sf/f TV development news - 2013

[stj]

^^^You mean I have to read them!

That's seems awfully high-handed!

[RJDiogenes]

The argument about creativity baffles me. If you use somebody else's idea, it's less creative than using your own idea. That's pretty straightforward.

jefferiestubes8 wrote:

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looking forward to any space opera or space-set tv series (preferably without ships blowing up).

Same here. If I never see another space battle again, I won't miss it.

Temis the Vorta wrote:

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I don't really see the distinction, unless it's that they used to have to please the tastes of King Ethelrod, whereas today Walt Disney's offspring aren't as worried about their own tastes than the tastes of the general paying public. So for all of us who aren't kings or corporate behemoths, the situation has improved.

Not really. As you yourself have said, when they think about the tastes of the general paying public, they think about the lowest common denominator.

Borgminister wrote:

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Don't go dissin' comic books!

As a huge comics fan over over 45 years, I'd say they currently deserve it.

[Christopher]

RJDiogenes wrote:

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The argument about creativity baffles me. If you use somebody else's idea, it's less creative than using your own idea. That's pretty straightforward.

I'm sorry, but you're obviously not a creator, or you'd understand how completely and utterly wrong you are here. You do know that Greg and I, the ones telling you that your assumptions about creativity are in error, are professional writers, don't you? This is what we do for a living. You wouldn't assume you were qualified to tell a surgeon he was wrong about how to perform surgery, would you? So what the hell makes you think you're qualified to say you know more about what creativity is than those of us who make a living at it?

This actually came up at a panel here at Shore Leave just yesterday, a workshop on creative writing run by Marco Palmieri, David Mack, and David R. George III. They said the same basic things I've been saying: that it doesn't matter where your ideas come from, that every story has been told before in some form. Everything you do is going to be an amalgam of elements from past works, but that doesn't matter. The originality comes from the fact that you are telling the story instead of someone else. Your perspective on it is different from another person's perspective. Even if you use the same names and the same premise that an earlier author used, what you create is still a reflection of yourself, and that is what makes it new and different. Different creators can do wildly, wonderfully different things with the same idea, and creators have been doing exactly that for as long as humanity has existed.

So you are so, so incredibly, monumentally, elementally wrong here to think that just using a premise and characters that have been used before makes you less creative. That is utter BS, it's a superficial and ignorant understanding of creativity, and you'll still be agonizingly wrong no matter how many times you stubbornly restate it. That's as ludicrous as saying that a composer who writes for the trumpet is less creative than a composer who invents an entirely new wind instrument. It simply doesn't work that way. The pre-existing characters and concepts are just your building blocks. It's how you put them together that matters.

[Temis the Vorta]

Who's to say King Ethelrods tastes are all that exalted? I don't begrudge others their bad taste, since they'd probably think my taste is bad, too. I may sneer at cop show aficionados, but many people think sci fi is inherently childish.

If you take the decision making out of the hands of market forces, who are you giving the power to instead, and will you be any better off?

[Borgminister]

RJDiogenes wrote:

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As a huge comics fan over over 45 years, I'd say they currently deserve it.

Yeah, I'm stuck in the Spidey saves yet kills Gwen Stacy past, I guess... haven't really hung out at my local comic book store in a dog's age, by Crom...

[stj]

Borgminister wrote:

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Yeah, I'm stuck in the Spidey saves yet kills Gwen Stacy past, I guess... haven't really hung out at my local comic book store in a dog's age, by Crom...

I kept up with comics til my mid-twenties. In recent years, I've discovered libraries carry the trades. I very much liked Astro City and some Alan Moore. But I can't stand the remakes and reboots in the comics. I like the new ones, whose story gets told and actually counts. That of course means I read very few trades.

Temis the Vorta wrote:

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Who's to say King Ethelrods tastes are all that exalted?....If you take the decision making out of the hands of market forces, who are you giving the power to instead, and will you be any better off?

The King Ethelrods are themselves market forces. Patronage is market-led artistic production, just for a smaller market. The corporations whose advertising is pays for broadcast TV are also imposing their tastes on the creative system. Both the King Ethelrods and the corporations take into account the effect on the masses of their display. That's why neither are known for buying porn. Both the King Ethelrods and the corporations have distinct social and political slants to the products they buy.

As for artistic production that isn't guided by market forces, a mix of subsidized productions selected by popular vote instead of purchases; critics' panels; fan clubs; delegated groups acting as independent commissions; random choice and simple government purchase would be genuine non-market forces. Some would be more democratic than others.
But so-called consumer sovereignty is not what it's alleged to be. And it is most especially not equivalent to democracy or populism.

Christopher wrote:

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....That's as ludicrous as saying that a composer who writes for the trumpet is less creative than a composer who invents an entirely new wind instrument. It simply doesn't work that way. The pre-existing characters and concepts are just your building blocks. It's how you put them together that matters.

The analogy simply doesn't work that way. The correct way of putting it is to assert that when a composer writes pieces that use older tunes as building blocks, what matters is how he or she puts them together. That Morton Gould's famous medley of Americana or Beethoven's Wellington's Victory reusing well-known tunes, or, even that another arrangement of a tune is just as creative as pieces of music that don't reuse themes.

Not too long ago, I listened to Tom Leher's variations on Clementine, with great pleasure. Unfortunately I am now authoritatively instructed that my failure to appreciate Mr. Lehrer's musical creativity showed me to be ignorant and insensitive. Sort of ruins the experience.

[RJDiogenes]

Christopher wrote:

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I'm sorry, but you're obviously not a creator, or you'd understand how completely and utterly wrong you are here. You do know that Greg and I, the ones telling you that your assumptions about creativity are in error, are professional writers, don't you?

