Nothing to see here, but the last edit (until, you know, somebody who’s trying to help me get the book published comes back and tells me to do it again) on Accidentally Inspired is finished.
One last pass (to be completed in an afternoon or so) to clean up the formatting and save it in about a half dozen places, and then it’s time to go about the business of submitting it.
Deep breath.
Time to jump off the cliff.
There’s a mantra I regularly preach, scream, whisper, write, and otherwise fling at my soccer team: Nothing Easy. I’m sure it’s not original to me, though I can’t say I got it from anybody outside of my own skull. I like it — and I encourage my players to repeat it, internalize it, live it — because it can be taken several ways and it works several different ways.
First, the external: the other team wants the victory just as badly as you do. They owe you nothing, and they’ll give you nothing, so don’t make it easy for them. Control the ball so you don’t give them any easy turnovers. Get good position so you don’t give them any easy passes. Mesh on defense so you don’t concede any easy shots. Nothing easy.
Then, the internal: in soccer, more often than a lot of players would like to admit, speed beats talent. Hustle and hunger beats technical know-how. You might have the best touch, the most precise passes, the most devastating shot, but if you can’t beat the other man to the ball, all that skill goes for a big fat goose egg. So, you have to play hard from the opening whistle. Fight for every ball. Run on every play like it’s the one they’re going to break away and score on. Nothing easy.
Point is, if you play easy — if you give the match a halfway effort — you’re giving the opposition an advantage in every phase of the game. Which means, you’re putting victory that much farther away (if not entirely out of reach).
Well, soccer season is almost over, and I’m sitting here really analyzing my writing process, because I’m in a transitional time. I’m almost done with the final (for now) edit of the novel, which means it’s time to start considering what I’m going to dedicate my writing time to next. That means setting new goals, planning a schedule, determining how I’m going to approach the project.
In all this analysis, I realized that, among other things I haven’t been doing in my writing of late was writing short fiction — those 1000-word-or-so stories that I was pretty religious about posting for a long time, those little pressure-release valves for the creative energies I was bottling up while I worked within the confines of the overarching Project. So last night I embraced the prompt and wrote one. And I’ll admit — it may not have been my best work, but what was different about it — what worked about it — was the approach. I didn’t fine-tune the idea to death. I didn’t plot it out meticulously before I put keys to board. I didn’t sit back and wait for it to be perfect before taking my shot (much like the protagonist in the tale). I leaned into the uncertainty and I wrote it full-steam ahead.
I haven’t written like that in a while. I’ve tried out some new approaches (and liked them a lot, to be fair!), honed my craft, become a bit more exacting in terms of how I build stories. But what I realized is, that approach has me operating at half capacity. Throwing myself halfway into the work, keeping one foot on the edge of the pool as I dunk my toes in and test the water. It keeps me from making as many mistakes along the way, but it also keeps me so focused on the road that I forget to enjoy the view along the way.
Like my soccer team working easy in a match, making things easy for the opposition, I’m working halfway and making it easy to get distracted, easy not to finish, easy to pretend I’m working when really I’m just hiding behind excuses.
Now, the only absolute is that there are no absolutes. I’m not going to say that there’s not a time for the methodical, measured, relaxed, easy approach. Sometimes if you rush the work, you make foolish errors that cost you. But if you embrace the easy approach too much — if you work halfway all the time — well, first of all you never get anything done, and second, you don’t make the mistakes that make the work interesting.
When it comes to writing, you have to throw yourself into it the way you’d run out into the road after your kid. You have to give yourself over to it like jumping out of a plane. You can’t keep one foot on solid ground while you let the other foot acclimate. You can’t do it halfway.
So the mantra for my writing — for a while, at least, until I think of a new one — is: Nothing Halfway.
This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.
“Ernie Collins.”
“The name doesn’t ring a bell. Then again, I’ve only been working here for six months or so.”
“Oh. Well. He’d have been here back in ’07.”
“I see.” Lana, feeling that the conversation had reached that inevitable point where things peter out and the bartender and patron go on with their individual existences, began polishing glassware, and only when she noticed Eddie gesturing at her did she realize that he had continued speaking.
