Vittachi

Made-up characters invade the real world

Fictional people are stealing our jobs and women

By Nury Vittachi

ZOOMING up the New York Times bestseller chart this week is a romantic novel called Charm by Kendall Hart.  Nothing odd about that.

Except for the fact that she doesn’t exist. Kendall Hart is a made-up character from a TV show.

I pointed this out to my publisher, who couldn’t see anything wrong with it. “Look,” he said, huffily clicking on the computer. “Here’s a video clip from the TV episode in which you can see her write it.”

This of course proved nothing except that the logical thought processes of publishers are a mystery more arcane and complex than Einstein’s dreams or my wife’s purchasing decisions.

               Now I don’t know about you, but I have a serious problem with non-existent people doing stuff in the real world. This is our world, dang it. We spent years building it. I object to fictional people coming over here and taking our jobs, sleeping with our women and so on. 

               I was fuming about this when I got a letter from the person who buys my novels. “To be honest, I don’t really like your writing that much,” the man wrote. “But I like Mr. Wong’s. Where can I buy his book?”

                I made the mistake of mentioning this to my publisher.  “This person wants to know where to buy a fictional book written by one of my fictional characters,” I said. “Like duh.”

                “What a great idea,” he said, completely missing the point. “I could publish Mr. Wong’s book. It could hardly sell worse than yours.”

                At first I thought he had been taking illegal substances (mandatory for publishers who want to stay sane), but he was serious. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to his shelves. “A Series of Unfortunate Events was written by Lemony Snicket, a fictional character in the story.” He showed me two books written by fictional authors from the world of Harry Potter. Kennilworthy Whisp wrote Quidditch Through the Ages and Newt Scamander wrote Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them.

“Why hasn’t JK Rowling sued them, like she has sued everyone else?” I asked.

                “You can’t sue fictional characters,” he said. “And even if you did, what would you get? Fictional dollars?”   

Intrigued, I did some research. The author who has most been tormented by his creations coming alive must be Chicago author Edward Gorey. He had a habit of dreaming up characters whose names were anagrams of his own name. His publishers soon started releasing books by Ogdred Weary, Mrs. Regera Dowdy, Raddory Gewe, Dogear Wryde, E. G. Deadworry, D. Awdrey-Gore, Wardore Edgy, and Madame Groeda Weyrd. Some of these outsold Gorey’s own books.

Further investigation revealed that Ogure Ito, credited with having produced several top Japanese manga books, is also fictional. The name Ogure Ito is really just a Japanese-accented spelling of the English phrase “Oh great.” Apparently the publishers did not realize that when English speakers say “Oh great” they actually mean the opposite, as in “that’s really baaaad”. (Which is what English-speakers say when they mean something is really good.)

Oh well, if you can’t beat them… I told my publisher that I intended to write my next book under the name of my fictional detective, Mr Wong. "Fine. The book will be issued under his name,” he replied. “As will the paycheck.”

Arthur C Clarke completes his final orbit

Arthur and the Ego Chamber

By Nury Vittachi

SIR ARTHUR was lost in his own world, as usual. The last time I saw Arthur C. Clarke, the visionary author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, his hearing had gone.                

           This columnist was interviewing him on stage in Sri Lanka last year. I shrieked each question into his left ear until I was red-faced. But he misheard everything I said.

Thank goodness.

The result was that (a) the audience got a good laugh at the total disconnect between what I asked and what he replied, and (b) Arthur ended up ignoring me and talking about whatever came into his head, which was a darn sight more interesting for all concerned.

Sir Arthur, who died [on March 19^th], had a wicked sense of humour. Talking about claims that UFOs regularly visit this planet, he said: “They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth.”

                He first approached my family in 1956, when he was diving addict hanging out on Unawatuna beach on the south coast of Ceylon. He wanted my father, a newspaperman, to print something he had written. The stuff was bizarre, mind-boggling and unrealistic, but kind of fun – so my Dad agreed.

                Good call. To be brutally honest, Arthur wrote some of the most forgettable human characters in literary history, but his non-human ones (such as HAL 9000 the computer) were absolutely riveting.

                Our families became friends. His house in Colombo was famous for three reasons. It had a satellite dish on top, long before anyone knew what a large metal dinner plate on one’s roof could do. It had its own elevator—an unheard-of luxury in a private home. And there was his souvenir-filled study, which he called The Ego Chamber. “This is a bit of a spaceship, and here’s a chunk of the moon,” he would say, holding up items from his shelf.

“Yeah, right,” we said, not knowing whether we dare believe him.

Clarke became totally Asian. He wore a sarong on his lower half and a Nehru jacket on his top half. His friends were all locals. He lived on curry.

                But he never lost his sense of humour, which infected everyone. When US astronauts returned from the moon, one of them phoned him: “We want you to know that we were sorely tempted to call NASA and say, ‘Hey, Houston, we found this big black monolith thing on the dark side of the moon.’”

                He took revenge on people who didn’t take him seriously. He revealed to everyone that the short story that became 2001: A Space Odyssey was written for the BBC, but was rejected.

                And then there was his dig at a lawyer who gave him bad advice. Arthur famously came up with the concept of orbiting satellites. A lawyer friend thought the whole idea was too far-fetched and told him not to patent it.  Arthur put this anecdote into an essay entitled How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time.

                At his birth anniversary party in December, Arthur C. Clarke told folk that it wasn’t his birthday. “It’s my 90^th orbit of the sun,” he explained.

                Goodbye, Arthur. We’ll miss you, but your tales will orbit forever.

