Proximity Muse

A camera! Yes, now not only can I bore you with my writing when I remember to post, but also with my photos! Yay!

Here’s a link (maybe) to my trial run. Oddly I wasn’t at all cold while I was taking the pictures, only when I stopped and had to move to a different spot again. I get like that when I’m writing sometimes too. I dunno what to call it. Zen?

Photoshopped? I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I’m not here to discuss my meager Photoshop skills. What I’d like to talk about is auteur excess.

The best example I can give you is Heaven’s Gate. No, not the religious loonies, the film by Michael Cimino, the director of The Deer Hunter. Cimino was so out of control on that film that when it crashed and burned (one reviewer likened watching the movie to a three hour guided tour of his own living room) it took a studio down with it. Auteur excess is all about believing you are the only person who really knows how the story/movie/play should be done, and anyone else is just meddling in things they don’t understand. It is about ignoring any and all advice about your project. It is the ultimate form of artistic arrogance. I can almost hear the clicking of keys as folks do a Google for Cimino and I know what you’ll say once you’ve looked him up.

“Aha!” You’ll say, “That bastard never did anything major again. It was his downfall.”

And that’s all true. But what about people who get away with auteur excess? As might be guessed from the picture header, I have some suspects in mind.

The Clown

I like many of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. When he’s good, he’s really good as is the case with Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. But when he’s bad, oh boy. Watch out! His characters just keep talking and talking and talking and talking and…you get the idea. Some people have tried to tell me I just didn’t get it, but I still believe Death Proof was a terrible movie. It was an hour of talking to set up a 20 minute car chase. Death Proof was the movie equivalent of Tarantino whacking off.

I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, however, so I saw Inglorious Basterds last summer. It was really not good. I won’t say it was terrible, but it wasn’t great. The movie suffered from too much Tarantino. I saw a review that said something along the lines that Tarantino the director was too much in love with Tarantino the writer. I agree whole-heartedly with that. It’s no challenge to pick out a number of spots in the movie where an editor that wasn’t so enamored of his own work would have cut early. A number of scenes just go on and on, draining away any tension the scene might have had with sheer fecundity. I say that Inglorious Basterds was one editor and one producer away from being a fantastic movie. As it is, the auteur triumphed and the movie suffered for it.

The King

Stephen King is one of my favorite authors. I even enjoy some of his books that I really have no business liking such as Needful Things and Tommyknockers. Neither of those books was great, but neither of them were as awful as Insomnia either (possibly the worst book Mr. King has ever written). I’ve enjoyed most of his offerings since he finished the Dark Tower series and “retired.” Cell was alright and Duma Key stole ideas directly from my brain, but nothing he’s written in the last 20 years has come close to the brilliance of The Stand. You might guess at my excitement when I saw the press blurbs for Under the Dome. “As big as The Stand!” they said. “Chock full of characters!” they said. I checked when it was going to come out, then put it out of my head until after my semester was over. No way I was going to start on a 1000 page King book around finals time.

Finals over, I got the book. It’s awful. Only Insomnia is worse. You know why? The book is full of characters I’ve already seen and situations I’ve already read. The bad guy comes directly from Needful Things, the good guy from The Stand. The whacko sheriff from Desperation makes an appearance, as does a gang of kids in the tradition of It. The dome itself and the reason it appeared are mainly forgotten for 500 pages. Mr. King says he doesn’t like to plot books, and usually I’m right there with him, cheering. In this case, some notes would have been good. What would have been even better was an editor with the nuts to tell Mr. King that he needed to cut the fuck out of that book. Just as with Tarantino and Inglorious Basterds, Mr. King is too in love with his own work. The auteur wins at the expense of the fans.

The Point

I do have one. Here it is. No one creates anything in a vacuum. Everyone needs useful feedback on their work. Find some people you can trust, some people that know their stuff and let them do their jobs. Listen to them when they say things. You might think 50+ pages of your main character doing household chores in the buff is awesomesauce, but most people won’t. Find people who will tell you when your stuff sucks and why. Find people who can tell you where you need to make cuts. As soon as you start thinking you are the only authority on your work, you need to step back and think again.

