Veronica Mars, George Lucas, and My Take on Editing, Outlining and Listening to Fans
First, I’m going to admit that I’m a tiny bit of a hypocrite here. Since I’m a starting author, and since it’s my dream/passion/etc, I didn’t give a lot of thought to what kind of writing was marketable. Most of my “journey” is admitting that I wanted to write, and pursuing the dream of writing centered around whether I would try and write professionally. not WHAT I would write once that decisions was made.
Instead, I focused on writing that I wanted to write, and what I was passionate about: namely, literary fiction and children’s books that had Asian American protagonists.
I know it wasn’t necessarily the smart thing to do. I know that writers like Nicholas Sparks have admitted that they chose their genre based on things like competition, marketability, etc. Self-publishing books and articles will often talk about how writing, without prior thought and consideration toward what genres are marketable and have end users, is a passion project destined to fail. These blogs also talk about the importance of outlining, of having a master plan… not just you know, writing by the seat of your pants and hoping things work out in the end.
For me, especially because I didn’t always want to be a writer, and even now, a couple months in, I’m struggling more with logistics than writing, the idea of an outline seems foreign. I come up with something like an idea (for example, Cosmetics), or an ending (for example, Unwell).
I don’t outline.
I’ve let my friends and family… plus one hired editor (who only did a partial), do almost all of the editing.
I have no fans to listen to.
But, and this is a big but, I’m inexperienced. I’m clearly making mistakes and am learning from them (the hard way).
So, when it comes to movies, books or really anything else that has had several people and/or lots of time and money involved. I expect better!
Nothing peeves me more than series and/or movies that clearly don’t know what their emotional and/or action-sequence climax is supposed to be.
Nothing pains me more than when a series is clearly supposed to be headed in one direction, and then veers off in another, at the last minute, in an effort to seem surprising! Or to incite talk about how unexpected all of it was!
I read romance novels if and when I feel like reading about an uncomplicated world where happy endings triumph and love conquers all.
When I want news, I go to cnn.com, bbc.com.
Which is why I don’t understand all of the backlash about the recent Veronica Mars movie (that it’s antifeminist and promotes the Bad Caterpillar theory, that it wasn’t creative enough and was basically a really disappointing, long episode of what had been a great television series, and of course, that making Kickstarter fans happy is somehow going to the death of creativity in the movie industry).
I mean…
Really?
From the industry that has brought us reboots of everything from Transformers, to Spiderman, and Amazing Spiderman to the Muppets (with many of these being crazily successful), we’re worried that Kickstarter and the input of fans might somehow… kill the creativity?
My take on this (despite the fact that I’ll admit, again, I’m a bit of a hypocrite, up till now, I’ve written what I wanted, when I wanted) is that authors, directors, everyone who might dare to call themselves creative does need a certain amount of feedback.
As far as I can tell, the Veronica Mars crew listened, and gave fans what they wanted. Good for them.
If we really wanted to write an article about people who don’t know how to edit themselves, people who start something with an endgame planned out, or people who have disappointed their faithful fans, I can think of at LEAST 10 examples I would put far, far above Veronica Mars.
Top 10 People/Shows that Would Have Benefitted from Fan Input/Editing and/or Planning
1. George Lucas -- If we had gathered any significant number of Star Wars fans, locked them in a room for a week, ordered pizza and soda and shut the door… how many of you think that the final product would have been WORSE than Episodes I-III? Would have had a creature like Jar Jar Binks? Also… how many of those fans would have said: yes, let’s go back and retool Episodes IV-VI. Let’s completely change charter-defining scenes like Han-Solo-Shoots-First? More than that… weren’t some of the best lines in Star Wars, at least for me, some of the most memorable, ad-libs? For example, when Han says, “I know.” I’m not saying that Episodes I-III are irredeemable, I just think that Lucas would’ve benefitted from listening more to fans and also… less free rein.
