The Authenticity Anchor

by Jack Norman

Jack Norman (

Thingol

), author of the forthcoming collection Sleep Capricorn(pre-order now!) brings us a keen analysis in the pursuit of answering a question we’ve all asked, perhaps subconsciously: what, exactly, makes a story worth caring about? And when, exactly, does it lose us?

The Authenticity Anchor

Allow me to summarise and explain what ((( David Herod))) and (((

Gabriel K. Sinclair

))) of

Tooky's Mag

(more accurately a YouTube channel) failed to elucidate during their recent "Slop Kings" episode. The free-form "slop" series—formally titled "Slop Kings"—and perfectly topical at the time of its first episode (before the idea was thoroughly raped to hell by the usual click merchants)—attempts to dissect the quality, nature, value, and overall relevance of popular media as it is regurgitated to us again and again on every platform we are captured by.

I won't start by saying the series has run out of steam. You know we have all been distracted at one time or another. Only that David and Gabriel have spoken past the issue in this case. And failed in their line of inquiry. No, it is not enough to debate the merits of the Star Wars prequels—and are they "Lucas" enough or "Lucas" at all?—and suggest you have presented any description of what is "Authentic" fiction and what is not. Or solved for its "anchor points," as they refer to throughout the episode. No, I am afraid the question was left wanting and half on the edge of something more.

What is Authenticity as it presents in a work of art or fiction? How do we experience it? How does it lack when it lacks? What is it, exactly, we are missing when we feel that a story has gone begging? And where, as the Tooky's hosts have asked, are the various "anchors" or touchpoints throughout various and individual settings that bestow a thing's sense of Authenticity? I will refer, mostly, to "casual," genre media—"pulp," if you like—in the spirit of the "Slop Kings" series and its wide, sloppy scope. I should be up front and state that I have accused the hosts of "Slop Kings" of basically digressing for the full length of an episode, and yet they began and ended with the notion of the "platonic ideal," which will serve us here as the correct answer, and is to the their credit (as savvy as ever in their old age, however fattened, hunted by the sharks of Subverted Subversions, Futurist Letters, and the returning Unreal Press Podcast).

In an older interview, which I can't now find, but did not imagine, George R. R. Martin describes the nature of adapting his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy book series into HBO's A Game of Thrones television series. They are, of course, two very distinct entities, and yet for much of the television series' lifespan, it did not merely "adapt" the source material in a direct enough fashion via the screen, but it faithfully retained the vision, spirit, and soul of the original series in tangible and intangible ways. Martin, whose own television writing career began during the 1980s, points out that where any change is made a story for logistical or cinematic reasons, viewers will find that one detail gradually effects another, and writers may be hard put to it if they continue to pursue the "authentic," 1:1 plot threads fans have been conditioned to demand. But this is merely a case of mediums. This is a technical task for writers and showrunners. And it does not alone, or even at all, have intrinsic effects for a work's Authenticity.

Martin makes the example of a particular controversy he recalls amongst his fanbase which developed some time during the middle run of the series. A character known as "Grenn"—a shaggy lowborn, and close friend of the show's protagonist—is killed in the HBO series during a siege of the large, fantastical stronghold the series spends much of its time exploring. It seemed many fans were distressed by this deviation from Martin's source material, where they remembered the occasion was meant to serve as the dramatic, sacrificial death of a fan-favourite "Boba Fett" type character—a one-armed, blacksmith with limited stage time, formerly in service of the King, and equipped with many of the series' most prescient statements regarding the nature of various characters.

Of course, in the scheme of things, the change was very minor. Martin attested to it himself. But he went on to the explain the following, his reasoning, for those who were chafed at the television show for violating the series' canon: the original character ("Donal Noye," in case it comes up), as he appeared in the source material, was one of a cast of hundreds. This would be no surprise to anyone familiar with the literature or the television series. And yet as much as HBO tried to honour Martin's expansive setting, inevitably, and quite a given from the outset, not all of the source material's characters would be able to serve the story in the same ways they had in the novels. Indeed, many would be omitted altogether... And so where and when—with the broader plot structure still in tact, episodes mapping roughly to certain sets of characters and events—an heroic death was required to punctuate the breaching of one important gate, it was figured as more Authentic to the story to kill a different character in "Donal's" stead, one who occupied a similar cult status, and archetype, even where the source material could be hastily established in an opening act for the purpose of one episode.

All of which is merely to say: that as an "authenticity anchor:" a merely painstaking replica of a story, brought over with all its parts, does not serve. Nor are the facts, in the first instance, much of a requisite either. We understand that there are larger notions of the "thing" than just the story, its characters, the sequence of events, individual scenes, carefully attributed dialogue, and so on. We understand that Authentic stories are settings, worlds, universes, credible fantasies! We ascribe to them carefully curated "canons" managed by lawyers, fans, volunteers, or only ever the author, as it depends on the intellectual property (another useful term, where our missing anchors are concerned) and its culture. It is the conceived, or equally unconscious, identity of a fictional story which bleeds through the page. I'll jump ahead and make a claim: a key anchor, or the key to making them, is the creator's sincere Effort, Willingness, and ability to explore their own work. It is, as Gabriel Sinclair put it, something that will eventually form, either in its sequels, iterations, adaptations, or so and however—so long as a desire to create remains reasonably pure and central—until it produces A Song of Ice and Fire as it resonates with all of us—tricks us into talking certain ways—figuring that the figments of the world existed at one time or another, had secrets, motives, and could have done things differently.

