daveon | Spoiler Space - Warning Fannish Writing...

I've been accused in the past of spoiling stuff for people. I will admit that I have done this but in my defence, your honour, it was mostly by accident. It has, however, got me thinking about Spoilers, within the Fannish context, and what, at least to me, is our rather schizophrenic attitude towards them.

In years past, at conventions, any media related panel would have to be heavily focused on the Spoiler, especially in terms of what could and could not be openly said about certain things. Between US seasons, Sky and terrestrial TV, these things could get confused. As we discussed at a panel at Concussion (Eastercon 2006) what is happening more and more is that people are watching the shows pretty much in real time as they are broadcast in the US. Will this mean and end to the spoiler warning? Does it actually matter? And, in particular, why is there such a gulf between the media and book formats?

First, I will freely admit that I don't mind spoilers. I don't find that knowing the plot points in advance ruins things for me. It's the handling of the resolution, especially in a TV show that works. Knowing, for example, that the Titanic sinks doesn't alter the story (crap as it was IMHO) - likewise knowing that Sheridan was doomed to die or that Delann faced down the Earth fleet didn't ruin those episodes or part of the B5 arc. Frankly, I’d like a full deck of Lost spoilers right now to explain to me why I’m wasting my time with that show.

However, I’ve friends who would practically ostracise you for letting slip even the most mild of spoiler for a show, even if it didn’t give away one iota of the denouement.

In contract, the book world is different. Reviews often give away quite important parts of the plot, certainly degrees of information that if transferred to the visual media would have people screaming. I like to know what I’m getting myself into with a book, especially by a new author. I started reading Neil Asher because of a recommendation based on a fairly large set of what could be called spoilers about the plot of one of his earlier books. This is fairly typical. I’ll re-read books more frequently than I’ll watch TV shows or movies.

Perhaps, therefore, it is down to other factors and the way people think.

As I’ve said, I don’t mind spoilers, but I will freely admit to being rarely surprised by plot twists and the like. I did a lot of TV writing in the mid-90s and it practically ruined TV for me for about 5 years. You learn a lot of “tricks” about the method of shifting from a concept outline to a script, and you also learn about how to pace the action. A classic example of such a writing trick was the use of the lift in Doctor Who on Saturday, sorry if I spoil anything there [;)]. Technically, it’s Chekhov’s gun; you don’t waste anything in a script. If you show something, it is because there is a purpose for it.

TV, as a media, is more constrained than a book. However, even knowing how the journey ends, isn’t always as interesting to me as the journey itself. Murder mystery and thrillers are similar but quite often the ending is so amazingly implausible that you have to not so much suspend belief, as throw it out of the window.

Now that TV shows are becoming pretty much commoditised, I hope that we can more openly discuss series at Conventions and elsewhere, in more of the way that people are happy to discourse on books without people getting ratty.

But that might just be me…