Last week, BBC Audiobooks America announced that it would sponsor the creation of a story via Twitter feed, using a first sentence written by author Neil Gaiman as the seed and inviting the public to collaborate in completing it, one 140-character passage at a time. The experiment was widely pronounced "cool," as such things usually are, then promptly forgotten by everyone but the participants -- again, as such things usually are.
The several dozen people who contributed to the story seemed to have fun, and perhaps that's all that really matters. A Web 2.0 version of the old surrealist parlor game known as "exquisite corpse," the twittered story was intended as a publicity stunt for BBC Audiobooks America's line of "distinctive single-voiced and full-cast dramatized audiobooks," and surely succeeded at that. Yet BBCAA intends to publish an audio-only version of the story, read by Gaiman himself, which makes this as apt an occasion as any to raise some questions about the creative potential of social networking. How is a good story invented? Is it yet another of those decision-based endeavors that can, according to the technotopian, freakonomical wisdom of our time, be performed better en masse than by the hopelessly antiquated individual? Can fiction be crowdsourced?
Although this is far from the first Twitter-generated story, Gaiman may be the ideal writer to preside over such an undertaking. No popular author better demonstrates how openly borrowed material can be transfigured by the force of a powerful imagination. His work combines elements of fairy tale, folklore, classic British children's fiction, comics, horror and hard-boiled mystery. "Coraline" taps into the tradition of countless stories about bored children who find portals to other worlds, partakes of the evil-stepmother motif from the Brothers Grimm, structures it all into a save-your-parents quest reminiscent of "A Wrinkle in Time," and so on, but Gaiman's limpid style and heady imagery (those button eyes!) also make it indisputably original. The Newbery-medal-winning "The Graveyard Book" performs a similar alchemy by combining Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" with (improbably enough) the modern-day serial-killer thriller. This method makes Gaiman easy to imitate but -- and here's the rub -- impossible to equal.
Gaiman's kickoff sentence for the the BBCAA story is, "Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, 'We don't love you anymore.'" What follows, coaxed out of the Twitterverse, is a patchwork of extremely familiar motifs: malicious animated puppets, cuddly talking animal pals, an ominous castle, a sinister music box and spookily chanted rhymes -- all tied to the obligatory chase after objects of obscure magical importance (otherwise known as plot coupons).
The twittered story (which as of this writing has no title) is Gaimanesque, yes, but only really in tone. Much of it is simply lifted -- from "Coraline," from "Alice in Wonderland," from "The Wizard of Oz" and, above all, from the storehouse of shopworn Hollywood clichés -- to form a patchwork that never resolves into anything more that just that, a hodgepodge of random stuff you've seen a zillion times before. The considerably muddled narrative describes the adventures of a girl who is either 1) kidnapped by her mirror reflection and trying to get home or 2) bravely attempting to rescue her little brother from an evil queen, or both (it keeps changing), but Sam's exploits turned out to be far less compelling than the spectacle of their composition. Witnessing this story come together was an object lesson in the trials of collaboration and the limits of the wisdom of crowds.
Here's how it worked: Although anyone could tweet a suggested next sentence, an editor at BBCAA selected which ones would be incorporated into the canonical version of the story. (Gaiman's involvement in the creative phase of the operation seems minimal, which didn't keep one participant from grandiosely claiming to be "writing an audiobook with Neil Gaiman" elsewhere on the Web.) Oddly enough, no one was bothered by this "gatekeeping" role, even when the BBCAA editor repeatedly rebuffed a campaign to give a minor character a bigger role in the plot. (He/she later gave in, though.) Anyone who took a good look at the chaotic selection of potential paths forward could see that somebody had to steer. Yet, even with a skipper, much of the time the tale didn't seem to be sailing anywhere but in circles.
It's tempting to attribute this meandering quality to the lack of a master plan. However, contrary to what people often think, improvisation is a vital part of the fiction-writing process. Remarkably few single-person authors outline their plots in advance of writing. Many, like the science-fiction novelist Samuel Delany, report that they start out with a few images and then see where their intuition leads them. "Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction," Delaney once wrote, "it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader."
Nor is the problem always a matter of too many people pulling the story in too many directions. True, if you're only going to get one or two of your own sentences into the end product, you're going to want them to be boffo. Consequently, most of the proposed passages represent bids to initiate a pivotal plot development ("Suddenly" has to be the most popular adverb deployed), attempts at high drama ("'No!' The Queen shrieked, 'this will not be allowed! He is mine!'") or articulations of some grand insight or theme ("You have to face her. She's part of you"). Without much in the way of simple scene-setting or nuance, the story lacks texture, atmosphere and the variety in pacing and intensity that makes fiction dramatically effective. Instead, with the emotional volume knob stuck on high, the result is just one damn thing after another.
