The Desolation of Smaug: A Review

Last night, I did something that I haven't done in a very long time: go the midnight premiere of a movie, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. It was an enjoyable flick, but I did have my gripes with it. There will be spoilers below so if you're planning on viewing the movie and don't want it spoiled, stop reading here. 

Firstly, and perhaps most minor, was the deviation from the book. This is to be expected when you pad out a two-hundred page children's book into three two and a half hour films - there were a lot of extra subplots and a lot of characters (Beorn, Bard) that had either no backstory or very minimal backstory were significantly expanded upon. Scenes played out very differently from the book and some made me tilt my head. 

For example, early on in the story they go visit Beorn, like in the book. However, here Beorn is first met in his bear shape - for those out of the loop, he's a skin-changer and can go back and forth between human and a giant black bear. In the book, Beorn doesn't like strangers and thus Gandalf devised a plan to introduce the Dwarves gradually: he slowly told Beorn their story and brought them in small groups of two or three. 

Here, they rush into the house together, which apparently enrages Beorn in bear-shape as he attempts to kill them. So, they lock him out of his own house until he changes back into human, and this is never mentioned again. 

I could go on literally forever with the changes from the book, but that, I think, would be fairly pointless overall. I personally am of the opinion that it's really best to approach film adaptations of books as alternate continuities that can stand (or fall) on their own. (As an aside, that's my biggest problem with the Harry Potter films, but that's a topic for another day)

But the deviation from the book and all of these extra subplots does lend itself to my biggest problem with the movie: it doesn't like it's about Bilbo, our titular Hobbit. He feels like a bit player in his own movie - this is crystallized in one of the Mirkwood sequences, whenever the Dwarves are being attacked by giant spiders. 

In the book (yes, I know another book-movie comparison after I said I was done with them, but bear with me here), it's Bilbo who is all kinds of awesome and kills the spiders by insulting them and leading them on a chase through the woods. It showcases his character growth, and how valuable he's become to the party. Here....Legolas and Tauriel (the love interest of one the Dwarves - we'll get to that in a second), show up and kill them all, then capture our heroes and lock them up. Also: Legolas is a effing jerk. (seriously, he had the Dwarves searched and ridiculed a family portrait one of them was carrying, and called his son a 'goblin-mutant'. Bonus points for that son being Gimli. Oh, irony.)

Back on point. It doesn't feel like he does all that much. All  the movie's attention is on two things: Thorin and setting up Lord of the Rings films. He feels lost among the shuffle of the film's characters and its tons and tons of subplots and that honestly is my biggest problem. It doesn't feel like it's about him anymore. He still does the stuff from the books - getting the Dwarves out via barrel, getting them into the Lonely Mountain itself, conversing with Smaug (who, by the way, is awesome. Benedict Cumberatch did a great job as the dragon and its design is top notch) - it just feels lost among everything else going on and it doesn't feel consequential.

Now, onto the whole Tauriel/Kili romance that was added - this was a sore spot for fans, when it was announced. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't also irritated. Elf/Dwarf pairing is something I don't think I'd ever see outside of really bad fanfiction. And here - it wasn't as bad as I had feared and didn't take up too much screen time, but it was still unnecessary. And there's a implied love triangle happening here, which just made me roll my eyes and wonder why Kili, of all Dwarves, was singled out for this random subplot.

My final complaint: the climax. It was really confusing. I'm still not quite sure what happened - there was a chase around the mountain, the forges re-activated, all of which led to coating Smaug in molten gold...? I really didn't follow their plan very well.

All that said, I still enjoyed the movie. It had amazing visuals and there were some scenes that left me, as a Middle-Earth fan, gleeful. The opening scene from the movie, for instance - a scene lifted pretty much straight from the Lord of the Rings appendices, set shortly before the events of the book/movie in which Thorn and Gandalf bump into each other in Bree and discuss the matter of the dragon. The scene where Sauron reveals himself to Gandalf is amazingly terrifying and does a great job of incorporating both Sauron's humanoid form and the Eye in one.

My final score: 8/10. Definitely worth a watch.