Every writer has a head full of useless facts and zany trivia. We pound so much garbage into our skulls that some of it is bound to stick. When I know something random and someone asks me how I know, I’m frequently forced to admit I have no idea. Every once in awhile, though, I’m at least able to say that I know because it was part of the research I did for Project X. So research, yeah. That’s what this post is about. It just took me awhile to get there. Specifically, we are gonna talk about using the Interwebs. Start by memorizing this phrase. Just Fucking Google It.

How Much?

How much research needs to be done depends entirely on what you are writing and what your audience is. If I’m writing short pulp stories in the vein of Two-Fisted Tales, the amount of research I’m gonna need to do will be light. I may need to know how to spell the name of some exotic locale properly (hey, that is research), what sort of folks live there and what the nastiest animal around is. That should take like 20 minutes, tops. I’m not gonna be taking a ton of notes (though I make some bookmarks for later reference), because the genre doesn’t really require a great deal of verisimilitude. Now, if I’m doing a freelance bit for the WWF (environmentalists, not wrestlers) and they want me to write about the same area, I’m gonna need to dig a little deeper. I’m gonna need to spend more time reading, more time documenting sources and more time making sure of the quality of my sources. This seems like common sense, yeah? Do the amount of research your work requires – don’t be lazy – but don’t do more than you need too.

Where?

Wikipedia. There I said it. It has a lot of good information that can help you get started with your research. If nothing else, Wikipedia should give you an overview of whatever you’re researching. Obviously, you don’t want to take everything posted on Wikipedia as the absolute truth, but a reasonable amount of the content is sourced. Go look at the sources. Them things is gold mines, son. I use Wikipedia to find sources that are more reliable. Those sources generally lead to other sources, and so on. I’d also suggest working on your Google-fu. I’ve found full academic .pdf files online that my professors said they couldn’t get hold of. No, I’m not advocating piracy here (arrr!) I’m just saying know how to work the system.

Here’s an example of how to work the system and find obscure shit. Let’s say I want to find a picture of Chuck Wendig naked. Stop making that face at me, it’s hypothetical. Fine. A poem about Chuckles naked form then. The worst thing you could ever do is type “Chuck Wendig naked poem” into the browser. I don’t know what you’d find and I don’t want too. My guess would be pictures of woodchucks banging to bluegrass music. I digress. The important part of a poem about naked Wendigs isn’t the naked part. The internet loves the word naked so much that you’ll get 3 million hits on crap that has nothing to do with a nude Chuck (I’m guessing here). You need to learn what sort of words Google likes but doesn’t love. A better search would be “poem chuck wendig artistic” or “poems about chuck wendig.” Either of those should let you find what you want, assuming such content actually exists.

Plagiarism

Just because I can’t spell the word doesn’t mean you don’t need to watch out for it. I know how tempting it is to just copy/paste stuff directly from a site into your work. Resist. Even if that wasn’t completely unethical, the internet is filled with millions of howler monkeys looking out for exactly what you just did. God forbid you ever become famous and someone finds that shit. We’ll never hear the end of it. Make the information work for you, don’t just work the information.

NOTE: No poems or pictures of naked Wendigs were produced during the making of this post.

Last month was the devil.

First I quit smoking. Yep, still not smoking. 1.5 months, zero cigarettes, no fatalities. I took Chantix to help me quit and it worked. It worked, but it made me crazy. I couldn’t concentrate for shit. One day it took me two hours to write a two page outline. No, that isn’t because I suck at outlines either, Mr. Smartypants. I just couldn’t concentrate. One of my professors actually asked me if I was on drugs. I told him yes. Apart from being twitchy and slightly irritable as part of the whole withdrawal thing, I also made the mistake of taking one of the pills on an empty stomach. Within an hour I felt like ass. I only did that once. So, after a week of the pill and not smoking, I was feeling a little odd. Then I started coughing.

