Macbeth (2015): Movie Review

Macbeth, 'The Scottish Play', a piece that needs few introductions, has been through many film adaptations over the generations. Let's recap just a few:

The BBC TV Drama. This was regarded as a very orthodox performance of Shakespeare's play. I remember watching it as part of the obligatory high school course on it. Find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0LrdOa7uZQ

Ian McKellen's performance, with Judy Dench as Lady Macbeth, from '78. You can also check out other clips where McKellen discusses the best way to pull off some of the harder soliloquies, but the main footage is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKWWK0Pj34

Patrick Stewart has also been Macbeth. I couldn't find the full movie on youtube, but here's a clip where he delivers the famous 'tomorrow, tomorrow...' after learning of his wife's suicide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84

There are so many other wonderful adaptations of the renowned play, and they are easy to find. Of course, the latest adaptation of Macbeth has just come out in cinemas everywhere, and it features Michael Fassbender in the lead role, with Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth. I've been really excited about it. Firstly because it's a great tragedy, so great in fact that you're forced to learn about it in school(!). Secondly because I am such a big Fassbender fan - he was amazing in such films as Inglorious Basterds, Prometheus, even Xmen: days of future past. Thirdly... the visuals in the movie trailer were so amazing. If you haven't seen the trailer, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqHhKuCQmoY

 My review of the new movie:

The cinematography didn't disappoint, neither did the music. The amazing thing about Shakespeare is that you can sit down and just read the words, the pure text--and still get something out of it (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/full.html). Having the scenes seamlessly stitched together with the beautiful backdrop of Scottish scenery and a mournful, atmospheric score went even further to delivering the import of the story. The lonely and desperate vibe was just what the doctor ordered to supplement the predicament of the characters.

Then there were the acting performances. Obviously Fassbender and Cotillard led the way in terms of skill--if they hadn't been stealing the show, they wouldn't have been cast. But I was distracted by the fact that most of the other actors were genuinely Scottish. Fassbender is German, Cotillard is French. It's hard to ignore that fact if you've seen other movies they've been in. So as a result, the guys playing Malcolm, Ross, Siward etc... all come across as more compelling in terms of making you feel like you're watching something in a coherent setting. Having said that, Mr and Mrs Macbeth are such distinct characters, they go mad, and perhaps it's more fitting for them to 'stick out' from the crowd in a variety of different ways including their facial features, mannerisms, and accents.

Personally, my standout pick in this movie was Macduff, played by Sean Harris. He brought it all--the emotion, the energy, the accent. Macduff is the one going from standstill hanging out at Macbeth's premises, to discovering the murdered Duncan. He later receives the news of his family's brutal murder, then resolves hatefully to destroy Macbeth. I thought he was flawless.

As mentioned earlier, this is a classic, it's been performed so many times before and by so many different casts. When you watch the latest adaptation, you are watching to see how faithful they are to the original spirit of the text--or not. You certainly feel yourself doing that during this movie.

But....

You're also constantly being surprised with the innovations that this rendition brings to the table. It's a balancing act--keeping intact the things that work best when intact, while taking license to make it into a slightly different and newer story at the same time. This makes sense to me. If you set out just to stand some contemporary actors on the Scottish highlands and have them read the original text, you're likely to be rewarded with quite a forgettable result.

Spoiler alert: even though you know what happens in the Macbeth story, I'm about to discuss some things that this film may have intended to surprise you with.

Macbeth and his Lady don't have kids of their own. The original play alludes to this. However, the movie brings the fact further into the foreground. Instead of using the three witches for the opening scene, a new prologue is slapped in there, where the Macbeths are having a funeral for their dead child. Later, when Lady Macbeth is delivering the 'Out, damn spot!', she is hallucinating a vision of that same child. It's rather creepy. In committing suicide, she goes to the witches, who in the new film are insinuated to have more effect on the story than their classic plot device suggests.

Banquo's son Fleance is in his teens or even a 'young adult' when you watch other film adaptations. Shakespeare has some lines for Fleance. The new movie has it that Fleance is actually a much younger child, younger than 10 for sure, and his dialogue is scrapped. For me it was an immense change--for the better. Banquo's character becomes far more honorable and fatherly, and Macbeth's decision to send assassins for him comes across as even more chilling. Speaking of chilling, the scene where Fleance has to watch his dad get cut up by the thugs really killed me. The kid actor delivered a performance that had nothing short of a physical effect on the audience.