Still, most of the participants have a pretty firm sense of what the parameters of "a Neil Gaiman story" ought to be, and even the rejected tweets had more in common than you'd expect. There was the occasional marginally literate non sequitur -- "'Sir, do you know what is this egg?' Asked Sam to the badger. 'Of course, lady. This is an Catoblepas eggs.'" (Huh?) Yet even these fell within the same essential thematic register. There were few contributions that came entirely out of left field -- no Mach-5 race cars, say, or sessions of Parliament.
Instead of being bombarded with too many ideas, what the twittered story really suffered from was too few. The handful of contributors who could come up with interesting motifs or turns of phrase had no idea how to constructively inject these into the whole, while the ones who were good at moving the plot forward tended to write exclusively in clichés. The dialogue is particularly lamentable, imported exclusively from the most formulaic of action movies: "'Events are already in motion,' the Prince said. 'We must act'"; "Sam screamed 'Nooooo'" "'Sam! Listen to me!' the Prince shouted, 'You must go, we will hold them off, now RUN!'" I was thinking they'd managed to hit every overplayed note of the blockbuster pulp factory except for the venerable "Don't die on me, damn it!" -- when, sure enough, Sam sobs to the stricken Prince, "No, you can't die!"
The same tired devices turned up over and over again. Any shift in the action always seemed to be accompanied by a mysterious glowing light, and the heroine was forever being "enveloped" or "engulfed" in this glow, if not in darkness or some other featureless miasma, as a way of getting her from one indistinct setting to another. At one point she even finds herself transported to a featureless, solid blue vacancy -- much like the green-screen backdrops used to film connect-the-dots CGI blockbusters.
Despite an endless series of chase scenes, by the fourth day of tweeting with the projected 1,000th-tweet end point approaching, the plot wasn't especially close to a resolution, and key elements remained unexplained. Who was the evil queen (besides a lift from "Coraline," "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Snow White"), and what did she want? What promise had Sam broken? Who didn't love her anymore? What exactly had happened to her brother? Why had she been sucked into the mirror? What was her reflection doing back in the real world? She'd collected two sidekicks (a badger and a wisecracking puppet, motivations unclear), as well as a green marble egg that intermittently pulsed (pulsing being almost as commonplace as glowing in this story), a gold key, a blue crystal rose, a music box with an evil talking doll inside and a confusing back story involving royal twins, a puppet maker, a magpie with a magic mirror and several doppelgängers, none of which added up to a coherent explanation of what was going on. A lot was happening, and it was all pretty boring.
Consensus began to break down, despite efforts among the contributors to sort out the loose ends while the BBCAA editor was off getting lunch or a little shut-eye. Occasionally a sentence made an obvious plea for answers ("It was that voice again. That voice that had haunted her the first time she reach the castle. And then she realized ..."), but no one took up the challenge, leaving those ellipses sadly unfulfilled. It's so much easier to just introduce another new development! As @Toujours_Diva, the group's self-appointed heckler, wrote sarcastically, "You know what this story needs? A few more extraneous characters." (Some of the collaborators interpreted that as a sincere suggestion.)
Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: "When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room." Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you've got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason. Well past the purported 1,000-tweet limit, Sam was still reviewing the pieces of the puzzle confronting her and wailing, "I don't know how to put it together!" She was not alone. At one point, BBCAA put up a poll asking participants where Sam should end up after yet another engulfment, and the response was evenly divided among several major alternatives. Then they tried literally smooshing all the characters and plot coupons together (because they're all part of Sam!) in a climax that involved yet more glowing and pulsing. And it still wasn't over. People were confused and, it seems, still dissatisfied. Time for another poll! Even the ol' "It was all a dream/the ravings of a lunatic" finish was seriously contemplated.
At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, "Where do you get your ideas?" but the real question is "How do you make sense of your ideas?" Delany believed that good writers read so much that they "internalize" certain "literary models" and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story's proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.
But gather together a hundred people who don't really know how to do this and they're still not going to be able to do it. Even if a handful among them actually do have some aptitude, their efforts will be sabotaged by the well-meaning but misguided inclinations of the rest of the group. Like any art, good fiction requires a combination of talents -- eloquence, inventiveness, pragmatism, decisiveness and taste -- rarely found in a single person, and a prevailing feeling for form that can only be located in a single person.
