TV – Penstricken

TV Review: After Hours

Posted on 28/07/201927/07/2019 by Ndrw

SPOILER ALERT

Anyone who has not seen the British sitcom After Hours (2015) is hereby advised that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.

My wife and I’s Now TV subscription will be coming to an end in a few days and, in an effort to save a bit of money, we shan’t be renewing it. Consequently, we’ve taken to cramming in a lot of short TV shows from Now TV to get our money’s worth. Thus, you’re going to be getting quite few reviews of TV shows over the next couple of weeks starting with the little known* British sitcom, AFTER HOURS

Well then, what can I say about After Hours? In many respects, this six episode British sitcom defies a lot of the requirements for good telly and yet I really enjoyed it.

Willow (Jamse Tarpey) hasn’t long finished school and plans on going travelling with his girlfriend Jasmine (Georgina Campbell). However, when the first episode has barely started she meets up with him in a cafe just long enough to dump him. Lauren (Jaime Winstone), who is working at the cafe, tries to comfort the dismayed Willow, and as they are talking it is revealed that she is one of the hosts of Willow’s favourite internet radio program, After Hours. She is delighted to learn that someone actually listens to and enjoys the show, and so she and her co-host Ollie (Rob Kendrick) invite him to work with them on the show, broadcasting from Lauren’s longboat on the canal.

This show contains only the absolute minimal required suspense, drama or conflict. In fact, it probably contains less than is required to make a genuinely good TV show, even for a sitcom and yet… it has a real je ne sais quoi about it, that makes it very pleasant to watch, like cuddling up on the sofa in a thick duvet. Most of the characters are friends with each other. Even Willow and Jasmine’s new boyfriend are reasonably civil. Whenever one character suffers, the other characters rally around and support and help each other. Willow’s parents want him to get a real job instead of working for free on After Hours. But they see it’s important to him, so they let him do it anyway. Willow’s father (Ardal O’Hanlon) wants the family to boycott the local supermarket. Money worries drive both he and his wife to secretly get jobs there, however this never climaxes in a shocking discovery or any sort of marital strife. The most ‘dramatic’ part comes in the final episode where Lauren and her ex-boyfriend/bandmate reunite to do a one-off gig. They sleep together, fall out and cancel the gig at the last minute. But no problem! The gig goes ahead anyway with a little help from Lauren’s friends. It’s a huge success and everyone’s happy again.

I mentioned that it’s a sitcom. Perhaps you think what it lacks in drama, it makes up for in eye-watering laughter. But I’d have to say no to this as well. It had funny bits, don’t get me wrong, but it was hardly a rip-roaring, side-splitting odyssey of mirth. It was the kind of funny that makes you smile rather than laugh. It was a really, really nice program that gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I realise I’m making this sound frightfully dull but it wasn’t. Believe me, my wife and I enjoyed every last minute of it and were sad when it was over (though I suspect if it had gone on for too long it could have become boring; I think it was just the right length). If life’s getting you down or if you’re just sick to the back teeth of intensely depressing TV and you’re looking for a bit of comforting escapism, I can highly recommend this show.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Footnotes:

*Seriously, I had to really hunt for this on IMDB when I was doing my research for this post.

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ATTENTION AUTHORS:

I’m still looking to interview fiction authors here on Penstricken, especially new or indie authors. Whether it’s books, plays, comics or any other kind of fiction, if you’ve got something written, I want to hear about it. If you’re interested in having your work featured on Penstricken, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest.

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Review: The Orville (season 1)

Posted on 26/05/201925/05/2019 by Ndrw

As a lifelong Trekkie (who has been profoundly disappointed by Star Trek: Discovery) I’ve been really curious to see what The Orville was all about. I’ve heard a lot of folk talking very positively about this show, even claiming it fills a Star Trek void in a way the most recent Star Treks fail to do.

High praise indeed. My curiosity was piqued. And so, late for the party as usual, I watched the trailer for season one before deciding to buy the DVD.

I won’t lie to you. I bought it with a certain trepidation. The trailer made it look a bit too spoofy for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good spoof, but it’s been twenty years and I’m still in remission from Galaxy Quest. Had it not been for the great reviews I found online, I probably wouldn’t have taken this gamble.

Lucky for me, I did. Season one was brilliant. Yes, it is a comedy spoof in some ways, with subtle-as-a-phaser-on-kill references to all your favourite Star Trek tropes, but it also retains something of the drama and depths that made Star Trek great.

So, that’s enough about how it compares with Star Trek. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

This series begins with Captain Mercer being grudgingly offered the captaincy of a starship after a year of wallowing in a pit of despair after he caught his wife, Cmdr. Kelly Grayson, in bed with a blue alien. He’s thrilled to be in the captain’s seat again– until he discovers his ex-wife is his first officer. The ensuing story arc concerning their working relationship is predictable but enjoyable nonetheless. The other characters are also reasonably well developed, largely playing on your favourite Star Trek tropes (an artificial lifeform who doesn’t understand humour, a burly alien with a grim countenance and so on and so forth) but distinctive enough in their own right.

The first episode or two seemed a little heavier on the immature spoof humour than the rest. Off-beat gags about how frequently aliens need to urinate, whether or not the navigator was allowed to bring drinks onto the bridge and how badly framed the Krill commander appeared on the view screen while he threatened to destroy the Orville jarred slightly, however as the show wore on it began to develop a much more even balance of humour, drama and suspense, seasoning each story with humour rather than depending on it to carry the narrative.

