It’s a widely-held aphorism amongst creative types that we tend to be our own worst critics. This is doubly true.
In the first sense, we are our own worst critics in that I am certainly not aware of anybody out there who judges my own work more harshly than I do myself. I’ll grant, my audience is virtually nonexistent at this point, but I am constantly naggled at by a vicious little voice in the back of my mind: “That thing you just wrote is stupid!” “You should have used more commas there!” “You should use less commas there!” That OTHER thing you just wrote there is stupid!” “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” I’d say that one of the greatest barriers to my progress on the Project has been getting that little howler monkey to shut the fargo up. Problem is, he never shuts up. Much like the Id-Writer, who is always screeching from the damp cellar he gets locked in, “WRITE ABOUT THIS AND ADD MORE METAPHORS AND MAYBE MAKE A COMPARISON TO JESUS OR AN INFINITELY-LEGGED OCTOPUS OR I DUNNO WRITE ABOUT COOKIES,” the best I can do to overcome the ever-present, ever-negative voice of writer’s doubt is to tune it out for a while. That doesn’t mean it shuts up. That means that, like the muzak in an elevator, or like the phantasmal infinitely-legged octopus floating just out of my line of sight, I tune it out and attempt to live my life.
In the second sense, we are our own worst critics in that we are TERRIBLE JUDGES OF OUR OWN WORK. Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for other creative types; I imagine it’s easy for a Stephen King, for example, to discern whether the pages he’s written today are utter tripe or not. Personally, I have no idea. I wrote 1300 words today, and haberdashery, I think they’re pretty good. There are parts in there that suck, but I enjoyed them while I was writing them. Some of the metaphors in there are pretty darn clever, I think, but who knows, maybe you’d read them and find them inane. I really have no idea. I just vomit up my word-slurry (slurry has been my word of the week) and hope that when I finish writing it, I can edit it up into something that will eventually pass as entertaining and not awful to the masses. (Let’s be optimistic, right?)
It’s a weird place, being a writer. I sit here, banging my fingers against this poor defenseless keyboard which has never done me any wrong (the tablet keyboard is another story, I want to murder the built-in tablet keyboard in the face), pouring the better part of an hour most days into telling a story (which I’m not sure is any good) to an audience (which I’m not sure I will even have) in a way that will hopefully be funny and poignant (which I’m not even sure I’m capable of). It’s a quagmire of uncertainty, a web of doubt, a forest of what-ifs. And it’s daunting as haberdashery. On the daily, I am daunted. Always, always, always, the howler monkey of self-doubt chitters away at me. It flings its tiny little balls of doubt-poop at the wall, it leaves the peels of its doubt-bananas on the floor for me to slip on (doubt bananas? Really? YES.) Whatever form it takes, the message is the same.
You’re not good enough. Quit. Writing is hard. It would be so easy to quit. Just quit. QUIT.
Another teacher post, here. I try to keep them from coming too often because I know that I have readers of all walks and I don’t want to alienate by writing too much about any one thing. That said, sometimes it just has to be done, and the first day back from spring break brought with it an incident that my inner Id-Writer won’t turn loose of until I purge it.
Kids are lazy. I get it. I see it in my own two-year-old, and he doesn’t even know how to be lazy. I shouldn’t say lazy. I should say they are efficiency seekers. Nature abhors wasted energy. A tree grows only as high as it must in order to harvest the sunlight it needs to reproduce. A pride of lions hunts only when they are hungry, otherwise they are basically enormous housecats looking for a patch of sunlight or shade to lie in, depending on the season. So, too, do humans, and by extension human children, have a biological imperative to get as much for as little as they can. I understand this. It makes perfect sense. The problem is, we are no longer driven by survival. A child does not risk starvation if it does not complete its homework. It will not die of exposure if it does not get its room clean on time.
The energy that would once have been devoted to survival is now (in a perfect world) devoted to making a child the best future human it can be, and that means enriching the mind. The yachts and mansions and shiny red convertibles don’t, as a rule, go to the dunces. They go to the smartest and then to the bankers and then to the politicians (the rest of us are just BORROWING their money). So while academic achievement doesn’t benefit a kid in the immediate, (working hard & getting good grades would be “wasted energy” in a survivalist sense) it benefits them in the long term.
