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How would you replicate Whedon's character appeal?
takyris
Registered User
Registered User
Cross-posted from le blog, which I know not everyone here reads:
Say that someone wanted to write a fantasy piece that got people excited about character interactions in the same way that people
got excited about the various works of Joss Whedon. What form of written word would you say best captures that kind of episodic soap-opera feel?
Various ideas occurring to me include:
- Write a serial, a weekly or monthly short story or novelette in the 10,000-word range. (Then find out how to make money on a serial in this day and age.)
- Write a novel that has a built-in serial format, so that it feels more like reading a dozen novelettes than like reading a novel. (Then convince an editor that this is a viable novel concept.)
- Write a fantasy series like everyone else and just focus on character development. Don't worry about trying to capture the episodic feel. That isn't what grabs the Whedon crowd.
Part of this is actual writing thinking, and part of this is just having picked up the Buffy graphic novels. It's interesting looking at how attached people are to the characters, how they hand on the interplay between all the leads, how they look forward to the arrival of guest stars, all of that. I'd love to figure out how to replicate that kind of audience attachment (with the understood caveat that "write interesting characters well" is part of this, and if I can't do that, no amount of aping is going to help me).
caveat 1: I'm specifically thinking of how to do this and make money. I've got enough ideas floating around that I am quite comfortable only doing the ones that are either fun games or present the possibility of profit.
caveat 2: I'm not really interested in the fact that you personally didn't like Buffy, Angel, or Firefly. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm not arguing any kind of objective merit. I'm arguing that Whedon has created a couple of IPs that have effectively gotten their fans arguing, positing, and running annoying convention panels about the characters in a way that few other IPs do... whether or not you personally like the shows.
Say that someone wanted to write a fantasy piece that got people excited about character interactions in the same way that people
got excited about the various works of Joss Whedon. What form of written word would you say best captures that kind of episodic soap-opera feel?
Various ideas occurring to me include:
- Write a serial, a weekly or monthly short story or novelette in the 10,000-word range. (Then find out how to make money on a serial in this day and age.)
- Write a novel that has a built-in serial format, so that it feels more like reading a dozen novelettes than like reading a novel. (Then convince an editor that this is a viable novel concept.)
- Write a fantasy series like everyone else and just focus on character development. Don't worry about trying to capture the episodic feel. That isn't what grabs the Whedon crowd.
Part of this is actual writing thinking, and part of this is just having picked up the Buffy graphic novels. It's interesting looking at how attached people are to the characters, how they hand on the interplay between all the leads, how they look forward to the arrival of guest stars, all of that. I'd love to figure out how to replicate that kind of audience attachment (with the understood caveat that "write interesting characters well" is part of this, and if I can't do that, no amount of aping is going to help me).
caveat 1: I'm specifically thinking of how to do this and make money. I've got enough ideas floating around that I am quite comfortable only doing the ones that are either fun games or present the possibility of profit.
caveat 2: I'm not really interested in the fact that you personally didn't like Buffy, Angel, or Firefly. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm not arguing any kind of objective merit. I'm arguing that Whedon has created a couple of IPs that have effectively gotten their fans arguing, positing, and running annoying convention panels about the characters in a way that few other IPs do... whether or not you personally like the shows.
takyris on
Dox the PI wrote:takyris, Greek God of blowing shit up.
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With that said, I think you're going this the wrong way, because I don't think there's anything Whedon does that's really different from other popular writers. Writing wise, he certainly has a particular style, where most of his characters are snarky and full of pop culture references, but I don't think that's what draws the crowd. People get attached to stuff all the time. Look at star wars, star trek, sport teams, movies, books, etc. It's silly to try to figure out why something because popular and then try to imitate that.
It's not the serial episodic thing that grabs people attention. It's CHARACTERS. So maybe you should be focusing on what makes your characters interesting first.
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
He's also a man who puts together a big cast, relatively speaking, who are the main characters. This gives the audience more to choose from in finding someone they enjoy watching, but is also challenging to balance, as you can give a little too much in one person and ruin the overall show. In Firefly he managed to never lose a character when they visited a new planet, all of them went or were involved somewhere in it, and usually only about 1 was ever left out. Justice League, the animated show, failed at this a few times when they started out having everyone at every mission, but as the show progressed and got more character centric they'd have all the superheroes, except they'd leave out Superman; leaving the audience with no explanation.