“And from there, it’s on to Melbourne, to a little hole-in-the-wall joint called Dingo Lingo.”
She angled back into the conversation as best she could. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Of course not. Very few people who haven’t cracked the top-10 bestseller list have.”
Lana squinted at him, still turning a glass in her hand. It was impossible to tell if he was putting her on. The crazy ones never seem crazy. “And you’re going there to …?”
“To drink it all in, man.”
“What, Dingo Lingo serves some proprietary drink?”
“No. What? No. Look.” Eddie pulled out his phone and opened his notes app. He tapped on a file, zoomed in on a maniacal-looking spider web diagram dotted with pictures of towns and bars and faces she didn’t recognize, clicked and zoomed and scrolled a few more times, and finally stopped and shoved the phone toward her. On the screen was a picture of an absolutely normal-looking guy. Slightly unshaven, slightly frumpy, a below-average intelligence gasping for help in his faraway stare as he sat at a Starbucks street table. “Because of him. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“I fear I may have lost the thread.”
Eddie sighed. “He’s a Pegasus.”
“A what, now?”
Eddie sighed again, harder this time, to make clear that he was explaining something he shouldn’t have to explain. “In Greek myth, Pegasus was said to strike springs from the very ground where his hooves touched.” He smiled at Lana as if this should have meant something to her, but it obviously didn’t. “Pegasus was the personal transport for the muses. Like Uber, but, you know, a horse.”
Lana gave an ever-so-slight shake of her head. “Muses?”
“The Greek goddesses of inspiration.”
“Okay, and you want a drink from the bar because –”
“It’s a metaphor, man! It’s not a literal spring. Ernie Collins is not a goddamned winged horse. But he’s a Pegasus in spirit. He travels the world on his parents’ retirement fund, and every so often:” here Eddie rapped his fingers on the tabletop and made a clop-clop noise with his tongue. “Inspiration springs forth.”
“So you think,” Lana said, studying the freshly polished bar as if it might offer some insight on how to deal with a clearly deranged individual, which it did not, “that just by being in these places, you’ll … what, soak up some inspiration?”
“Exactly.” Eddie folded his arms and leaned back from the table as if he’d just solved a two-hundred item crossword puzzle. He raised his eyebrows at her, again, as if he expected her to be impressed.
“And that’s why you haven’t ordered anything but that one beer, then?” She tried to keep the edge out of her voice, but he’d been nursing the one drink for three hours. It wasn’t like she needed him to vacate the stool — it was a Tuesday night, after all — but principle dictated that a bar tab should at least exceed in dollars its length in hours.
“Nothing personal, you understand.” He picked nervously at the label which had already been thoroughly picked at. He came away with bits of glue under his fingernails. “But I’ve got quite the itinerary ahead. Atlanta. Seattle. Toronto. Melbourne. Tokyo. Gotta make every dollar count.”
“You can afford travel to all these places, but you can’t afford another drink?”
“I’ve got a GoFundMe page set up. I’ll move on when I can afford airfare.”
Won’t hold my breath for a decent tip, Lana thought. “You’re a writer, then?”
“Trying to be,” Eddie replied, a sort of self-satisfied smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“What have you written?”
“Well.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Nothing yet.”
“Oh, a work in progress?” Lana returned to wiping glasses. “I had a roommate in college who always had about a dozen works in progress. Never did get published. Wrote like a demon, though.” She glanced sideways at Eddie. “Ordered more than one drink at happy hour, too.”
“Thing is, I don’t want to just write anything. When I actually sit down to write, I want it to be the best. Hence: following in the footsteps of Pegasus.”
Lana frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose there’s intelligence of a sort in that.” Then her thought caught up to her frown. “Wait. You mean to tell me you haven’t actually written anything yet?”
“Er.” More glue, more fingernails. “Not as such, no.”
“Not a draft, not an outline, nothing?”
Eddie shook his head.
“I mean, you at least know what you’re going to write about, though?”