This leads us to selective laziness. A clever future human quickly does the math and realizes that there is a balance to be struck between doing the best that you can (applying all of your energy) and doing only what you need to do in order to survive. Of course, the risk-assessment portions of our brains don’t fully form until we are, I dunno, thirty or so, so it’s even harder for a kid (and let me clarify that I’m talking about any kid in government-sanctioned school age, which is to say, any 5- to 18-year-old) to grasp that “doing your best” in school might be a wise course of action. Mom and Dad can push you in that direction, of course, but you can only fight nature to a point, depending on how big your stick is (anybody else out there get punished for bad grades? Yeah, you can spot us pretty easily, we’re the ones not dropping out of high school in droves). Incidentally, this is why a student’s grade in a class is not a good indicator of their intelligence. Any teacher will tell you that the smartest kids in the class are rarely the ones with the highest grades. The smartest ones are usually the ones barely passing. (NOTE THAT I DID NOT SAY ALL THE ONES BARELY PASSING ARE THE SMARTEST. WE’LL GET TO THEM.) They’ve figured out exactly how hard they need to work to pass (and by virtue of passing, get their parents off their backs, and by virtue of getting their parents off their backs, how to do what they want to do, which is be a teenager, sleep in, eat pop-tarts, and play Call of Duty). Selective laziness allows them to do this. I have a host of students — very nearly half — in my English class whose grades have hovered within a handful of points of 75 for most of the year. They could do better. Easily. But they don’t. They haven’t made the connection. One day they will. Maybe there will be regret, and maybe not, but the best I can do is to try and help them to see this situation for what it is. A waste of energy, and a waste of potential.
Whew. This brings us to the fun part, which is pointing out how dumb some of my students are. I shouldn’t say dumb. I should say lazy. And this time I mean lazy, which is to say, they don’t want to do ANYTHING they’re not interested in, whether they pass or not. That’s not selective. That’s just, well, a failure of evolution.
I’ve got a handful of kids who are not passing. It’s unfortunate, but in the majority of their cases, it’s what needs to happen. They haven’t yet learned what they need to (and I’m talking about the ability to read, analyze, and make sense of what they’re reading — you know, the things you, dear reader, can do without really pausing to think about it) and they need to go back and try it again.
It doesn’t stop them, bless their hearts, from trying, in whatever ways are available to them. Of course, hand-in-hand with this extreme aversion to work is an aversion to common sense. Which brings me, finally, to the comment that set in motion my ramble for today.
The child in question has been failing since about the second week of the year, which is to say, since the time I put in the first grades. His grade has been no secret to anybody, least of all him, and he has, since the end of the year is suddenly upon us and he has realized that he will be a senior again next year, finally taken an interest. We talked briefly prior to Spring Break about his grade and what he needed to do to have a chance at passing for the year.
So he comes to me today (first day back) and asks me, “Is my grade going up?”
I teach over 100 kids. It’s virtually impossible for me to know offhand what an individual student’s grade is off the top of my head. Thankfully, there are apps for that, and we have wonderful technology at our disposal to garner this information at a moment’s notice. Which I do. I start logging in to systems and pulling files. Then it dawns on me. He hasn’t turned in anything since we spoke.
This I tell him. He nods and says, “yeah, I just wanted to see if my grade’s going up.” I look at him oddly, in much the way I imagine God must have looked at Adam (if you believe in that sort of thing) when Adam told God that, yeah, he had actually had some of the fruit from that one tree God had specifically told him not to touch, you weren’t serious about that, right, God? (Did I just analogize myself with God? I think I did.)
I ask him how he expects his grade to have changed when he has not in fact done any work, and he just sort of looks at me like I’m speaking in Latin. They do this a lot when I move my modifiers around or use big words like “appropriate requirements” or “requisite amount of work”, which I do for the purpose of seeing them look at me like I’m speaking in Latin.
I am torn between feeling badly for him and his parents and the teachers that will teach him again next year, and being abjectly horrified at the amount of taxpayer dollars and man-hours that have gone into this child’s education only to bounce aside, as impactful as spitballs to a Panzer. Dribbles from a spigot in his ocean of academic indifference.
Sidenote: Thanks to this post, I’m going to be calling all my students “future humans” from now on.
Last night I enjoyed a rare opportunity to go see a baseball game.
I love going to Turner Field, driving through the slums and parking in the shadiest of places to watch our overpaid athletes smack a ball around. No, really, I actually do enjoy watching the games, I just can’t help but be extremely cynical about the sport and the costs and the everything surrounding the game itself.
You might guess that there is more to the ball game than the ball game, if you’ve been reading the blarg here, and you’d guess right.