I didn’t stop coughing for two weeks. A certain blackhearted Irishman gave me the Hamthrax. I was basically in a coma for four days. I’d wake up, move around (and whine) for about three hours, then be exhausted enough to sleep for another 10 hours. It was, as they say, the suck. Said swiney malady also put me behind in all my classes by a week and I’ve spent the last week and a half getting more or less caught up. Mostly. I still have around 50 pages of Nietzsche I need to read and a term paper to finish by the middle of next week.

But! I wanted to get back to posting, so here I am. And I have a plan.

I’ve decided that I’m going to post a page of my treatment a day for general perusal. Those folks what look at this site may comment on it if they choose. Serial content incoming!

It’s true. I know it’s bad for me and everything, but I still like it. I have difficulty picturing myself writing without a cigarette burning away in the ashtray. I have trouble considering any drive over 20 minutes without a full pack in hand. My smokie treats and I have been through a lot together and it’s hard to picture life without ‘em.

But (there’s always a but), I realize smoking is bad for me, really I do. I’m sure non-smokers think they are doing me a favor when they spew out facts and figures about smoking, intended to make me see how bad it is. Honestly, these people just piss me off. Do folks really think I could’ve missed the warning label on every pack? Do they really believe that I’ve somehow tuned out all of the proof of smoking’s ills? I particularly hate the anti-smoking commercials on TV. All they do is make me roll my eyes, and I’m pretty sure that, as their target audience, that isn’t the reaction that crowd was hoping for. Here is the thing. Smokers don’t stop smoking until they want to stop smoking. You can show a smoker pictures of blackened lungs and tumors all day long and that will accomplish nothing.

So, here’s me, loving to smoke, and still realizing how bad it is for me. Not all that long ago my fater died of lung cancer. I know, Holy Shit! right? Maybe you better lay off those coffin nails, Newman! When it happened, I tried to quit. It didn’t work. In fact, I’ve tried to quit a number of times since then. It just hasn’t taken. I’ve had people suggest to me that quitting smoking is nothing. That it’s easy. They’ve compared it to quitting drinking coffee. Fuck off, with that. Seriously, you have no idea what you are talking about. I managed to stop smoking for two weeks once, then backslid as soon as I was around other smokers. It isn’t easy.

Last week I went to the doctor. I told him how badly I sucked at quitting by myself and he gave me a prescription for some stop smoking drugs. While he was at it, he prescribed some drugs to counteract the side-effects of the stop smoking drugs. Pesky little side-effects like suicidal tendencies, severe depression or chronic insomnia. This for a habit that some folks have derided as “easy” to overcome. I have a finger here I’d like to hold up for those people right now. I’m sure you can guess which one it is.

I’m not asking for sympathy and I’m certainly not going to be in any mood for more lectures. You want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for my wife. The doctor suggested she wait to try and kick the habit until spring, because of her seasonal depression and anxiety issues. You know what that means? That means she’ll be smoking outside, and, by golly, it’s just about to get mighty cold here in Ohio. What I am looking for is reinforcement. I have never announced my intention to quit smoking in a public manner. I’m gonna tell everyone I meet, so they can ask me how it’s going. I want reminding that this is something I’m doing for myself.

I went and picked up my drugs today. In the time it’s taken me to write this, I’ve smoked the very last  of my cigarettes before I turn to the pills. I’ll be throwing away ashtrays, chucking lighters and generally trying to ditch anything that reminds me I’m not smoking. My father was only about 20 years older than me when he died and I don’t fancy having an expiration date.

At least once (and often ad nauseum) during his or her life, every writer has been asked the dumbest question. Where do you get your ideas? The answer is that none of us know. We’ll just be moseying along in life, maybe taking a dump, maybe washing behind the ears, when Blammo! an idea pops into our minds. Where does it come from? I blame space aliens. Space aliens would explain why when I don’t use an idea, it immediately appears in someone else’s mind and I see it in print roughly six months to a year later. I have yet to find the right amount of tinfoil to keep them at bay. Actually, I like Neil Gaiman’s explanation the best: “I make them up, out of my head.”

