Monday, March 27, 2006

The Brilliance of Buffy

…and other Joss Whedon creations.

Hey everyone. I'm Cat Marsters, and I'm thrilled to be the first guest blogger this week! I'm going to have a little chat with you about one of my favourite subjects: Buffy, and the work of Joss Whedon. Not only is Buffy a great show to watch, I've also learned a lot about writing, plotting, characterisation, and dialogue from it.

Excuse my spelling, I'm English.

I’m going to assume that everyone in the Western Hemisphere has by now heard of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Little old men in the Himalayas who haven’t seen a TV since the moon landings have heard of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I’m going to introduce her anyway.

Buffy is the creation of Joss Whedon. She first appeared in a movie, which I liked, mostly because it had Luke Perry in it, but which sadly flopped. Undeterred, Joss came back a few years later with a primetime TV series, starring a blond Californian teenager endowed with the superpowers necessary to fight evil, especially vampires.

So: Lesson the First. Never give up. If you want to write about a teenager with superpowers, then do it. No one (not even the Buffy characters) can see into the future and tell you what’s actually going to sell. Somewhere out there, there’s a market for your story. When I first started trying to sell my sexy fantasy chicklit mysteries, I got told that no one writes fantasy in that voice. I reworked the idea, brought in some new characters, made it sexier still, and sold the first story to Ellora’s Cave. It came out in February.


Lesson the Second: Kill the darlings. No, I don’t mean kill off your favourite characters (although Joss has been known to do that too, repeatedly), but taking out your favourite bits. Just because you—or someone else—thinks they’re great, doesn’t mean you should rely on them.
There are a couple of things about Joss’s writing that really stand out as hallmarks. Firstly, his brilliant dialogue. Here’s an example, from the Season Four episode Something Blue.

Giles: Look, look, Spike—we have no intention of killing a harmless.. uh, creature.. but we have to know what's been done to you. We can't let you go until we're sure that you're…impotent—
Spike: Hey!
Giles: Sorry, poor choice of words. Until we're sure you're, you're..
Buffy: Flaccid?
Spike: You are one step away, missy.
Buffy: Giles, help! He's going to scold me.

Joss acknowledged the praise, thought about it, then wrote an episode with no dialogue (Well, not entirely. But the characters all become mute halfway through, and it’s well-known as one of the best eposides there is), called Hush, in Season Four.
So people went away and thought about this. Aha, they said. What makes Joss so brilliant is his plotting!

So he wrote Restless. Which is a dream sequence, and has no plot at all.
Well, then, said his critics. Must be the humour. He can’t write an eposide that’s not funny.

He wrote The Body in Season Five, where Buffy’s mother dies. It doesn’t have a single joke.

What I’m getting at here is that Joss’s writing evolves because he never relies on one strength. He develops them all the time. Hush was an exercise in making the show stronger visually. Restless explored characterisation. The Body was simply very true.
Don’t be a one-trick pony. Learn lots of tricks!

Lesson the Third: Love your fans. Because they love you, and you’d be nowhere without them. After Buffy ended, Joss wrote a sci-fi western series called Firefly. It was actually brilliant, but got axed after ten episodes. Possibly because the studio execs all had lobotomies.
But in that short space of time, Firefly gained a massive fan base. And it grew. Google it: look at all the websites. The DVDs sold like hotcakes. Fans took out a full-page ad in Variety, thanking Joss and his team for giving them the show in the first place. They petitioned the studio. They petitioned everybody.
And lo, Serenity was born.

Serenity, of course, is the movie, released last year, about the Firefly crew. As soon as it was announced—as soon as it was rumoured—the fans went wild, and even more websites were set up. Conventions were arranged. Money and publicity were both raised.

And the film was great (thank God, because how embarrassing would that have been otherwise?). And it had a great opening weekend. And the DVDs sold like even hotter cakes.

And Joss thanked the fans on the DVD.

There are more lessons to be learned from Joss. Stuff like: It’s do or die: hey, I’ve died twice; Don’t be afraid to make a main character a lesbian; If they sing, there’d better be a damn good reason; Vampire stories don’t have to be sombre and serious; British characters aren’t always evil; If you want your characters to talk like a mixture of Californian teenagers, Shakespearean actors and Wild West gunslingers, then let them; and Just because something’s set in space doesn’t mean there have to be aliens.

Oh: and the most important one. Don’t forget about the importance of hot men. Although I’m sure you knew that one already.



Thank you for your time.

Cat

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