The drive between the world and the character creates a relationship between the two that the audience, if done right, is compelled to watch and dissect. The story behind the characters in this world needs to be engaging and believable of course, which is really all that's left after the first two are built up. It's just like making a D&D game from scratch, as novels follow a similar line: make a world, make people to live in it, make a reason for them to live; or anyone else to watch them live.
... and I cough for every crater that I could see, / on the surface of that coffin we've come to call the moon." Circle Takes the Square
Approaching the issue from the angle of money-making is a bit flawed: insofar as assuming that better quality pieces have a better chance of being picked up, fine, but endeavouring to use specific tropes etc. out of the hope of making a sale is a recipe for disaster. But maybe I’m just bitter because the stories I’ve written specifically for submission to genre/style-specific publishers have always been rejected, unlike spur-of-the-moment creations. Hrrmph.
But anyway, yes: I’d say character development (and perhaps irreverence!) is what you need to nail if you want to bag his target audience. That and asskicking and explosions and wisecracks. As long as the reader has time to form an attachment to the cast, how they read about their exploits isn't much of a concern.
It seems as though his characterization is largely defined by two things, small unexpected quirks and redemptions in easy to swallow 50 minute intervals. Basically, he seems that he starts with an archetype and adds heart of gold. Mal is a bitter dogooder down on his luck with a heart of gold. Simon is dispassionate and dedicated but with a heart of gold. Jayne is a mercenary with a heart of gold. Inara is a hooker with a heart of gold with a heart of gold.
For example, Jayne sells out his fellow crewmembers. This is unexpected to the audience because he is clever in a way and likable. Then by the end of the episode he redeems himself. At that point the issue is settled and Whedon doesn't have to explore the lasting implications of this quirky and unexpected turn of events. Throughout the whole series each episode is mostly defined by the unexpected actions of a character. It makes the viewer feel soft and cuddly to see the "family" display some dysfunction and then to return to the happy place an hour later. Many people consider Inara to be the least interesting character because Hooker with a Heart of Gold is already an archetype and she doesn't really break out of it. I have seen some people blame the actress, but to be fair, the writing for her character was always the least likable, most stable, and therefore uninteresting. She never gets a chance to define herself outside of the archetype.
In a longer work Whedon would have to explore the characters in states of normality, as the constant quirk to redemption arc would become too transparent and tiring: like a M*A*S*H episode with too many one-liners per minute. Episodes, from my experience, are Whedon's best medium.
Another thing about Firefly is that all of the characters are likable. There is that old Vonnegut rule about having at least one character the reader can root for. In Firefly the entire primary cast is likable and quick witted and rootable-for. It might also help that they never have to go up against a likeable adversary. The bad guys are all really bad; the good guys all have hearts of gold.
Serenity doesn't seem to work as well as Firefly in that the unexpectedness doesn't come from these quirky actions of the characters. Instead the characters seem like that are following the only path available to them.
I think the real secret to his success is writing that resonates with a certain audience (like Kevin Smith's writing) combined with the do-what-you-want nature of an episodic format. Might be hard to Bogart, though.
There's a difference between writing specifically to go after a popular market trend and writing something that you think could sell. If I decided to try to capitalize on "teens go to magic school" and release a Spiderwick Potter ripoff, that would be me selling out.
There's currently not a market out there for serials, the way that there is for novels. I'd love to write a serial, but not so much that I want to write it for free, and not when I could write the same story a different way and sell it.
It may also be that I'm stating this in too elliptical a fashion. I'm thinking of writing a bigass fantasy epic series. I've written standalone novels, and I want this one to be the big honkin' multi-book epic, because I really like the story. With that in mind, I'm trying to figure out what structural elements Whedon used to get people so into his characters. I'm not thinking solely about money. I've got a half dozens things I could be writing, and enough time to do exactly one of them, not counting work. I'd prefer to work on the one that will see the light of day on a shelf somewhere someday. That means publication, and that means writing for money.
