Climb the Trope Ladder

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I fell into a TVtropes rabbit hole today.

If you’re a writer, and you don’t know about TVtropes.org yet, you should.

I don’t know if there’s a better resource for teaching you that there really and truly is nothing original left in the world for artists to create. A wholly humbling browsing experience. Yet, by the same token, it’s encouraging to click through its wealth of pages to see all the stories that use the same old tired tricks and do just fine.

If you haven’t seen TVtropes yet, it works like this:

You land there for whatever reason. Maybe a fellow writer or critically-minded movie buff refers you to it. Maybe you’re looking for the name of that one guy who was in that one movie and you stumble upon the site. Maybe somebody who secretly hates you and wants to destroy your productivity sends you a link.

You click around a little bit, maybe trying the “random trope” or “random text” functions to have the site spoon up a tasty helping of trope-centric technobabble to your face. Want to write your story with a hero who unwittingly unleashes even greater evil upon the world? There’s a trope for that. How about the twist where a loved one is left dead for the hero to find? Yeah, it’s been done. Maybe you want to see a bunch of examples of the ways heroes have sacrificed themselves in stories. TVTropes has you covered. Whatever your device, whatever the circumstance, whatever unique idea you think you have, it’s been done before and TVtropes has it on record.

Hours later, you’ve got twenty-four browser tabs open compiling all the different sins of all the movies and books you love and all of the tropes with cool names like Toxic Phlebotinum and you forgot to eat lunch and they turned the lights off in the building and you’re wondering, finally, how you can weave all these things into your next story.

The cycle will repeat as long as you leave even one tab open. One thing leads you to the next, and then the next, until you’re miles deep in the forest and everything looks the same. The only way out is for the power to fail on your computer, and even then, you have to have the resolve not to click on that bright, shiny “restore tabs” button when you get booted back up, lest you find yourself falling once more into the black hole…

In all seriousness, while the site sounds like it’s a great way to depress yourself at the prospect of seeing exactly how much and how often a certain device has been done (to death), it’s fascinating nonetheless to see all the different permutations of plot and character which can be perfectly successful. In addition, I’m not sure if there’s a better tool for thinking of ways to carry on a stuck project; simply look up a beloved story, identify some of its defining tropes, explore those tropes, and then bend them to your will.

What felt like endless, zombie-like wandering through the dark alleyways of the site has filled my head with all kinds of ways to expand my current story.

I think that means I can qualify all that mindless clicking as research.

So, I’m off to do more studying…

Wasted Time… Like a Leaky Faucet

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Time.

I’m a little bit obsessed with it. So much so that I’m one of those dinks that actually still wears a wristwatch that’s functional, rather than a fashion accessory.

It’s eternal and unchanging, unless of course you happen to be traveling at the speed of light, or taking up residence within the jurisdiction of a black hole. Then again, if that applies to you, you’re probably not here reading my drivel.

But for all that time is eternal, we, sadly, are not. We get only so much time to operate with, and as miraculous as modern medicine is, it can do nothing to stretch that time out. (I just heard a story on This American Life about a cryonics experiment that went… horrifyingly wrong, all because people are determined to extend their time on this mortal coil. It ain’t happening yet.) Which means that it’s up to each of us to make the most of this non-renewable resource that’s been allotted to us.

So why — why, why, why? — are so many people determined to waste their precious time?

I’m not talking about relaxing after a tough day at work, or watching a few reruns of Seinfeld with your wife. Time spent relaxing, to a point, is not wasted time.

No, I’m talking about the in-between moments, the moments not specifically spoken for but bridging the gap between moments that matter. Driving your car. Walking from one place to another. Shuffling zombielike through the aisles of the grocery store. Moments you don’t even consider, but that end up swallowing up so many minutes — or even hours! — of your day.

I’m a teacher, so I see this one every day: students have five minutes to get from one class to another, and they lurch at the slowest pace possible from Biology to Math II. That I can understand, to a point — you’re not looking forward to sitting through another drone about the Pythagorean Theorem — but still. You eat up every possible moment getting from A to B, then you have to take extra time to get your business together, get your head right for sitting through another class… in short, you end up slowing everybody down since you wasted time on what? dragging your feet?

But that’s a student. That’s a kid. Who doesn’t properly understand the significance of the time he’s wasting.