Critics have largely slammed this show’s mixture of drama and comedy, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit the pattern for your typical spoof or a sci-fi drama, but instead mashes them together in a way which is, perhaps, a little unusual. But this show isn’t your typical spoof. It’s a homage to Star Trek by someone who clearly loves the show and wants to do it justice; as such there are episodes which tickle you, others which have you on the edge of your seat and others make you stop and think. I don’t think it’s a flaw. In fact, I liked that about this show. It made it stand out among other tedious spoofs and depressingly grim actual Star Trek shows like Discovery. “Majority Rule” for instance (easily my favourite episode of the season) brings together a well measured dose of humour and a plot the audience could really care about. There was something at stake. Lt. LaMarr was in real danger and we cared about his plight while also bemoaning his hilariously cringe-inducing attempts to save himself. I think this episode even has something to say about real life and the negative impact of social media on the modern world. It’s everything a meaty but light-hearted TV comedy drama should be.

Source: https://media.giphy.com/media/l1J3KYz77HU9H8Xdu/giphy.gif

I will say this against the first season: some of the stories have slightly disappointing endings. I don’t want to get too detailed and spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it so I’ll just give one example of what I’m talking about. Be warned, there is a big stinking spoiler coming up in this next paragraph. Ready? Here it comes:

In the episode “If the Stars Should Appear”, the Orville crew discover a massive ship with an artificial biosphere inside: grass, trees, cities and farms. The people living there have never seen a night sky because the ship’s roof constantly displays a day sky. They do not realise they are on a ship and, apart from a small and fiercely persecuted group of heretics called Reformers, they all revere a deity called Dorahl. Social tension is at boiling point between the Reformers and the established theocracy. Then in the final moments of the episode, the Orville crew find a way to open the ship’s ‘sunroof’, thus allowing the inhabitants to see a night sky and proving the Reformers right. Good night. The end. Mission accomplished. All social tensions resolved, truth wins over ignorance and…

Yeah. This is a dissatisfying ending, no denying it. It was too easy. You can’t just flick a switch and resolve centuries of false belief, social tension and theocratic dictatorship. Remember, these guys have never even seen stars. What do you think would happen in real life if the sky was suddenly replaced with something bizarre, like brickwork or something. Rioting, surely. Certainly not a quick fix to the main conflict that’s blighting society. Not only was it hard to believe, but it’s also one step away from deus ex machina, which is unforgivable even in a comedy. And there are a few episodes which end like that.

I do have one more complaint about this series. Sometimes, especially on the more serious episodes, key issues will be left hanging and are never referred to again. For instance, it is strongly implied at the beginning of one episode that Bortus and Klyden are having marital difficulties, as Bortus leaves for work in a huff while Klyden whines that he feels neglected. Given that in a previous episode they had recently been to court over whether or not their newborn should be given gender reassignment surgery (being female is considered a birth defect on their world), I naturally imagined that this was going to be an on-going part of the story arc but… it wasn’t. It was never referred to again and that was pretty much it.

All in all, a very enjoyable show. There’s probably a lot of good reasons why the critics can find fault with it at a technical level but if you just take it for what it is — a bit of Star Trek inspired fun — it’s a thoroughly enjoyable show. I loved every minute of it and I will certainly be purchasing season 2.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

ATTENTION AUTHORS:

You can check out our previous interviews here:

Sharleen Nelson, Author of The Time Tourists [2]

Review: Doctor Who, Series 11

Posted on 13/01/201910/01/2019 by Ndrw

SPOILER ALERT

Anyone who has not watched any part of Doctor Who reboot series 11 (including the New Year special, Resolution) is hereby advised that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.

Well, well, it may feel like it’s only just begun but Jodie Whittaker’s first series as the titular character in the BBC’s Doctor Who is finally over. Actually it was over almost two weeks ago but I had to do 6 Six Word Stories for the 6th last Sunday so you’re getting the review this Sunday instead. Lap it up.

I’ve already written in some depths about the first episode, so I’m not going to waste too much time talking about that today. What I really want to do is give an overview of the series as a whole.

Let’s start with the most important question of all: characters, specifically the four regular ones.

The Doctor in this series is lively, kindhearted and generally likable. My biggest criticism is that she seems to have completely lost all her demons, and with it, her motivation. She still abhors violence but previous Doctors (especially in the reboot) have been somewhat weighed down by the violence they’ve witnessed and committed themselves. One of the things I loved about Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, for instance, was how plagued he was by his own sense of guilt. This motivated him to chase around the galaxy seeking vindication. As a result, I cared about the Doctor’s goals, even in rubbish episodes like Into the Dalek. The Thirteenth Doctor, alas, lacks this depth.

Graham wins the ‘best character’ prize by a million miles. He is haunted by the death of his wife and is travelling with the Doctor mainly as a way of fleeing from his own grief, only to be faced with it everywhere he goes, finally culminating in his showdown with Tim Shaw whom he (quite rightly) blames for his wife’s death. My only real criticism is how suddenly his hunger for revenge comes upon him in ‘The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos’ (which, by the way, was the most forgettable last-episode-of-the-series since the show rebooted in 2005). It might’ve been nice to see hints of this slightly darker side to him before he finally encountered his wife’s killer again but this is the only minor grievance I have with Graham.

Ryan started strong. His dyspraxia gave him an inner struggle to overcome, as did the loss of his grandmother; he apparently had a tense relationship with both Graham and his absentee father and there was some chemistry between him and Yasmin in the first few episodes. That should’ve been more than enough to make a really interesting character. Unfortunately, most of these issues came to nothing. His dyspraxia was barely mentioned and in no way hindered him; he deals with his grandmother’s death fairly easily and the sexual tension between him and Yasmin fizzled out into nothing after a few episodes. Only the business with his dad came to any sort of resolution, and even this in a fairly clumsy manner in the New Year special.