Plenty of novels and series have interesting characters. They don't all spawn the sheer volume of shippers and character-arc arguers that Whedon's stuff does, so I can only figure that there's something structural that he adds to the mix that gets people more invested. Part of it seems to be Whedon's willingness to change his characters over time. Part of it seems to be the episodic structure. I dunno.
This is all anecdotal, but all the cons I've gone to have had discussions about some aspect of Buffy, and at some cons, they're absurdly specific. There are massive panels about Spike, panels about Willow and Tara, and so on. I didn't see that about Michael Garibaldi or Han Solo, at least, not in those numbers.
Enough people have referred to Buffy as a fantasy soap opera that I'm guessing he's mixing that structure in, little bits of character changes and revelations and a refusal to resolve character issues inside an individual episode. The fact that I don't know soaps for crap sort of screws me there, but I read enough romance to pick up some of the character interaction, if not the pacing.
Oh, shit, I should write good characters? Damn! Why didn't I think of that? Oh, wait:
"(with the understood caveat that "write interesting characters well" is part of this, and if I can't do that, no amount of aping is going to help me)"
Guess I wrote that in some kind of invisible font, then? Sorry to hear it.
More seriously, I'm working on characters. I don't need any advice on them, so I'm not bringing up a thread to talk about them here. I was hoping to talk about structure, and how that structure is used to advance character arcs.
Willeth: Hadn't heard of Sigler's stuff. I'll give it a look. Thanks!
Dyrwen: Those are excellent points. I was thinking about Whedon's characters as all having secrets that were gradually doled out, but it's equally important that those secrets tell something more about the world. That gives me something to think about. Thanks!
Edited, to not add another post: Ed, I'm not specifically thinking, "I want to make more money, so how can I steal this?" For better or for worse, what I'm actually thinking is, "I have this story idea for a big epic fantasy piece. I really like these characters. How can I bounce them off each other in a soap opera format like Whedon does to get people rooting for certain relationships or arguing over character-change arcs and all that?"
Sorry if that's too baldly mercenary. I mean, I am baldly mercenary, in that I pretty much want to at least try to sell anything I'm not writing as a writing exercise or a personal favor, but it's not about the money per se. Selling means that a publisher will charge the viewing public money to read it, which is the easiest way to convince a bunch of people that my stuff is worth looking at. (And sure, the easiest way for me to avoid having to get a real job.)
Muncie: That's actually what I'm kind of afraid of. If I just do this in novel form, I might get good characters (you know, depending upon my ability to create good characters), but it's not going to feel like the soap-opera format. The closest I might get is, I don't know, Robb's "In Death" series or Butcher's Codex Alera or Dresden series, where you get character progressions over the course of the novel, yes, but it's not as taut as in a television episode, because the reader is getting so much of it at once (and thus, not as much suspense).
Obviously this is going to come down to personal experiences and what not, but I just don't really see that big of a fanbase as you do. Obviously it has a sizable fanbase, but so does Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, and more recently, Twilight. I'm not sure you can put stock on such thing anyways, otherwise Firefly and Serenity wouldn't have failed would they?
And I really don't think he's at all changing the formula. Everything I see in his work can be seen in any kind of work. To me it really just seems like that Family guy segment where Stewie makes fun of Brian and his novel;
Your character grows...friends become enemies and enemies become friends . etc.
L
Muncie is also right on, but I'm certain that dialogue and chemistry are what really sell Whedon shows.
As for how to imitate it -- maybe analyze Dr. Horrible? There's not a lot of talking, but what's there is by-the-numbers Whedon Chatter.
Anyways, I think you know the obvious Whedon stuff. There's the dialog about their personal relationship stuff that works in parallel to the action, but isn't directly a part of it. The establishment of archetypical roles that change and develop as a result of their adventures. That kind of thing.
Aside from the pop culture voice (which I think is a huge part of Le Formulae Whedon) I think you have another source to look to for episodic narrative content that you might not think of at first, because it lacks the pop culture sensibilities of most Whedonalia. GRRMartin's A Song of Ice and Fire, despite not being my particular cup of tea, really nails the episodic narrative with his structure. It's one of the things I think the books really do well, and I suspect it's a huge part of the series success. By changing viewpoints, he is able to develop characters in new ways as well as provide a shift in perspective that allows for change and growth that isn't jarring.