Peter Dinklage is "Tyrion Lannister." This is now incontrovertible. Sean Bean is "Eddard Stark." Mark Addy is "Robert Baratheon." These characters exist before and after themselves. The most irrelevant thing about them is their description in the Martin's novels. They have ascended this way because the setting has remained remarkably Authentic—and, like Stars Wars, The Hobbit, Amazon's Rings of Power—as David and Gabriel reference them—the backlash to its final seasons (episodes, instalments, etc.) was the lashing out of an audience confronted by the uncanny valley which had formed between the carefully resonant world, lavishly depicted via detailed sets, wide shots, passive worldbuilding, extemporaneous scenes between characters totally original from, and yet now forever married to, the source material; and the lazy, character centric, scene-after-scene-after-scene, over-the-shoulder, lingering shots of its sad, aging actors in its final seasons that resembled little of the world, and all of its lack of Care.

So, yes, it's an Effort issue. That is the one and main thing that produces the artefacts of a world's internal consistency. And that is one thing you will already understand. Where we have all known the tedious feeling of reviewing a peer's work and finding it, within seconds, lacking in quality, insight, oversight, theme, intent, intrigue, interest, consistency, direction, prose, characters, or Authenticity!—"the perfect, eternal, and unchanging form of something that exists in a realm beyond our physical world!"—the instructions are right there, have been there for as long as we've known—where the act is in the name, aspiring writers or creators, must try to create! How can we seriously argue over the merits of the Star Wars prequels? In the context of Authenticity! Is that really what we are going to do? It's not a matter of the soundtrack, the choreography, the details of the galaxy as laid down in any one film, later controverted, and reorganised for the opera, it's no matter of CGI, "political" themes, clumsy dialogue, or what on earth, or what else. This kind of analysis is too granular, it wades into the territory of technical review and bogs the investigation down in scene-by-scene discussions of the film’s classical merits, instead of examining the Authenticity of the world it addends. The real question is does it bleed? Was it made out of actual stuff, instead of just being put on the page? Obviously it was. The world of the prequels is as real as any you have known. If it's "Goblin Town" versus "Orc City," and where and how that's clear to anyone, then it's "Chancellor Palpatine" versus "Supreme Leader Snoke." One asserts itself with organic confidence, the other is fake, overly exerted, and its intentions are too obvious to the audience. The conversation almost ends there. Because you know it when you see it. And everyone hates the sequels.

Nomenclature. This is a serious “authenticity anchor.” For several reasons. In its effect it disarms the audience’s reservations. Where it is executed properly, and barely more than once, we are willing to submit totally to a world’s illusion. It is the clearest example of a carefully devised world that has manifested itself to its creator in another realm, who has conceived of its contents in their platonic form, and named them aptly, easily—concepts which have been Created for us, and not merely written down. I can’t speak to its technical aspects. There is no one process for creating veracity in a world. But that to say there is no work that is anchored by this factor that has not been created without a monumental, explorative Effort. Nothing real, nothing Authentic, comes cynically, half-hearted. Whether you find it enjoyable in the end or not.

I am sorry to say, for the implications it might have, the writers it may pertain to, that Authenticity is Effort of the very first, most earnest kind. It is not enough to maintain a "writing schedule." Even if that is every day. If you are sitting down at your computer, typing, hoping, taping some idea together, one arcane name for a hero, a fictional world you have not put your semen into, then you are not establishing any sort of realm that could gain an inch towards the "beyond." You are recording a set of pithy, worldly letters that agonises anyone who reads them. That is why you are not captured by the thing either. Because they are no more than words on a page. I suppose the reason I belabour this point, and harshly, is because most creators are oblivious to the degree of Effort that is required to obtain that most Authentic quality—even talented ones.

Where a work lacks, it's because the creator fell short of the task, and it's usually their fault. There is, I think, something to be said for the wanting of an idea without the Willingness to get it. And the subsequent, aborted worlds that populate our store fronts. William Gaddis can be quoted a thousand times on the matter: “I think often there's a confusion—and this is not just kids in colleges but it's in writing conferences, which I've gone to three or four of—and it's less wanting to write than it is wanting terribly to be a writer. This is a fuzzy number that one has got to get through very quickly because there is a difference.” But I am not, here and now, militant towards anyone's performative instincts, or in figuring if their motives for writing are correct—we are all guilty of our truer, shallower desires—that is not exactly the problem, as I see it—only that we all have drastically underestimated the drudgery of the task of Creation, the necessary length and fatigue of our investigations, and it shows!

You know it when you see it. But you should know when you're failing to produce it. And that's mostly all of us who want to have our cake and to eat it too. And where our own stories fall short gives some insight into how and where others achieve their Authenticity.

P.S. I recently urged a friend of mine to edit a novella which had been rejected by various publishers, because it seemed to me that it was clearly rough around the edges, incomplete as far as its Wholeness was concerned. The man shrugged and told me he was more after an audience that was into that sort of thing. You might call it "Lo-Fi." And where its edges were rough, he could probably convince people that was the point. Well, I say this with love, but that's case in point, you doofus. Pore over that manuscript some more!