Macbeth is finally undone when the English send an army with Malcolm and Macduff to take him out. Classically, the prophesy begins to fulfill itself when they cut the trees and walk them up the hill. In the new adaptation, they simply burn the forest and it's the ashes of the trees floating up to the castle that satisfy the prophesied condition. Not a big deal, but it does allow the art direction to include a glowing orange backdrop to the final fight sequence.

There are so many other little nuances that they bring. I will let you discover them for yourself. For me, this movie really lived up to expectations--and they were high from the outset! I would watch it at the cinema a second time. I will probably buy the DVD. Long live Macbeth.

Use Google Documents for Creative Writing

There are a few reasons why I’m using Google Documents for creative writing at the moment:

Auto-save

Much better than having to remember to save your work, or having a big gap of time between saving only to see your system freeze or crash on you. Very convenient, and perhaps MS Word (my backup word-processor these days) has a way of doing this, but I haven’t discovered it.

Cloud-Storage

The chances of Google collapsing and losing your saved work is a lot less likely than having your computer stolen, catching a virus, or somehow having your files overwritten/deleted. Let’s face it.

Access from any computer via the internet

I currently enjoy the luxury of being allowed to use the internet for personal things while I’m on the job, due to downtime. I know that very few people get this privilege, but if you do and you’re into creative writing, this lets you log into Google docs and write while you’re at work. It’s amazing.

Controlled Sharing

For me, this is the main selling point of Google Docs. I collaborate with others as much as I can, and I want people to be able to highlight parts of the text and make comments. GD allows this even to the extent that you can reply to comments or resolve them, and get e-mail updates about them. You can specify access level, making the text ‘read-only’ to certain people if you want. This is great for my writer’s group, we can all work on a story together even though one of us is overseas.

So yeah, Google Documents! I don’t work for Google or have any responsibility for promoting their product, but this particular one has really been a great tool for me as a writer. Definitely recommended.

Here's an example of one of my documents: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wzLpyODIm69KH8zUg9HL1rjgu2Rp65ESSFMTHKaawG8/edit?usp=sharing

 

Fantasy Tropes

First, a distinction:

Stereotype: a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.

Trope: A:  a word or expression used in a figurative sense, B:  a common or overused theme or device

In fantasy genre-fiction (I’m thinking Lord of the Rings, Song of Ice and Fire, The King killer Chronicles, and many others), you’re bound to find not only ‘fantasy stereotypes’ but actual ‘fantasy tropes’, ideas that seem to repeat themselves in this particular genre. People have something of a love-hate relationship with tropes. On the one hand, you don’t want them to be exactly the same every time, not only instantly recognizable but indistinguishable from earlier incarnations in other stories. Yet on the other hand, you don’t want them to be missing—we love most of the things that make fantasy stories (perhaps I should say ‘high-fantasy’ or ‘epic-fantasy’) what they are. If I go out to buy an apple, but attempt to locate an apple that isn’t round, juicy, crunchy, etc… I might end up with something either totally undesirable, or something that can’t be considered an apple at all. It’s the same with my endeavor to find new fantasy literature.

What really makes a fantasy trope wonderful is the way in which it is adapted, evolved, nuanced, developed, improved upon, re-contextualized, deployed, executed… and so on…. By the fantasy author. Let’s take a look at these wonderful fantasy tropes. I will commentate on them in the order that they appear and are described as per the lovely entry for them in Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_tropes

Good vs. Evil

Obviously, the classical approach to this concept is to clearly define these two forces as opposing factions, showing the alignment to each for all relevant characters. In contemporary works, we see a breakdown and deconstruction of the trope, but without disposing of it entirely. By that I mean, there are factions and characters set up against each other, and they may be construed as either good or evil for the perception of the audience, but that colouring may change or even become ambiguous as the story progresses. Bad-guys may turn out to be good-guys and vice-versa, or the authors may even leave it up to us to decide who the good-guys and bad-guys actually are. We may argue these points with our peers in book-review sessions. But importantly, we’ll still be talking about the concepts of good and evil. And if we are still doing that, this trope is still a successful ‘keeper’ in the world of fantasy fiction.