I don't think you'd want to ape it exactly, but I think you could probably get some "soap opera" feel mileage out of examining some of the structural choices that Martin makes. There's no denying that the series is a huge fantastical soap opera. Give it a modernized voice and less creepy pedophilia and you can Whedonize the form (I think).
Let me know how it turns out. I've always been a fan of the episodic feel of collected short stories I read as a kid.
(Someone else to check out is Brian Michael Bendis. I think the episodic yet dynamic characters in his comic work are successful in the same vein as Whedon's stuff is.)
Nah, that's unpossible.
@oldmanhero tumblr
Ah. Lack of clarity on my part. The fanbase is considerably smaller -- as you noted, the shows were cult hits, not mainstream hits, like Star Wars or Harry Potter, with nowhere near the audience of the latter -- but extremely rabid, if it's possible to use that in a nonjudgmental way, about the characters. I'd argue, based on cons, that they're more rabid than the Star Wars fans regarding character (with the exception of Jar Jar bashing) and... I don't know how to compare them to the Potter crowd, since I haven't seen enough Potter subject matter at cons. My run-ins with the Potter crowd online suggests that they're pretty rabid about who's dating whom and which character is turning evil in the next book, so maybe Potter, as a novel series, is a better example for me to work from.
Edit to not-double-post:
Hey, I don't think that's kidding. I think an important part of the soap opera is screwing with the expected relationships, and something that I need to remind myself to do rather than just pairing people up happily like I usually do.
Mahnut: Yep. I've always been decent with dialog, and working in a job in which dialog is what I get paid for has helped. Iriah read one of my novels and suggested less exposition and more dialog, in fact, so I'm hoping to run with that.
Zenpotato: Yeah, I didn't want to say that I was aping Martin, because saying that you're aping Martin makes you look like even more of a poseur in the writing circles. And I'm not really aping anyone, despite my initial false modesty. I'm not making a Xander and a Willow and a Giles. I just want to figure out what makes the Browncoats and Scoobies go so crazy and see if it's something that I can incorporate into my own work.
I just thought it was something to think about, structurally at least. You might get more out of looking at Ultimate Spiderman or something similar by Bendis.
Because there are so many of them and they are relatively diverse, a wider swath of the general populace can find at least one of them to bond with--I call it the identity meme. It's what happens when you get groups of nerds taking online quizzes to find out which Firefly crew member or which member of the Scooby gang they are most like. And yes, the effect extends to other fandoms like Harry Potter. It's escapism at its finest.
The key, I think, is to create characters that are:
1) Essentially good, with a few morally ambiguous ones mixed in
2) Essentially likable, but with sympathetic flaws
3) Fundamentally unique, but compatible with each other
4) More or less realistic, but still more awesome than normal people
Another thing that I think Whedon does very well with his characters is combining predictability with surprise. His characters are generally static, with very slow characters arcs, and as such they remain recognizably themselves no matter what the circumstances. This makes their reactions somewhat predictable: Buffy wants to leap in and hit things, Willow wants to do research, Xander wants to stay out of trouble, Giles wants to make a thorough plan, and so on. But there are also underlying motivations and anxieties that affect the actual actions that the characters take: Buffy wants to protect her friends, Willow wants to be helpful, Xander wants to impress Buffy, Giles wants to keep Buffy safe, and so on. These secondary impetuses (impetii?) allow for flexibility: Buffy makes a plan instead of being rash, Willow and Xander rush to save Buffy despite their lack of physical prowess, Giles punches someone out of anger, etc.
Whedon also allows situations and dialogue to be surprising in their predictability. Take a scene from Serenity, in which the stalwart captain squares off against his recalcitrant crew:
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Do you want to run this ship?
Jayne Cobb: Yes!
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: [caught off guard] Well... you can't...
The usual response is not yes, it's no. Whedon knows this and takes advantage of the predictability to craft something surprising. Obviously he can't do this with every line or action, but it is a trademark of his.
