Really interesting essay on acting...
Aug. 15th, 2012 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tuftearsChristopher Wright writes about James Dean, William Shatner, and how acting changes over time with the tastes of the audience... And the same may apply to writing as well.
He raises a fair point. No one raises an eyebrow at how Shakespearean plays are spoken and read; it would actually cause us to cry out (or at least regard it as a bold stylistic decision) if someone decided to 'modernize' the language in them. Kabuki and noh plays have their own severely distinct styles. But across a generation, little changes in style make the old style seem distinctly old-fashioned, even cartoonish to us.
It definitely gives me a new perspective on Shatner's oft-decried "overacting". And it makes me wonder about how writing may advance in the future, building on today's accepted conventions. Right now the trend is for writing to be as transparent as possible, to use a few words to create a rich panorama in the reader's mind. But what of the future, with books becoming increasingly online entities?
Maybe they'll laugh at late 20th and early 21st century authors for writing such empty books, so minimal -- in the sense that they expect the writer to be layering the prose with opinions, asides, and digressions into other topics... Feedstock for intelligent reading apps of the future to transform a manuscript into a "holographic" novel that lets them read a multilayered story with no more trouble than we read simple stories now.
Imagine being able to read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
haikujaguar's Aphorisms, Admonishments, and Black Blossom like a native of Kherish'dar because the Lexicon of all things Ai-Naidar is subtly whispering into your ears every time you encounter some new word, and before one eye appears a composed picture of the scene; in the background hang the strains of alien music. Imagine the dialogue spoken just as the characters would, thanks to text-to-voice mini-apps, feeding off of cues in the prose and samples of the audio books.
I dunno, trying to see the future is difficult. What we see as inevitable changes never happen, and disrupting change happens from unexpected quarters.
He raises a fair point. No one raises an eyebrow at how Shakespearean plays are spoken and read; it would actually cause us to cry out (or at least regard it as a bold stylistic decision) if someone decided to 'modernize' the language in them. Kabuki and noh plays have their own severely distinct styles. But across a generation, little changes in style make the old style seem distinctly old-fashioned, even cartoonish to us.
It definitely gives me a new perspective on Shatner's oft-decried "overacting". And it makes me wonder about how writing may advance in the future, building on today's accepted conventions. Right now the trend is for writing to be as transparent as possible, to use a few words to create a rich panorama in the reader's mind. But what of the future, with books becoming increasingly online entities?
Maybe they'll laugh at late 20th and early 21st century authors for writing such empty books, so minimal -- in the sense that they expect the writer to be layering the prose with opinions, asides, and digressions into other topics... Feedstock for intelligent reading apps of the future to transform a manuscript into a "holographic" novel that lets them read a multilayered story with no more trouble than we read simple stories now.
Imagine being able to read
haikujaguar's Aphorisms, Admonishments, and Black Blossom like a native of Kherish'dar because the Lexicon of all things Ai-Naidar is subtly whispering into your ears every time you encounter some new word, and before one eye appears a composed picture of the scene; in the background hang the strains of alien music. Imagine the dialogue spoken just as the characters would, thanks to text-to-voice mini-apps, feeding off of cues in the prose and samples of the audio books.I dunno, trying to see the future is difficult. What we see as inevitable changes never happen, and disrupting change happens from unexpected quarters.