NYT reveals ending

I WAS INTERVIEWED on the radio this morning (ABC and RTHK) about book issues, including all the palavar over Harry Potter. I really agree with what Caterpillarboy says in his comments on this site - the fuss may be silly and over-the-top, but the whole debate has been good -- it has stretched people's imaginations and reminded people that reading books can be a seriously fun activity.
     In the meantime, two newspapers, the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times, have printed reviews today that more or less give away the ending of the new book. What does this show? This reveals that even smallish web-discussion groups like this one can have higher principles than the biggest, richest media groups in the world. Yay for us.

Your special book/ album/ movie

ARE YOU EMBARRASSED by your choice of favourite book/ band/ movie?
    I got this letter from a friend who likes to call herself Merlin:
    “Has this ever happened to you? I read a book that got rave reviews and it just didn’t work for me. I just didn’t get it. And then I read a book which I thought was the best thing ever, but the thing attracted no attention: no one else has ever heard of it. When people ask me for my favourite book, I just lie. What would you do?”
    I think Merlin’s question is an intriguing one, and one that I would love to hear from current or previous members of my “writing cells” about.
    Don’t worry, Merlin. Probably we all have examples of what she is referring to. The book that everyone loved (it has a place in literary history) but which meant nothing to me is Wuthering Heights. I was so shocked to get nothing out of it, after reading so many litcrit raves about it, that I sat down and read it all again, in case I had missed the magic. But it still remained closed to me.
    As for the book that I really loved, that never won fame or a Pulitzer or anything remotely similar, was a little book called Talking Man by Terry Bisson, about a wizard who lives in a car junkyard in Kentucky. He looks like an old hobo, but in fact he was he who dreamed the world into existence….

New Tolkien book out

There’s a new JRR Tolkien book out.

            Huh? Isn’t he dead? True, but that’s never stopped an enthusiastic publisher from making a buck. It’s a tale Tolkien wrote decades ago that has been completed by his son.

Conroy, de Kretser: new work

TWO AUTHORS from two sides of the planet  have swung new deals: Pat Conroy from the US and Michelle de Kretser, a Sri Lankan based in Australia
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Vonnegurt dies

GOODBYE TO A CULT HERO. Kurt Vonnegurt, author of Slaughterhouse Five, died last night in New York at the age of 84. Farewell, Mr Kilgore -- you'll be much missed. He was a funky, imaginative writer, with works full of biting satire against modern values. A former soldier who was very anti-war, he was popular with the young. Yet he strongly engaged the attention of the critics. It wasn't an easy ride. One of his early books, Cat's Cradle (1963) sold only 500 copies. Yet now it is still in print, four decades later, and on many school reading lists.

In his honour, here's a literary game: can anyone name any other author beloved of the critics, AND popular with the general reading public?

Virgin Comics' India series

WELCOME TO THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH. This is Ayodha, final dwelling place of humanity in a new comic book series called Ramayan 3392 AD.

How to write a screenplay

What's the secret of writing a good screenplay? I'm on my third, but I haven't really submitted them to anyone except my friends. How do I know how good they are? Alo, how long should they be.
Sunmu
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Those are tough questions to answer in a short, packagable form. So let me answer the easy one first. How long should they be? Most movies are between 90 minutes and 120 minutes long. The rule of thumb is one page per minute, so your screenplay text, if formatted more or less in a standard way, would be between 90 and 120 pages.
    As for "what makes a good screenplay good", that's a little more complicated.

The Secret of Cinderella

In which literary journeys cross one evening in Hong Kong...

THERE WERE THREE major happenings in Hong Kong last night for people interested in literature. Two kilometres south-west of where I stood, the current holder of the Man Booker Prize, the pre-eminent literary award was having dinner. I am fascinated by John Banville's writing, but I declined the invitation.

Two kilometres northeast of where I stood, there was an event featuring Suketu Mehta, who had just won the top literary award for Asia-Pacific writing: the Kiriyama Prize. I could have gone to that, but I had had breakfast with him the previous day, so decided to skip it.

In the end, I went to an event for the launch of a new children's anthology by Chameleon Press, a small publisher based in Hong Kong. It was the least grand of the events listed for the literary festival for the day, but it was important in an unusual way: there were a range of authors, mostly amateur, in the book, from Indian to Chinese to Italian to Sri Lankan. Children's book authors are rare in Asia, so I joined the celebration for the anthology, which is called Thomas Beckham Wang.

I love children's books and I am fascinated by the mysteries in the history of the genre.

One of them is the secret of Cinderella. I have long been intrigued by the tale, which most children assume started as a Disney cartoon, and most adults assume is a European fairy tale.

But there has always struck me as something odd about the tale: it's the shoe-size. Why should the story hinge on the shoe size of the main character? Stories are inevitably based on the inner beauty of the character, the outer beauty of the character, the brains or the strength or the courage of the character: but never the shoe size. Cinderalla is unique in that respect.

Think about it long enough and you will solve the mystery.

Cinderella is an early example of a pirated piece of creative intellectual property. It is a fairy tale from this side of the world, from East Asia. It was written around AD 860, and concerns a girl called Yeh-Shan, who had the smallest feet in town: a key signifier of beauty in traditional Chinese culture.

The tale of Yeh-Shan and her ugly sisters was lifted by French writers in the 1600s, some 700 years later. They changed her name but retained the fact that her fortune was made by her shoe-size: a detail that makes sense in Chinese culture, but is odd in a Western context.

So much creative work is misunderstood and wrongly packaged these days; and only the few people who are interested in culture and history know the truth.

Children all over Asia purchase the "Disney Princesses" books and videos and accompanying merchandise. But almost no-one remembers the origins.

But let us not forget. Welcome home, Yeh-Shan.