Hopefully this rambling response has been at least somewhat helpful. I know you have a sense of what it takes to pull together an ensemble cast; you've already written that novel, and it was good. Whether it fits all the above criteria, I'm not sure. Maybe the setting was a bit more out there, which reduced the empathy potential. Otherwise you're already on the right track.
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Oh wait, sorry!
Lost is a perfect example of this. While the ever-changing mystery of the island is the engine driving the show, the way the characters evolve is absolutely key. So yes, the serial format works best. I'm thinking that maybe you should focus on trying to maybe pitch and sell a TV show more than a series of serial novels, or novellas. Or whatever.
I have really no basis for saying what I'm about to say, but I think that the printing/binding process is a bit limiting for what you want to do. Unless, of course, you were to write the majority of what would amount to a "season" of short novels before the first is published. Even then, looking at TV and/or comics, it's understandable that they can do what they do. A TV show is a better example, though. They make an episode, that episode is streamed out to the country or the world directly to a set. There's no physical media being distributed, so the cost is lower. Offset that with the income generated by commercials (across many, many many markets) and you can see how that would work better.
Of course, I'm kinda talking out my ass, since I just don't know.
But I'll buy whatever you sell!
I don't know if this has been brought up or not, but if you are going for that market, it would probably serve well to aim for the teens side of age. The whole 'capture them young' sort of thinking, as they're probably the ones that are more easily suceptible to obsessing over characters. Then your books can grow up along with them. Or at least that's what is always said about Harry Potter.
Pretty much. Now, if that means duplicating it exactly, I'm not interested, humorous notes about aping and ripping off aside. I'm trying to see what, beyond just being written well, makes fans argue so much about whether Willow and Xander should have stayed together or which season represented the true Cordelia or Spike. Is it the slow revelation of information and gradual evolution, the repetition of the character in nice bite-sized chunks, the mix of foibles and redemptive bits, or all of the above?
I don't think it's been brought up. I think that's a fantastic idea. Hadn't thought of it myself, and I have no idea whether it'd fit with what I want to write, but I'll certainly give it some thought. With the state of the market these days, that really just means that the fantasy novel is slightly shorter, and you have a bit of free shielding against people claiming that you didn't do enough worldbuilding. (In my "only read Harry Potter as far as the YA market goes" opinion, which is worth about that much.)
How much have you considered that a certain amount of sexual pandering may be required? I'm less familiar with Firefly, but Buff (aside from being a sexually empowered young woman) was also something of a wetdream for nerds who lusted after both vampires and cheerleaders.
I think a big part of this is the sexual politics of adolescence and young adulthood. As overdone as it is, the coming of age story is relentlessly popular for a reason.
16 is still considered a teen
And maybe it's cause I'm just now watching Buffy/Angel, but they seem incredibly tame, with most of the vamps(angel excluded) not exactly exuding sexuality.
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Haven't gotten to her. Guess I got that look forward too then.
Also, there's the whole Buffy/Xander awkwardness, and the Willow/Xander awkwardness, and then the Willow/Oz pairing... lots of stuff going on, even if it isn't NC-17. Call it gender relations if that seems more appropriate.
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While I'm sure that's not the only audience, it seems to be a significant part of the viewership all the same. Having the hot actor friends that Joss Whedon has would seem to make things a lot easier to sell.
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The answer you are looking for is archetypes. Whedon is not particularly adept at creating interesting characters. He is massively talented at delivering experiences using a stock set of them. The goofy but noble leader. The wisecracking sidekick. The calm and dignified intelligent one. These are not by any means something out of Whedons brain. He just handles interactions and dialogue well.
Worry less about the characters, or even the method of delivery (ie the style of writing, or the construction of the narrative)
Spend all your efforts on dialogue. Or interactions. Alone, they are boring. It is only when in a group the flow and back and forth happens.
Oh, and they can never have sex. Nor hook up. Nor achieve all their goals. Or have everything go smoothly.
This I can do. I would actually say, without false modesty, that I do this already (which is not to say that I'm claiming to be at Whedon's level, just that it's my strong point). People's critiques of my first drafts tend to go, "Great dialog! Shame you had no setting and your plot was lame." I've been working on setting, but it's never gonna be my strong suit.
This. Thank you. My standalone novels do all of the things you just said not to do.
