ADET 1: Unusual Cases · 2:33am Feb 18th, 2014
This is the first of a series of posts (Called Art Design Expanded Topics, or ADET for short) which are meant to serve as informal companion pieces to the ADPA series. The difference in name is both for organizational purposes, and to indicate a difference in style; ADET posts will employ a less formal and precise style, and are not intended to be rigorous dissections of topic.
Whereas the ADPA posts are meant to be equally useful as an explanation or as reference material, the ADET posts are meant solely for explanation. Basically, these posts exist to dig into topics that are inappropriate for ADPA for whatever reason, or to add extra context/examples/explanation to topics in ADPA. Suggestions and comments are welcome, as are requests for additional ADETs. So far, most of these topics came about as a result of discussing ADPA, so anything that comes to mind while reading that series is probably fair game.
Without further ado, here's the first ADET, which deals with the unusual, fringe cases that necessitate such careful wording in the primary ADPA posts.
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Artists can be frustratingly clever and creative.
That may prompt some snickering to the effect of, "Yeah, that's the point", but when you try to say what is and isn't art (or what is and isn't 'good' art), it can make life pretty difficult.
This goes double for authors, who can break almost any definitive 'rule' while still producing a good work with relative ease. In writing the ADPA series, I've had to be very careful with the language I employ because of this. It would be too easy to say something along the lines of, "Good style is always consistent and accurate", only to run into problems with solid works of prose that have deliberately inconsistent or misleading style (As in the example given of a character with mental illness).
One issue here is that ADPA is meant to be abstract (as implied by the title). Whether a work is 'good' or 'bad' is subjective; an author may not care who (or if anyone at all) 'gets' their work, or they may only care about a specific individual 'getting' it.
So to them, it may be a good work because it did what it was intended to do. To the populace at large, it may be viewed as rubbish. Neither of those measures is 'objective'. Value itself is something people assign; it isn't ever objective.
So in ADPA, discussions of what is 'good' and 'bad' are avoided in favor of what is possible and what isn't.
If you want a work that has wide appeal, examine how people will understand and relate to it. I try to outline those methods. Otherwise, it's a non-issue to an artist. ADPA isn't designed as a writing guide, so the principles of relating to an audience are only given in abstract, objective terms.
But since this is an informal piece, I can more readily discuss what I feel are 'good' examples or ideas for stretching the boundaries of normal art.
First off, inside the FIMFiction community itself, let's consider the post by Titanium Dragon, criticizing the first Omnibus by The Royal Guard: http://www.fimfiction.net/group/202103/the-royal-guard/thread/81260/the-omnibus
That post is part of the impetus for the ADPA series in the first place, as I am attempting to outline a more objective approach to the concepts in art. A rigorous common language for discussing how all of the aspects of a creative work tie together seems like a pretty obvious necessity for an objective review process; lacking one would be like trying to objectively review the quality of engineering work without having any of the terminology of modern Physics. Possible, but difficult and cumbersome, as one would have to talk around points of interest in the absence of specific terms for them.
The post by Titanium Dragon highlights several unusual works inside of the fandom that break various rules. I am not familiar with all of the works cited, but thankfully Titanium Dragon does elaborate somewhat on the nature of how several of them break a given rule while remaining effective works.
The rules being broken are not directly relevant to ADPA, but the post helps illustrate the difficult of discussing art in rigorous terms. In the ACT model's case, and especially in the Delivery model outlined in ADPA 2.1, there are a lot of implied or perceived rules that can still be broken by effective works.
For instance, the Elements design aspect in Delivery is primarily meant to cover characters, setting, and events. But not all works need to have all three of those; a work about two characters having a conversation may not ever give any indication of setting (Or may in fact be deliberately written so that the meaning of the exchange changes depending on the setting you interpret them as interacting within)
Likewise, a work may lack characters. It may simply catalog events which occurred in a given setting over time; such a work can still be a story (or even a compelling work of fiction), even if it lacks the elements most commonly seen in works of that nature. Some argument could be made as to what defines a 'character', but if you stretch the terminology out too much, it becomes meaningless anyway.
Speaking of stretching terms, depending on how you think of 'events' in a story, you could even write one without events (of a sort): You could show the aftermath of a horrible catastrophe, and the audience can imagine the events that led to it, without those events ever actually being discussed in the work in any way. Time, in the work, never progresses, and there is no cause-and-effect relationship that occurs within the prose itself. Whether that counts as a story without 'events' is up for debate; from a design perspective, if you wish to evoke the idea of those events in the audience, they're still design elements, even if not present in the work itself.
But their absence in the work itself still leads to a radically different design process from other works.
Design approach consistency is one thing I've been asked about. "How could a work ever benefit from an inconsistent design approach?" Well, some works use plot-driven writing for certain episodes/scenes/whatever, and are character-driven other times. That may even be more realistic, in situations where some powerful event occurs that forces characters to respond, whereas the rest of the time is spent in relative peace.
Even Cohesion is worth discussing here; you don't always want your elements to harmonize perfectly. Some dissonance can make a message more powerful. An example I noted recently was a scene in a show where a character is depicted with an apathetic, uncaring appearance as they do something cruel to a villain. Their behavior is lauded by other cast members, and they seem by all appearances to be completely at peace with this.
But the music takes on a distinctly malevolent tone, and the mismatch between the visual expression and the music completely changes how the scene is interpreted. This is only a mild example of an intentional cohesion mismatch, but there are more stark examples where a work 'runs on different levels'; different aspects of design may be used to convey different messages, which come together in different ways.
The long and short to take from this post is that there is no real 'right' or 'wrong' in art, objectively speaking; there is just what you intend to accomplish, and how well you accomplish it. The artist sets their own parameters.
Unless they're getting commissioned, I guess. Dangit, there's an exception to everything!
"So in ADPA, discussions of what is 'good' and 'bad' are avoided in favor of what is possible and what isn't."
So that's why I've been struggling so much with this! I'm used to the idea that when authors talk about art, they talk about how the things they like are "good" and the things they don't like are "bad." You're an author talking about art, so I kept thinking you would get to discussing what you thought was "good" and what you thought was "bad." I got more and more confused as you kept avoiding that. (That's not a bad thing, it's just a shock.)
This creates something of a problem for me--as I'm a total
hole, I was waiting for you to make statements I could argue with. I guess I'll have to wait and see more of where you're going with this.
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I figured something like this was going on, actually. I was left scratching my head after one of your comments, and speaking to someone else about it, we concluded that people probably thought this was meant to be a writing guide instead of an abstract dissection.
Sorry to disappoint if that was what you were here for
Avoiding arguable statements or statement of opinion is important if I want to make an objective lexicon for discussing art. Especially since ADPA is formatted as reference material, so it needs to be something you can pull up, grab a line or two out of, and use to back up an argument.
I edited the original post to include a tentative table of contents, so you can see exactly what my current roadmap is for the series. Suggestions for new ADETs or other changes to the schedule are welcome. Thanks for following this so closely; your feedback has been pretty useful already.
Apparently I need to read the ADPA series before reading this.
4112453 That's correct. The entire ADPA posting is also significantly outdated; I've revised the entire model significantly since posting it, since there was some interest in including it in a collegiate text. I haven't bothered trying to rework the new version into blogposts due to a general lack of interest on here, as well as some concern over where it should be published first.
I still believe the older posts provide useful insight, so I'm leaving them up for the time being.