Speaking of Yasmin, I’m still trying to think of anything I can say about her, whether good or bad. She seemed like a nice person but as characters go, she had all the substance of the Speaking Clock. That’s not a criticism of the actress. She brought Yasmin to life as well as anyone could, but the fact of the matter is, the character could have been completely cut out of this series with almost no loss to the story as whole (even in ‘Demons of the Punjab’ — arguably the only real ‘Yas episode’ — she was just there enough to make the story happen and no more). The character was, in a word, only half-written written.

Now, what about monsters? Doctor Who has always been famous for its monsters, though since the 2005 reboot, it’s been an almost constant barage of Daleks, Cybermen and Moffat’s pet invention, the ~~eye-gougingly tedious~~ Weeping Angels. Not so this time! Every monster (barring the New Year special) was brand spanking new, which was a breath of fresh air for me at least. Although while I’m on the subject of Daleks, I just need to say one thing: since when could the sonic screwdriver disable the Dalek’s gun arm?! If sonic screwdrivers can do that, why was there ever a Time War?

This series has come under some pretty heavy criticism, especially on social media (where all the vitriol of society coalesces, kind of like in that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, ‘Skin of Evil’, but I digress), for being too ‘politically correct’. I don’t know if that’s because the Doctor’s a woman, because they finally wrote an episode where the racism of modern history is shown in all its ugliness while still being a family friendly TV show (complete with a time travelling white supremacist bad guy) or what but in any event, I see nothing wrong with this. Oh, sure, you might not always personally agree with the message behind each episode, but that doesn’t make it bad writing. Quite the reverse. Give me a real life theme that offends my sensibilities over Moffat’s meaningless, sentimental fluff any day of the week (though just to be clear, I wasn’t offended by this series at all). When it comes to the themes that were explored in this particular series, my only real criticism is how poorly executed they were, often feeling obvious and preachy.

I have only one more criticism (and I know, it sounds like I hated this series, but I really did enjoy it): there was no series-long story arc whatsoever. Since the reboot began (and now and again in the old series, too), Doctor Who has boasted some excellent story arcs. This series just didn’t have one. Just a bunch of time travellers with no discernible motive (apart from Graham) going on lots of pointless but mostly entertaining mini-adventures, finally (anti-)climaxing in them bumping into Tim Shaw again who was, frankly, less scary second time around.

I know it sounds like I’ve really slammed this series. That notwithstanding, I did enjoy it. Really. And since I know you’re all just dying to know what I think about having a woman Doctor, I really did like Whittaker’s portrayal of the character. Please don’t come away from this thinking I hate series 11 or Jodie Whittaker. I do not and I’m really looking forward to series 12. It could’ve just done with a bit of tightening up here and there on some of the most basic principles of serialised story-writing: characterisation and development, subtle execution of themes, story arcs and so forth. But please, watch it with my blessing. It was, for the most part, entertaining and certainly not the worst series in the show’s mostly excellent history.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟

ATTENTION AUTHORS:

You can check out our previous interviews here:

Sharleen Nelson, Author of The Time Tourists [2]

Christmas Clichés and How to Avoid Them

Posted on 23/12/201819/12/2018 by Ndrw

Well it just wouldn’t be Christmas without a good Christmas movie/Christmas special of your favourite TV show; and so, since I’ve just come to the end of my series on genre clichés and how to avoid them, I thought: what better thing to post about this Christmas than Christmas movie clichés?

So here we go ho ho! (Sorry).

Film Ends; Snow Begins

Question: how do you know when a Christmas story is nearly finished?

Answer: it starts snowing and everybody’s amazed. It seems to be the only ending anyone has has been able to come up with for a Christmas flick.

There’s a really clever trick to avoiding this particular cliché. Basically, you just end it any other way you like! Kissy endings are fine, violent deaths are fine, I’ll even put up with riding off into the sunset but please, if you have any sense of compassion, don’t make me sit through another inevitable snow ending!

Christmas Miracles

These little deus ex machinas appear in an alarming number of Christmas films. They don’t tend to solve the main conflict of the story (though they sometimes do, and should be doubly ashamed of themselves) but usually involve small miracles at the very end of the story to instantly undo any lingering sadness that might remain from the struggle that has gone before. For instance, just after the main conflict of the story has been resolved and the film appears to be over, the boy’s puppy who got flattened by a monster truck in the in the first half hour of the film comes running down the road to meet him. Then the snow starts. The end.

The rules about how to write a good ending don’t just change because it’s Christmas. Your protagonists have struggled throughout the story; even if they haven’t lost anything substantial, they’ve had a rough time. There was a bad guy who wanted to hurt them. There was a real danger that Christmas might be cancelled. Your characters have developed and learned things from their strife as much as from their victory; don’t rob them of that by making everything magically fall into place for them in the last few minutes.

The Conversion of Scrooge

Yeah, Dickens I’m blaming you for this one. In this trope, there’s always a bitter and miserable old git who hates Christmas and wants to spoil it for everyone but in the climax of the story they learn the true meaning of Christmas (note: it’s seldom the true, true meaning of Christmas but usually some woolly notion about love and fuzziness) and become a nice person who decides to join the Christmas party, give all their money to the poor and generally become a real life Santa Claus (double cliché points if the real life Santa Claus is the one who teaches your miser the true meaning of Christmas).

I mean… depending on exactly what your bad guy did, I’m inclined to give you a bit of leeway on this one. After all, it is Christmas: good will to men and all that jazz. But if your antagonist has deliberately tried to ruin Christmas for everyone (especially if it involved committing a serious atrocity), a little bit of comeuppance wouldn’t go amiss… would it?

