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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

The Purist's Plea

6/27/2015

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I’m a bit of a purist.

Well, okay, I’m actually a major purist. That’s today’s literary confession out of the way. You know, that which the Master hath penned, let no one put asunder, and all that.

Last entry, I briefly made reference to “Tolkien’s or Jackson’s versions of Middle Earth,” and a friend queried that statement. Two versions? Whatever was I talking about? To which I began my response by giving him The Look. (Generations of my students are very familiar with The Look. In fact, once, after I had just given one miscreant The Look, I let it sit there for one endlessly silent moment, and in that moment, one of my more astute scholars whispered clearly, for all to hear, “Incoming!”) What had my friend done to deserve The Look? Well, plainly, he Had Not Read The Master’s Words, only seen the films. Which, dear reader, I’m informing you right now, is a heinous sin. When there’s a book in existence before the film version, Thou Shalt Always Read The Book Before Seeing The Film so that, at the least, you can see what the author intended before Hollywood gets its claws into the material. I’m constantly telling my scholars that just because they’ve seen the film version, it does not mean they’ve as good as read the book. Not even close. In fact, sometimes, what winds up on the screen bears only a passing, tortured resemblance to what the author originally penned. (Doesn’t anyone wonder why the opening credits will say, ‘based on the book by’ so-and-so?) And sometimes that passing resemblance is truly horrendous. Let me give you an example that has nothing to do with Jackson or Tolkien.

When I first began teaching George Orwell’s Animal Farm to the masses way back in the Dark Ages, I cast around for a film version (because --- sigh --- my imaginatively challenged little charges hungered for something visual; more on that later). At that time, there was only an animated version out there, so I obtained it and we watched it. I hated it with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. Why?

Because they changed Orwell’s brilliant ending. No, that’s incorrect: they mangled it, destroyed it, killed the entire point the great man was trying to make.

If you’ve read the book --- and if you haven’t, you should, because it’s neither a long nor a difficult read, but is elegant and brilliant in its storytelling --- you’ll know that it ends (spoiler alert) on a truly hopeless note: the pigs who were to guide the rest of the animals into a new, golden era have become so intoxicated and corrupted by the exercise of absolute power (thank you, Lord Acton) that they have become indistinguishable from the awful humans they replaced. The book accurately and masterfully reflects the massive political and social betrayal of the people by Stalin’s USSR in the early 1940s, as Orwell intended.

But the cartoon version, made in 1954 in Britain with American funding (Wikipedia asserts that it was CIA funding, which would certainly explain a great deal), changes the ending so that the animals rise up against their new oppressors, thereby triumphantly proving that tyranny cannot stand against truth, justice and the American way. Which, as I said, completely destroys the point Orwell was making.

Now, fortunately, Jackson didn’t eviscerate Tolkien quite to that degree. At least, not with LOTR. We can talk about The Hobbit some other time. A time when I’m feeling emotionally much stronger. But when I discuss Tolkien with my students, I’m very clear with them that J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth are not the same place at all. At all. The late, great movie critic Roger Ebert summed up my thoughts on this issue very eloquently in his review when the first LOTR film came out in December of 2001. (Go to http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-2001 to read the full review.)

Jackson changed all sorts of things. To be fair, some of those changes I could understand. For example, along with many others, I deeply mourned the omission of Tom Bombadil from the film version, but I could understand it, because, enormously entertaining and wonderful as that particular episode is, it really doesn’t do a lot to advance the plot --- not directly, that is, although it does perform other functions which we can talk about another time --- and even in an extended movie edition of three and a half hours and counting, we’re on a bit of a tight timeline here.

Other changes I had a lot more difficulty with. Not all. Some changes were, actually, pretty good (proving the old adage that there’s always an exception to every rule). But some changes really altered the tone and intention of what Professor Tolkien had intended, similar to changing the end of Animal Farm, and it took me a long time to be able to appreciate the Jackson films on their own merits, and to be able to make that distinction in my mind between the celluloid and cellulose versions. (Some of those changes I still struggle with.)

Now, all of this may leave you wondering aloud, so what? (To which I give you Arthur C. Clarke’s famous rebuttal: ‘Shut up, he explained.’) But in this increasingly visually oriented society which seems hopelessly addicted to, as Ebert said, tales that “instinctively ramp up to the genre of the overwrought special-effects action picture,” I do make an appeal for you to at least look at, and hopefully appreciate, the written words of an author. Is the written word dead, or dying? Gosh, I sure hope not. Because coupled with a vibrant and fertile imagination, it has the power to transform worlds.

By way of concluding, and speaking of the power of the printed word, the same friend I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, having evidently not learned from receiving The Look, made reference to the “literary house” metaphor I made in my very first blog entry.  “Where’s the complaints department?” he demanded jokingly. At least, I think he was joking.

“Why, in the basement, of course,” I replied sweetly, without missing a beat. “Just look for the door with the inscription that says, ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ Knock and walk straight in. At your own peril, of course.”

He looked at me narrowly, but I think he understood that, no, I wasn’t joking.

