Vocabulary for Deconstruction
Apr. 7th, 2018 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI've got halfway through the new Snicket series on Netflix, and several people (a phrase which here means "more than two") are curious what I think of it.
The problem is that I was supposed to be spending this week plotting out setups and payoffs, character development landmarks, and thematic threads, over the tragic arc of the Terra Nova Expedition. I have not done this, instead I've been applying those poor brain cells to retroactively "fixing" exactly those things in a television show that has already aired. This is poor time and resource management, but I couldn't shut it off.
Well, today I woke with a clear head at last, so I'm going to put a pin in the series and come back when I've made some headway on my own stuff. Once upon a time I'd have excused a bit of a deconstructive rant for the reason that it taught me stuff about story; this is no less true here, but I need to make progress on my own stuff, so I'm going to do that on the foundation that 14 years' worth of deconstructive rants has given me, and take this one instead as affirmation that my storycraft is fully functional and I ought to, you know, use it to construct something at last.
So for those several who are waiting for my review, I leave you with a decoy.
The phrase "over-egging the pudding" is an idiom in British English that means "going too far in embellishing, exaggerating, or doing something" or "spoiling something by trying to improve it excessively." It is a pity this phrase is not in more common use in America, where puddings are of the custard variety so concerns about egginess are less structural in nature, because having it in one's repertoire may have an unconscious effect on the creative person's aesthetic boundaries. If I could sum up the second series in one phrase, it would be "over-egging the pudding," but if you want to know how I would apply it to specific over-embellished improvements to the matter at hand, you're going to have to wait.
The problem is that I was supposed to be spending this week plotting out setups and payoffs, character development landmarks, and thematic threads, over the tragic arc of the Terra Nova Expedition. I have not done this, instead I've been applying those poor brain cells to retroactively "fixing" exactly those things in a television show that has already aired. This is poor time and resource management, but I couldn't shut it off.
Well, today I woke with a clear head at last, so I'm going to put a pin in the series and come back when I've made some headway on my own stuff. Once upon a time I'd have excused a bit of a deconstructive rant for the reason that it taught me stuff about story; this is no less true here, but I need to make progress on my own stuff, so I'm going to do that on the foundation that 14 years' worth of deconstructive rants has given me, and take this one instead as affirmation that my storycraft is fully functional and I ought to, you know, use it to construct something at last.
So for those several who are waiting for my review, I leave you with a decoy.
The phrase "over-egging the pudding" is an idiom in British English that means "going too far in embellishing, exaggerating, or doing something" or "spoiling something by trying to improve it excessively." It is a pity this phrase is not in more common use in America, where puddings are of the custard variety so concerns about egginess are less structural in nature, because having it in one's repertoire may have an unconscious effect on the creative person's aesthetic boundaries. If I could sum up the second series in one phrase, it would be "over-egging the pudding," but if you want to know how I would apply it to specific over-embellished improvements to the matter at hand, you're going to have to wait.