I know you want to be nice to your bad guys but come on… if you think he deserves it, then just be brave and do what my favourite Christmas movie hero always does: blow him up and say ‘yippee ki yay’. Your audience will respect you for it. They probably hate your bad guy’s guts too.

Merry Christmas!

ATTENTION AUTHORS:

I’m still looking for more authors to interview here on Penstricken, especially new fiction authors. If you’re interested in having your work featured on Penstricken, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter.

You can check out our previous interviews here:
Sharleen Nelson, Author of The Time Tourists [2]

Pants, Plants and Plans: A Beginner’s Guide

Posted on 05/08/201807/08/2018 by Ndrw

If you’re the sort of person who spends a lot of time reading up on story writing, you’ve probably heard myself or other writing bloggers talk about the differences between planners, pantsers and plantsers. It’s a spectrum we writers are all spread out across, separating those on the one extreme who plan everything before they write from those who pants their way through their story (that is, they write ‘by the seat of their pants’, making up the story as they go along with absolutely no forward planning whatsoever). And of course, slap bang in the middle of the spectrum, we have Plantsers (because it’s a combination of the words ‘planner’ and ‘pantser’, see?).

We all naturally gravitate to one side or another on this spectrum. However that doesn’t mean we can’t choose to plan, pant or plant even if it doesn’t come naturally to us. After all, we might be tempted to think that one method is inherently better than the others, and that we should try this.

We might even be right. For my money, I think there are some situations where planning is more appropriate and others where pantsing is more appropriate. I’m not going to tell you categorically that any one method is better than another* but there are pros and cons to each. If you’re struggling with whatever method comes naturally to you, it may be time to try a different approach. And so, what follows is my own ~~short and ill-informed~~ concise analysis of each approach, comparing pros and cons as evenly as I can.

Planning

Strengths: Planning everything in advance saves buckets of time. If you already know exactly what is going to happen, how it’s going to happen and who it’s going to happen to, all neatly ordered into chapters and scenes, you won’t waste time writing lengthy portions of narrative you won’t use. You can also rest easy in the knowledge that your first draft won’t have too many large plot holes to sort out.

This makes it easy to work to a schedule. If you know you can knock out 1000 words a day, you can reasonably well estimate that it will take you about three months to complete a draft, especially in those first drafts, because you won’t get stuck about what to write.

Weaknesses: it’s easily the most strict approach to writing. The writer must be disciplined enough 1) not to begin writing a draft too earlier and 2) not to deviate from the plan when he does start drafting. This does not suit everybody. Many authors find it sucks the pleasure out of writing and stifles the imagination, as new ideas insist on being heard throughout the writing process.

Tips for Planning: Be disciplined. Plan everything and resist the urge to draft until you have completed all your chapter outlines, character biographies, the lot. When you finally do begin to draft, don’t deviate from the plan. Add nothing, change nothing, remove nothing. Write it exactly as you planned it. Remember, dear planner, you’re not making art. You’re constructing an intricate machine.

Pantsing

Strengths: This approach to writing allows the imagination to run wild. Most people who write stories tend to do it because they’re people who like to dream, to create and to give artist form to their flights of fancy. Pantsing lets you do just that. I often find that, while pantsing can produce a lot of excess material, some of it can even be later recycled to create a whole new story. Many of my story ideas have come from material I rejected while pantsing an earlier work.

Weaknesses: If you’re serious about writing for any reason other than as a hobby, you will probably find this approach seriously undermines your productivity and success, especially if you’re writing anything longer than a short story. Pantsing out a novel length story in a couple of months is easy in theory but it is doomed to be full of half baked themes, plot holes and other inconsistencies that will need to be fixed before they can pass over any agent or publisher’s desk. You may find yourself virtually starting from scratch when you come to do your second draft, assuming you ever reach the second draft stage.

Tips for Pantsing: Don’t get too attached to your work. A draft that has been fully pantsed will require a lot more editing than a meticulously planned draft. While killing your darlings is always good advice for any writer, pantsers will probably find themselves producing a lot more darlings (because their imagination has been given unlimited credit in the sweetie shop) that have to be killed (because their story will be full of things that simply don’t work).

Plantsing

Strengths: Plantsers have the best of both worlds. They are anchored to a plan but they are not enslaved to it. If the author wants to make changes halfway through writing their draft, or if they identify problems with their story, they can simply adjust the plan as they go along. The imagination is thereby given space to work but is also kept under a tight leash.

Weaknesses: It’s probably the hardest method to strike the correct balance with, even if you do find yourself naturally gravitating towards it. Planners know to write nothing until their story is fully planned out and pantsers don’t give a rip if their story doesn’t make sense in the first draft, but plantsers must learn to bring these two extremes together and make them work in harmony. It is difficult to create a systematic approach to plantsing and will be largely figured out by trial and error. This can be time consuming and frustrating.

Tips for Plantsing: Plantsing is not creating a plan then disregarding it, nor is it writing a draft then making a plan around it. Both of these are a waste of time. Plantsing involves blending these two seeming opposites in a way which allows you to work to your strengths, while still enjoying the benefits of both extremes. For example, you might pants out a few zero drafts to stimulate your imagination while you plan. Alternatively you might create a very loose-fitting plan (story beats for example, but no chapter outlines) and pants out your novel within the boundaries of that limited plan. You might also decide to forsake character biographies in favour of conducting several ‘interviews’ or ‘auditions’ with your characters to help you get to know them better. The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to plantsing. My best advice is to spend a little time finding an approach which works for you.

Footnotes:

*I know what you’re thinking: ‘if he’s going to be so unbiased in his approach, why has he only got pants in the featured image and nothing else?’ Well the short answer is I just couldn’t find a single picture on the internet which depicted a plan, a pair of pants and a potted plant so I had to pick one. I picked pants because pants are funnier. Sue me.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Be sure to leave us a wee comment if you enjoyed it and don’t forget to ‘like’ this post and follow us so you never miss another post. You can also follow Penstricken on Twitter and like Penstricken on Facebook, if that’s what tickles your toes.