Hero

Everyone loves a heroic figure, but like ‘Good vs Evil’, it’s easy to be predictable and boring with the trope. These days we also have the concept of the anti-hero, “a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes.” Audiences by-and-large identify more closely with heroes who also have meaningful flaws. Yet characters, especially protagonists, can’t be too mundane. We find something deeply agreeable about heroes who are capable of something we ourselves aren’t capable of. Fantasy is a genre that further enables that extension.

Dark Lord

Ah, my all-time favourite without doubt. For the same reason that we like romanticized battles over real ones, we prefer romanticized villains over real ones. Perhaps you’ve felt as though you wanted to see more of Darth Vader during the story-telling process, compared with Luke Skywalker. Dark Lords are cool. They hang out in Dark Towers (another beautiful fantasy trope), wear dark clothes, have dark dialogue, exercise dark powers, have dark agendas, and so on. But it becomes rather one-dimensional unless you figure out realistic motives for them and subtleties that retain the attention of contemporary audiences.

Quest

The trope most popularized by Tolkien, it spawned countless computer/video-games and roleplaying games, not to mention works of fictional literature. It’s SUCH a good vehicle for a story. Just be wary of your quest starting in such stereotypical conditions, with such stereotypical ending conditions, and featuring such a stereotypical blend of ‘character classes’. Of course your story’s characters are going to need some kind of problem to solve, some kind of agenda to pursue. But there is plenty of room to carve out variation upon this trope.

Magic

This could go well beyond the scope of the present blog-post, since the concept of the ‘magic system’ is a bit of a thing. It’s such a malleable and variable thing though. You can keep your magic to something sourced ‘off-page’, a ‘black-box’, something like ‘magic-realism’ as in the genre, or you can systematize it and make it an integral part of the storytelling. Both approaches have worked historically. What’s important is that the magic present in the story should do something for the story or characters. It shouldn’t just be an obligatory nod to the genre.

Medievalism

This isn’t a must as far as fantasy-in-general is concerned, given that stories like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory count in the genre. But it IS a must for epic and high fantasy, in my opinion. Well perhaps not a must, but it’d be quite the unusual story that didn’t draw from the trope if it wasn’t from the high/epic fantasy sub-genre. There’s something romantic and yet brutal about this type of setting. It allows for society to be portrayed in terms that are superlatively easy to understand, and therefore the delivery of other tropes comes even easier. Perhaps it’s just a generation thing, but one can easily imagine what it would be like to have to confront medieval adversities without resorting to guns and telephones and the like.

Races

Perhaps my least favorite trope. Yet in our society there is such an ‘us and them’ attitude ingrained in us that we can’t help but get behind struggles between the protagonist elves (they’re civilized and elegant) and the antagonistic orcs (they’re uncouth and disgusting) and similar opposing ‘racial’ factions. I actually don’t feel like high/epic fantasy needs this trope. You can tell the same story without it. Tolkien made it work because he characterized his races so well, even went to the length of designing whole languages for them to speak. When a contemporary author just invents a new race out of nowhere, deriving it from some pre-existing fantasy race idea, it just makes me somewhat skeptical, although I can and do appreciate the gesture

Ultimately we read stories for the sake of conflict and how the characters resolve it. But in fantasy we encounter tropes along the way. We identify them, pass judgement upon them, and potentially appreciate them. They can add, or detract from, a story. But what is a genre if not for its tropes?

'Scope' in Storytelling

Mary picked up the phone--it was her mum calling. But there wasn't any way she was going to come home from the restaurant. After a few minutes of talking, the Samsung was shaking in her hand. And when she hung up she was in tears. Mary didn't talk to her mum for a month after that. And it was three years before she forgave her.

 

This miniature story starts out by zooming in quite close on a character and examining her emotion in a bit of detail. But it only does so for the first four sentences. Notice that in the fifth and sixth sentences, the narration suddenly zooms right out and starts talking about much longer time periods, where immediately prior we were hearing about things that were happening 'in the moment'. But does the story actually make sense? Is it coherent enough for the audience to follow? Of course it is.