It’s not a thing that I’m specifically familiar with myself, because it’s not a thing I partake in all that much, but apparently, sometime in the last couple of years, Turner Field has started selling adult beverages with actual hard liquor in them. Personally, I think this is fantastic, because given the choice between getting gouged for $8 on a lukewarm beer and getting gouged for $10 on a watered-down margarita, I know where my hard-earned money will be wasted — where it will do the most good. This, naturally, seemed to be the inclination of a good many patrons at last night’s game.
Before I get into the story, let me make the appropriate disclaimers. I don’t mind drinking in public. BY ALL MEANS, GO OUT, HAVE A GOOD TIME. I don’t even mind a bit of intoxication in public, as long as it’s done the right way. The right way to drink in public includes some of, though not necessarily all, of the following:
1. A clear, decided-on-beforehand designated driver. If your group is big enough, you need more than one and you need to know who’s riding with whom so hat there is zero confusion about who is and who is not allowed to imbibe.
2. Cash. This depends where on the scale you fall between Bill Gates and, oh I don’t know, ME. And it applies more at venues like sporting events, where stuff is really overpriced, as opposed to restaurants and bars, where it’s only reasonably overpriced. If you’re paying with cash, then you know when you’ve had all you’re allowed to have. Credit cards and drunk people do not mix well, unless you are the proprietor of a credit card company, in which case, let me cue up the cash register noises.
3. A brain. More specifically, the brains of the operation. The group needs a leader, and while it could be the DD, it doesn’t have to be — the job of the brain is to assess the situation and LOCK SHARKNADO DOWN when it starts to get out of control. “Oh, Billy’s had a few too many, let me get him some onion rings and a coke instead of a beer on the next round.” “Hey, Charlene just bought a round for the table, she doesn’t make that much money, let me steal her wallet so she can’t buy any more drinks.” “Hey, Ted, help me get Eddie down from the drapes.”
Our companions for the Braves game last night had none of these. Let me clarify. I’m calling them companions only because I learned so much about them, not because they were our partners in enjoying this spectacle of athletic prowess.
They were an office group (!) composed of but not limited to, Jerry, the boss, Martez, the gay one, Jenny, the quiet one, and a handful of sundry others whose names I didn’t catch, largely because they were too far away. Couple of the older members of the group had their kids along for a night at the ballpark. Nice group. Innocuous. Perfectly ordinary.
And then there was Leah.
Leah showed up hammered. We could tell because she arrived to the group with a shouted, “HEY Y’ALL! ARE THESE OUR SEATS?” Back over her shoulder, she bellowed, “I FOUND OUR SEATS.” Back to her group. “ARE ALL THESE OUR SEATS?” Back over her shoulder. “THE SEATS ARE DOWN HERE, GUYS.” The caps are necessary because she was speaking in them. She began to step past the others in the row, stumbling and holding her (first) beer up over her head, sloshing it wantonly about.
As she slid down in front of us, my actual group exchanged glances which spoke of the unending weariness we would surely feel with her before the night was out.
I can’t relate everything she did that was offensive. There simply isn’t time. But I did take some notes. No, really, I did, because I always have a little notepad with me (never know when the Id-Writer will grab the steering wheel), and why not get some material out of an otherwise irritating situation?
It took me two note cards to write down all the crazy stuff she did and said!
I’ll start with the selfies.
Stop foaming at the mouth and put aside your feelings on the subject for the moment. I really don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with trying to document your life, and a selfie is an immediate, if a bit artless, way to do that.
However.
Comes a point when you need to turn outward and enjoy the Braves game / the panoramic view / the street riot / your own marriage proposal the way you were meant to experience it, which is to say, through your OWN eyes and in your OWN mind, not through the lens of a camera (sorry, the screen of a phone) and for the benefit of your social media “friends”. At some point, taking a few pictures of yourself and your friends turns the occasion from “look at this amazing thing we experienced” into “look at how amazing we are, also this thing was happening while we were amazing”.
It’s the Sorites paradox. You have a single grain of sand, then you add another grain to it. This is not a heap. Add another grain, it is still not a heap. No single addition of a single grain of sand marks the moment when your handful of grains of sand becomes a heap, but suddenly, there before you, sits a heap. Likewise, no single selfie marks the moment of transition from “amazing thing” to “I’m amazing, and thing”. But the moment is in there somewhere. I don’t know what moment it was, but it happened well before the 54th picture Leah took of herself and her friends. That’s 54 pictures documented; I didn’t count the ones she took during the first inning or, for obvious reasons, when she was away from her seat (which was often, after all, those beers won’t refill themselves).