“Well, kind of. I mean, I have some ideas.” He jabbed at his phone again, and showed her the picture of Ernie Collins. “Truth be told, that’s kind of what I was hoping this whole Pegasus thing would help me out with.”
“Let me make sure I understand clearly,” Lana said. She set her glass and rag down and leaned in close. “You want to be a writer, but you haven’t written anything. Instead, you’re going on a trip around the world, on the dime of internet strangers, hoping to sponge up some inspiration … from a man you feel is the embodiment of a winged horse?”
“To be honest, the GoFundMe only has fifteen dollars in it so far.” He eyed the last swig in the bottom of his bottle, felt the moment was right, and swallowed it. “From my mom. Actually –” he waggled the empty bottle — “how much did you say this was, again?”
######
Chuck’s challenge this week: The random title challenge. My title for the week was “Pegasus Intelligence,” which was the fanciest bit of nonsense I’d heard in a while. A little bit of research, though, led me to a place I didn’t entirely hate. It’s more of a vignette than a story, but, well, that’s life, innit?
Also, about halfway into the writing, I realized that I have here the seedling for a … not exactly a sequel to my first novel, but for another story in the same universe as that one. Dammit, Chuck. These short stories are supposed to let me vent pent-up creative energy, not spawn entire novels to go clanging around in my skull.
Spoilers below for the finale of The Walking Dead season 6. Be warned.
Stories are like missile launches. Somebody, somewhere, gets pushed out of their comfort zone, so they push a button. The symbol of their hurt feelings, anger, frustration or desperation goes sailing through this liminal space, there’s maybe some doubt about whether or not it will actually hit its target, then it either hits the target and blows it to holy hell … or it doesn’t.
That’s a story. Problem, struggle, solution.
Stories play with this simple but fundamental structure all the time, especially in the contemporary age of sequels and sagas and ten-book series and multi-season television dramas. Harry Potter, for example, hasn’t beaten Voldemort by any stretch at the end of Sorcerer’s Stone (or Philosopher’s Stone if you must) — that problem remains to be solved. He has, however, halted Voldemort’s plot in its tracks, found a long-lost magical artifact, and established himself as at least a passable wizard. Book one of Harry Potter sets up a lot of problems (is the stone real? what’s up with that weird professor? who were Harry’s parents and why did they leave him with the most horrible people in the world?). And Book 1 answers something like 90% of those problems (the answers are “yes”, “he’s possessed by Voldemort”, and “they were crackshot wizards themselves who died saving the world”).
To return to the missile metaphor, Rowling aims at the problem of becoming a wizard and finding out what’s up with this stone, fires, and obliterates her targets. Out of the rubble arises a new problem, though. The cliffhanger here is: Voldemort is not actually killed in the encounter with Quirrell, and he escapes to fight another day.
This is an acceptable cliffhanger. The critical moment has passed. Answers have been provided, and the cliffhanger establishes a new question that doesn’t need an answer right now, but rather gives us something to think about in the space between the book and its sequel (how will Voldemort strike next?)
Then, you have the unacceptable cliffhanger, like the one we saw at the end of The Walking Dead earlier this week. (You have seen it, haven’t you? This is the part where I cry SPOILERS and wave my hands frantically as you read on into the abyss.)
The entire season has revolved around a couple of questions: namely, can Rick’s group survive in their new community, and who the balls is Negan? Well, here comes our missile metaphor again: the writers take aim at these problems and push the button to deliver annihilation. Midway through the season, it seems the missiles have found their mark: a man claims to be Negan and the group kills him, and life seems to be stable (if not entirely safe) in the compound.
But then more threats are discovered, and we learn that the compound isn’t safe at all, and that Negan is probably still out there. This is well and good — we don’t mind that our missiles missed the mark, as we can always adjust mid-stream and launch again.
Which brings us to the finale. It answers our two questions, and thanks, at least, are due for that. Is Rick’s group safe in Alexandria? No, not even almost. Who the balls is Negan? He’s a leather-jacket-wearing, barbed-wire-wrapped-bat-wielding, ruthless but cultured sonofabitch. Okay, great, awesome. Targets fired at, and we have the answers to our questions, yay!