Until next time!

ARE YOU AN AUTHOR?

I’m looking for authors (especially, but not limited to, new and/or indie authors) whose work I can feature here on Penstricken over the coming year. It will simply take the form of a quick Q&A about yourself and your work via private message or e-mail and, of course, a link to where we can all get a copy of your work.

I’m open to interviewing authors of almost any kind of story, provided your work is complete, original and of course, fictional. I will not consider individual short stories/micro-fictions, however I am happy to feature published anthologies or entire blog-sites of micro-fiction, provided you are the sole author.

If you’re interested, or want to know more, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter.

Super Snappy Speed Reviews – TV Edition (Vol. 2)

Posted on 17/06/201817/06/2018 by Ndrw

SPOILER ALERT

While every effort has been made to avoid spoilers, anyone who has not seen Star Trek: Discovery, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Hooten & The Lady, Endeavour or Doc Martin is hereby advised that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.

Yes it’s another day and another instalment of Super Snappy Speed Reviews. So far we’ve reviewed books [2] [3], TV shows, films, computer games, writers’ apps and even the Star Trek movies, so this time it’s going to be all about TV shows. I’ve picked 5 TV shows entirely at random from my DVD rack/Now TV/Lovefilm/etc. accounts and reviewed them all in no more than four or five sentences.

As ever, these reviews reflect nothing but my own personal opinion. The TV shows I have selected have nothing in common, save the fact that they are all fictional stories. They are not necessarily stories of the same genre, nor are they necessarily TV shows that I particularly liked or disliked, nor are they sorted into any particular order. These reviews reflect nothing but my own impressions and opinions, reduced, powdered and decimated into a few short sentences. So without further ado…

Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery promised a lot more than it actually delivered. Roddenberry’s utopia has been replaced with a grim world where Starfleet personnel see nothing wrong with using living creatures to power their engines and the crew are all at each others’ throats. It’s also got far more bad language and other adult content than we’ve become used to after fifty years of Star Trek. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a top-notch TV space opera, almost as good as Star Trek… but it’s not Star Trek.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman

If you’re sick of the dark and gloomy superhero films/TV shows we’ve been getting served up recently, you might want to have a look at this ’90s gem. From a story writing point of view, it focuses far more on the developing relationship between Lois Lane and Clark Kent than on any superheroing (verb: using superpowers to rescue people while wearing impossibly tight spandex) and I think that is what makes it so compelling. It’s lighthearted, cheesey in the extreme and yet not entirely without substance. Be warned, it does end on an unresolved cliffhanger.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟

Hooten & the Lady

My wife and I were perusing Now TV one day when we stumbled across this ‘rip-off Indiana Jones meets rip-off Lara Croft’ type show. Don’t be put off by my use of the word ‘rip-off’, however. This is a thoroughly entertaining show, especially if you long for the days of feel-good adventures and light-hearted love triangles that don’t really come to anything. I should point out, however, that if you have even the most elementary knowledge of history, religion or archaeology, you might want to switch your brain off. It’s a fun show, but there’s a lot of nonsense in it.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟

Endeavour

Prequels are often rubbish; Endeavour is not. This show balances complex mysteries (a little too complex, if I’m being critical) with a rich cast of characters that can just as easily stand alone, apart from the original Morse canon. In addition to solving mysteries that his (rather lazy and/or inept) superior officers cannot, this show focuses heavily on the formative years of the Morse character and the personal issues he faces as he develops into the character portrayed by John Thaw. It’s intense, but not overwhelmingly so. Do yourself a favour and watch it.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Doc Martin

I really like this show. It balances drama, comedy and a rich cast of distinctive, well-written characters in a way few modern prime time TV shows manage. Having said that, I feel like they should’ve probably axed it after series 7 or so. The story is clearly finished now and it is beginning to feel a little bit like ITV is flogging a dead horse.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

ATTENTION AUTHORS:

I’m hoping to do author interviews here on Penstricken over the coming year, especially with new fiction authors. If you’re interested in having your work featured on Penstricken, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter.

Until next time!

Should You Use Profanity in Your Story?

Posted on 21/01/201820/01/2018 by Ndrw

I’ve been reading Tom Hanks’ Uncommon Type: Some Stories. It’s not really my intention to review it here today (not least of all because I haven’t read it all yet), but I will say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality of his writing. It doesn’t read like an actor trying to make a few extra quid by writing a book. It reads like something written by a professional author who knows a thing or two about writing quality stories. In short, I’m enjoying it. But something else about it surprised me: the language. There’s a lot of profanity in there and for some reason, I expected Tom Hanks’ work to be a little bit more family friendly. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s just because I’m hearing it in Woody the Cowboy’s voice.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about the use of profanity in fiction. We authors walk a fine line between realism and rudeness, especially when it comes to writing dialogue. Where do you draw the line?

Well… it depends.

The first and most obvious thing is to consider your audience and what they expect from your story. Certain audiences tend to go for certain genres, and as such, the level of profanity in your work will often be largely dependent on your genre. If you have a real aversion to using any profanity whatsoever in your writing, the simplest way around this is to stick to those genres which tend to have less profanity in them. Alternatively, you can always sit down and watch the soaps for inspiration. Really, I’m serious. Emmerdale, Eastenders and Coronation Street are simply chock full of characters having heated arguments about adultery, betrayal, crime and all sorts of other grim subjects without a single f-bomb being dropped.

giphy — Image source: http://gph.is/1c3k48L

However, let’s assume you are willing to use some profanity in your story. There might be lots of reasons why you use bad language in your story. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Spock makes frequent (mis)use of mild profanity in a vain attempt to fit in with 20th century human society. Here it serves a very simple function: comedy relief (even though The Voyage Home is pretty light-hearted anyway). It also works, because it’s done in a fairly subtle way. Bad language is also often used to add a sense of anger or urgency to a character’s dialogue. It is, therefore, an undeniably useful tool for some authors.

