Jane Espenson: "Make it ugly and rough and emotional"

As well as writing our own pieces on what gets us excited and enthusiastic about genre/sci-fi TV storytelling here at Nathan Fillion is My Imaginary Best Friend we're also going to share links to interviews, articles and interesting ephemera that washes up along the shore of the great wide Interwebz.


This interview "Caprica"'s Jane Espenson: "It's Time For Sexuality to be Incidental" appeared on www.afterleton.com and is worth reading in full.


Jane Espenson has written on a lot of this blog's favourites, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, BSG, Caprica and soon Torchwood.


In telling stories that are also issues based, which I'd argue all the best sci-fi/speculative storytelling is, there's a risk that one might lose sight of the storytelling in order to 'make a point'.  Espenson talked about how the writers on Caprica handled the storylines of two characters, one of whom is gay, the other in a group marriage, and neither of whom are entirely squeaky clean.


"But I kept coming back to they're complex, real people who we aren't bending them around to accommodate their preference. They're the most interesting people for our world and our stories, and making the sexuality incidental. It's time to start doing that."


Making "it" incidental, whatever "it" happens to be, seems so obvious, but is so easy to forget when you're up close and personal with trying to tell a story. 


Joss Whedon has spoken at length about his writing and the "dark place" that he goes into to find it. It's this understanding that can lift something like Buffy - (blonde teen fights vamps whilst wisecracking about high school) - such a ridiculous concept that it should only be played for laughs, right? But instead of settling for a cool, jokey show, the creative team elevated it to address "issues" along the way such as being an outsider who finds acceptance, confronting death in all its forms, dealing with the way that killing damages the killers, the way that love can be romantic, obsessive or generous.


So in this article it is interesting to see Espenson referring to the "dark place" in response to not only the work she has already done, but that which she is embarking on now - a new series of Torchwood.


"The Children of Earth miniseries that was their Season 3, oh my God, how brilliant! The decision that he can't save his grandson, his grandson has to die. Yes, that's a very Battlestar-y/Buffy kind of decision to pay the dark price. Go there. Don't make everything sweet and wonderful and all tied up. Make it ugly and rough and emotional."


As a writer, my response to Espenson's observation about being prepared to "pay the dark price" strikes such a chord. That is the stuff that moves me, when I read it or see it. It's the way I try and write. Not in a melodramatic way, that I think is the point, but in a real way, one that illuminates the truth about the way we live and die in the real world. 


In Walden, Thoreau wrote:  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation" and in "The Gift" Buffy tells her sister, "...the hardest thing in this world... is to live in it" - Walden and Buffy, two extremes of culture, yet united in the recognition that within the ordinary processes of living lies great suffering and tragedy; both echoing a philosophical observation made millennia earlier, in the first of the Buddhist 4 Noble Truths that of the Truth of Suffering - a truth that is often unrecognised in our daily life. 


"Don't make everything sweet and wonderful and all tied up. Make it ugly and rough and emotional" - they are words to hang up on your shingle if you're a writer.