Where'd my day go?
My sister got me "The Writer's Tale" by Russell T Davies (ie current Doctor Who showrunner and the guy who brought it back to the BBC) for Christmas, and it finally arrived the other day. I had plans to get stuff done this weekend but they all went out the window when I got this basically textbook-sized book.
Started reading a little last night but really got into it this morning and I'm already over halfway through, despite stopping mid-afternoon to try to get something else done. What a fascinating book. Helps that in watching all those Doctor Who Confidentials and listening to all those commentaries, I completely can hear his voice when reading his emails. Helps that he's very engaging and humorous. And it's really interesting to see the ins and outs of the creative process, where I can completely identify (that deadline-driven, leave it all to the last minute tendency, the self doubt and self-analysis) and where I completely can not (that constant roil of ideas in his head, and constant creation of stories - I was pretty sure I wasn't a creative person before, but now I'm positive I'm not). It's also interesting to see all the behind the scenes things that were at work in the creation of series 4, and how the ideas we saw on screen came into being, as well as some of the insights into the production process.
*Also* interesting to see how some of the things that did bother me a little in watching were actually things that he struggled with and felt he could never come to a proper solution for. I always had a tendency to forgive the writer anyway and try not to pick things apart *too* hard, but reading this reminded me that the writers - and the whole production team - *are* human and it's far far easier for a group of fans to pick apart details after the product has been finished than for the writer sitting there staring at the blank page to think of everything and come up with the perfect, logical, bulletproof storyline or solution or whatever. And for a production team struggling to deal with the million jillion logistical issues of putting together an episode and a season to catch every potential problem and propose a good solution for it.
One bit he mentioned did make me think a little. Back when I was engaging heavily on Buffy fandom, I tended to defend what I perceived as the writer's intent (why I thought I knew what that was, I have no idea) based on what was there in the text: the words in the script, the sequence of actions we saw on the screen. But he describes getting into an argument with David Tennant about the hymn in Gridlock, and how he ended up being convinced that David was right, that David understood the script as it was there in the text better than he did, even though he was the one who wrote it! Which made me wonder about this concept of writer's intent vs textual interpretation. What the writer consciously was thinking about when he wrote it, vs what he actually put into the text (he says himself that the text itself has the hymn as the turning point that spurs the Doctor to action). It's all kind of fascinating. Plus, the concept that your belief system and your interest in exploring ideas and people and issues will come out in what you write if you strive to just write what feels true as opposed to starting with a theme and trying to build a script off of it makes a lot more sense to me. When I did literary interpretation for school, even as I was deriving all these meanings and themes with textual support from the text, I always wondered how a writer could possibly have consciously constructed something that really layered all that meaning with all those signposts, etc into it. How did that even work? This book made it a bit more clear to me how some, at least, have done it.
I can't help but wonder if Joss Whedon were ever to embark on something like this (and boy did Russell T Davies have an extraordinary amount of trust in Ben Cook, and willingness to open himself up), what it would be like. It seems to me, as an outsider and a fan, that there are similarities in how they approach their work, particularly as both are showrunners and not jus writers. But Joss always talks about themes and intentions in a way that sounds like it's a lot more conscious for him, while at the same time making it sound like their inclusion in his work is just a byproduct of how his mind works. I doubt he ever would - it's amazing to me that anyone ever did this. But it does make me wonder, as well as wonder how much insight I've already gotten into Joss' head by getting into Russell's...
Still have a bit less than half the book left to read but I've flipped through the rest and it seems to be increasingly taken up by script pages. Which is cool, they're fun to read. But I guess means there's a bit less insight into Russell's head and just more season 4 fun to get into.
And on a different note - I envy people who love what they do for a living or are so clearly meant to do what they do for a living that, even if it torments them, it's something they can't seem to do without, and are willing to do at any hour, and get great personal satisfaction from it. Wish I could find something like that =P.
And just an entirely random other comment - saw an article on io9 about actors who get fandom, which of course included David Tennant (and Kristen Bell, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day - but not Seth Green, whassup with that?). That, and a comment on the TWoP Doctor Who forums made me think that it's not every day you hear the writers of a show razzing a lead actor's geek cred for not being geeky enough to remember right off trivia about the show from 40 years ago. It's so much fun how much of a fan he is.
