An incest joke

The other day I was teaching Irony, which I always do by first explaining why Alanis was wrong, although now kids don't even know that song anymore. Then I tell them the story of Oedipus. Then we read something ironic, in this case Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour."

Irony is a tough concept to grasp for a lot of people, so you've got to triple the explanation. I'll probably have to explain it a few more times to really get it to sink in. But so far they seem to be following along okay. When I asked them why the ending of "Story of an Hour" is ironic, most of the kids got it.

I love teaching that story because it is two pages long, but it teaches about so very many literary concepts. Plus feminism. After the lesson we had a discussion about the purpose of marriage, and I thought the boys and girls were going to start a gender riot. They were seriously pissed off. Kids these days are jaded.

But that's not what this post is about.

While I was telling the story of Oedipus, I got to the part where he goes in and finds Jocasta hanging from the ceiling. I said "And then Oedipus found her dead. And he was distraught. He slapped himself and yelled MY MOTHER! (slap) MY WIFE!  (slap) MY MOTHER! (slap) MY WIFE!"

Although they enjoyed watching me slap myself, they did not get my Chinatown joke. And I thought, if one of you guys was there, you'd have laughed.

So often my brilliant comedy is lost on 16-year-olds.

Plans and stuff

I realized yesterday that if I bought Avid my computer would explode. So instead I ordered Adobe Premiere and an external hard drive (both still with the educator's discount), because I like my computer and I don't want to blow it up.

I'll practice on my Game Night footage so that by the time I go to edit Guthrie I'll have an idea of what I'm doing. And if I end up sucking as an editor, I'll turn to one of the people I know who's better than me. But I'd like to give it a try first, and it's not an absurd amount of money. It's not cheap, but it's not going to bankrupt me either.

Now I just have to buy a camera.

Meanwhile....

The Great Dramatic Irony Debate: The Sequel has begun over at Wordplay. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people can be confronted with a dictionary definition of a term and refuse to admit that they're wrong. I got a little carried away the last time and some girl told me I was a horrible teacher and implied that I was a cunt - yes that word and yes, over a goddamn definition of a fucking literary term - so I'm trying very hard to stay as clean as possible in this one. Still, I can feel the ire rising again. Just when I think I got out, they pull me back in.

And, I should add, Terry Rossio will now forever know me as the girl who pissed him off by criticizing his vocabulary on her blog.

For the record, I've met Terry and I think he's fabulous and wonderful and makes a bazillion dollars more than I do and I really liked The Mask of Zorro and I wish he'd stop hating me.

Talkin' bout my education

I got a couple of questions the other day relating to my education as a writer so I thought I'd address those today.

I grew up in a house of educators. Both my parents are teachers and I went to a school where academics was everything. Your SAT score was more important than who you were taking to the prom. I worked on the school newspaper. I wrote poems and songs and short stories in my spare time.

Then I went to college and majored in English with a concentration in creative writing and graduated in three years.

Then I looked around at the real world and decided I didn't want any part of it.

So I went back to school for another year and a half and got my MA in creative writing. I wrote a collection of historical fiction for my thesis.

Then I graduated. Then when I decided to become a teacher less than a year later I had to take more classes. And I have spent my life since in a classroom teaching.

So education's nice and all, but I'm retardedly sick of it. No more classes. Except Spanish class because I'm sick of not being able to talk to parents.

I learned a lot about story while I was getting my degrees. It was really valuable and my thesis director was awesome, but when I left that school I was still a beginner. I learned much more by hanging out with writers and reading blog posts and screenplays and writing.

And more writing. Writing is the answer. Every time you write something you get a little better and relax a little more about the rules and expectations. And after a few scripts you start to figure out your style.

I'm choppy. Oddly enough I kind of hate Hemmingway's work, but here I am emulating his style. Fragment sentences, short paragraphs. I'm not sure how it happened but it's my style so I embrace it.