Then, lewdness.
Let me come back around to what I said about alcohol: in essence, DO YOU, just do it smartly. Whatever gets your rocks off is between you and whichever Big Daddy you pray to, but some (most?) of it is simply not the business of anybody who is not you, ergo, don’t make it their business.
She spent much of the game sexting.
I know this, not because we were reading her texts over her shoulder (though that happened, eventually, because frankly, the woman was a living, breathing train-wreck we could not look away from) but because this became a topic of much debate among her group. Her work group, let me remind you.
So she’s hammering away on her phone for much of the game, and somewhere around the 5th inning, Jerry (the “boss” of this group — and presumably, the man she works for, or who at least supervises her in some capacity) gets curious and snatches her phone to see what she’s so engrossed in when there is a perfectly engrossing baseball game happening just a few hundred feet away (oh yeah, we had pretty swell seats). His eyes and his mouth get wide and he passes the phone back. Things get quiet for a while. Then conversation picks up, slowly, the way grumpy siblings start communicating with one another only by saying “he started it,” “no I didn’t,” after the parents have separated the kids. Leah’s complaining about being judged, about feeling massive judgment. She’s still drunk, so she’s still loud.
Let’s pause and evaluate. Jerry’s stone-sober. He’s the boss, or at least a supervisor. JERRY SHOULD BE THE BRAINS OF THE OPERATION. Jerry should have Leah on lockdown. Truth be told, he should have kept her from drinking anything since the 3rd inning, but by this point, it’s obvious to everybody in section 218 that she’s off her Asgard and needs no further alcohol. Let’s not forget that in the immediate vicinity are five or six co-workers, a few of whom have children with them.
But instead of locking the sharknado down, he’s commending her on her correspondence with whatever champ is on the other end of her dirty little fingers (ew). And he gets her another beer when he comes back from the restroom in the 6th.
In the 7th inning, said champ sends her a picture of his, uh, situation. She passes it around. We all see it, too. It’s awesome, in that way of giving us all things to talk and rant about on the drive home. It’s less awesome, in that I feel strongly that there is a fixed number of, uh, situations that I should look upon in my lifetime, and I just wasted one on this idiot.
There was other bad behavior. She kept throwing her head back to laugh and smacking the knees of people in my group. She raised her arms in triumph after “winning” an argument with Martez, only to spill beer backwards on our shoes. She had to have two hands supporting her to walk down the stairs in the 8th inning.
I occasionally have the thought that I really do stay in too much. It’s bad enough that I chose a solo activity for exercise (running), a solitary hobby (writing), and I have a kid at home who needs my supervision and my time every moment I can spare them. It makes me feel like a hermit, a recluse, that guy whose house the kids wander past and say “that weird old guy lives there — I heard if you say his name three times in the dark, he’ll appear behind you in the mirror and tell you to get off his lawn.”
Then I go out and cross paths with a Leah, and suddenly all my decisions seem right.
Seriously. Friends don’t let friends get drunk and act like a fool in public. Certainly not at the age of 33. That was the saddest part. She is my age.
Living with a toddler is two parts awesome, two parts terrifying, six parts gross, and eight hundred parts blinding, world-shattering panic. One moment you are giving high-fives to your adult family members as he takes his first steps, the next moment you are spilling lemonade all over yourself in a scrambling frenzy as he legs it across the yard toward the street.
They are incredible little critters, capable in single acts of making you shake your head in amazement, shaking your head in wonderment, shaking your head in disgustment; sometimes all in the same single act. For example (and this is a 100% true, zero-embellishment story), MERE MOMENTS AGO as I was sitting down to think what I would blarg about tonight, I situated myself with tablet on the armrest of the sofa and keyboard in my lap. I reached over the arm of the sofa to get a sip of my soda and put my hand in a pool of something slimy.
Let me not bury the lede. I did not at the time, nor do I now, know what the slimy something was. I was more or less equal parts appalled and curious (a state of mind I have come to live in as a parent), but this time, at least, discretion got the better of curiosity and I cleaned it up without asking the difficult questions. I should point out (and I don’t know if it’s a guy thing or a parent thing or a me thing) that whenever I come across these somethings in the house, I *must* sniff them. For some reason, some tiny but unknowable part of my brain just HAS TO KNOW whether what made the mess is benign (masticated cookie bits, fruit juice, melted chocolate) or Just Another One Of Those Things Which Will Make Us Need To Burn The House Down One Day (cat barf, blood, cat poop, human poop), and as long as the stain in question hasn’t yet dried, what better way to test the content of a smear than by shoving it up under your beak? This happens more than I would like to admit.
