mediocre shows -- I'm thinking of Chuck specifically here, but I know it's happened to me with other ones -- I can't even deal with the commercial breaks.)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I think that's similar to my "No, really, I'm done" reaction. I'll buy everything they try to sell me, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and then they do something that turns me off forever. With X-Files, it was the introduction of the fifteenth species of alien. Or whatever. Might've been the 90th, I don't know. With Buffy, it was the origin of the First Slayer. All that world-saving grrl-power, from a rape? Oh no, I'm done, thanks.

Watching things in real time does make a difference. The bloom goes off the rose faster when I have time to think about it.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I either hadn't caught or hadn't remembered that First Slayer bit, and I think that I will continue to not do so, because I totally can't blame you for your reaction. (And that knocks yet another peg out from under the hypothesis that Joss wasn't responsible for the things that went wrong in S6.)

-Nameseeker

[heresluck]

Clearly the next time you visit me we should watch Castle! Hee.

I'm really interested in what you're saying here. You and I feel differently about Buffy, obviously, both about S7 in particular and about the show as a whole in the wake of S7: It wasn't my favorite season, certainly, but I did enjoy it, and I found the finale quite satisfying thematically (though perhaps not precisely narratively). But I liked S7 more when I marathoned it with renenet later than when you and I watched it in real time, and I think this is largely because I knew what was coming: I knew that for me the payoff was worth the missteps, and it made it much easier for me to mentally disregard the missteps, to sort of mentally edit the season down to 12 or 13 really good episodes.

And of course that mental editing phenomenon was more pronounced because in the interim I'd found vidding. I spent most of S7's real time airing thinking not about S7 but about Faith in S3 and S4, because that's what I was vidding at the time, and so the time and headspace that you spent on anticipating S7's next move I spent somewhere else entirely.

I also have some thoughts about how serial consumption of media in real time (or serial release of books, for that matter) facilitates the growth of a fandom in the way that marathon consumption does not. But that's a post for another day.

[shadefell.livejournal.com]

I also have some thoughts about how serial consumption of media in real time (or serial release of books, for that matter) facilitates the growth of a fandom in the way that marathon consumption does not. But that's a post for another day.

That sounds like a really interesting post.

[touch-of-ink.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing I read the comments, because I was going to say I thought everyone hated/disliked S7 :)

For me, it's a variation of "Trust the Author". When I'm dealing with something new and it seems headed in a direction I don't like, I have a moment where I decide to trust the author. I'm usually rewarded. When I'm not, I don't go back to that author any more. If I have a long history of good with that author, and this is only one bad, I view new things from the author with suspicion.

With TV shows, it can be hard to trust the author, because it can be written by a wide variety of people. There are some shows that seem to have a strong guiding force that stands in for "the author". Joss is one of those people. It was well known that he wasn't giving S7 his full attention, because he was excited by the shiny Firefly series.

However, after watching Buffy and (years later, after I got over my snit) Firefly (and Serenity), I knew how Dr. Horrible would end.

I admire Joss Whedon's work with story arcs. I wish he would write a book on it. I don't trust him to give me happy endings.

I guess this only tangentially related to what you were talking about. Sorry about that.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

It's certainly true for me that a show looks very different seen as a lump than weeks apart (for what it's worth I don't actively dislike S7 - which parts of S6 I did - but I do feel that it didn't fulful its early promise.)

I'm more an 'after the fact' worrier about narrative. For example, unlike some I didn't hate the last episode of Lost. But the more I think about it, and the season leading up to it, the more I'm irritated by it because of the unfulfilled potential. So much happens in the last two seasons before that which, in the end, just doesn't matter to the resolution. Entire plot threads - and in fact much of the whole of season 5 - could have been cut without greatly affecting the end of the show.

Of course, this is part of the price you pay for hanging everything on endings. Buffy had the advantage of only having 'in-season' narratives. Most shows which have narratives across multiple seasons leave themselves in a completely sticky situation. There was no way that the end of BSG or Lost was going to match expectations.

Not sure that was terribly relevant. It's a theme I keep returning to in my head though...

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

I think this has less to do with the one-ep-a-week pace than it has with Buffy Season 7, especially coming on the heels of marathoning the first five seasons. I like the show a lot, but S7 is the suckiest, so watching it after rushing through the better material that came before would really not help.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think pace of reading, or experiencing in the case of other media, is a pacing issue that isn't much thought of. I've had this kind of problem with late sequels. If a book comes out and then a sequel comes out a reasonable amount of time later and I re-read the book for the first time and go on to the sequel, this seldom happens. But if a book comes out and there's a long gap in which I re-read the book and there's another long gap in which I maybe re-read the book and then the sequel comes out (worst case, Regenesis, twenty years, thirty or so reads of Cyteen) it's sometimes hard for me to believe the sequel. Sometimes this is just getting into the beginning of it -- I can't believe there's new stuff about these people, this world, I've thought about. Sometimes it's just not where I thought it was going and I've had too much time to get invested in where I thought it was going. Sometimes re-reading the sequel will fix this. Other times, not.

The related thing is when I hear the author read the first chapter in a con, before the book is out, or if I read a sample chapter online, or at the back of a paperback. And then I wait, and I think about it, and the book comes out and I re-read the first chapter and the pacing of my experience is all screwed up as I go on to the second chapter.

[soho-iced.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience with Regenesis, although I felt it was a lot to do with the author's writing having matured over the years in between: a gradual process, obviously, so it's late sequels like this that make it particularly obvious what has changed. Even more jarring for me (though not in a bad way, exactly) was re-reading the original Thomas Covenant series before moving on to the latest: Donaldson's style is so much smoother and more digestible that it's almost unrecognisable.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel like there are two issues here, both of which I identify with. One, the difference it makes consuming a story in small spread-out units. And two, the difference dreading an author's (or authors') coming narrative choices. From your post, to you the two are linked. To me, they aren't, but they both make a huge difference in my reading and watching.

ANYTHING I consume in small, spread-out units I dislike more. I can dislike a favorite book if I am forced to reread it in tiny discreet pieces days apart. It keeps me from getting swept up in the story and causes me to nitpick everything. I only ever really LOVE shows I can get on DVD and watch in a rush. (I watched the entirety of Buffy in a big DVD rush. Season 7 was the worst, IMHO, and I watched them all in a row. The only episode I really liked was the one about Spike and Robin's mother-related conflict.)

I sometimes avoid reading/watching things because of fear of how it will go. Usually, once I summon my courage, it pays off. When I give up on something altogether, it is usually because I feel like I am being insulted. (E.g., the show keeps taunting me with hints of a romance that it is now clear will NEVER HAPPEN because of some Mork & Mindy type fear, even though The Office made it work. Or the sequels have stopped advancing the overall plot, so I feel like I am waiting a year and forking out $30 on a book that doesn't tell the story I am paying for. This is not an issue with your books.)