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Jan. 17th, 2007 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSo as those of you who have had the misfortune to be stuck with me late in chat the past couple nights probably know extensively from my constant babbling about the book, I've been having massive amounts of fun playing Sophie Hatter (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talkstohats) from Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle in Milliways.
To spare you all, therefore, I am going to concentrate my thoughts on why I love Diana Wynne Jones so much in a post here. (I cannot guarantee that it will lessen my babbling glee, but I will make the effort.)
So . . . basically, Diana Wynne Jones is who I want to be as an author.
I do not know if this is a chicken or an egg thing - i.e., whether I read too much of her when I was young and therefore decided that this was what writing should be, or her writing originally appealed to me because of ideas I already had. (It probably doesn't matter.) I'm not really talking about her style here; I do love it her way of phrasing things, but I don't want to copy it and I'm not sure if I could - though I know it's influenced mine. What I'm talking about is her way of writing characters. Someone, somewhere - I can't recall if it was an Official Quotething or a random fanquote - said that the thing about Diana Wynne Jones' characters was that even in the middle of whatever dramatic events were going on, you could always picture them fighting over the last brownie.
While obviously not every character ever written is going to be the type of person who is going to fight over the last brownie, I think this sort of sums up what I feel about fantasy. Epicness is great. I'm occasionally a sucker for epic. But half the appeal of fantasy, for me, is seeing believable characters placed in these fantastic situations; is in knowing that these people could just as easily have been born into an everyday life, and knowing that while their situation may be life-and-death right now, there will also be petty, brownie-fighting situations in there too.
DWJ is fantastic about putting those situations in, and I love her for it. Her characters often wield impressive power and usually save the world, or at least a section of it, or sometimes just themselves in what are often her best books of all - but they also cut up other people's suits because they're cranky, or spend two hours in the bathroom in the morning, or sneakily hide their trash because they don't want to be caught littering, or write horrible fanfiction involving sweaty backs and rippling muscles, or dream about becoming world-famous cricket players. Even if they happen to be the most powerful magic-worker in nine worlds, they really are, to quote W.H. Auden (I had Auden class today) "silly like us".
I'm not saying that her books are uniformly fantastic, because they're not; there are definitely several that fall flat, and her style is, I know, not for everyone. But when she's good, she's good. And her - character aesthetic, I guess - not only appeals to me, but really is the way I would like to write my own characters. With that sort of completeness and ordinariness; not in a way that precludes them being special, but in a way that would allow them to exist in an ordinary world as well as the special one they live in.
So there it is: my worship of Diana Wynne Jones, out in the open. I freely confess it.
In other news, tomorrow I get akenovay! :D!!!
talkstohats) from Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle in Milliways. To spare you all, therefore, I am going to concentrate my thoughts on why I love Diana Wynne Jones so much in a post here. (I cannot guarantee that it will lessen my babbling glee, but I will make the effort.)
So . . . basically, Diana Wynne Jones is who I want to be as an author.
I do not know if this is a chicken or an egg thing - i.e., whether I read too much of her when I was young and therefore decided that this was what writing should be, or her writing originally appealed to me because of ideas I already had. (It probably doesn't matter.) I'm not really talking about her style here; I do love it her way of phrasing things, but I don't want to copy it and I'm not sure if I could - though I know it's influenced mine. What I'm talking about is her way of writing characters. Someone, somewhere - I can't recall if it was an Official Quotething or a random fanquote - said that the thing about Diana Wynne Jones' characters was that even in the middle of whatever dramatic events were going on, you could always picture them fighting over the last brownie.
While obviously not every character ever written is going to be the type of person who is going to fight over the last brownie, I think this sort of sums up what I feel about fantasy. Epicness is great. I'm occasionally a sucker for epic. But half the appeal of fantasy, for me, is seeing believable characters placed in these fantastic situations; is in knowing that these people could just as easily have been born into an everyday life, and knowing that while their situation may be life-and-death right now, there will also be petty, brownie-fighting situations in there too.
DWJ is fantastic about putting those situations in, and I love her for it. Her characters often wield impressive power and usually save the world, or at least a section of it, or sometimes just themselves in what are often her best books of all - but they also cut up other people's suits because they're cranky, or spend two hours in the bathroom in the morning, or sneakily hide their trash because they don't want to be caught littering, or write horrible fanfiction involving sweaty backs and rippling muscles, or dream about becoming world-famous cricket players. Even if they happen to be the most powerful magic-worker in nine worlds, they really are, to quote W.H. Auden (I had Auden class today) "silly like us".
I'm not saying that her books are uniformly fantastic, because they're not; there are definitely several that fall flat, and her style is, I know, not for everyone. But when she's good, she's good. And her - character aesthetic, I guess - not only appeals to me, but really is the way I would like to write my own characters. With that sort of completeness and ordinariness; not in a way that precludes them being special, but in a way that would allow them to exist in an ordinary world as well as the special one they live in.
So there it is: my worship of Diana Wynne Jones, out in the open. I freely confess it.
In other news, tomorrow I get a
kenovay! :D!!!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-18 04:58 am (UTC)One of the beautiful things about her writing and books is that they're so... small. They're really all about the minutiae of everyday life, even while huge global things go on around the characters. It's their thoughts and the way they react (or not) to the greater goings-on that make her work so priceless.
Read the book, and then you can decide for yourself. And then, when you realize you breezed through it in a day or two and didn't get nearly enough, you can read Castle in the Air for Round 2. I bet you'll enjoy them both.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-18 06:34 am (UTC)But, wait a minute. Castle in the Air? Is that the same as Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky? Because that's pretty much my favorite Miyazaki movie.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-18 06:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-18 07:58 am (UTC)Castle in the Air is a whooole lot of fun, but half the fun, for me, is from having read Howl's Moving Castle, and then getting the othercultural perspective on the characters and scoeity. So . . . I'm not sure.
On the other hand, the visual effects would be pretty awesome.