 

Some novice writers really struggle to use scope effectively as a tool. Suppose you spend a page following a character's actions quite closely as they are walking around their house. But then you reach a point where nothing relevant to the plot happens until either they get to some distant location, or to some distant point in future time. As an author it's common to feel like you have to write in a 'transition' that moves the narration smoothly to that point, otherwise it will feel 'too weird' if you take a sudden jump in scope.

 

But are your readers going to feel the same way?

 

If not, what's the problem? If you spend half a chapter following the activity of a character over a single day, then suddenly jump a month ahead, then continue narrating their actions over a new day, the reader can still follow this and appreciate that they are reading about the important/exciting events. All you need to do is retrospectively add remarks about anything of importance that happened during the gap, if in fact there was anything important that happened. Note that we actually do this naturally when sharing anecdotes in real life. There's nothing strange about describing your doctor's visit for five minutes, then spending the next five talking about the follow-up visit that happened the next week, and in between just saying "then, the next week..."

 

There's a similar concept to keep in mind when writing dialogue. Suppose you actually write out a page-long dialogue between Mary and her Mum. Then she gets off the phone and meets up with her cousin. In the plot, Mary needs to tell her cousin what she talked to her Mum about. Would you really copy/paste the previous page and show the audience that Mary is repeating everything verbatim? Or would you just write something like Mary told her cousin about the terrible phone call, and then just move on to the new resulting conversation between Mary and the cousin?

 

Sometimes it actually is better to tell instead of show, in writing.

 

But that's an easy one. What can be more difficult is deciding when to type dialogue out in the first place and when to describe dialogue. Consider:

 

1. Kurt said, 'that was the worst attempt at cooking a roast chicken I've even seen, Norma!'. Then he left the room.

2. Kurt took a moment to insult Norma's cooking before leaving the room.

 

Both tell a slightly different version of the story, but they both get the story moving. Deciding which way to go with communication is something that can take some practice. Maybe I'll go into this in more detail in a future blog post...

 

 

 

 

Plot Construction & Development in Fiction

I think everyone's had that moment where an idea came to them and they said, 'hey, that would be such a great idea for a movie/book.'

Equally, it's probably true that most good works of art, whether they are movies/books/tv-shows/paintings/songs... started out that way--with a basic premise that inspired their creators into action. So when we casually have such an idea, it's quite appealing to believe that those thoughts could be a real and glorious thing just like all of the finished projects out there that we admire. Unfortunately, most of the time, these little kernels never turn into popcorn. With regard to books, since that's the theme of this blog, some people make the effort to sit down and turn their idea into a project and fail. That's because they have no process--no mechanism for developing their idea so that it becomes hundreds of ideas put together under one thematic roof. But this activity, like so many things, is actually a skill that can be practiced, taught, developed... accomplished writers pump out new projects quickly and on demand because they know how to efficiently get from point A ('that would be a great idea for a book') through to point B (the book has a setting/plot/characters/scenes/dialogue/everything else). So let's talk about what their process might look like.

Suppose your idea is: 'A secret agent has to save the world from a mad villain, and the government has given him a license to kill bad guys along the way.' If that's all there is to the premise, the author is going to need to flesh things out a fair bit before it becomes presentable as a James Bond story. It might not be too hard to characterize the main protagonist, main antagonist, people supporting each of those parties, etc. But you'll need to dream up a specific agenda for the villain so that the conflict can kick off from somewhere, then put your protagonist in at a particular chronological point. Complications will need to be added so that it isn't complete plain sailing for him. The events will need to be fed to the audience in such a way that they can follow progress, but other information will need to be withheld from them so that you maintain enough intrigue. There will be a host of little problems to solve along the way, like making the characters and their actions/dialogue believable, keeping everything consistent, making sure the audience can invest themselves emotionally and cerebrally, and so on.

If you're writing according to a formula, or copying your plot ideas from somewhere, it's a bit easier. But lets say you're starting from scratch, because you want the structure of your story to serve the ideas themselves, not the other way around. Here's how I might proceed.