Started reading a little last night but really got into it this morning and I'm already over halfway through, despite stopping mid-afternoon to try to get something else done. What a fascinating book. Helps that in watching all those Doctor Who Confidentials and listening to all those commentaries, I completely can hear his voice when reading his emails. Helps that he's very engaging and humorous. And it's really interesting to see the ins and outs of the creative process, where I can completely identify (that deadline-driven, leave it all to the last minute tendency, the self doubt and self-analysis) and where I completely can not (that constant roil of ideas in his head, and constant creation of stories - I was pretty sure I wasn't a creative person before, but now I'm positive I'm not). It's also interesting to see all the behind the scenes things that were at work in the creation of series 4, and how the ideas we saw on screen came into being, as well as some of the insights into the production process.
*Also* interesting to see how some of the things that did bother me a little in watching were actually things that he struggled with and felt he could never come to a proper solution for. I always had a tendency to forgive the writer anyway and try not to pick things apart *too* hard, but reading this reminded me that the writers - and the whole production team - *are* human and it's far far easier for a group of fans to pick apart details after the product has been finished than for the writer sitting there staring at the blank page to think of everything and come up with the perfect, logical, bulletproof storyline or solution or whatever. And for a production team struggling to deal with the million jillion logistical issues of putting together an episode and a season to catch every potential problem and propose a good solution for it.
One bit he mentioned did make me think a little. Back when I was engaging heavily on Buffy fandom, I tended to defend what I perceived as the writer's intent (why I thought I knew what that was, I have no idea) based on what was there in the text: the words in the script, the sequence of actions we saw on the screen. But he describes getting into an argument with David Tennant about the hymn in Gridlock, and how he ended up being convinced that David was right, that David understood the script as it was there in the text better than he did, even though he was the one who wrote it! Which made me wonder about this concept of writer's intent vs textual interpretation. What the writer consciously was thinking about when he wrote it, vs what he actually put into the text (he says himself that the text itself has the hymn as the turning point that spurs the Doctor to action). It's all kind of fascinating. Plus, the concept that your belief system and your interest in exploring ideas and people and issues will come out in what you write if you strive to just write what feels true as opposed to starting with a theme and trying to build a script off of it makes a lot more sense to me. When I did literary interpretation for school, even as I was deriving all these meanings and themes with textual support from the text, I always wondered how a writer could possibly have consciously constructed something that really layered all that meaning with all those signposts, etc into it. How did that even work? This book made it a bit more clear to me how some, at least, have done it.
I can't help but wonder if Joss Whedon were ever to embark on something like this (and boy did Russell T Davies have an extraordinary amount of trust in Ben Cook, and willingness to open himself up), what it would be like. It seems to me, as an outsider and a fan, that there are similarities in how they approach their work, particularly as both are showrunners and not jus writers. But Joss always talks about themes and intentions in a way that sounds like it's a lot more conscious for him, while at the same time making it sound like their inclusion in his work is just a byproduct of how his mind works. I doubt he ever would - it's amazing to me that anyone ever did this. But it does make me wonder, as well as wonder how much insight I've already gotten into Joss' head by getting into Russell's...
Still have a bit less than half the book left to read but I've flipped through the rest and it seems to be increasingly taken up by script pages. Which is cool, they're fun to read. But I guess means there's a bit less insight into Russell's head and just more season 4 fun to get into.
And on a different note - I envy people who love what they do for a living or are so clearly meant to do what they do for a living that, even if it torments them, it's something they can't seem to do without, and are willing to do at any hour, and get great personal satisfaction from it. Wish I could find something like that =P.
And just an entirely random other comment - saw an article on io9 about actors who get fandom, which of course included David Tennant (and Kristen Bell, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day - but not Seth Green, whassup with that?). That, and a comment on the TWoP Doctor Who forums made me think that it's not every day you hear the writers of a show razzing a lead actor's geek cred for not being geeky enough to remember right off trivia about the show from 40 years ago. It's so much fun how much of a fan he is.