And that is the truth. Sure, our imaginations can be prodded into action, that’s pretty much what sitting down with the intention to write is. We dial up the muse and see what we get. Sometimes we get a busy signal, which results in a lot of flailing around. Sometimes we get a direct line, which results in words spilling out of our heads so fast we can’t be bothered to fix even the worst typos until the rush is over. Most often we get a kind of steady drip of ideas; just enough to keep us on task. But we still don’t really know where they come from.

According to Plato, where ideas come from is hardly a new question. When Socrates went in search of folks wiser than he was, at one point he went to visit the artists. It didn’t take him long to figure out that most artists have no idea how or why they do what they do. Plato, using Socrates as a mouthpiece, went on to say some unflattering things about artists after that, likely because Aristophanes had pissed him off. But I’m drifting from the point. If Plato and Socrates couldn’t figure out where ideas come from, whom among us is arrogant enough to think they can come up with the answer?

I’m pretty arrogant, so I’ll give it a go. Every human’s brain is a sponge. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste and feel is recorded in the ole noggin. The proof of this is our dreams. Our dreams take crap we don’t even remember having experienced, mix it with other junk that is more familiar, run it through a blender with some tequila and pour out frothy sleeping experiences that don’t mean a goddamn thing. What our dreams do as part of the natural rhythm of the sleeping cycle, writers do intentionally when we start casting around for ideas. Writers (good writers anyway) stuff their brains full of so much random crap, that some of it is bound to mix together to form an idea. This is part of the reason that professional writers will tell folks that if you don’t read, you can’t write.

Our brains are hungry for information and writers are only too happy to feed the beast. Hell, at this point, it doesn’t even have to be reading, assuming you have a fair grasp of the mechanics of writing. The glories of modern entertainment mean we can absorb just as much random information from watching the History Channel, late night movies or clips on YouTube. Sometimes it’s even easier than that. The idea for the short story The Goodtimes Man that I posted on this site, came from nothing more than having an ice cream truck pass me on the highway. That truck must have been zipping along at 70 mph, which struck me as unwise. Ice cream trucks don’t seem like inherently aerodynamic vehicles to me. Speed aside, the truck was old. It had rust splotches and the smiling face of a clown that had been painted on the sides was fading. In a word, it was creepy. My immediate thought was what kinda whackjob drives that thing? Blammo!

I really like Señor Wendig’s analogy of subconscious brain activity as mind gnomes. I have no difficulty at all at picturing those little suckers in my head, peering under boxes, pulling random pictures out of my photo albums and generally making a mess of the place before they present me with the collage that is an idea. You give those little buggers enough to work with and they’ll deliver every time. So there’s your answer next time someone asks where ideas come from. Tell them the mind gnomes come up with them.

I’ve had people accuse me of being cynical a few times in my life, as though it were some sort of condition I should be ashamed of like genital herpes or conservatism. I refuse to be ashamed of my cynical ways, in fact I embrace them. Likely, most people don’t really understand what cynicism entails. It is not, as popularly thought, just the act of being contrary or sarcastic. Cynicism is a philosophical outlook that defies societal expectations and materialistic culture. A cynic asks people to examine if what they are doing is only of benefit to themselves and if that’s really the best way to go about things. A cynic doesn’t accept everything at face value. In short, just like most philosophy, cynicism is irritating because it makes people think about their behavior. So, by accusing me of being a cynic, people are accusing me of thinking, which isn’t really much of an insult.

What makes me cynical? How about that bullshit report by the insurance industry claiming that the bill working its way through congress will cause premiums to increase? Does anyone really believe that report is anything but self-serving fear tactics by the insurance industry? An even better question might be who would believe that nonsense? But that’s a pretty obvious case. I wouldn’t expect anything different from big business any more than I’d expect Fox News(?) to actually report the truth. Less obvious examples are election issues and propositions intended to change a state constitution in some way. Nothing sets off my cynic alarm quite so much as the words, “constitutional amendment.” Proposition 8 in California was one example of this, but Ohio has also seen this same sort of nonsense.