The Four Steps

It is time for another blog entry! Today, I’m going to give you a quick update on the progress of my story and then jump into the four steps I’ve been using to hammer out a novel. I just finished the Chapter Outline, and tomorrow I will start the draft itself (would start it tonight, but I’m tired and there’s only a few minutes left.).

Word update, I don’t have it yet – haven’t calculated it so…yeah. Won’t get to that this week. Let’s just get right down to it.

The Four Steps

The first of the four steps is the plot sketch. It starts with a seed/germ of an idea to explore and from there it gets fleshed out via informal, very loose stream-of-conscious collection of ideas – the idea here is to keep the ideas on track and start working out a plot. It’s very loose, very informal – it’s basically you talking to myself, working out problems I encounter with the story. This is basically the titular drawing board. Some ideas may need a lot of work and you may find yourself working on multiple versions of these. 

It’s also important, though, to keep it simple. The first story I attempted (which led directly to this method) imploded under its own weight. You just hammering away at the drawing board, until you have the plot worked out all the way to the end. 

Next up is the plot summary. It’s pretty straightforward and it’s built directly on what you did with the plot sketch. It’s pretty much a formal version of the plot you worked out in your plot sketch, with all of your ramblings trying to work out the plot problems straightened out. Tweak your plot, change stuff around and get all that in order. Print out a copy, you’ll want it for what comes next. 

After that, it’s the Chapter Outline (which is what I just finished). There are two steps to this. Take your plot summary, get a pen and then start dividing it, trying to figure out where your chapter breaks are. Once you’ve done that, it’s back to the computer. Using your plot summary as a guide, start doing composing a list of things that need to accomplished in each chapter – include stuff like descriptions, narrative shifts and so forth and so on. I personally put a little one-sentence summary of the chapter, followed by a list of things that need to be in there – not everything as a rule (because I think I’m smart enough to connect the dots a few at a time). Also, use Page Breaks. Each chapter should start on a new page.

Then print that out and it’s time to actually write the draft of the story. This I haven’t done yet – I’ll start on that tomorrow. But with your Chapter Outline as a guide, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Just stay on the list of things to accomplish, check them off as you go and before long that should result in a finished draft, provided you stick to it. I will keep the blog updated with how the writing is coming along. 

That’s about it. That’s the four steps. This was a really short entry, so that’s all. Take care and thanks for reading.

Weekly Blog Entry 7-29-13

Hello and welcome to the first of the blog entries on the new weekly schedule, in which I discuss writing and whatnot. I had meant to tackle this earlier, but unfortunately procrastination reared its ugly head – still working on beating that. Statistics this week: I tackled about ten hours of writing, when all is said and done and I wrote around 16k words, when the dust cleared – around the same as last week. We’re slowly, but surely, building our way up to the top. 

I had originally intended to work on an actual essay type thing, going over my problems with procrastination and writing in general, but that obviously didn’t happen, so instead let’s play catch up. Writing wise, I spent a great deal of time on one project, only for it to collapse under its own weight. I was experimenting with how to plan, and it just kept grown and growing, until it was this enormous monstrosity of a story that had completely focus of what I was originally trying to do. So, I scrapped that but I think I’ve learned things from that – you learn a lot from failure: firstly, keep it simple. 

Narratives might become complex later on – especially for massive multi-volume narratives – but there’s still, I think, an inherent simplicity to be found in them. Those large narratives are made of many smaller narratives that’s built around a central core. 

The second thing that this mess of a project taught me was a possible way to approach my writing from here on out, a four-step method, as it were, involving firstly a stream-of-conscious “plot sketch”, where I work the basic plot of a story, then a more formal synopsis where the plot’s finalized, a breakdown of the plot into chapters – complete with summary and a laundry list of things to include in each chapter, and then finally use that to write the draft itself. You basically have the complete guide. Write it out and checkmark stuff as it’s done. 

I think I might write another blog entry later this week, going into this in a lot more detail. (Read: almost certainly, keep an eye out for that) I’m currently trying it right now on a different project (an older project that needs revamped), and its coming along quite well, though I’m still on the first step

Meditation, as I mentioned I was trying it out and seeing how that went, does seem to work, but I think more important I have a certain drive to what I do. I felt increasingly like I was running on a treadmill – moving, yes, but not moving forward or anywhere at all really. 