As I said, I somehow stopped myself from smelling this slimy something, but it was green and brown and cold and gross and Extra slimy, so I felt it a safe bet that it was something I didn’t want to smell. I cleaned it up, simultaneously wondering at a number of factors:
1) when did he make this mess?
2) what did he use to make it?
3) how did he make this mess in this spot without either my wife or myself noticing him making it?
All at once I am admiring his stealth and choking back the bile rising in my throat at the touch of this slime on my hand. So, you know, impressed and horrified at once, that’s parenting.
Anyway.
It’s funny how clever he can be when he wants to be and how dumb he can be when it suits him. We’ve been trying to teach him colors for over a week now, and he is more than happy to call everything blue. The sky? Blue. The plate of spaghetti? Blue. School bus? Blue. OR, he will happily hold up a brightly-colored object and ask us, “what color is this?” and when we tell him, he tosses it aside in favor of the next bright color that he can “what-color-is-this” us with. This game can be played for entire minutes at a time (a minute in baby time is worth a good hour of adult time).
So he either cannot understand, or is willfully refusing to understand, colors, but at the same time, he can make a fully-understandable (and in fact perfectly grammatically correct) sentence to tell us, “No, I don’t want green beans”. “No, I don’t want juice.” “No, I don’t want night-night.” All I know is, as Bill Cosby once put it, it takes a lot of intelligence to fake stupidity, and if he can pick and choose what kind of vegetable he would like for dinner, then he can Dondraper sure tell the difference between blue and red, no matter how much he calls them both orange.
Then there’s his motor skills. Improving, by leaps and bounds in fact, but I still wouldn’t trust him with a ginsu knife, or for that matter a tube of toothpaste. He can conduct himself across a room in 2.3 seconds, arms and legs flailing like a scarecrow in a hurricane, leaping with outstretched legs up the step into the foyer and sidestepping the cat like he’s Jackie Chan in Drunken Master. The same child will then, while walking AND holding my hand in a grocery store, trip over his own feet so badly that he sprawls on his face and begins screaming like I’ve taken his favorite plastic dinosaur away.
Yesterday we were watching The Tigger Movie for, oh, I don’t know, the thirtieth time this week (those of you without children, don’t judge — those of you with children know exactly what I’m talking about, you know your kid has THAT ONE MOVIE). For no apparent reason, without any apparent impetus and certainly without warning, he turns to me with the look of greatest purpose on his tiny, innocent face, and says, with all the gravity and urgency of a bloodstained, cyborg-pummeled Schwarzenegger, “I GO.” And then gets up and dashes from the room, scarecrow arms and legs flapping madly.
I don’t know what was in his head, and it doesn’t matter. It was awesome. Things are so immediate. There’s no doubt, no hesitation, no waffling over “well, if I do this, somebody might think this…” The cookie looks delicious, I GO. That juice needs spilling, I GO. That cat needs it’s tail pulled. I GO. Simple words for simple deeds. There’s an eloquence in that to be striven for. I’m not sure it’s worth the price of all the poop and vomit, though.
I just finished the first act of Accidentally Inspired.
This was a surprise to me. I hadn’t been writing it with a 3-act structure in mind, though certainly I’m aware that stories tend to read well when there’s a structure like that in place (problem is introduced in the first act, characters bang their heads against the problem in the second act, problem is resolved in the third act). Nonetheless, I’ve never been much of a planner. In storytelling, I like to learn who the characters are, decide what the central problem is, and then simply write the characters and let them figure it out.
In retrospect, this might be why I’ve burned myself out on writing in the past. Because as much as any character worth his salt can surely find his way to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it helps if there’s a trail of breadcrumbs, a map, or ANY SEMBLANCE OF ANYTHING TELLING YOU YOU’RE MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Up until the current project — and I mean that as literally as I possibly can mean it, as in I took action against this problem TODAY following my Project writing session — here’s how I write.
Step 1: The idea strikes.
Step 2: A few days / weeks / months pass in which the idea putters around my head like a hobo looking for change. If the idea is a good one, it will grow, drawing my focus and attention to it like protoplanets gathered matter in the infant solar system. If it sucks, it withers and dies like every tomato plant I have ever tried to grow.