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Who's Your (Literary) Daddy?

6/20/2015

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Several people have asked me about the literary influences on me as I came to write Gryphon’s Heir, and that’s an easy one to answer: J.R.R. Tolkien, the master himself, and to a lesser extent, C.S. Lewis. (Although I’m a bigger fan of his Christian apologetics works, Narnia has its place in my heart, too. But if you’re looking for simple yet profound works on Christian theology, you need go no further than his Mere Christianity or his especially brilliant Screwtape Letters, which is my personal favourite of his.) But Tolkien was the primary influence for me, like so many others. Here’s my nerd confession for today: I first read The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) in the summer of 1970, shortly after my 12th birthday. And I was utterly enthralled. I was a fairly bookish boy who had loved to read ever since the first grade (I still remember dashing home with my initial primer, an eponymous literary tome about a dog named Tip, shouting excitedly to my mother as I crossed the threshold of our house that I could read!), and perhaps I was also a wee bit precocious, which probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to those who know me... although I deny that I was a troll. My mother had bought The Hobbit for me some time earlier, and it had actually taken me one or two tries to sink my teeth into it, along with the encouragement of a family friend. But when I had finished it, I just had to go after its big brother, LOTR. And so, that summer, as my family and I went off on our summer holiday trip to B.C. and the Olympic peninsula in Washington state, there was I in the back seat of our new car, ensconced with Professor Tolkien’s masterpiece. (The car, a dark blue 1970 Pontiac Strato Chief, purchased by my father for the then-princely sum of $2000, was as large as the Queen Mary and probably weighed nearly as much. I learned to drive in it --- the car, that is, not the ocean liner --- a few years later while we were on another summer trip to Jasper National Park, where, in a gesture of either supreme confidence or unbelievable naïveté, my father allowed me to roar at high speeds on the narrow, twisty mountain byways with treacherous drop-offs of several hundred feet beside the road. How my mother didn’t have a heart attack, I don’t know to this day. But I digress.)

From my back seat perch that summer of 1970, I read. And read. And read. I just could not put LOTR down --- to the strange annoyance of my parents, who couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking out at the endless forested vistas as we drove (ah, the simplicity of life back in the Dark Ages before cell phones and in-car DVD players). Actually, I WAS looking at those trees and mountains every once in a while. They provided great atmosphere, like the rainforests in our campgrounds each night as I sat by the campfire’s vermillion glow and read some more. I could look up from my book and gaze around, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe I was in the Old Forest or Mirkwood or Fangorn. That’s how it started.

(I also bought the little wooden figure pictured in the accompanying photograph while on the Olympic peninsula, and named him Thorin Oakenshield in honour of... well, you know who he was named for. Granted, he doesn’t much resemble Richard Armitage, but in my defence, my little wooden guy has been playing the role for much longer.)

(And I guess, since we went all around the Olympic peninsula that summer, that we must also have driven through Forks. But it had not yet achieved its literary notoriety, and I have absolutely no recollection of it. Was probably too busy being in Lothlorien, anyway. Thank goodness.)

From that initial exposure to Middle Earth, it really wasn’t too much of a stretch to want to write my own stories. I actually still have some of those early attempts still in my files. I take them out and look at them once in a while, peering back over a distance of more than 40 years, and I smile. It’s a smile of wistful nostalgia, not scorn, because even in those embryonic efforts, the desire to create something powerful and believable and wonderful is clearly evident. I think that’s how it often is with creativity: coming across something that we fall in love with, we want to create our own versions of it. We desire more. Now, my Arrinor is not Middle Earth (either Tolkien’s or Jackson’s version). Let’s be perfectly clear about that. There are a few similarities, but a lot of fundamental differences. There’s a big difference between being inspired by something and merely doing slavish imitation.

But it’s ultimately as C.S. Lewis has said, and I’ll leave you for now with his words: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

God bless you, Jack. Because I have certainly tried to tell the truth in the story of Rhiss and his Arrinor.

 

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Writing a Story... Whys and Wherefores

6/13/2015

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It's been a pretty amazing week... Wednesday, I actually got to hold a real print version of my novel in my hand for the very first time. Not 8.5 by 11 pages emerging from my printer, not a binder version... the real McCoy. An honest-to-goodness book. After nine years, a very significant milestone and a wonderfully memorable moment, which I've shared on my Facebook page.  And people have actually begun purchasing my story --- in paperbacks, in hardcovers, and as eBooks. That's an amazing feeling, too. People reading my words, my story, Rhiss' story. I'll share some of the details of that nine year odyssey another time, but today, I want to focus a little bit on the actual process, because people have already been asking me about that.

"How do you write a story like Gryphon's Heir? Did you know the entire story beforehand? How do you plan it out?" I've been hearing those questions a lot lately, and I don't presume to be an expert --- after all, this is my first novel, although I've been writing prose for most of my life (and we can talk about that sometime, too!). People who know me are aware that my nature may tend towards the organized (well, that's the charitable way of saying it), so it might come as a surprise to hear that writing, for me, is often a surprisingly unstructured experience. I said last week that I know how the story is to end, but I don't know exactly how we're going to get there, and I recall reading something Stephen King said when he was asked how he writes his novels. "One word at a time," was his laconic answer, and while I'm not comparing myself with such an immensely successful author, I understood his response.

