RAMBLING THAT -- SPOILER ALERT -- IS RAMBLY

[earlgreytea68]

The other day I wrote and posted an Inceptionfic. It was just a silly little thing, right? Eames and Arthur vs. the mouse. It was completely unplanned, the kind of thing where you wake up with the characters talking and you just let them talk it out.

I had no idea how I wanted the fic to end. I was taken with the idea of Arthur shooting at the mouse, and I liked the idea that Arthur would think that was a romantic gesture. When Eames made the crack about Arthur not being the kind of boyfriend who gave roses, Arthur's line about discharged bullets being forever came to me. I liked the line, I liked Eames's Hallmark joke that came after it, I liked the little repartee between them about Arthur paying for his designer clothes (because one of my favorite fanon-canon details is Arthur's obsession with costly fashion). And I especially liked that Arthur making a joke about greeting cards seemed like the kind of thing he would only do when comfortable and relaxed with his boyfriend at home. Like, I've thought a lot about Arthur recently, and I think he has a lovely sense of humor that he keeps mostly buttoned up, and part of the joy of writing Arthur/Eames in established relationship is you get that sense of humor, and I liked having Eames have that same moment of realization.

All of which is to say that, well, this was just a fic I wrote because I'd just got done with hundreds of pages with these characters and I missed their heads a little bit and I was fooling around and hanging out with them, and I was totally caught off-guard when a couple of people mentioned the fic's (500) Days of Summer reference, a movie I've never seen and definitely didn't intend to reference.

It turns out that, in (500) Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (otherwise also Arthur in Inception) plays a character who writes greeting cards for a living. And, once you know that, I seem really unbearably clever giving Arthur that sly little aside about greeting cards, right?

I actually am an extraordinarily clever individual, I assure my students of that all the time, but I am not nearly as clever a writer as I wish I could pretend to be. All of you are so very lovely in thinking brilliant things of me, but this situation happens to me all the time, where something shows up in the fic that I wish so desperately I could take credit for and really it almost always ends up that I just liked the joke (I almost always do everything in my writing for the joke, okay? I hate to lose a good joke, I will tie myself up in knots to keep some good banter in a fic).

ANYWAY, I'm writing all about this because it happened to coincide with Moffat starting a new season of Doctor Who, and then Moffat winning an Emmy (OMG YOU GUYS!), and then the usual Moffat camps drawing their lines and me sitting there in the middle of it with my little frowny face of thought. Because after a while of being told how awful Moffat is to women, you start to feel bad when you like Moffat, which I do. You start to feel like a terrible person. You start to feel like there's something wrong with you. You start to only be able to enjoy a writer you actually really like if you quickly say first, "IknowhisstuffismostlyterribleBUT." You start to feel a little the way I did when someone once accused me of being misogynistic because I wrote two little girls who liked pretty dresses and glitter and there I was reinforcing gender roles and I spent a little while panicking about what I was doing and was I setting bad examples and and and --

And a friend happened to point me to this old-ish post on Moffat that I had never read before and well, anyway, that's my point, isn't it? Just as no writer is responsible for every moment of brilliance you think is sitting there in their fiction, no writer is also responsible for all of the terribleness you think is in there, either. I mean, on some level, a writer is responsible for EVERYTHING, but authorial intent is another thing entirely, is a tricky, tricky being, and sometimes a writer is terribly, horribly sexist, and sometimes a writer just wrote about two little girls who liked pretty dresses and glitter and didn't mean them to stand in for every little girl everywhere.

I don't know, I struggle a lot with a writer's sense of social responsibility, with how much writers need to consciously set out to change the world. But there comes a point in time when, as a writer, there's a piece of you that stops worrying about the "message" and just writes. Just writes the story. Just gets up one morning and writes about the Doctor having to deal with glitter in TARDIS machinery, because it's *funny.* Just gets up one morning and has Arthur write greeting cards about bullets, because it's *funny.* And I don't know, maybe I'm destroying the mystique of my writing in saying this, but what I want, as a writer, is to make you smile, okay? I want you to laugh. I want you to love the characters I love, I want you to want to hang out with them, to hug them, to take them for coffee or a drink or a playdate, to give them a snuggle or a snog, to just like *them.* Which is probably because I want all of you to like *me,* if you're doing some kind of psychoanalysis, and if you start to go down that path, you're back in the mire of authorial intent, which is just my point: it's all a mess.

Maybe it's because I was trained as a lawyer. There's this exercise all lawyers are forced to do: You tell the story so your client wins; you tell the same exact story so your client loses. Every lawyer learns this. Word choice here, one fact focused on over another there, and you get to the opposite conclusion, and, if you've done it right, it feels inevitable. And maybe, when you're forced to do that enough, you're less capable of thinking sides than you used to be, less capable of drawing the conclusions others might be. Is Moffat's writing sexist? Sure, you can write that story. Is Moffat's writing not sexist? Probably you could write that story as well. (Or, at least, no more sexist than any other writing that has come out of the conditioning of a patriarchal society, and I include mine in there as well.) Is Moffat's writing bad? On some level, if it's not your thing. Is Moffat's writing good? On some level, if it's your thing.