Most of us do recognize the real thing when we see it in action, but that's another matter. As Delany put it, "While many -- or even most -- people can internalize a range of literary models strongly enough to recognize and enjoy them when they see them in ... new works that they read, very few people internalize them to the extent that they can apply them to new material and use them to create. Lots of people want to. But not many people can." Not many people, and certainly no crowds.
"Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales," edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
This anthology of fractured and reconfigured fairy tales for young readers offers an excellent introduction to the unreliability of perspective, one that plenty of adults will find provocative, too. How do the old stories look when retold from the point of view of the wicked witch, the evil wizard, the troll under the bridge?
A dazzling array of contributors -- Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, Jane Yolen, Peter S. Beagle and Kelly Link, among others -- present the other side of the story. Some hew pretty close to tradition; Beagle's clucking giantess says of Jack, "He was a nice boy, really, for all the vexation he caused. They always are. I've never eaten a bad one yet," even if she insists that the beanstalk was planted by her husband. Garth Nix's Rapunzel is actually a lazy teenage freeloader, not so much imprisoned in the hardworking witch's tower as squatting there, gorging on free food and cable TV.
Link, not surprisingly, provides the edgiest tale, reinterpreting "Cinderella" as a modern-day account of blended family resentment and a boy's temptation to do "exactly the wrong thing." The book's creepy cover art may give some sensitive kids nightmares, but it's Link's story that will make the grown-ups think.
Check out recent Critics' Picks:
HBO's "Boy Interrupted," by Heather Havrilesky
Michelle Forbes on "True Blood," by Laura Miller
Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" on DVD, by Andrew O'Hehir
Bibio's CD "Ambivalence Avenue," by Heather Havrilesky
"Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading," by Joy Press
Henry Selick's stop-motion animated film "Coraline," just out in a double-disc collector's edition on DVD and Blu-ray, is a wonder of visual invention, creating a prickly, whimsical fun-house world and then tearing it down again. It is best considered independent from the Neil Gaiman novella that inspired it, a mini-masterpiece of English Gothic horror with a bone-chilling darkness at its core. Selick tells essentially the same story, about a modern-day Alice who finds a secret passage into an idyllic other world that turns out to be a deadly trap, but renders its plucky heroine and her universe in friendlier, goofier, more American colors. Only the youngest children will find Selick's "Coraline" truly frightening, I would think, although its seductive-cum-sinister "other mother" might puzzle them. (I haven't tried it on my 5-year-olds yet.)
A theatrical smash in both 2-D and 3-D versions, "Coraline" now reaches home video in both formats; four sets of 3-D glasses are included, along with a digital copy of the film that's easily exportable to your laptop or iPod. I watched the whole movie with the red-blue specs on, and there are some nifty effects, notably in the glowing, spectral tunnel between Coraline's real house and the other world and in the haunted garden patrolled by her "other father" atop a mechanical praying mantis. But let's be honest: Home video 3-D is a novelty at this point, awaiting further technical breakthroughs, and "Coraline" loses virtually nothing viewed as an ordinary film. (I have heard that the 3-D effect comes closer to theatrical level on a big-screen plasma set, but I don't own one.)
Like Selick's now-classic "Nightmare Before Christmas," "Coraline" is more likely to charm the pants off you than scare 'em; the evil "beldam" who wants to entrap our heroine is a spiderish, faintly sexy combination of Cruella DeVille, Stepford wife and Morticia Addams. While Gaiman depicts her as a bottomless reservoir of unexplained evil, I almost feel that Selick views her more sympathetically. She creates wondrous, ephemeral landscapes designed to draw in the young and the young at heart, and so does he. Almost wistfully, he disassembles them in the end and allows us to go home to what Coraline calls "the other, other world."
Check out previous Critics' Picks:
"Torchwood: Children of Earth" on BBC America and DVD
Phoenix's CD "Wolfgang Phoenix Amadeus"
The giant Javits convention center in New York City felt a bit empty during last week’s Book Expo America, the publishing industry’s annual gathering. Attendance was down and recession-friendly cocktail parties replaced the traditional sit-down dinners. But bestselling authors dutifully showed up to promote their latest books, and committed fans lined up to have them signed.
We tracked down some of our favorite writers to ask them what we should take to the beach this summer. Despite Neil Gaiman's weariness after signing 170 books in a row, he couldn't resist a chance to share several of his favorites. Jonathan Lethem opted for a classic. "Outlanders” series writer Diana Gabaldon plugged her favorite crime fiction. Watch all of their thoughtful suggestions below.
