When should a creator of something know when to stop from over-writing / revising their works?
I know that I definitely shouldn't ask George Lucas that question!
Well, What you are reading is the "final" version of a caption that I made for Miss Evie Hyde, a TG writer that tends to work with the corruption of men into bitchy Alpha women. Here is the original version I mocked up first, and thought I was done with it at first.
BUT I didn't think it told the story in full. What I had in mind definitely did not fit into what I had created, and Honestly, I had more meat on the bone so to speak with what else I wanted to get onto the "page".
And while I think the newer version is better, and gets across what I was trying to infer / imply with the original one .. I think it ended up losing a bit of zip, steam, momentum, etc .. Not quite sure why, other than to say it's like the last 40 minutes of The Dark Knight. Joker is dead .. and it just keeps going, ostensibly to set up the sequel. And I think that's a mistake.
So I really would like people to comment below. Which version of the caption do you like better? Did the original seem to be too vague for you, or did you get the gist of it? Did I "overwrite" the newer version, or do what I needed to do to get the entire story told, regardless of the pacing. Do you even notice pacing when reading TG captions? Please discuss!
I think it's interesting from the perspective of a reader in that there seems, to me, to be two rather different plotlines. In the old one it could conceivably be argued that Evie has no real clue what she's done only that she's got herself a new body and a nice car. In the newer version, Evie is very much part of the action - maybe even the instigator - and the plot seems much more complex and rich. There's the 'completeu' typo though and an errant indefinite article in that new version - very George Lucas in 1997 I think! - which is meant as a compliment!
ReplyDeleteOf the two, I prefer the newer one - there's more, as you say, meat on the bone and thus more to chew on. When it comes to captions, I find the ones with detailed vagaries (if that's not too much of an oxymoron) are much more fun because the details can be pushed into a number of interpretations and preconceptions that I bring to the experience. Those that are a bit shorter tend to leave rather too much to my imagination and thus, well, I may as well have made my own! (She says, noting that it's been a good nine years since she did so).
Anyway, I enjoyed this journey beneath the hood of the captioning process and hope my thoughts are useful to you in some way!
Glad I got to take you on a bit of a ride with my fiction. The interesting thing is that I was trying to get to the same place with both of them, with Evie being the instigator in both versions, but it got to breathe more when I added more space and elaborated slightly. I think the main issue is that I ended up using the same design of text for Evie talking to Ian as I did for when she got on the phone with Dee. I didn't want to confuse anyone .. but it ended up bogging it down either way.
DeleteAnd I tend to like being somewhat vague in my captions, but I am usually still trying to push readers at least indirectly where I'd like their minds to go. IF they are no where near what I was trying to indicate, I have failed narratively, even if they enjoyed where their brain took them.
And you definitely can take the teacher out of school, but you are always the teacher, Miss Joanna! I don't mind the corrections, seriously!
Very good and interesting story! Why would Evie ever want to return to his former chasis (body). What hot girl wouldn't want to drive a sharp looking red sports car? Zoe
ReplyDeleteEspecially when they didn't have to pay for it!
DeleteBoth are good but I prefer the revised one. The original is blunt. The revised is sweeter and gets a bit more tangly then at the end. Would make a great movie.
ReplyDeletethe revised one is sweeter? I am having the protagonist literally killing two offscreen characters and getting away with it, and collecting a fortune in life insurance as well! Well, it IS sweeter if I happen to be Evie or Dee!
DeleteI definitely agree that the original is sort of blunt, in that everything is just BAM, BAM, and then BAM! Thanks for your thoughts. Definitely feeling better about the revised version.