A year or so ago, a bill was up to amend the Ohio constitution to allow gambling in select areas of the state. I’m generally in favor of anything that will increase revenue for the state, especially considering our economy is inching toward utter collapse like a one-legged lemming approaching a cliff. Unfortunately, the people behind this bill tried to be sneaky, and because of my cynicism, I dug into the wording to see what had set off my BS detector. They tried to tie tax revenue from the casinos to the taxes paid by Native American-owned casinos. Currently, there aren’t any Native American-owned casinos in Ohio, but if there were, how much would they pay in taxes? Zero.

A current issue in Ohio proposes a constitutional amendment to set up a council, “To Create the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board to establish and implement standards of care for livestock and poultry.” (This is Issue 2 if you live in Ohio, btw). As soon as I saw the words constitutional amendment and standards in the same place, my cynic alert began to scream for attention. It took me, literally, two minutes of searching to determine that big business was behind the issue. The immediate question was, why would big business consent to more regulations? The answer is, they wouldn’t, unless they were in charge, which is exactly what the issue would allow.

What is my point? Be cynical! Don’t accept what you see or hear as fact. Question everything! Don’t be part of the 20% of “independent” Americans that sway this way and that in the opinion polls depending on which side of the argument has disseminated more propaganda. Don’t be part of the 60% of Fox viewers that believed we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Don’t take the words of politicians at face value. Think for yourself!

Regardless of what certain people think, I don’t hold with outlining every single idea I have before I start working on it. I don’t like outlines. I won’t say I hate them, mind. Hate is a strong word that should be saved for things like Neocons or the Nazi Party, but dislike is a reasonable word. That doesn’t mean I never do outlines, either. Some projects call for an outline. Generally, I’ve found that “formal” work (like technical writing or a term paper) benefits from an outline in many ways. For more speculative work, though, I prefer to work a little differently. I use mind maps.

What the hell is a mind map, you ask? Well, the picture at the top of this post should be a good hint. At its core, a mind map is an illustration of ideas, a picture of your thoughts and how they connect with each other. A mind map usually starts with a central idea, character or group and branches off from there. Each branch connects to a different node that relates in some way to the central idea, and, in turn, to each other. What mind mapping does for me is to take the idea out of my head and help me develop it by allowing me to see where each idea fits in relation to the central idea and with each other. It forms a picture, rather than creating the To-Do list that is an outline. Once I’m finished with my map, I’ll pick out ideas I think need further development and write a few words about them. In the case of groups or characters, a few words can quickly turn into several paragraphs, which is fine, as I’ll be needing to know a reasonable amount of detail about these things. Other characters or ideas that don’t need as much detail can hang out on the map until I figure out that I need them, or I decide to incorporate them into an already developed idea. That sort of process just doesn’t work for me with an outline.

From there, I take my mind map and my notes and I go to work. Sometimes I know where the story is headed and sometimes I don’t. This is fine. No one yet has been able to convince me that I absolutely have to know what’s going to happen on p. 433, or on p. 22 for that matter. If I think my story is starting to stray, I look at my map and my notes and I ruthlessly shove it back on course. Sometimes, though, the straying is a good thing. It means that while I’ve been eating lunch or wondering how my dog can possibly be that stupid and still live, my brain has been combining stuff in the background. It seems to me that outlining a work can sometimes force the story in a single direction, whether it wants to go in that direction or not.

So I use mind maps instead of outlines. I rarely draw them out by hand. To be honest, my drawing skills are only slightly more marginal than my ability to fly unaided. Any mind map I begin by hand eventually ends up in a tangle of scribbles and lines that ruthlessly compete with each other for sunlight. Fortunately for me, other people suck at drawing just as badly as I do, and have created programs for mind mapping. Because I’m cheap, the one I use is called VUE and is a free download. As is the case with most things involving writing or drawing, a program is better than dead wood because it allows for easy editing or expansion of ideas.

