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Annie Annie Annie

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mariez:

--- Quote from: atz75 on September 21, 2008, 06:16:25 pm --- :laugh: :laugh: :-\  Well, that certainly is a pretty god-awful excerpt Bud.  Yikes! 

--- End quote ---

Amanda, did you follow the link?  It's meant to be god-awful.  It's part of a satire poking fun at the idea of sending Annie Proulx BBM fanfics. 

My mind is still boggling from the idea that anyone would send any author a fanfic of his/her original work.  It's not only brazen; but, frankly, stupid.   What kind of responses do these people think they're going to get?  And I don't think it's just the quality or the "type" of stories she's being sent that upsets her.  There is a lot of bad fanfic - but there's also a lot that is amazingly good - professional level writing for sure.  But, I'm quite sure she wouldn't like any fanfic, b/c they all change her story in some way.  Although I must say, I imagine the stories she's being sent are probably pretty horrific in light of the mindset it would take just to send them to her looking for approval. 


--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on September 22, 2008, 09:09:59 am ---But in any case her quoted comment wasn't exactly diplomatic. ...

 ;D

--- End quote ---

Well, that's a pretty "diplomatic" way of putting it  :laugh:  She ain't the touch-feely type, for sure.  I love her writing, but, even though I obviously think BBM should've won best picture, not to mention best actor, etc.,  I still wince thinking about some of the statements she made after the Oscars. 

Marie

Brown Eyes:


No, I didn't follow the link.  But, I agree with the point regardless... that it's an odd idea to send fanfic to Annie or to expect feedback from Annie on fanfic.

optom3:
I think Proulx is from the school of hard knocks, as they say in England.She tells it as it is and feels no need to justify what she says. There is no sugar coated pill, but neither is there in her writing.

The only thing that slightly surprises me, as she herself says, " I was an aging female writer, married too many times" , one would assume she has therefore seen a lot in her lifetime. Writers I would guess are keen observers of human nature. Why did she then seem so surprised by the deluge of fanfic.

MountainMan:

--- Quote ---Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are my intellectual property
--- End quote ---

...yawn.


--- Quote ---beneath every mangled rewrite is the unspoken assumption that because they are men they can write this story better than a woman can
--- End quote ---

Yawn, part II. I think that's an assumption on your part, Annie....


--- Quote from: louise van hine on September 18, 2008, 11:11:12 pm ---
I think Annie Proulx DOES have a problem with ownership, afer all, why would she have had her publisher send cease and desist orders to little old fanfic writers like me and threaten to get CBS's lawyers after me?  Even though fan fiction falls in the large grey area of inellectual property law, I don't have the money to put where my mouth is so I obeyed the cease and desist order, and ultimately I am glad I wrote an original story instead of hanging it on Annie Proulx's coat rack. 

--- End quote ---

...exactly. It seems like she's more concerned with preserving her characters (her story and ending) than anything else - I mean, surely it's not about the money one way or the other......either she doesn't need/want it or she could profit from "collaborative" fanfic. The interview excerpts make her sound....well, not good. Arrogant, I guess. Although I do sympathize with what appears to be her desire to preserve the integrity of her original story.....and (even tho I THINK this has prob been discussed to death elsewhere) I can understand her labeling certain attempts (ahem, slash)  as "pornish".

(for the record, I'm not "anti-slash".)

I'm going to have to read some more of her work now (I can't remember how much of Close Range I read), because every interview I've come across makes her sound incredibly pretentious. I dunno; maybe we are (I am) just bouncing off the film too much.......I feel as if she gave us this beautiful story with these incredible characters but doesn't seem to give a damn about them. I wonder how she really feels about the movie, since she didn't do the screenplay.

From what I've come across, I can't figure out her background either; it's kind of a mystery. "Hard knocks" tho, I think not - more like upper class liberal arts major (but "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle"). Some details are there, but those don't really reveal much about her as a person.....I feel like I might understand her work and her better if I knew more than the info from a few interview quotes and wikipedia.