Here are some choice kiss off lines.
(Right before impaling someone on a mining drill) Screw you!
(Right before launching them into a building strapped to the back of a rocket) You're fired!
I need to write a phd on kiss off lines. seriously.
I disagree with anybody who says Whedon's kind of story can't be told in novels. Harry Potter = Buffy. In fact, the character Harry Potter literally has most of the same personality traits, issues, and relationships as Buffy. Ron and Hermione are much like Xander and Willow, etc. And people like the two series for most of the same reasons.
Somebody mentioned Twilight above. I haven't read that, but from the plot synopsis it looks like somebody's beat us to the punch of copying Buffy wholesale. I'm sure we all had too much integrity to do that anyway.
I think the most important lesson to learn from Buffy is that it lets audiences fantasize about things they want for themselves. That's more important than "good writing" or "complex characters" or "intelligent plots". (of course, Whedon and his team were more than capable of producing any of those things, and often they did)
One fantasy that Whedon always gratifies is the fantasy of being surrounded by supporting, loving friends. So the first thing you should do if you want to copy him is to write a group of charming heroes who love each other. (Harry Potter was just the same way) But, you need to keep stringing the reader along, too, so they can never be fully demonstrative about their feelings. The Whedon Way to do this would be for the heroes to constantly save each other's lives and gaze into each other's eyes etc. but never really understand their own feelings.
Another fantasy, of course, is an idealized girl. This is incredibly easy, actually, just make her smarter and more active than everybody else, and then have EVERY MALE CHARACTER fall for her or at least be obsessed by her. If somebody falls for the ideal girl for no plausible reason, all the better, because that just demonstrates how desirable she is. But you're still stringing the reader along, so put obstacles in the way of any happy relationship. Also, the girl sees herself as unworthy and lonely, so the male readers can imagine themselves sleeping with her and the females can relate to her. Bonus: turn this character male and you get James Bond.
The other fantasy that occurs to me offhand is having the fate of the universe in your hands and being a badass. You might even be able to get away with other characters telling the hero he/she is the Chosen One. The only other observation I have about this is that the plot doesn't need to make sense at all. Rewatch a random Buffy episode if you don't believe me. Until you get drawn back in, it's nonsense.
Zoe => Loch
Wash => Kale
Mal => Pyvvic
Kaylee => Tern
I'm a 30-year-old guy who started watching Buffy around its 5th season. Now I own the entire series on DVD, as well as Firefly. I haven't gotten into Angel yet, but that's mostly because I find the first batch of episodes harder to get into, which has prevented me from really starting to like the show...
I'm also a huge Firefly fan. I agree that the main thing that makes Joss Whedon's writing so compelling and memorable has to do with surprise. But at the same time, don't discount the world-building: whether it's the Buffy-verse or "the 'verse" of Firefly, there's something compelling in the way these things are built. I haven't found "the trick" to writing like him, but if I did, my writing would immediately become 100% better, notwithstanding the fact that it would be derivative.
To those of you who don't think Whedon can write feature-length content, check out his writing credits on IMDB. You might be surprised at some of the movies he was involved with, over the years. For instance, he wrote the first Toy Story. He also wrote a script for Alien Resurrection, which was later heavily edited and modified (although you can still sort of feel his influence, here and there, in particular with the crew of the Betty, who feel somewhat like precursors to the crew of Serenity.)
Now, about the whole "writing a serial" aspect of this discussion: have you considered writing for an episodic RPG? I still can't believe no game developers have made any sort of splash with an actual episodic CRPG. Here, I'm thinking more in the JRPG mould, like the more linear Final Fantasy games. You make one double-length episode (the pilot) which you distribute for free, and then you put out regular episodes, which have to be bought. And here, I'm thinking that normal length for an episode is 1-2 hours of gameplay, maybe up to 3 hours if you're really trying everything and looking into every nook and cranny.
Naturally, if you're only a writer, you can't do this all by yourself. Well, I just noticed that Takyris works for Bioware, so he's already in a better position than most of us if he ever wanted to make an episodic RPG.