None of us really know how this whole creative thing really works anyways, so don’t be shackled by the oppressor that is outlines! Find a way that works for you and stick to it.

Likely it will come as no surprise to those reading this that I’ve been working on a screenplay. I wrote it over the summer, in preparation for my Screenwriting and my Art of Story and Preproduction classes. On the whole, using the script for those classes has been a positive and helpful experience, just like I hoped it would be. The only exception is this one guy. Let’s call him Morton.

Morton has heard me describe the screenplay any number of times and has read the treatment I wrote up for it. Morton is an enthusiastic sort of fellow, that has done well in his own life through force of personality, and owns several businesses. At this point in his life, Morton is used to getting his own way. So, Morton likes my idea. He thinks its swell. Except for one thing.

“Where’s the twist?!” says Morton. “Where’s the irony?”

I try to explain to Morton that this story doesn’t need a twist and he doesn’t want any part of it. I spent most of an hour trying to explain this to him before giving up and making a promise to at least think about it. And I do. I think about it a lot. I ask other people what they think, and I ponder some more. This is the result.

Not every movie needs a bloody twist or dramatic reveal at the end. In fact, some movies have hurt themselves by attempting it. I’m sure you’ve all seen the type of movie I’m talking about. You’re watching the movie, and it ain’t bad, right up ’til the end. The Twist. Suddenly, instead of a movie that is at least good entertainment, you have a horrid mess. The plot drank too much booze, wandered around aimlessly for a bit and vomited right at the end. Rather than leaving the theater (or turning off the DVD) with a sense of satisfaction, you are instead left with a feeling of WTF? I don’t have any proof of my numbers, but my gut tells me that, maybe, one-in-five movies with a twist ending actually works. Exhibit A for my reasoning is M. Night Shyamalan.

M. Night Shyamalan (wow, that’s a pain to type, henceforth he is MNS) has pretty much made a career off The Twist. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village are all prime examples of a movie that is pretty much nothing more than a vehicle for The Twist. I can’t speak for The Happening as I haven’t watched it yet. MNS did pretty well with The Twist in Sixth Sense. It fooled enough people to make the movie a hit. Other people, like my wife, for example, guessed what was going on inside the first 15 minutes, then just sat through the rest of the movie waiting to be right. Unbreakable is one of the few movies in which I think The Twist actually worked really well. Possibly it worked so well because the rest of the movie was interesting enough for me not to sit there wondering what The Twist would end up being. The Village and Signs were bloody awful, because The Twist crashed and burned like a monkey trying to fly a helicopter. Would those movies have been better without The Twist? I don’t know. Maybe? I just know that The Twist is what finally did them in.

Of course, I can’t just blame MNS for Morton wanting to see The Twist in my screenplay. Plenty of other folks have used the same tired old cliché, with limited success. Here’s what I think. I think unless you are really clever, most audiences will guess what’s going on well before they ever see The Twist. If they have guessed it, or even tumbled to the idea that The Twist is coming, I think that is apt to toss suspension of disbelief right out the window. Suddenly the audience is dissecting the move instead of just watching it.  Even if the audience doesn’t guess, I suspect you have a 50/50 of the audience actually being interested in your trickery. MNS has gotten such a reputation for using The Twist that it’s become something of a joke. That isn’t good either.

So I’m not adding The Twist to my screenplay. Not only do I feel it doesn’t need that kind of rubbish hanging around, I think it’s often a lazy way of finishing a movie.

Note: Don’t talk to me about The Usual Suspects, either. That movie was phenomenal in every way, and not just because of The Twist.

I’m going to start posting more interesting stuff soon, I promise. For the moment I’m still trying to figure out exactly what all this newfangled technology does and how I can make it do my bidding. Yes, this is filler, but I’m trying to get in the habit of posting something each day. If I have failed to amuse, here’s a link to a free webcomic by Warren Ellis.

Freak Angels