Step 3: I start to write. Notice there is no “planning” step. I simply pick a moment at the beginning of the story and begin to write it.
Step 4: In a flurry of energy and excitement, I write several scenes / pages, typically about five to ten pages or so, and maybe I even take a few character notes (not PLOT notes, you know, things that would help me to tell the story and make sure things stay interesting, but CHARACTER notes, so that I know exactly what kind of patent leather shoes to put on the ANTZhole lawyer character when he arrives at the end of the first act because THESE ARE THINGS THAT MATTER). Then I get distracted with something; let’s say that it’s painting a bathroom or replacing some light fixtures and definitely not watching Seinfeld reruns.
Step 5: The idea falls from the pockets of my mind like a discarded candy wrapper, to lie forgotten in the ditches of my memory for a couple years, until it reoccurs to me out of nowhere (probably while I’m, again, patching some drywall, and definitely not watching the Lord of the Rings films again), at which point I think, oh yeah, I started writing that idea a while back, I wonder if I still have my notes on it somewhere?
Step 6: While looking for the notes on the original idea, I have an idea for another idea, and the process begins again, cycling back on itself into infinity. This can occur once every few months or every few years.
So, how can I be sure that it’s FOR REALZ this time and not just an extended step 4?
I’m glad I asked. For one, and I really can’t pinpoint the exact reason for it now more than at any other time, but I simply want to make it happen. There’s more drive there and, frankly, I don’t want to question it too much, I just want to ride it like the strong wind that it is. For another, as I mentioned above, I’ve taken some proactive steps to make sure I don’t bog down. Like salting the roads before an ice storm (and I live in Atlanta, so enjoy the stupidity and futility of that simile), this will keep my sharknado from spinning out of control.
So I’ve outlined some high points for the story to follow. Not a rock-solid outline — technically I already have that in the form of the stage play, though in a lot of ways that’s out the window if it’s anything other than a ROUGH outline — but rather some tentpole moments, as my kung-fu master Chuck Wendig would call them (if Douglas Adams is my spirit guide, Chuck is my ANTZ-kicking bearded ninja guru, perching on treetops and dispensing wisdom and beatdowns with one hand tied). For the moment, it’s a scribbled series of notes: this happens, then that happens, at some point these characters need to make this happen, try to bring this situation about. It’s what I see in the distance for now, and it’s by those shining points of light that I will steer through the darkness.
But. (There’s always a butt.)
Translating this story from play to novel has taught me a few things. First of all, the dialogue is easy, it’s the descriptions that are hard for me. Being that there is virtually all of the former and none of the latter in stage plays, it’s easy to see why I gravitated to those (and, likely, still will in the future). Second, stories are living things.
I set out to tell the story of the play in novel form, and it was like tossing a sea monkey on steroids into the ocean. That thing swelled up and expanded and started growing all sorts of spider appendages and lizard tails and buzzard beaks and IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES. As I write the characters, I keep learning new things about them, they keep doing things that surprise me, and as a result, the story is taking odd turns I never expected. And therein lies the lesson I learned from my work today.
Are you listening, future me? REMEMBER THIS MOMENT, because you learned something today, and if you forget it, Past Me is going to reach up through space and time and punch you right in the nads. You hear me? RIGHT IN THE NADS. It’ll hurt me as much as it hurts you, but sometimes you have to send a fargoing message.
TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME. Sure, plot the path. Figure out how you’re going to get from where you are now to the end you imagine. But don’t be afraid to blaze a new trail, to take a turn down a side street and see what secrets are hidden off the main drag. Maybe the end you end up with is better than the end you thought you wanted. (Whose end?)
Following that advice has led me, as I mentioned back at the top of this post, to the end of the first act of this novel. The characters are all stuck, they’re all in trouble, they’re all in doubt. They’re at the edge of a cliff, and it’s hard for any of them to see the way out. (BUT THE ID-WRITER SEES ALL). It’s a moment that never existed in the staged version of the story, caused by a character who existed only as a throwaway joke in the staged version, and yet it fits so perfectly (at least in my mind at the moment) that I don’t see how the story could unfold any other way.
For now.
So they’re stuck. Tomorrow the second act begins, and it’s time to start digging them out.
OR IS IT?
*evil laughter echoes*
*sounds of struggle*
Sorry about that. We’ve really got to get a handle on that guy.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 