A word of warning, however: profanity has the power to augment your story or to utterly ruin it, perhaps more than any other technique you might use. A measure of bad language may or may not be appropriate if you’re writing for adults, but bad language is not the defining characteristic of a good adult story. It is simply a tool that you may decide to use or not use as you see fit. Overusing it, as with any other literary technique, can destroy your story. The fact is, profanity loses its power very quickly. The more often bad language is used, the more desensitised the reader becomes to it. What began as a striking technique with which to shock or amuse the audience quickly becomes nothing more than a few pointless extra words which ruin the flow of the narrative.

‘But in real life, some people do swear ten times in a single sentence!’ I hear you cry. ‘How can I make my dialogue realistic if I water it down?’

It can be tempting to think this. On the surface it seems perfectly rational. However, any seasoned author knows that dialogue in fiction is actually very different from the way real people talk from day to day. Dialogue flows. Dialogue makes sense. Dialogue is to-the-point. Even when sub-text is used, what is said remains clear and advances the story in a very definite direction. For this reason, profanity may sometimes be necessary but it should be carefully measured, lest it lost its power.

In real life, people talk rubbish. They say things they don’t mean. They’ll change the subject. They’ll utterly misunderstand the subject and, you know, they’ll like… how can I put it? They’ll, I don’t know, they’ll– respond in inappropriate ways. You know, like, you’ll say something and they’ll say something back and it’s obvious they’ve not understood you because what they’ve said back doesn’t make any sense. Like that time I was talking to Sandra about fly fishing and she… [insert long winded, irrelevant anecdote here]. They’ll misuse pacific words, mishandle slang and make such a mess of their utterances that it frankly beggars belief that humans are able to communicate verbally at all.

In the same way a real person might swear twenty times per sentence, but if you want to fictionalise that person, you’ll probably want to tone down his language lest it ruin the flow of your narrative.

One last thing to bear in mind: You’re never going to please everyone. What matters, therefore, is you, your story and your intended audience (not necessarily in that order). Ask yourself, why am I using profanity here? Is it really necessary to make my story work? Am I comfortable using it? Will it produce the correct response in my intended audience (forget your ‘unintended’ audience; you can’t possibly please everyone), or will it bore/offend them? Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself what’s appropriate. Personally, I find less is usually more when it comes to profanity, but maybe that’s just me.

Until next time!

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50 Quotes About Fiction

Posted on 19/11/201718/11/2017 by Ndrw

“I like telling stories.” — Hunter Parrish
“All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.” — George R.R. Martin
“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” — GK Chesterton
“The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life.” — Sufjan Stevens
“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.” — Francis Bacon
“The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.” — Antony Beevor
“The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.” — E.L. Doctorow
“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” — Mark Twain
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.” — Virginia Wolf
“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” — Simon Weil
“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.” — Ray Bradbury
“Human kind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.” — Jim Crace
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” — Albert Camus
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” — Oscar Wilde
“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” — Doris Lessing
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” — Albert Einstein
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
“It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” — Ken Kesey
“Fiction wouldn’t be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.” — Jasper Fforde
“General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else” — Marvin Minsky
“Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.” — Charlaine Harris
“The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing – and everything – about it is real.” — Todd Strasser
“Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.” — Leonard S. Marcus
“[Characters] are the beating heart of any story that’s worth reading. All my favourite stories, whether they be books, films, TV shows, comics, computer games, or any other kind of story you care to mention, feature compelling characters. Characters who are not just believable people (though that is vitally important), but who are intriguing, unusual, captivating and – most importantly – unique. Their distinctive qualities makes them memorable, interesting and appealing (even if they are the most sinister villains) and they don’t slot too neatly into cliched archetypes – damsels in distress, moustache twirling villains, reluctant heroes or any other such thing.” — A. Ferguson
“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” — Terry Pratchett
“Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life” — Martin Amis
“History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.” — Victor Hugo
“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.” — Daniel Keyes
“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.” — Isaac Babel
“There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.” — Orson Scott Card
“The best fiction is true.” — Kinky Friedman
“To write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.” — Stephen Leacock
“Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.” — Raymond A. Mar
“It’s never too late – in fiction or in life – to revise.” — Nancy Thayer
“All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‘the plot.'” — Margaret Atwood
“I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.” — Isabel Allende
“I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence – and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I’d always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.” — Tom Bissell
“When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realise that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less ‘real.'” — Jane Lindskold
“In the best works of fiction, there’s no moustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy’s got his reasons.” — Lin-Manuel Miranda
“I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.” — Steven Spielberg
“The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‘Doctor Who.’ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.” — Terry Pratchett
“I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.” — Taiye Selasi
“A play is fiction– and fiction is fact distilled into truth.” — Edward Albee
“All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.” — Barry Unsworth
“Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” — Arthur C. Clarke
“Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.” — Arundhati Roy
“I can make up stories with the best of them. I’ve been telling stories since I was a little kid” — Rabih Alameddine

Until next time!

Fiction: Reality Refined

Posted on 05/11/201704/11/2017 by Ndrw

There are two kinds of story in this world. Those that are not at all true to life and therefore are completely unsatisfactory, and those that create the illusion of being true to life but, in fact, are not. Very few stories (even those meticulously and faithfully based on true events) accurately reflect real life once they’ve been structured in a way which allows them to be communicated, because real life is far too much of a jumble for that to be possible.

