Wednesday 15 May 2013

From the Margins: Redshirts and Writing


Firstly, by way of a bit of an introduction, I am Suzanne, this agency's friendly neighborhood editor.  If you get to the end of this post and find that you like my thoughts on books, and would like to peek a bit further into my head, I have a separate blog over at http://galacticmarginalia.blogspot.com/.

Warning: In discussing this book, this post has to talk about the book as a whole. It therefore contains spoilers. Just go read the book first. You'll thank me for it.

What would happen if you were on a spaceship that is actually the set for a TV show in another and you didn't know it? Worse yet, not only are you a part of this TV show in another reality, it is a poorly written TV show meant to capitalize on the commercial success of Star Trek, and you aren't one of the bridge crew, you are staff on the lower levels—an extra.

Yes, that is right, you are a redshirt. This is the premise of the book by the same name by John Scalzi, but, at the same time, it is so much more than this. A book that seems to be a humorous examination of what it would be like to be a redshirt trapped on a show (Chronicles of Intrepid) with no concern for that character’s fate or back story actually becomes a very thoughtful, and sometimes incredibly poignant meditation about the writer’s role as god of his or her universe, and the responsibilities the writer has to his characters.

The book’s main characters (different from the ship’s bridge crew and therefore the “main characters” of the show for which the redshirts are being sacrificed for) begin to piece together the pattern of deaths not long after they arrive on the ship. Mysterious disappearances of mid-level officers when the senior officers arrive looking for people to staff away missions, strange and very flamboyant deaths with those same senior officers are involved. Members of the senior staff possess miraculous healing abilities (a convenience for a character wounded in one “episode” to be completely fit by next week’s adventure). All of these new recruits to the Intrepid were replacing people who had died.

But it wasn't until a yeti of a man appears out of the ductwork and tells our main character, Dahl, to avoid the Narrative that pieces start to fall into place. This book is hilarious.

In this book, what is one person’s reality is another person’s narrative, and is shaped by a writer and a writer’s whims. The senseless deaths turn out to be the dramatic gasp needed before the cut to a commercial break, to try to make the danger real without affecting the main “cast” of characters. As far as Chronicles of Intrepid is concerned, the character has no back story, and very little value beyond a little drama. However, from the vantage point we are given through our cast of “redshirts”, we as readers see each one of these deaths as fully felt and realized, and yet they are controlled by a force that has less than the normal cosmic disregard for human life.

In order to gain control of their destinies, these characters travel back to our time (by way of capturing one of the main characters, in order to bend the laws of physics to their favor), in order to meet their writer-god and plead for their lives and dignity. In a plot twist consistent with the twists that had littered the characters’ time on the Intrepid, a solution presents itself that allows the redshirts to put the producers of the show in their favor. They return to their own timeline having saved the day, and hopefully earned the right to die deaths worth dying.

But when you, dear reader, have gotten to the page when you read, “They all lived happily ever after. Seriously,” there are about 100 pages left in the book. This is where the book changes tones, and gets intensely interesting. There are three codas, labeled “First Person,” “Second Person,” and “Third Person,” all dealing with the fall out of the redshirts' visit on individuals in 2012.

The first coda is the one I really want to focus on. It’s written as the personal, anonymous blog of the head writer for the TV show, Chronicles of Intrepid, from the moment right after he’s found out that when he writes a death scene for a character, someone really dies. It is an interesting meditation on writing, writer’s block, and feeling responsible to your characters to provide them a death (and a life) of worth. And underneath it all, the fact that maybe the universe itself may be a chaotic, essentially meaningless world, but that is all the more reason not to let the written universe be. Let me share with you a scene from the “blog,” which Nick, the writer, recounts a dream he had which all of his dead characters came back to talk to him:


NICK
Look, I get it, Finn. You’re unhappy with being dead. So am I. That’s why I am blocked!

FINN
You don't get it. None of us are pissed off at being dead.

REDSHIRT #4
I am!

FINN
(to REDSHIRT #4)
Not now, Davis!
(back to Nick)
None of us except for Davis are pissed off at being dead. Death happens. It happens to everyone. It’s going to happen to you. What we’re pissed about is that our deaths are so completely pointless. When you killed us off, Nick, it doesn't do anything for the story. It’s just a little jolt you give the viewers before the commercial break, and they've forgotten about it before the first Doritos ad fades off the screen. Our lives had meaning, Nick, if only to us. And you gave us really shitty deaths. Pointless, shitty deaths.

NICK
Shitty deaths happen all the time, Finn. People accidentally step in front of buses, or slip and crack their head on the toilet, or go jogging and get attacked by mountain lions. That’s life.

FINN
That’s your life, Nick. But you don't have anyone writing you, as far as you know. We do. It’s you. And when we die on the show, it’s because you've killed us off. Everyone dies. But we died how you decided we were going to die. And so far, you've decided we'd die because it’s easier than writing a dramatic moment whose response is earned in the writing. And you know it, Nick. (p. 266-67)


As I was transposing this quote, there is something about that last moment (“but you don't have anyone writing you, as far as you know” [emphasis added]) which makes this coda, and perhaps this book, strike a chord with me. Don't those two themes often go hand in hand: the power of the author within the universe he or she has created, and the larger analogue of a controlling power in our own universe? These characters are rising up and doing what we ourselves cannot, questioning their creator (finding out for sure they have one and that he is a flawed senior script writer that may drink too much) and demanding that their deaths have meaning.

Since want to keep this blog away from the blatantly religious, I will open up the floor to you, dear reader. How much responsibility do you feel the writer has to his or her characters? If you are a writer, do you characters act in unexpected ways? When you kill them off, do you feel like you are actually killing them off? Do you feel like the writer-god of your universe, or do you feel more like you are the conduit for the narrative and your characters are talking to you?