Aside from info from good ol' wikipedia :) here's a couple old (1997, 1999) interviews:

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/factfict/eapint.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/specials/proulx-home.html

and a biography - http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Proulx-E-Annie.html

Cheers!
 8)

Nevermore:

--- Quote ---It seems like she's more concerned with preserving her characters (her story and ending) than anything else - I mean, surely it's not about the money one way or the other......either she doesn't need/want it or she could profit from "collaborative" fanfic.
--- End quote ---

Well....yeah!  She created these characters. They are hers. And not incidentally, the reason we are all here. So it does kind of follow that Annie Proulx is the authority and the last word on these characters, amen. Whether or not she is a nice, caring person is very much beside the point.
As for her doing collaborative fanfiction with anyone...look, I'm told I have a pretty good singing voice. When a coworker's stepson was killed in Iraq, his wife asked me to sing "Scarlet Tide" from the Cold Mountain soundtrack at the memorial. But that doesn't mean I'm going to go to an Alison Kraus concert and expect her to be thrilled when I muscle my way onstage and join her in an impromptu duet.
Like, Not. In. A. Million. Years. OK?
Also, if these quotes from the Independent article are anything to go by, their writers are delusional, and that's being nice, if they think they have anything to say to Annie Proulx about writing. I'm not going to make any judgements about the quality of the writing so much as pointing out what should be glaringly obvious, that none of the samples is one the same plane with Proulx, or even goes with hers. At all.


--- Quote ---"With their eyes closed, they shared an intimate moment of united longing, pain and beauty that would take a place in eternity"
--- End quote ---


Not bad, until you hold it against this:

--- Quote ---Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held."
--- End quote ---

I can't imagine either the Jack or Ennis of the original coming out wiith anything like


--- Quote ---"Your eyes are like the stars. Your touch is like the sun"
--- End quote ---

considering they were


--- Quote ---...both high school dropout country boys, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.
--- End quote ---

Sample of realistic dialogue:


--- Quote ---"I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain't nothin like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about you. You do it with other guys? Jack?"
--- End quote ---

They might think it:


--- Quote ---During the day, Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow an an insect moves across a tablecloth. Jack in his dark camp saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain.
--- End quote ---

...but they don't say it. The fact that they are neither of them the type is the crux of the tragedy. It's character, not highfaulutin' language, that makes Brokeback Mountain one of the great American tragedies. Proulx is enough of a writer that she can do the soaring language thing when she chooses, when she's doing the omniscient narrator, but when she's in the characters' heads, the narrative takes the plain, unadorned idiom of their voices.
That's where the difference between the master and the amateur shows itself most painfully. Proulx is sure enough of herself as a writer she doesn't unnecessarily display her craft, or be obscure or arcane when she doesn't need to be:


--- Quote ---...Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennnis's nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, but the staunching hadn't held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.
--- End quote ---

The above is effortless, the following is overworked:


--- Quote --- "They painted beautiful, plunged creative. The kingfisher, silent, did not remove his belt".
--- End quote ---

The one thing they beat into our heads in my college writing classes was "show, don't tell." "Play it, don't say it." In other words, let the character's actions indicate his thoughts, and don't fall into the trap of thinking you have to spell it out for the reader, let him come to the conclusion himself, don't lead him there by the hand:


--- Quote ---Ennis, riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he'd never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon.
--- End quote ---

Rather than


--- Quote ---"Everything about Jack and his jeans disturbed and tormented Ennis that summer of '63 until all he could think of or see was blue."
--- End quote ---


For the record, I'm not against fanfiction, in theory anyway. But I didn't write Brokeback Mountain or the ten other stories that make up Close Range, which is meant to be read collectively, by the way, like Winesburg, Ohio or Spoon River Anthology--a number of the characters appear in more than one story, as does  the town of Signal. If I had, I might get frustrated too, that after all that work, people weren't getting it at all.
It's just like Lister's example of that script-pitch scene in The Player, where after a few "minor changes," the final product bears only the most passing resemblance to the original.
I marvelled to think anyone could be so clueless as to actually send Proulx their "improved" version of her story, but I believe she has been known to respond very sympathetically to letters she has gotten from people who have lived the lives of the characters from Brokeback, so I suppose I can see how they let their emotions get the better of them. Possibly too she used to be more open to this kind of communication, maybe even found it amusing in an appalling way, but got burnt out, especially since 99 percent of it is terrible.
As I said, I'm not against fanfiction, or slash either, as long as the writers respect the real writer's boundaries and don't take themselves too seriously. I haven't read too much of it myself--I was curious about the phenomenon more than the writing itself, especially the fact that most of it is written by women, which I find fascinating. Most of the time, a paragraph or two was more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.
There were a couple of really, really good ones that stood on their own merits, and interestingly, both were written by men and left the original story completely intact--"canon," I believe it's called--not only does Jack Twist die, but one of the writers went back to Ennis's childhood and pretty much killed off the entire town. The body count at the end was like Unforgiven--or an Annie Proulx story.
 

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