‘But wait just a minute here,’ I hear you cry. ‘I read a book/watched a film/attended a play/played a game just the other day there and it was the truest darn thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life!’

Well of course it’s true that if you’re writing a story, you’ll want it to be true to life in the sense that it must accurately reflect the human experience. A skilled author can (and should) attempt to communicate far more fundamental truths than this about life and death, war and peace, society, philosophy, religion or whatever it might be in their stories. And of course, stories based on true events must remain faithful to history. No one is denying any of that.

However, in real life, events are disjointed and random. Things happen for no reason. Reality must therefore be refined in order to turn it into a digestible and entertaining story. For instance, you might be writing a novel (based on the true story) about your holiday to France where you met your future wife and fought to win the respect of her disapproving father. Now while you were there, you also bumped into Mr. Donald, your former maths teacher. It turns out he’s there to attend the Fête de la Musique because (to your surprise) he’s ridiculously enthusiastic about music and will travel far and wide to attend music festivals all over the world. You make polite conversation about this for twenty minutes and then go your separate ways. You put the event out of your mind. Life goes on. It never comes up again. All that you have learned about Mr. Donald, his passion for music or that there is an all-day music festival that happens in Paris every June neither harms or benefits you in any way, at any point in your life, ever.

So… when you come to write the novel about how you went on holiday, met a girl and won the respect of her father, you’re not going to include that event, are you? Because in all story telling, everything happens for a reason. Meaningless events only serve to break up the flow, rhythm and pace of the story. Have you ever been watching a film and noticed that nobody ever says goodbye to anybody else, even on the telephone? Or that nobody ever walks into a room and forgets what they went there for, or forgets what they were about to say. And no one ever needs to go to the toilet, unless there’s a mad axe murderer in there already poised and waiting to kill them. This isn’t true to life at all! In real life, people always forget things, usually do say goodbye on the phone and, more often than not, have uneventful visits to the bathroom.

Not only that, but in all good stories (even those based on true events) there is a clear and identifiable structure, sometimes called the ‘story arc’ or ‘narrative arc’ (a simple definition and description is available here) and all the events in your story should contribute in some way towards its construction. This is not true to life, but it is good story telling. In real life, you meet new people all the time. They enter your life, do or say so many things and then leave your life, often without ceremony. Many different events happen all at once and are often never fully resolved. Good story telling isn’t like that. In good story telling, A leads to B which leads to C and in the end, all the loose ends are tied up. They might not necessarily all live happily ever after, but the story comes to a neat end. Our questions are answered and we are happy to assume that life goes on (at least for the survivors).

If all of this is teaching your granny to suck eggs, let me draw your attention to one more point: dialogue. In dialogue, you walk a fine line between creating a distinctive and believable voice which tells you something about the character and constructing your dialogue in a way which allows your narrative to flow.

It may be difficult to do because we’re all so used to verbal communication, but next time you’re having a verbal conversation with someone, listen to the words they use. Don’t just listen to their meaning. Pay careful attention to every utterance. You will notice that, more often than not, the rules of grammar go out the window. New sentences are often begun before the previous one is finished. People interrupt and talk over one another. Sometimes misunderstandings will derail a conversation (‘Do you like coffee?’ ‘Oh yes I’d love one, thank you!’). Words are often misused (for instance, when people say ‘pacific’ instead of ‘specific’). Sentences are often punctuated by non-sensible utterances (‘erm…’, ‘uhh…’). The list goes on.

Seriously, I encourage you to try it someday. Make a precise transcript of a real-life conversation in exactly the order it is spoken and read it back to yourself. You will marvel at the fact human beings are able to communicate at all when you see just how muddled up our verbal communication is.

In fiction, however, your dialogue can’t be like that. You can add dialects, accents and perhaps even the odd bit of bad grammar to your heart’s content but the flow of the conversation still has to be clear for the reader. Dialogue, just like the rest of your narrative, has a purpose. It drives the story on, and therefore it must accomplish its ends. Still, it must sound believable. You as the author, therefore, walk a fine line between making it sound so implausibly perfect that your characters seem wooden and so realistically imperfect that it reads like meaningless waffle and drags your story’s pace down to a crawl.

Not only that, but you also have to beware of making the content of a conversation sound too contrived. It can be all too tempting to use dialogue as a place to info-dump. E.g., ‘I visited my sister, Andrea McLaren, 24, who lives just around the corner from the butchers on Western Road’.

Real people don’t talk like that. If Andrea’s full name, age and address are important, they need to be worked in with subtlety and believably. There are many techniques you can use to lend credibility to your dialogue, but I’ll come back to that in a future post.

Until next time!

5 Sci-Fi Tropes I Could Live Without

Posted on 29/10/201729/10/2017 by Ndrw

Among the many styles and genres of fiction which I enjoy, I must unashamedly confess to a particular fondness for popular sci-fi and fantasy. Yes I know it’s all just unrealistic escapism into a nonsense world of space adventures, suspiciously human shaped aliens and humanity being conquered by the very robots we built to help us but still… it’s fun. And you know… fun’s allowed, even if you like serious literature.

All the same… there have to be limits. But for some reason, sci-fi is just chock full of certain clichéd tropes, some of which are so very ridiculous that it frankly beggars belief that they ever became clichés. The others are just plain done to death. What follows are some of my (least) favourites.

The Holographic Hook

You’ve got to write a space opera and are struggling to come up with an exciting opening scene to draw the audience in from the very beginning. Solution: an exciting space battle! Ships firing at one another, hand to hand combat between aliens and humans, lasers, explosions–

Then an admiral calmly walks onto the scene and ends the simulation. It was all just a holographic training exercise!