How about this? You’re in the grocery store, waiting to check out, all your precious foodstuffs on the belt, and the person in front of you is watching the groceries go into the bag, or watching the numbers on the display tick slowly up… and then the cashier tells them, that’ll be entirely too much money, please. This isn’t even an old person, most of the time. It’s a thirty-something guy who looks perfectly ordinary, you know, not like an idiot. Or a twenty-something woman texting on her cell phone. Anyway, the cashier tells them, you know, it’s time to pay, and THAT’S when they reach for their purse or their wallet. As if it was a total shock to them that there was input required from them in this transaction. As if you’ve never been to a grocery store in your life, and you never thought that you’d have to lift a finger to get the food to your house so you can cram it down your beak.

How can you not be prepared for this? Sure, it’s a few seconds, but those seconds add up, and they’re not just your seconds, either — those seconds of your own hesitation get pawned off on everybody in line behind you.

I’m at the soccer match the other night. Match scheduled to start at 5:30. It’s 5:25. Teams are both on-hand, warmed up, ready. Officials are on-site and ready. Scoreboard is set for the start of the match. And everybody is standing around looking at one another. 5:30; nothing happens. 5:35; more milling about on the sidelines. 5:40; finally the teams line up to have their starters announced. 5:45, the match finally starts. Fifteen minutes late. For no reason! The fault could lie anywhere — maybe one of the coaches had to run to his car, maybe the on-site administrator had to deal with an issue and wanted the start of the game held, whatever. But that’s 15 minutes that a stadium full of parents and friends, two teams of players, an additional two teams who play after, can’t get back. For nothing!

We live in a society where, for better or worse, everybody overlaps with everybody else. I cut you off in traffic, you take it out on your husband later that day. You don’t notice the light changing and cost me the traffic light, I assign extra homework for the 90 students I teach. The repercussions of our every action echo outward like ripples in a pond. Yet again and again, I come across these people letting their time — AND MINE — dribble out the corner of their mouths like so much drool. Distracted with something else. Not paying attention. Just not at all motivated to put any pep in their step.

I want to grab them by their collars, shake them until their bleary eyes snap into focus. Impress upon them, somehow, the fact that while they shuffle through the hallways, while they blunder through the aisles, while they dodder at the stoplights, their time, like sands through the hourglass, is slipping irretrievably into the past.

It only takes a half second to look up from whatever’s right in front of you and remember that your actions impact the world all around you. Is it so much to ask that we do so? In fact, if you are alert and aware and moving through your life with purpose and vigor, you actually gain time… what would have been wasted can then be applied to other, more important things. Is it ridiculous, then, to expect the people around us to act with a little urgency, to behave as if time matters to them?

And at what point would one become a total jerkstore for demanding that they do so?

The Immutable Mr. Jenkers

Pavowski18 Comments

Chuck’s challenge for the week: The Opening Line challenge. I took a few weeks off from the flash fiction game, but it’s time to saddle up again. The task at hand: choose an opening line from another author and build it into a 2000-words-or-less story.

I took a line from a guy calling himself Nicholas. The first line is his. The rest is all me.

The Immutable Mr. Jenkers

The 3rd time I killed Mr. Jenkers I knew i had a problem.

Not because he came back to life. That happens all the time. Once is rarely enough when you start talking about quantum murder. Sorta like fixing a wobbly chair. You shave a few millimeters off one leg, then it’s wobbling the other way. Go back and try again. Or like swatting cockroaches. Sure, you get that one, but there’s a thousand just like him in the walls just waiting to pop out. That’s why there aren’t too many guys working solo like me anymore. Murder’s one thing, but that’s one universe, one reality. You want somebody well and truly wiped out, it takes legwork. Timelines have to be rewritten, sometimes memories have to be wiped, hell, I once had to take a two-hundred-year detour to make sure this one woman didn’t date any men from India, so that her descendant’s bloodline could be clean enough for her to marry into a rich family. People ask for the craziest things. And I’ve been back and forth across time so often, sometimes it feels like I’m older than the dirt itself.

Certainly felt like that after Jenkers. Who hires a hitman for a cat, I should have asked. Why not just, you know, stop feeding him, or drop him off across town. But it’s a hard thing to say no to a hundred thousand credits. And besides, how hard could it be?

I should’ve asked around before I took the job. I did, after the fifth try. Turns out, this cat’s been around for over three millenia, and maybe longer — they just don’t have good records going back past ancient Egypt. And no, I’m not making that up. Best I can make out, there have been over 800 documented attempts on the life of this particular feline; most of them successful. But like a bubble under a static sticker, you squish it down, it just pops up somewhere else.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The owner’s this sweet old lady. ‘Bout 60 or so. All white hair, glasses on a chain, looks like a librarian except for the dark circles under her eyes and the smell like she hasn’t bathed in a few months. And she wants Mr. Jenkers whacked. “Do it humanely,” she asks. On account of she still loves him, despite the fact that she’s pretty sure he’s eroding her sanity. Those were her words. “He never sleeps,” she says. “He just watches me all the time. Like he’s accusing me of something. Like I had tried to kill him and he knew all about it.”