So I decided I’m going to try and come up with a goal and accomplish that. My first one? Finish the plot sketch for the current project, ideally by tonight and I can then get moving on the other steps and, with any luck, be writing the actual draft before the week is out. It had something to do with the timers, as I mentioned before. 

While they are helpful for gauging how much time I spend on these sorts of things, I tend to just stop and don’t do anymore after that, because its done. I’m now starting to think in terms of projects – what can I do today to get somewhere and feel like I’m moving forward, instead of ‘Okay, that’s 80 minutes now I’m going to wander on the Internet for a while’. 

I think it helps to think like that, though again it’s a little early to say where its going or what I’m doing yet. Other changes that I have made to my writing routine: I’ve upped the timer from 30 to 40 minutes. I still, of course, require two sessions at a minimum from myself, so now we’re looking at 80 minutes a day instead of a full hour. We’re going to keep building up from there. I also added a time stamp on both the blog entries and the main project, so that I can gauge when I worked on it, and get a feel for my own habits.

Still another (albeit much smaller change) I made was to be more precise in labeling of whatever project I worked on: for example, instead of just saying ‘Project X’, I’ve started putting ‘Project X (Plot Sketch)’, or ‘Project X (Draft – Chapter One)’. Like that. 

I think that’s pretty much all of the news I can think of for today. I will be back later this week, with my promised entry on this four step process I’m developing and am going to use.

Thanks for reading.  

Weekly Statistics + Story Planning

Firstly, some housekeeping: This week’s writing yielded around 570-something minutes (which is an average over the past couple of weeks), and I wrote about 16k words total, and average about 2200 words per session. Not too shabby. Now, onto this change in schedule: as I said, I really have nothing to say on a day by day basis. 

I’m thinking that I’m going to update weekly with statistics and whatnot, and possibly some articles I’ll put together, where I try and be a lot more detailed about my philosophy and how I approach writing. There will also be the occasional short story I come up with on the cuff. I say ‘weekly’, but there will probably still be multiple posts a week. One guaranteed post and other stuff as I write it and think that it should go on the blog. That’s all for scheduling updates.

Now, let’s tackle the planning thing and think about how I’m going to do stuff. I’ve decided to try an experiment and attempt meditation in an attempt to sharpen my focus on my writing and maybe help deal with the procrastination thing, as well as break my addiction on the internet. Twenty minutes a day, ten in the morning and ten before I go to bed. Too early to tell if it’s going to work or not, but I’m definitely up for giving it a try. 

I’ve been thinking about planning a series I have in mind, and was thinking that I might start by throwing what I’ve already developed on paper, world-building wise, then work from there. What I need, I realize, is a framework of some sort (I talked about this at length yesterday) – the plot needs a structure for how it’s going to develop, and give me ideas about where to put certain plot points and subplots, where to introduce major characters and so forth.

But how to develop this framework? That’s the question. What is the basic plot of the this series? Our young lead becomes a spellcaster and embarks on an epic journey that leads him to face a great, hidden evil. That’s about as general and broad as I can get (and yes, fairly generic, I know, but there’s some fun twists and turns that I don’t want to get into here. Plus I love the setting). I need to get more specific. I need to decide how the events of the journey will shape the plot and how whatever the evil’s doing is going to shape it.

Maybe the plot is defined by the actions of the villain(s) – they act, the heroes respond. Their plots and schemes together form an elaborate network that pretty much drives the plot forward. Or maybe, as I talked about in another series, it has something to with the spatial relations. Draw up a map, pick some spots and send the character to them. You then have your framework for the plot ready to go. 

Or maybe there’s other machinations at work, on the part of the good guys, working against the bad (or against other good guys, if this is more of a political series) – expanded alternatively into different groups of people, with different agendas doing different things. 

The plot of a book is essentially made of events – obvious I know – and each event is caused by a character or characters doing something or another, with various motivations behind it. It’s a very abstract thing, trying to put together the basic shape and structure of the plot – is it a quest to collect a McGuffin from somewhere? Political intrigue? 

We need to define characters and their motivations. We need a establish a villain, I think. And we need to establish a few key plot events that stuff is going to build towards, and fit things in there to suit them.

I’m going to try these ramblings out and see if they bear fruit. 

Thanks for reading.