This kind of scene, made famous by the Kobayashi Maru scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and then repeated time and time again in one form or another), gives the audience a burst of excitement that has very little bearing on the story which is to follow. The best it can do is foreshadow some internal conflict the protagonist may face later on in the story.

Please… it’s been done too often. Put some effort in and come up with a proper hook for your story.

Is That You Clive?

You’re alone on an abandoned space station or a spooky castle. Or maybe you’re just home alone, meticulously colouring in your colouring-in book on a dark and stormy night. Suddenly you hear something… something rattling, hissing, banging… perhaps even a sinister inhuman voice whispering your name.

You spin around wildly.

‘Is that you Clive?’

No. No, it’s not Clive. It’s never Clive. And really, ask yourself, is this the sort of thing Clive normally does? If it is… you need to dump Clive and get yourself some nicer friends. Just saying.

Just once I’d like to read or watch something where the victim doesn’t automatically assume that the scary noise is their friend pulling a cruel prank on them. Or better still, just once, I’d like it to really be Clive pulling a cruel trick. At least I’d be surprised.

Hey Clive, Are Those New Horns?

Something terrible has happened to Clive. He’s being controlled by an alien or replaced with a robot duplicate. His behaviour is erratic. His speech has become strange. His eyes have turned luminous green and he has grown horns.

And no one really notices until it’s too late.

My personal favourite example of this occurs in the Doctor Who episode, Rose. Rose returns to her boyfriend’s car to find he is now made entirely of plastic and is talking funny. And what does she do?

Goes out for dinner with him. She suspects nothing until the Doctor fires a corkscrew straight through his skull without injuring him. And she’s supposed to be his girlfriend.

Sigh.

We, The People of Earth…

So it finally happened. Aliens have made contact with humanity. They may have come in peace or they may have come laser guns blazing, but one way or another, it’s first contact day for the people of Earth.

You know Earth, don’t you? Seven-point-four billion different versions of the truth, spread across one hundred and ninety five independent sovereign states (to say nothing of those who want to break away and start their own nation or conquer others) all gathered together on one planet, unable to agree on even the most trifling of matters?

A whole host of different political ideologies, systems of government, international treaties and religious beliefs, and yet when the aliens finally come, humanity all rallies around a single leader, or at the very least, sets aside all their differences. Usually it’s the President of the USA, except in Doctor Who where it can be just about anyone except the President. In any event, I have a sneaking suspicion that if aliens did make themselves known to us today, humanity would not respond with a single unified voice, or even two or three differing voices. Call me cynical but I think it would probably be chaos.

Ask yourself this. If aliens landed on Earth today:

How would Donald Trump respond?
What about Kim Jong-Un?
What about Angela Merkel?
What about ISIS?
What about the Pope?
What about the World Health Organisation?
The Scottish National Party?
The British National Party?
Richard Branson?
Kim Kardashian?
The writers of Doctor Who?
The guy that sells the Big Issue in the town centre?

You get the idea.

Magical Alien Artefacts

I don’t really have a problem with functioning magical artefacts if you’re writing a fantasy, set in a world of magic and myth, rather than a sci-fi set in space and/or the future. At its core, sci-fi (even silly popular sci-fi) tends to speculate on the advancement of technology and science, rather than the possibility that magic might actually work. If we are assuming that magic is not real, as sci-fi tends to do, we have to ask some serious questions about why it would work on an alien planet.

‘Ah, but, you see, it’s not really magic!’ I hear you cry. ‘It’s just technology that seems like magic!‘

But if it’s just technology… why dress it up like magic? Star Trek is very guilty of this. Whether it’s the legend of the Tox Uthat (a quantum phase inhibitor which appeared in TNG: Captain’s Holiday), or Vulcan mythology concerning the psionic resonator (TNG: Gambit), there just seems to be no end of magical artefacts in space which are actually just very clever technology. Technology made of stone. Stone technology that does magic. Heck, some even involve meditating and muttering incantations.

Dishonourable Mentions:

Everybody knows how to fly every kind of spaceship in the universe, even if it is of completely alien design.
Everybody knows everything about science.
Rough alien taverns. Just once, give me a classy alien wine bar.
With just a slight modification to the engine/shields/BBQ grill, we can do some sci-fi magic to save the day!
The bad guys believe emotion is a weakness and that is their Achille’s heel.
Love conquers all (exemplified in the Doctor Who episode Closing Time, where Craig is turned into a Cyberman then somehow manages to turn himself back into a human simply because he hears his baby son crying… as if he was the first parent the Cybermen ever upgraded. Seriously, I preferred it when the Cybermen’s greatest weakness was gold).
Universal translators.
Legendary technology, planets or lifeforms which really do exist.
Having a weapon of mass destruction called ‘The Weapon’. By all means call it the Super Zappy Death Ray, but don’t call it The Weapon. Use your imagination and give it a name.
Shooting the control panel/monitor shuts down everything on the entire spaceship, unlocks every locked door and/or disarms the Weapon.
Snippets of news reporters telling the general public how to survive the alien invasion. I repeat, do this to survive the alien invasion!
Jeanie who works at the shop is actually THE PROPHESIED CHOSEN WARRIOR QUEEN OF ALL THE MULTIVERSE and she doesn’t even realise it.

Well that was a far from exhaustive list but I’m glad to have got it off my chest anyway. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Be sure to leave us a wee comment below and don’t forget to ‘like’ this post and follow us so you never miss another post. You can also follow Penstricken on Twitter and like Penstricken on Facebook, if that’s what reverses your polarity.

Until next time!