1. You decide on your central idea/premise. Let's say it's: 'During World War 2, a British man becomes a conscientious objector, and avoids joining the army.'
2. The very next step is to identify the central conflict. That shouldn't be too hard: you need a character who represents the main opposing sentiment--someone that wants our protagonist to go to war against his wish. Maybe it's a close friend who has already signed on, or its someone responsible for recruitment. What if it's the guys own wife? That way the conflict isn't just ideological, it would inevitably be quite emotional and convoluted as well. I'll pick that option, bearing in mind that it's not the only choice.
3. The situation our characters are in is going to have to change in order for the plot to work. Perhaps the story starts with him already having joined the army, but he becomes a deserter. Or, he initially avoids conscription, but later chooses to when he comes under pressure from his wife/everyone else. Suppose we go with the second option there.
4. Now we can start looking at where the most important scenes are going to be. There will be one centerpiece of action where he gives in and decides to go to war. We can systematically zoom in on the situation and look at the crucial cause and effect of dialogue and people's resulting feelings. 
5. Having mapped out where the turning points are, we can build other scenes around them that effectively support the story by developing the situations and developing the characters so that the audience has the right expectations going into the pivotal scenes. 
6. This process is like building a house. You start with the fundamental parts of it, then add layers of detail around the central structure of it. You don't put everything together simultaneously, you start at a specific point and attach new things to it one by one. 

Some people really prefer to write spontaneously. That's fine, because it will mean that they are writing at the point in time when they feel most inspired by their ideas. That approach can have its drawbacks though. We sometimes see writers add a lot of filler material while they are working towards an important scene, because they haven't properly decided how to support it. Or, the story is really light on ideas because they only picked one central idea and tried to blow it up like a balloon, instead of using it progenitively to populate the world of the story.

Having a more structured and systematic process can really be useful if you are willing to brainstorm a bit. That way, your good 'starting idea' can slowly but surely be turned into hundreds of other solid ideas that eventually get combined together according to an overall plan and result in an actual finished project.

Publishing vs Self-Publishing

Are you going to publish your book?

As an amateur writer I get asked this all the time by people who aren't writers. It's a harmless question, but the assumption is that after the book is finished, it's just a simple matter of handing a manuscript in to the publisher and then seeing it show up gloriously on the bookstore shelf. I think most people also like to imagine themselves one day writing a novel, and then kicking back after the hard work has been done, while everyone else appreciates them. Also, the very drastic difference between actually having a book published by a publisher, and self-publishing it on your own, is completely lost on a lot of people.

I'll try put it all into better perspective with the following discussion.

"Publishing a book."

This is when an established company known as a publisher decides to invest their money into a manuscript you wrote in order to turn it into one of their products. They then own it and pay you fees known as royalties when it sells. If they want to edit and change it, they will. Usually they'll do a reasonably large print run on it, and perhaps advertise it and distribute it through bookstores and so on. Remember that this is an act of business, not primarily a celebration of your artwork. For that business to publish your manuscript, they will first need to assess the likelihood of making a return on their investment, just like any other business decision. 

Imagine running a publishing company yourself. You have to pay staff wages, offices and equipment, book printing costs, advertising, tax... all the normal business expenditures. You wouldn't want to publish a book that doesn't sell, otherwise you'd go under pretty quick. There are mountains of manuscripts written by thousands of people, but most of them will in fact not sell. That's why it's better to invest in books that aren't so risky: cookbooks, memoirs of celebrities and successful sportspeople, formulaic romance/erotic novels, re-prints of classics, bibles, and so on. Hollywood is basically the same with movies. Aren't most of the ideas invested in nowadays either remakes or continuations of successful franchises? Movie-makers lose millions when a film flops at the box office, but there are a lot of stereotypical films that they know are going to make money no matter how many times they are re-hashed. It's a similar situation with the book publishing industry.

Yes, some creative and inventive fiction sometimes turns into overnight success. But most of it doesn't. The odds aren't much different to that of winning the lottery. Generally, the type of creative writing that makes it through a publisher is usually designed for a particular genre-loving-demographic, and is written by authors who have built up a bit of credibility by slowly publishing short stories in magazines, and doing the hard yards writing material for b-grade television/radio, etcetra.

"Self-Publishing a book."