In any case, you can always write your episodic story as it comes to you (instead of trying to force it into whatever mould seems more profitable) and then edit it and massage it until it reads like a novel. Or make the episodes standalone enough that you can sell the first few without worrying about the episodic nature, and if you pick up enough fans, the rest of the episodes will be easier to sell.
I remember, about 10-15 years ago, I used to buy SF Age (a now-defunct SF magazine -- it was actually the first SF magazine I ever found on news stands after reading about such magazines in anthologies and such...) and I remember a series of very funny stories by Adam-Troy Castro which featured a pair of hapless criminals named Vossoff and Nimmitz. You could see these stories as a serial. The first few stories weren't linked much, but after a while, the events from previous stories would affect the basic plot in future stories. After the stories had run their course, he eventually published them in book form, and I guess that makes for something akin to reading a novel (but not quite.)
If you're not going to be writing fiction in the SF, Fantasy or Horror genres, you might have trouble selling episodic short stories (they'll be even harder to sell if they're novella-length, by the way) but in those genres, the short form still thrives! At worst, you can always put them up on a blog with ads and / or donation buttons, putting up the first few stories and then holding the next batch "for ransom" once you've got enough fans hooked on them.
I'm currently working on a series of linked short stories (some are even short-shorts) that should number around 20 when I'm done telling the story I want to tell. The thing is, while the plot traverses all the stories, I generally have all-new characters in every story. In this way, it's kind of like Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, although that was collected after the fact (the stories were never meant to fit together, so there are many inconsistencies) whereas my stories are all coherent with each other, and all in more or less the same tone (kind of fatalistic, pathetic, in some ways: the general rule is that the characters always come close to achieving their ultimate goal, and then narrowly fail, often spectacularly.) I've got five out of the twenty stories done, the idea for the sixth, and the basic outline of the entire arc (along with that rule I just described.) Considering that three of the five completed stories I originally wrote more than ten years ago, maybe I'll be done with this series before I die of old age. Maybe.
Then again, if the rule holds true, I'll die spectacularly right before I sit down to write the final story...
Check out my new blog: http://50wordstories.ca
Also check out my old game design blog: http://stealmygamedesigns.blogspot.com
Saying he wrote the first Toy Story might be a bit of a stretch considering that the credits were awarded to a team of three and one for story and a team of three (which included Whedon) and one for the screenplay. He wasn't the author of that work like he was for Firefly, for instance. I don't think he is incapable of writing feature length work, but I believe his bag of tricks, his identifiable Whedonness, can only really be maintained in episodes. I'd say the episode is essential to his work. No matter what happens every episode, normality is restored off camera and a new adventure starts next week.
As a disclaimer my entire opinion is based on the only Whedon things I've seen, which are Firefly and Serenity. Maybe the Buffy movie drives fans as batty as his episodic work. I don't know, you tell me.
Also, I don't want to get myself into a debate where I am claiming Whedon is a bad writer. I think he is quite good at what he does, but since the thread is about what he does, I'm trying to figure it out. As the late great Jezz once told me, "Sometimes I don't know what I think about something until I pick a side and debate it." Or something like that.
Can I have jezz's boots?
Very few Buffy fans are fans of the movie. Even Whedon himself is not a big fan of it, mostly because the studio more or less took it out of his hands. There's some of the Whedon charm left in, but a lot of it is gone. There's still more of that charm left in that movie than is left in Alien Resurrection, however.
(And I'm one of the few, it seems, who likes the fourth Alien movie. It's not as good as Alien and definitely not as good as Aliens, but I still enjoy watching it once in a while. Plus, the alternate version in the Alien Quadrilogy box set restores a couple of cool scenes.)
Check out my new blog: http://50wordstories.ca
Also check out my old game design blog: http://stealmygamedesigns.blogspot.com
But the character interaction and the way they talk is what makes it work so well.
I didn't mean to bring this back from the dead, but I got confused by Tak posting a link to here in the chat thread.
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{My Rambling Blog}
World building
It is the witty dialogue/interplay based around a shared history/situation that I find makes his characters so involving and believable.
Just my opinion.
Now, of course, the tricky part is writing characters with this philosophy in mind!
lol. Had not noticed it was a bit of a necro
Whedon isn't the first or only person to say this, but it's excellent advice.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"