I know, right? She didn’t get the irony, and I guess that’s fair. I didn’t get it right away either, but of course she was trying to kill him, and he absolutely knew about it.

I’m getting ahead of myself again. It’s a hazard of the job.

Protocol says you always go the straightforward route on the first try, because you never know when once will do the trick. So — that afternoon, picked up a cat carrier, came by Harriet’s place (her name is — was — Harriet). Jenkers in the carrier along with a couple of bricks, and into the river he goes.

Next morning, he’s back. I fire up the ReClocker and arrive at her house a day earlier. No frills, just a hammer to the back of his head. Get back to Now, the cat’s still there. I try this a few different ways, go back a few years on the cat, come to find out she adopted him fully-grown from a shelter. So I go back further. Try to kill him every time, naturally, but sure as the sun, there he is every time I go back to Now. Trace him back to another family. Two kids, picket fence, and this psycho-eyed cat. Thing is, though, I’ve gone back five years now, and the cat looks exactly the same. Killed it over a hundred times, now, and every time, he’s back. Mr. Jenkers. Orange stripes, big chunk missing from his ear, eyes sparkling like black diamonds. And now, Harriet’s words are in my head, and I feel like when he looks at me — in the past, you know, not in the Now — he knows what I’m doing.

I go back ten years, and there’s Jenkers. Same as ever. I go twenty years back. Same old Jenkers, same old scar on his ear, same evil eyes. He’s living with some World War 2 vet, and I can’t bring myself to kill him in that timeline, so I go back even further. Thirty years. Then fifty.

When you first suit up in this line of work they tell you not to go getting crazy notions in your head about drastically altering the flow of history. Can’t go back and wipe out Hitler, for example — something’s broken on that guy’s reality and he always comes back. Can’t scrub out Mussolini, or Pol Pot, or Rasputin, or any of those guys that the history geeks would really like a crack at, right? Thing is, those guys — and I’ve gone back and messed with them, who wouldn’t? — they at least exist in a normal timeline. They’re born, they turn into big world-altering jerks, they die. And you can’t erase them from the Stream, but at least they’re just little contained pockets of horror and atrocity.

But not Jenkers.

This thing is beyond anything I’ve ever seen, beyond anything the Bureau’s ever seen, and maybe beyond anything the universe has ever seen. You go back to the Renaissance, Jenkers is there scratching at the edges of a Botticelli painting. Go back to the Middle Ages and Jenkers is chasing plagued rats down alleys. Ancient Egypt, like I said, was a good time for the old boy — they worshipped cats back then, you know, and with his eyes like eternity, well. You think cats get spoiled now when they end up with somebody like Miss Harriet, it’s nothing on Egypt in the pyramid days. He had his own entourage.

Suffice it to say, as far back as we can go — and we can go pretty damn far — I can’t find an origination point for this cat. For all I know, he’s existed since life first crawled up out of the swamps. He can’t be killed. Can’t be erased. Can’t be unmade. He’s like a scar in the fabric of the universe.

So what else could I do?

I adopted him from Miss Harriet. Took him back to my house. Bought a bunch of toys, you know, feathers on strings, little jingly balls. Found this guy on the internet who sells catnip by the pallet — god knows Jenkers will go through all of it.

It was unnerving at first, coming home every night to those empty black eyes staring at me like death itself. But he grows on you after a while. I always laughed when people said their cats had personality, but Jenkers… he’s got a sense of humor. Like, he’ll run under my feet when I’m coming downstairs in the morning. As if he were trying to kill me, to get back for the thousands of times I killed him. But it’s all in good fun. Late at night, he sleeps on my feet. When I’m reading, he’ll nose under the book and demand to be petted, with that one floppy, chewed-up ear.

I still kill him at least once a week. Just to see what happens.

But he always comes back. Dependable as the Sunday paper. Watching me with those eyes like midnight at the bottom of the ocean.

You’re a Genius All The Time

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Much as I love to ramble on when it’s time for Stream of Consciousness Saturday, I think I’m going to let brevity get the better of my wit today. (As if that were a fair fight!)

I’ve spent the week dunking my toe back into the ocean of drafting delights this week, and whoo, it’s overwhelming. Drafting is awesome, but drafting is also awful. As such, I’ve been peeking around the internet to find things and stuff to keep me motivated and rolling forward, because, as I think I may have mentioned before around here once or twice, momentum matters. As is always the case when you go trawling the internet, you find a few gems and a lot of space trash, but in particular I found one site that’s chock-full of fantastic little tidbits for writers especially, but for everybody, when you get down to it. Lists like this one from Neil Gaiman, or this one from Kurt Vonnegut are delightful and straightforward.