And the day I embraced it I found it much easier to write. I don't stop and start much, I just go straight through. I start on page one and go to page last, and then I go back and fix the things that need fixing.

And I'm done when I a) feel satisfied the cohesion of the script, can't think of any ways to improve it, and the criticism from friends is nothing but tiny tweaks here and there; or b) when I dread working on the script. If B happens I move on to a new project and chalk the previous disaster up to another script that will help make me a better writer.

Because there's no point in working on something if you don't like it. I write because I enjoy writing; why would I want to write something that feels like boring work?

That's why I write action. I ain't the kind of girl who's going to win Oscars for deep, emotional dramas that make you cry. If you cry in my film it's because you're really sad that the funny guy got his head blown off.

It's taken a lot of false starts to get there, but I'm pretty sure of who I am as a writer.

And as for my education, I enjoy sitting in on lectures sometimes at the Expo, but I'd much prefer to sit around with a bunch of writers and talk one on one than sit in another classroom.

Irony will be the death of us all

The irony debate over at Wordplayer has gotten a bit out of hand.

Here's the scenario, which I first referenced a few days ago. Terry Rossio posted an inspiring article about how to play with expectations of both audience and character within a script.

Great article. Nobody here is arguing anything else.

However, Terry make the mistake of calling these references "dramatic irony."

"Dramatic irony" is when the audience knows something a character does not know. That's the definition, the universally accepted definition. I even looked it up in several places just to make absolutely sure I didn't have it wrong all these years, and the general literary world seems to agree with me.

The real mistake I made was in trying to describe irony. Just basic irony, when expectations conflict with reality.

Stupid Emily.

The problem is, irony is such a complex concept and I was trying to boil it down to its simplest roots, without realizing that everybody who's ever taken an English class has their own interpretation of what irony is and will stick to that interpretation even in the midst of battling a pack of wild dingos.

The audacity of me, disagreeing with people. I mean, really.

The real IRONY here - suckers! - is that the very people who were accusing me of forcing them to accept some societal definition advocated by cookie-cutter English teachers (and isn't that kind of what a definition is?), were also the very people who were demanding that I be burned at the stake for disagreeing with the majority.

But whatever. I gave up on that discussion. Irony is just too complex and I didn't take that into account when I tried to explain it. And some people who haven't been calling for my execution made some very good points that I've been turning over in my head for the past couple of days.

Still, Terry hasn't changed the references in his post to correct his mistake. So I thought I'd go back to the beginning and help to clarify the original problem, one that is much easier to solve.

"Dramatic Irony". It's not the same thing as "irony in drama". Terry's problem in this article is that he refers to every example as dramatic irony when in fact most of them are intended to represent simple irony.

I really hate the person who named these devices.

What's really driving me insane is that even that is causing a ruckus. Even though dramatic irony has one meaning, a meaning I've been teaching for ages, a meaning you can find in almost all literature books across the land, people are still disagreeing with me, and for some reasons so silly I just tried to type up five different sentences trying to explain why and none of them made any sense.

And then the truth came out. Terry doesn't like the definitions of dramatic irony so he came up with a better definition. Well no wonder. If this whole argument is over how to define dramatic irony and Terry makes up his own definition, we're never going to stop arguing because he's never going to acknowledge the real definition and I'm never going to acknowledge his fake one.

I met this guy once who hated Pulp Fiction because he claimed that nobody changed throughout the film - there were no character arcs. So I brought up Marcellus Wallace. Nope, he said, Marcellus didn't change at all. I knew at that point there was no point in continuing the discussion because if this guy wasn't going to agree on what I believe to be a pretty obvious plot point, then we were never going to be on the same level in the discussion.

That's kind of what I feel like now. If I tell you that your feet are on the ground and you keep telling me that you float, we can't really have a logical conversation.

So great. I may have made the writer of Shrek and the Pirates movies my enemy for life. Yeah that's a typical Emily maneuver.