So, I don't know. I guess this is just my very long, recurring manifesto saying: I like Steven Moffat as a writer. (I know nothing about him as a person, and don't presume to know.) I think his dialogue is brilliant, clever, witty. I think he writes with a lot of heart, I think he has an ear for the way emotion can sound, and I think he knows how to put together a good sound quote that feels like it wraps everything up in a bow.

Does he have drawbacks? Sure. I can talk about those, too. But, for just this little while, as I periodically feel the need to do, I wanted to give me a breath of space to just say I like Steven Moffat's writing, and not have to put the caveats all around it. I like Steven Moffat's writing, Arthur makes innocent jokes about greeting cards, and Athena and Fortuna still routinely save the world and still love glitter, I promise you. (Sometimes they have glitter parties. Matt and Sylvain aren't huge on glitter parties because they make a mess. Brem loves them because Brem likes to annoy his brothers-in-law. As long as they don't happen on his TARDIS because his TARDIS turns out to be super-fussy about glitter in the mechanisms.)

I still hate His Last Vow, though.

Comments

[kizzia.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this because it's pretty much how I feel about Moffat too. There are things he does that I love, things that I like, and some things that I think are a bit not good. Sometimes it seems like you have to pick a side and I don't want to. I just want to enjoy what I enjoy. And now I'm rambling! Sorry.

[earlgreytea68.livejournal.com]

Yes! No side-picking! Let us just be!

[rereader.livejournal.com]

I so hear you!

And I've never quite understood why it's a good thing to tell girl children that they should play with Legos and computers if they want to, but a bad thing to tell the same children they should play with dolls and glitter if they want to. Wasn't one of the ideas behind the feminist movement that we shouldn't let other people's preconceptions define us? And shouldn't that go both ways?

(And I think Moffat is a wonderful character writer, which means he writes about and for specific characters, and not about or for populations, and that approach has both good and less good aspects. :))

[earlgreytea68.livejournal.com]

I've never understood that, either. There's even a bit in Chaosverse where Rose thinks that she's not going to discourage her girls because they can save the world just as well in their skirts as they could in pants, and I think that's important. The girls who they are, full stop, period.

And I think you're right about Moffat. He writes on a micro level, in more ways than one, which, as you say, has its pros and cons.

[rereader.livejournal.com]

they can save the world just as well in their skirts as they could in pants, and I think that's important

YES!

That puts me in mind of something my youngest niece did when she was about three. My sister was working in her home office, and my niece suddenly leaped in, wearing a pink tutu from the dress-up box and waving a plastic sword, announcing "I a PINCESS!" And whyever not? :D

[earlgreytea68.livejournal.com]

Ha! I love this! :-)

[azriona.livejournal.com]

Of course you hate HLV. Everyone hates HLV. It's a terribly written story. The story itself is amazing and fantastic and twisty and turny and wonderful....but it's so poorly written it's hard to tell. I'm always going to wonder what HLV would have been if Moffat hadn't had to rush through writing it, and if he'd been allowed to write it prior to any of the filming taking place.

[earlgreytea68.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you make a good point that it was rushed. LET US NOT RUSH THE NEXT ONE.

[helping-capn-j.livejournal.com]

I totally agree about Moffat, and I really wish I was strong enough not to let the preconceptions about his writing on the large part of the internet effect my enjoyment because one of the things I admire most about his writing is the pure joyfulness in telling the story. Holy run on sentence batman! Anyway, what I'm trying to say is you are right about him. Sitting on the fence and being critical but not negative is where it is at.

Also, did I somehow miss this inception fic? I can't see it on your LJ?

[earlgreytea68.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know what? I just realized that I never linked the Inceptionfic on my LJ. It's here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2192868

[chocolamousse.livejournal.com]

what I want, as a writer, is to make you smile, okay? I want you to laugh. I want you to love the characters I love, I want you to want to hang out with them, to hug them, to take them for coffee or a drink or a playdate, to give them a snuggle or a snog, to just like *them.*
And you totally manage to do that, believe me.

[miwahni.livejournal.com]

I think of Moffat and his writing in the same way that I think about my friends and family - love them to bits even if I'm not fond of every little thing about them. You get that, with real people. Moffat's writing is (mostly) clever enough to win my approbation, even if he ties himself up in knots at times. Occasionally he skirts the borders of misogyny but I can forgive his lapses, even while shaking my head. Hell, I'm not perfect, why should he be?

[earlgreytea68.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's an excellent way of putting it!

[rifleman-s.livejournal.com]

"But there comes a point in time when, as a writer, there's a piece of you that stops worrying about the "message" and just writes. Just writes the story."

Yes, that's it. If everyone wrote to be "politically correct" all the time, there'd be no point to imagination, no point to free flying in your mind and the fiction available to read would be so much the poorer.

A sense of conscience, yes, but hide-bind by "rules", no.