Yes, I do. I am, too.

You wouldn't assume you were qualified to tell a surgeon he was wrong about how to perform surgery, would you? So what the hell makes you think you're qualified to say you know more about what creativity is than those of us who make a living at it?

Well, I've worked in health care for 27 years now, and I spent many of those years in utilization review and quality improvement. So I have been involved in telling doctors how to do their job better. And I've seen more than one of them sued for malpractice. And I am far more qualified to talk about creativity and writing because that's pretty much the story of my life.

This actually came up at a panel here at Shore Leave just yesterday, a workshop on creative writing run by Marco Palmieri, David Mack, and David R. George III. They said the same basic things I've been saying: that it doesn't matter where your ideas come from, that every story has been told before in some form. Everything you do is going to be an amalgam of elements from past works, but that doesn't matter. The originality comes from the fact that you are telling the story instead of someone else. Your perspective on it is different from another person's perspective. Even if you use the same names and the same premise that an earlier author used, what you create is still a reflection of yourself, and that is what makes it new and different. Different creators can do wildly, wonderfully different things with the same idea, and creators have been doing exactly that for as long as humanity has existed.

Yes, writers build on elements from the past. No, using somebody else's ideas is not the same as making up your own.

So you are so, so incredibly, monumentally, elementally wrong here to think that just using a premise and characters that have been used before makes you less creative.

Actually, what I'm doing is stating the obvious.

That's as ludicrous as saying that a composer who writes for the trumpet is less creative than a composer who invents an entirely new wind instrument. It simply doesn't work that way. The pre-existing characters and concepts are just your building blocks. It's how you put them together that matters.

No, it's not comparable to a composer writing for a specific instrument any more than it's about a writer writing for a specific genre. A more proper comparison would be sampling. When it comes to creativity, u can't touch this.

[Borgminister]

Can't get any more creative that Dubstep, can you?

[RJDiogenes]

Well, I don't really know what that means.

[Chemahkuu]

RJDiogenes wrote:

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Well, I don't really know what that means.

Or anything else it seems.

[sidious618]

RJDiogenes wrote:

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Yes, I do. I am, too.

As am I and, I think, I'm a legitimate writer as I've been paid for my work, both fiction and non-fiction, with my fiction works appearing in genre magazines both online and in print and in literary magazines and my non-fiction consists of reporting, op-eds, and feature articles. I try not to bring this up too often because it comes across as pretty egotistical since my work doesn't have anything to do with the shows and movies mentioned here. However, since it's been mentioned here as if it's a prerequisite to stepping into this discussion I'm bringing it up.

The idea that tie in books are lesser than others is simply no true. For one, people who write tie in books tend to be very passionate about the world they're writing in as opposed to, say, James Patterson or Vince Flynn who is writing for a paycheck and a paycheck only (although Flynn also writes to convince that we should torture people). In many cases this results in situations where tie in novels are better.

Further, there are a number of difficulties when it comes to tie in novels. For one, they limit what the author can do; Greg Cox can't kill off established characters unless he gets permission to. If you're writing your own thing then you can do whatever you want.

Now I'm not saying all tie in fiction is great. Much of it is bad but much of fiction that's published is bad. There are so many differences between regular novels and tie in novels that it's not fair to judge one against the other.

For what it's worth the only tie in fiction I read is Doctor Who and those novels tend to be much, much more creative than "mainstream" sci-fi novels.

[stj]

Was is das "lesser?" Less original, thus in that respect, less creative. Also, if the tie-ins are "creative" enough, they don't actually tie-in, which is false advertising.

Bach's Goldbach Variation; Mozart's variations on "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star;" Deethoven's Diabelli Variations; Elgar's Enigma Variations; Ravel's orchestration of Mussourgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition; Liszt's piano transcriptions of Schubert; Percy Grainger's arrangement of Country Gardens....the kind of creativity exhibited in variations on a set theme or in rearrangements of a set theme have been known and acknowledge for some time. They are not the most appealing kind of music, not for audiences nor do they constitute the larger part of any musician's work.

Remakes and reboots might be compared to covers, but generally most people regard even singers or groups who do their own (original or special purchased) material more highly than singers or groups who just do someone else's hits.

If this is all about tie-in books, yes, it is true that some tie-in books are better written than wholly original novels. No one said otherwise, or even explicitly said the opposite.
Tie-in books are still less original. In ordinary language that also means less creative. The point was not to diss tie-in books but to complain about the twin problems of a death of original material and false advertising.

[RJDiogenes]

sidious618 wrote:

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The idea that tie in books are lesser than others is simply no true.

I never did and never would say that tie-in books, or any work for hire writing, is lesser. Half or more of the stories that inspired me to become a writer when I was a kid were stories written for a pre-existing universe, whether it was Star Trek or comics or something similar. And that's not even what I'm talking about. Writing stories set in the Star Trek universe is one thing-- making up a "new" Space Opera series and calling it Star Trek and naming the captain James Kirk and so forth is quite another. Being inspired by somebody else's concept to create something of your own is great-- using their ideas instead of your own is not great (and by "you" I mean the generic "you").

[sojourner]

RJDiogenes wrote:

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Being inspired by somebody else's concept to create something of your own is great-- using their ideas instead of your own is not great (and by "you" I mean the generic "you").

See, pre hyphen and post hyphen here are in conflict. At what point does "being inspired" cross over into "using ideas"? What's wrong with using ideas as a jumping off point?

Ever heard the saying "good artists borrow, great artists steal"?

BTW, I'm curious, what type of stuff have you written?

[stj]

I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Upton Sinclair