This is where you as the author do everything yourself. You not only write the book, but you typeset and format it yourself, edit it, design any cover/art, and so on. That's not to say you might not outsource some of those things, but at the end of the day you are individually responsible for getting everything across the finish line, and that includes funding it yourself. If it doesn't sell, the loss of investment is on you, not an external publishing company. By taking this approach, you retain full control of the project, but miss out on any help provided by a publisher's reputation/advertising and of course their financial investment. 

There are local companies that can make a print version of your book. But unless you go with a large run of copies (like 500+), it won't be very cost-efficient at all. And you wouldn't want to print that many books without knowing whether anyone would buy them. On the other hand, there's eBook publishing, which can be done quickly and easily on Amazon and many other sites. It's so easy in fact, that the online market is swamped with titles that are very low quality, and short works are often indistinguishable from long ones. The reviews you will read for self-published e-books are largely written by people within the author's own social network. You could steal your little sister's diary and publish it on Amazon if you wanted to. Hundreds of titles go up every day - it's hard for a serious novel with any decent merit to truly stand out.

****

Personally I'm more interested in self-publishing, because the primary goal of my writing is not to sell a product but to enjoy the creative process. I love developing stories and characters, and crafting well-formed sentences. I love learning new words and finding appropriate ways to deploy them. Turning a book into a product that someone else can buy is a secondary objective. In fact, my next novel will be digital only, and completely free.

Creative Writing Projects

It's the first post of a new blog.

About nine months ago I self-published a novel called Zero Anaphora. Since then, I've been doing what I can to promote it within my own network, but I've also moved on to start a new project as well. Quite often, I find myself talking to others about my work, old and new, and it continues to come as a surprise that these projects are difficult for me to explain in terms of their content. If I wrote books that were simple enough to sufficiently summarize in ordinary conversations, there wouldn't be any point writing them in the first place, I feel. But explanations are almost necessary, sometimes. Perhaps a blog is an appropriate way to express them--'oh, what do I write about? Here's a link...'

In taking up creative writing again as a hobby one of the better and more useful experiences has been my involvement with groups like Auckland Writers Meetup. We generally get together at a cafe in Mt Eden, Auckland, a couple of times a month. Most of the people that come along don't actually do any creative writing--they're curious about it and have always wanted to try, but are looking for encouragement. To me, that's great. Writing can be really challenging and lonely at the best of times, so it's really quite therapeutic to just talk to other people about it in a casual environment. A few of us even kicked off an exercise where we're writing a crime fiction story together on Google documents--each person takes a turn to write a few paragraphs, and the plot is constructed in an impromptu fashion. Three chapters into it, we've been having fun, and it's very informative to see just how your own style/voice compares when juxtaposed with others so starkly. We also have a Facebook group, since not everyone is in Auckland. 

A while back I also used to be fairly heavily into Scribophile. It's like a social networking site for writers, you partake in a system that allows you to criticize pieces of writing and be rewarded with points that accumulate on your account. Then you spend those points in order to have your work receive similar criticism from other users. It's not a new or bad idea, but I did find that it really attracted only the absolute beginners of creative writing, people who aren't appreciated by their immediate friends and family when it comes to their efforts. I can completely relate to that type of starting point. Still, after swapping a lot of feedback with scribophile users, I can barely continue to stomach the content I'm required to grind through.

But back to my own books. Zero Anaphora was my first go at publishing something digital, an eBook. There are hundreds of these going up on the internet every day, and in front of a relatively small audience proportional to the audiences for other forms of art or entertainment. In the process of teaching myself the basics of eBook marketing, I was advised by an Indies Unlimited administrator that I should stick to a tried and tested format for writing a blurb for my novel. Originally just had "a young woman gives up her career in order to conduct a social experiment upon an unsuspecting lover." I begrudgingly replaced that with a misleading plot summary. It was for the best, but I couldn't understand the need for the compromise until well after I had committed to it.

Blogging isn't new but it still has some value. My main goals with future posts will be to share some ideas with people in my local writing community, and to help inform people who are following/interested in my writing, and perhaps even to give other people ideas, or to help them understand what amateur writing is all about. At the end of the day it can be a hard thing to promote, but that doesn't make me any less passionate about it at this time. I'm working on a new project right now, which I'm very excited about. I'll of course talk more about it in future posts for this blog.

Luke