2. Battlestar Galactica -- I’d like to go on record as saying that a LOT of the series I’ve started off LOVING, would have seriously benefited from either a) having an END GAME planned out or b) listening more to their fans. BSG, in particular… maybe it’s a case of reading too many interviews from the show’s creators (like this one, where he admits to picking some of the Final Five in season THREE!!!!). This was a tough, tough series to watch. On the weeks that had a low death count, I would actually start getting anxious, because I knew, just knew, that next week would be a hell of a ride: someone was going to die, someone was going to go to the darkside etc. After all of that angst and dedication, I wanted an ending that made sense. And… though there are parts of me that think the ending is more or less where they wanted to go, much of it didn’t make sense for me, and also, I hated that parts of it (like the Final Five) had been decided more, on the fly than anything else.
3. Heroes -- when this show first started, I told everyone about it. Everyone. In a preaching-to-the-choir way, I tried to force some of my friends to sit down and watch it. The first season was in my opinion, almost perfect. And then… it kept going… and going… and going… I know it’s set to be revived/spun-off now, but I got to say, I feel like all of my hope and trust was spent on Seasons 2 and 3. I normally think of myself as a completionist, and I didn’t even finish Season 4. To me, this is the quintessential example of a show that really needed to have planned out their endgame ahead of time. Or, alternatively, they could have learned from Chinese series, where the series actually have a beginning, middle and end. A one-season Heroes, even with a longer break between this so-called spin-off or second series, probably would have given the creative team enough time to you know, get their act together!
4. Lost -- There were lots of fan ideas that were, not going to lie, better than some of the endings of some of the major sci fi fantasies etc out there.
5. Cheers -- I should really add Cheers on here, because I don’t know what the heck happened with the ending of that show. I remember reading an article from the show’s creators about how they always kind of knew Sam and Diane were meant to be… they got Shelly Long back for the finale, and then, what the heck? I’m going to pretend the alternate ending is the way the series ended.
6. Dawson’s Creek -- honestly? I never really watched it, but I did tune in for the final episode because it was such an EVENT (supposedly). I basically watched enough of the show to realize (spoilers ahead) that I have SERIOUS issues with a show called DAWSON’s Creek where Dawson doesn’t end up with the girl.
7. Dexter -- I realize that a show that’s about a serial killer maybe has some issues to begin with, and this was definitely a series that seemed to suffer from dragging-it-out-for-ratings syndrome (where every time Dexter when through any emotional development, someone would die or something catastrophic would happen to convince him to go back to his ways), but still. That ending? Argh. With so many talented people involved, how did that not get red-flagged somehow?
8. Christopher Nolan -- while I’m a huge fan of Memento, I thought Inception, with its lack of a commitment to a clear ending, was a cop-out. Visually awesome, great cast, and then wasted on a gutless non-committal ending. If you’re going to go out there with a concept like this, and a set-up like this, I just think you need to… commit. Pick an ending. Stick with it. Defend it if you have to, but don’t give us the non-ending-ending. Memento was more disturbing and dark, but also far more satisfying.
9. Charles Dickens -- this will show up in another post I have later, but my issue with Christopher Nolan is more or less the same issue I have with Dickens and Great Expectations. The original, sadder ending, felt right, and felt like what Dickens had always intended. The revised ending feels a bit like A.I.Artificial Intelligence, where there are too many directors for one story.
10... and Not-10..., since it’s a counterexample, James Cameron -- As far as I’m concerned, can iterate away. The man obsessed with Titanic for forever and a half. I remember reading magazine articles about how his sinking ship movie would sink the studio, and even though I’m not a fan? Everyone else in the world was, and more importantly, they voted with their pocketbooks. I’m not arguing with the perfectionist who has 2 out of the 3 all time top-grossing movies. So, full circle, it’s time for me to come back to Veronica Mars.
I… liked Veronica Mars. I didn’t think it was life-changing, and (spoilers ahead), I loved that she got together with Logan. For me, their wounded bird relationship was at the heart of the entire series, despite their initial perceptions of each other (and again, I’m going to ignore the fact that the writers didn’t think they were meant to be, that Logan starts off as a sociopath because he had been hired to portray a “psychotic jack@#$”). I loved that the movie was basically a longer version of the tv series -- from the two steps forward, five steps back, to the voiceovers, to the wow, is ANYONE really better off feeling at the end. As a fan, that’s what I wanted. I’m not just happy about that, I’m ecstatic.
Main point? I think that often, it’s better to give the us (aka the fans…) what we want! To have an end game, and deliver us there -- which again, I’ll argue that Veronica Mars did. Admirably.