Michael Connelly
He started out as a reporter, and his latest book deals with the crumbling newspaper business (of course, it’s also a thriller). Connelly is a bestselling novelist and the creator of LAPD detective Hieronymus Bosch, a character that he has featured again and again in works like “The Concrete Blonde,” “The Overlook” and the forthcoming “Nine Dragons.” He had kind words for the books of George Pelecanos. Connelly’s books have appeared in 35 languages.
Mary Karr
We found Mary Karr signing autographs and giving away copies of her latest memoir, “Lit,” which details her descent into alcoholism and depression and then her emergence into the writer she is today. A professor of literature at Syracuse University, she has written poems, essays and three memoirs. The first two, “The Liars’ Club” and “Cherry,” spent substantial periods on the New York Times bestseller lists. Karr has also been a fellow at Radcliffe College and held a Guggenheim fellowship.
Jonathan Lethem
Brooklyn's own Jonathan Lethem has published nine novels as well as novellas, comics and fiction, including “Motherless Brooklyn” and “You Don't Love Me Yet.” His most recent book, “Chronic City,” will be published this fall. Although he says he will spend much of the summer outside New York City, he plans to reach for Balzac to stay connected to the urban vibe.
Sarah Dunant
Sarah Dunant was excited to share three new books that she can’t wait to pick up this summer (after which she’ll rest her eyes and lie down in the sunshine, she says). Dunant has written eight novels and two screenplays, and has edited two books of essays, also fitting in a stint working at the BBC. She lives in London and Florence.
Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman writes fantasy, children’s books, graphic horror, short stories, screenplays, journalism, poetry and drama. He gained a cult following with his “Sandman” graphic novel series and is the author of “Stardust,” “American Gods,” and “Coraline” (the latter recently made into a movie and a musical). Born in England, he now lives in Minneapolis.
Berkeley Breathed
An award-winning cartoonist based in Southern California, Berkeley Breathed is the creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic “Bloom County” and the series “Opus.” He also writes children’s books such as “Pete and Pickles” and “Flawed Dogs – The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster,” which will be published in September.
Diana Gabaldon
Diana Gabaldon is the author of the “Outlander” novels, New York Times bestsellers that Salon has described as “the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D.” She holds degrees in zoology, marine biology and quantitative behavioral ecology.
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson were sitting together signing their latest book, “Peter and the Sword of Mercy” (the fourth in a series based on Peter Pan, which will be published in October). A Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist, Barry has 30 books to his name. Best known for mysteries and thrillers like “Chain of Evidence” and “Parallel Lies,” Pearson has written more than 20 novels.
The author of "Coraline," "Stardust," and the "Sandman" graphic novels shares some of his favorite reads. Find more suggested books here.
There's often a pall of creepiness hanging over the most memorable children's literature: Wooden puppets yearning to become real boys are instead turned into circus donkeys, liable to be skinned if they can't perform on demand. Spoiled young girls who insist on wearing red shoes to church are doomed to dance until the end of time, even after their feet have been chopped off and replaced with wooden prosthetics. These stories were designed, in part, to scare kids into behaving, but they tend to outlast their obvious motivational purposes. They often stick with us into adulthood, perhaps as a reminder that childhood isn't necessarily a pretty or an easy place, even though we often talk ourselves into remembering it that way.
"Coraline," Neil Gaiman's compact but beautifully textured 2002 children's novel, is a modern-day fairy tale with its share of dark, jagged corners. Its eponymous heroine is a little girl whose parents are often distracted and don't always have time for her. But she discovers an alternative family that, at first, seems to be an improvement -- although this Other Mother and Father do have buttons sewn where their eyes should be, and you can bet that's not a good sign.
Reading "Coraline" as an adult makes you realize you're never too old to want to sleep with a light on. The wonder of Henry Selick's gorgeous stop-motion animation version of Gaiman's novel is that it preserves the book's shivery, unsettling qualities, even as it expands on, and slightly recasts, the original story. "Coraline" is essentially faithful to the spirit of its source material. But it's also so visually inventive, and so elaborately tactile, that it stands apart as its own creation. I don't recommend "Coraline" for very small children, and I'll warn you that it may also make very big children -- Exhibit A: Me -- feel very small. In the picture's opening-credits sequence (set to the most sinister-sounding lullaby music you've ever heard), a floppy, used-up cloth doll has her innards removed and replaced, her button-eyes resewn, and her belly neatly sutured, all by a spidery, disembodied hand.