I began Gryphon's Heir with imagining a single incident --- a desperate man going through a mysteriously materialized door that shouldn't exist to an entirely unknown reality on the other side. That's all. (Why that came to me can be the subject of yet another talk later on!) That particular incident is now buried about 17 pages in the narrative. (Why? Because, as the story became more and more fleshed out, there obviously had to be more of an introduction. But that's a good lesson for students of writing: start where you are prompted to start. It may not be at what will eventually be the beginning. That's okay.) From there, that incident sparked all kinds of questions that needed answering: who was this man? Why did the door appear to him? Where and to what would it take him? And so on. And after a while, it began to flow as a narrative. Before I knew what was happening, I had a 14,000 word fragment (which may sound like a lot, but isn't, really).

For me, writing is often a great deal like what we all go through each day in real life (but far more interesting than the fairly mundane lives most of us tend to lead). We're faced with interactions with all manner of people, and we have to respond to them with both words and actions. Our responses generate actions and words from those other people, and thus we live our daily lives. That's often how it works in my writing: if Character A takes his sword and lops off a man's head in the middle of a marketplace, how is Character B going to respond to that? And what will Character B say? ("I say, old man, talk about losing one's head.") Sometimes it's no more complicated than that. If you know your characters' inner voices --- which will all be different, because we are all different --- then it really isn't too difficult.

That's not to say I don't plan things out. I have a notebook or six, and will frequently plan out a chain of events that could be anywhere from one to four chapters long. That sometimes produces a curious feeling of relief within me, because I know where things are supposed to be going for a while. Then the writing becomes, as C.S. Lewis once said, like "taking dictation."

But --- and this is one of the coolest parts of writing --- characters are real people for me. Rhiss and Arian and Lowri and Parthalas (and even Maldeus, unfortunately) --- they're more real to me than some actual people I know. And because they're real people, they sometimes act unpredictably. Yes, they do. And every once in a while, they'll take a situation I give them and say, in effect, "Nope. I'm not acting the way you dictate. I'm going to do this instead!" And I'm left sitting there slack-jawed, watching them ride off in a cloud of dust, wondering what the hell just happened. It's wonderful and mystifying and very, very gratifying --- and not quite as weird as it probably sounds.

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Through the Portal...

6/6/2015

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Welcome to my literary home away from home! At this point, I'm in the process of moving in to my just built cyber house, so there's still new carpet smell, the paint is a little wet in places, and I'm figuring out where to put the furniture. But that will all come, and we'll soon have our comfortable overstuffed chairs unpacked and arranged around the fireplace (speaking virtually, of course). There's so much I look forward to talking with you about in the coming months... about writing in general, my book in particular, and much more besides. I'd love to hear from you if you have questions or comments, and there are numerous places throughout this house where you can do that. I've spent pretty much most of my adult life as a public school teacher, so you'll probably find that I'm not usually at a loss for words. Working with adolescents tends to have that effect on you.

Gryphon's Heir is a project that's been in my life for about nine years now, sometimes at centre stage, sometimes in the wings, and I have poured much of myself into its creation, so I'm both eager and a little nervous to see how it's received. As you can observe throughout this site, it is the first of a projected series of books that tells the story of a young man named Rhissan --- although his friends call him Rhiss. (And by the way, there is a pronunciation guide at the end of the book; it's there because I want you to have at least the option of pronouncing the many strange names the way the author intended them to be pronounced. The Correct Way. My nearest and dearest have implied that it's me being a tad controlling, but I like to think it's just the teacher in me being helpful. The reader must decide. After all, as they say, vox populi, vox dei --- I'm not sure that always holds true, but we'll go with it for now. (No, I am not going to tell you what it means. Go look it up.) 

Rhiss is thrust into an extraordinary situation not of his own making and certainly not of his own choosing (although we can talk about the entire issue of choice another time). He doesn't regard himself as particularly heroic or cut out for greatness --- in fact, you will probably find that, like most of us, he struggles mightily with doubts about his own abilities. You might even get a little annoyed with him about that. But please, cut him some slack; it's his first time being a hero and he's still learning the ropes. And like most of us, he messes up every once in a while.

I said a minute ago that this is the first book in a series that I'm calling the Annals of Arrinor. It will need to be several books, because I'm probably not giving too much away or being too surprising when I say that Gryphon's Heir ends on a cliffhanger. But don't worry... there's already over two hundred pages of the second book written, and I do realize that, having put the first book out into production, I no longer have the luxury of taking nine years to complete the second book!

Do I know how the story ends? Of course (he said with a wolfish smile). Do I know exactly how we're going to get there? Nope. Not a clue. That's part of the joy of writing --- for me, anyway. Come back through the portal next week and we'll talk some more about that. Until then, as they say in Arrinor, go you with the One.

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    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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