Proximity Muse

My posting has slacked a bit since I stopped with the smoking. Part of that is because the stop smoking pills make me slightly nauseous 24-7. I figure I can put up with it for a month. A month of nausea is easier to tolerate than cancer treatment, eh? To make up for my absence, here is a small bit of fiction.

Passing

You can see her in the distance, walking sprightly down the street through the falling ran. Her dress is matted to her skin and her bare feet splash through puddles. You can’t see if she’s smiling or not, but you guess she might be. With one hand she pushes her hair out of her face and in the other she carries, almost negligently, a white plastic bucket. Her steps quicken as she patters down the hill between well-tended houses, the bucket swinging in her hand as though it is somehow dodging raindrops.

You lose sight of her as she approaches the railroad bridge, and when you can see her again she’s slowed down. She looks up uncertainly as a train thunders over her head, shaking the ground with its passing. When she comes out from under the bridge she doesn’t look quite as happy as you had first thought. The ground ahead of her slopes up, promising tougher going and the neighborhood is nowhere near as fine as that she’s left. Raindrops fall heavier and colder, and the bucket she carries becomes heavier with the weight of collected water. It stops swinging in her hands and you can see the grimace on her face as she takes a firmer grasp on it before starting up the hill.

With each step she takes, her face becomes clearer. You can see the frown lines of concentration on her forehead as she struggles to maintain her balance on the slippery slope and still manage the increasing weight of the bucket. Before long you can see her makeup is running down her face, forming smudges and streaks. She steps gingerly over cracks in the pavement, her bare feet tender from the scraping of the road. The rain begins to come down harder still, and she pauses halfway up the hill, taking the weight of the bucket in both hands before continuing on.

Step by faltering step, she reaches the top of the hill, bent over almost in two from the weight of the rain collected in the bucket. The last of her makeup is gone, revealing every wrinkle and imperfection of naked skin. Dim light reflected from the water, overflowing her bucket, bleaches her hair giving it a dull, grey appearance. With one last burst of energy, she reaches the top of the hill and you begin to lose sight of her as the rain pours down. Dimly you hear the clunk of a bucket being dropped on the street and when the shower passes, the bucket remains, but she is nowhere to be seen.

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.

More discussion of my favorite thing. Boobs! Err, no. Wait. I was gonna talk about TV.

Flashforward has a really interesting premise. What if everyone on the planet passed out for two minutes and seventeen seconds, and during that period of unconsciousness were given visions of the future? Sounds cool, right? It even has some good actors in it. Joseph Fiennes and John Cho. Sadly, the show is losing me. I find parts of it interesting, like when the FBI is trying to uncover exactly what happened and the cloak-and-dagger involved with that. I do not, however, find the “drama” part of the show at all interesting. The characters involved haven’t pulled me in enough that I actually care what happens to them. It may yet get better, but I’m not holding my breath.

Stargate Universe is some good stuff. Oh, I’ve heard the whining from old SG-1 and SG: Atlantis folks that complain that the show isn’t Stargate enough. They bitch and moan calling it crap like Lost in Stargate or Stargate Voyager, but I think they’ve missed the point. In place of plucky heroes with one-liners and hordes of Jaffa gettting mown down, you have an actual drama with SG themes.The show obviously draws some of its inspiration from Battlestar Galactica (the new one, mind), which is great. Even though I haven’t seen all of the episodes, BSG was a good show. I suspect the same people that nerdrage about SGU loved BSG and just want to bitch.

I didn’t want to like Community. I only started watching it because I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Chevy Chase in anything. But I haven’t been able to keep from watching it and even the wife likes it, which makes it a rare TV show indeed (we never agree on TV shows). The idea is so simple that it makes you say, “I could have thought of that,” which is the mark of a good idea. Community is also funny, which is rare. Most comedies on TV are either low brow Schadenfreude or an endless repitition of the same sitcoms I watched when I was 12. It isn’t deep, it isn’t thought provoking, but it is entertaining.

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.

That’s what my mom called it anyways. She was never much of a TV person. I loved me some TV, though. Dukes of Hazard and A-Team were the finest cinema as far as I was concerned. My tastes have progressed a bit since then, but I still enjoy some dumb TV shows. I watch old episodes of the Tick and Stargate SG-1 on Hulu. I found Voltron on YouTube one day and watched that for a couple hours. In a similar vein, here are a few current dumb shows I enjoy watching.

Supernatural is probably the dumbest show I enjoy watching. The amount of disbelief required to watch that show and not shout, “Bullshit!” every 20 minutes or so is staggering. What do I mean? How about Sam getting laid by a demon, and then Dean one-upping him by getting laid by an angel. That last one was hard to swallow. I saw the shark in the pool and heard the revving of the motorcycle, but the show backed away from the jump at the last minute. I suspect one of the reasons I like the show so much is because the people responsible for it produce episodes that basically say, “Yeah, we know it’s goofy. Fun though, innit?” That’s the truth.

Castle is another incredibly stupid show that I don’t miss an episode of. I have no doubt the cause is my man crush on Nathan Fillion. He’s just so darn likeable that I’ll watch just about anything with him in it. The premise of the show is utterly ridiculous, the antics that Castle gets away with are equally ridiculous and yet I still watch. Damn that Fillion! Hopefully my wife will never find the signed posters I have of him hanging in the spare room of the basement.

Dollhouse is a show that wants me to think it isn’t dumb, but I know better. I realize I watch it because I enjoy listening to Joss Whedon’s dialogue and because Eliza Dushku is totally hot and there’s nothing wrong with that! Nothing at all! (I find that if I repeat that a couple times, I believe it long enough to watch the show.) Hell, the first season was such a mess that even Whedon finally admitted he had no idea what he was doing.

I’d feel much guiltier about watching these shows if I didn’t know for a fact that lots of people watch even dumber shows, without an ounce of remorse. I mean, how else can you explain ten seasons of Friends?

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

So begins a new chapter in the life of John Newman. The website. It’ll probably take me awhile to get it all sorted. First task is getting my writing on here.