But Selick -- the director of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas," as well as the charming 1996 Roald Dahl adaptation "James and the Giant Peach" and the raucous grown-up fantasy "Monkeybone" -- knows how to impart a sense of delight and wonder to even the spooky stuff. In "Coraline," the creepiest moments and images are also among the most seductively beautiful. The movie opens with the bored, restless Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) exploring the grounds of the rambling house she's just moved into with her parents: It's an elegantly ramshackle Victorian called the Pink Palace Apartments, and in her early explorations in the yard, she meets a nerdy neighbor kid on a motorbike, Wybie Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) -- a newly invented character who does not appear in Gaiman's book -- who seems nice enough even though he's wearing a skeleton mask. Later, Wybie gives her a doll that looks suspiciously like the one we've already met in the credit sequence. And that's where Coraline's adventures, springing from her restless wish that her family life could be "different," begin.
In Coraline's real life, her mother and father are both writers -- their specialty is gardening, even though they don't care much for dirt. Dad (John Hodgman) cooks the family's meals; his specialties are slippery, disgusting-looking concoctions that sit in a heavy mound on the dinner plate. Mom (Teri Hatcher) is in charge of cleaning the house, which is why she won't let Coraline go out in the rain -- she doesn't want to have to wipe up all that mud. And so Coraline, wandering through the house, discovers a secret door and finds, on the other side of it, an "Other" mother and father -- with buttons where their eyes should be -- who are willing to cater to her every whim. The Other Father has planted, just for her, a marvelous moonlight garden, complete with glow-in-the-dark snapdragons that really look and move like dragons, and the Other Mother presents her with elaborate, delicious and picture-perfect meals (although, curiously, she eats nothing herself). Coraline, at first delighted by this alternative home universe, begins thinking it might be time to trade up in the family department. Maybe she could even learn to overlook the button thing.
There's a catch, of course, and before Coraline can choose the family she wants to live with, her Other Mother makes the choice for her. Selick -- who also wrote the screenplay -- has intensified some of Gaiman's original themes, in addition to introducing a few overtly Freudian elements. This "Coraline" suggests some of the ways parents try to hold onto us, to keep us from growing up and therefore leaving them forever. It also flirts with the insidious rivalries that can crop up between mothers and daughters. (When Coraline learns that her Other Mother's intentions aren't entirely selfless, she says in astonishment, "Mothers don't eat daughters!" But sometimes, at least in fairy tales and in parts of Southern California, they may wish they could, as a way of preserving their own youth and beauty.)
There's so much going on in "Coraline" -- both visually and in terms of its elaborate story -- that the experience of watching it can be a little overwhelming. Selick and his team clearly came up with so many enticing visual and narrative angles, they couldn't bear to edit them down, and the picture might have benefited from some streamlining. But "Coraline" has been made with so much care, and with so much attention to detail, that maybe it's just as well there's more of it rather than less. The supporting characters in the story -- including the Russian mouse trainer Mr. Bobinksy (Ian McShane), the former vaudeville performers known as Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (with voices supplied by the English comedy duo Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) and the character known simply as Cat (Keith David), an elegant black creature with mischievous-looking eyes -- are all beautifully designed. But it's the thousand-and-one details around all these characters that give the movie its glorious and varied textures. Mr. Bobinsky's performing mice are hoppity fellows with extraordinarily long tails, who scamper and dance and play (as Gaiman described in his book) musical instruments with their tiny mouse fingers. One sequence features a performance hall filled with fidgety, pointy-bearded scottie dogs. There are 248 of them, to be exact, and according to the movie's press notes, none of these extras was computer-generated. That means every single pup you see on the screen is an actual, movable puppet figure, although many of the "background" dogs were operated via a mechanical system.
I have to say it sounds a little obsessive. On the other hand, we live in a world flooded with cheap, shoddily made goods: Almost nothing is made to last anymore; everything is mass-produced and designed to be replaced. So even if "Coraline" suggests that the many, many people who worked on it are at least slightly mad, it is also, clearly, a labor of love. Nearly everything in "Coraline" -- from the puppet characters themselves, to their small sweaters and shoes (the latter of which were, in some cases, cut from antique Victorian kid gloves), to the numerous miniature props (which include a toy chest full of weird, wriggly toys with button eyes) -- has been painstakingly handmade, and although the film was shot with digital cameras, the images have not been computer-enhanced. The picture is being shown in select theaters in 3-D, and while I'm generally not much of a fan of the 3-D experience, the technology lends itself beautifully to the tactile nature of stop-motion animation: At one point I really did believe I could reach out and grab the long, waving tails of those performing mice. The devil, they say, is in the details, and "Coraline" brings them close enough to touch.
The Best List of Best Fiction: 2008 Edition