But there’s something raw and enchanting about the magic brain bullets Jack Kerouac squeezed off in a list of 30 points entitled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, in all its disjointed shorthand and ungrammatical gutpunchery.

The whole list is excellent, but in particular, I really like this piece of self-motivational pie:

#29: You’re a Genius all the time.

I’m going to paraphrase Bill Murray’s character from Ghostbusters 2 and say that that is the kind of thing I need to hear every day, that kind of uplifting, you’re-right-even-when-the-world-thinks-you’re-wrong certainty. Maybe I wouldn’t be such an idiot. So I’m going to print that off and affix it to my laptop, or maybe I’ll stick it in the sole of my shoe, or maybe I’ll tattoo it backwards across my forehead, just so that I can remind myself in the morning when I’m feeling not so much particularly like a genius.

Did I say genius? I meant Genius. Capital G. Real deal. No games. Just Genius. All the time.

Anyway, there’s your wisdom for the day. You’re a Genius all the time. So if nothing else, you’ve got that going for you.

Which is nice.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Why I Love/Hate My First Chapter

Pavowski5 Comments

Beginnings are the worst.

Just ask the guys muscling for position at the starting line of a race; all elbows and hip checks and ankles getting stomped on. Ask the folks dragging themselves out of bed for a pre-dawn workout, fighting against the gravitational pull of the singularity created by a warm bed. Ask the authors, staring at the terrible white expanse of the blank first page.

The beginning of any endeavor is the worst, because each step is a battle. Every inch of ground is an inch that must be won not only from the enemy (your competitors, the weights you’ll lift, the miles you’ll run, the white space you’ll reclaim in ink) but also from your own momentum — momentum that wants to let you slide to the back of the pack, stay in bed, watch TV… do ANYTHING but fight that fight.

So it goes with writing.

I’ve just started a second novel, and MAN is it tempting not to do it. As much as I’m excited about the prospect of a new project, I know that for the few months of fun in drafting I’ll have the long slog of a better part of a year or more in edits ahead. Then, there’s the story itself. I don’t know for entirely sure where it’s going yet. I’ve got some moments and ideas mapped, but it’s still a lump of clay. It needs shaping. The result is that each foray into this new world feels a bit like a fish flopping around on a riverbank: There’s water just over there, just at the edge of vision, and if I can just get there, if I can just find the flow, everything will be okay. Problem is, a fish is designed for swimming, slicing through the water, carving liquid paths in currents and bubbles… the movement comes out as herky-jerky twitching on land, and I can’t even tell if it’s moving me closer to my goal or not.

I’m also pretty sure I’m terrible at writing beginnings anyway. Every word that goes on the page feels like needless exposition; clunky, unnecessary, and obtrusive, like riding an elephant to work. Any attempt at action takes a hard left with an explanation of who this person is, what the place looks like, why it’s even going on… end result? The 3000 words or so I’ve written so far feel positively glacial. My sneaking suspicion is that it’s crap, and I should probably pack this thing in, cut my losses, and do something more productive with my time.

But.

Much as the drafting is frustrating, it is freeing: the first draft is not constrained by the need to be perfect or even good. It doesn’t even have to hang together; it can have unformed limbs, elbows that bend the wrong way, or a vestigial tail. All that crap — the characters that randomly appear and disappear throughout the narrative, the note that you forgot to plant earlier in the story, the the gobs and gobs of exposition that feels like so many monster trucks spinning their wheels, spraying mud all over the walls — can be fixed when the narrative surgery begins, in the edit.

The draft is raw, bleeding genesis, messy and gory, staining the earth red in its wake. (Give me Genesis!)

The draft is rainbows spewing from the netherparts of unicorns, coloring the sky with a riot of sound and fury. It’s a newborn eagle spreading its wings for the first time after its mother boots it out of the nest: nervous at first, stumbling over its own tangle of talons and beak, but then — then! — the wind catches its wings and it soars. The story creates its own momentum and, once tilted over the edge, it rolls and tumbles and picks up crumbs and absorbs stray cats and it barrels down the hill, absorbing everything in its path.

At least, that’s how I think it will be. I’ve only done this once before, after all. But having done it once, the inertia is that much easier to break; the fear of failure is that much easier to overcome.

The first draft is awesome.

The first draft is awful.

The starting is the hardest part, but the good news is, as long as you keep your momentum up, you only have to start once.