But then.
The ending.
Image is the property of AMC.
Negan beats the everloving hell from somebody, and presumably that somebody dies from his or her wounds (hard to argue otherwise from the camera angle that showed blood flowing into the victim’s eyes, not to mention that a blow to the top of the head like that — and I’m not a doctor or anything — seems like it would almost certainly shatter some vertebrae, if it didn’t simply split the skull like a vat of cottage cheese dropped from a tall building).
And we don’t get to see or know who it is. The show works really hard to establish that it could in fact be anybody who’s present at the encounter, except for Rick himself, who must bear witness.
That’s not a cliffhanger. It’s a cheap shot at the end of a boxing match. The critical moment is interrupted.
With the introduction of Negan, and the dire predicament that Rick and co. find themselves in, we have both the answers to the questions that got us here, and a question that will drive us forward into next season (now that they are so clearly outclassed, outmanned, and out-ruthlessnessed, how will Rick’s gang survive this?).
But then, the attack.
It pretends to be one of those questions that carries over to next season, but it isn’t. Because it’ll be answered in the opening minutes of episode 1 (or episode 2, the way this show goes — they’ll join some new ancillary character derping around in the woods for 90% of episode 1 then cut back to Rick and co. for two minutes before the credits). It isn’t a driving question, it’s a sucker punch to frustrate us and keep discussion alive through the off-season.
And I guess, at that, it’s functioning as intended.
Still, for a show that really handles itself well when it comes to surprising its audiences, this cheap shot feels especially cheap. Because you don’t need it. In fact, cut the episode either thirty seconds longer — showing us who dies to end the season rather than start the new — or thirty seconds shorter — leaving the attack as a shocker to open the new season — would be immeasurably more powerful, narratively speaking.
It feels like a flub, or worse, it feels like a calculated measure to frustrate the audience and get them trading enraged tweets on the net. It follows the Donald Trump election strategy — just get people talking about you, who cares if they’re saying good things or bad?
It sucks. It’s exploitative.
But I shouldn’t be surprised. They did the same thing earlier in the season, showing the apparent death of a beloved character and then cutting to alternate storylines for two episodes only to reveal that what we thought was that one guy getting devoured by zombies? Yeah, no, that was just sneaky camera angles exploiting our viewpoint, and it was the guy that our guy was hiding underneath that had his intestines ripped out, not our guy.
Shameful. Cheap. It insults the intelligence of the audience. I remember watching that moment and thinking, “I see intestines, and I see our character, but I don’t see the actual intestines coming out of his actual body. The show doesn’t shy away from stuff like that. What are they trying to pull?”
Audiences expect things from their stories. You play with those things at your own peril. And a cheap cliffhanger like this … that’s one you use before a commercial break to make sure folks sit through all the DiGiorno ads so they don’t miss the reveal. It’s not something you leave sitting on our stomachs for six months while we wait for the new season.
That’s long enough for audiences to decide they’re tired of your crap and move on to stories that don’t suck.
Like Star Wars VII. It’s out this week, did you know? I bought it twice, once for home and once for the office.
Writing is a skill, much like any other. Sure, some of us are gifted in the art more than others, and acquisition of the art comes easier to some than to others. Nonetheless, it is a craft with techniques, maxims, principles and tropes. I like to think that I’m one of those who is to some extent “gifted” as a writer — it’s always come naturally to me and I’ve always enjoyed it — but I can still track my improvements, even markedly so, over the past couple of years. I can see where, when I started out, I was not particularly good at this or that aspect of storytelling, and where and when I learned how to tell my stories better.
But learning is a double-edged sword. When you’re oblivious to things, they don’t bother you; nobody in the dark ages gave a flying sharknado about whether the world revolved around the sun or whether an astronomical turtle carted it around the universe. They didn’t know any better, so they didn’t care. Meanwhile, in contemporary times, B.o.B. can scrap with Neil deGrasse Tyson on twitter over whether the earth is flat, and a fair contingent of people get rather reasonably upset with him. Once the knowledge of a thing is readily available to anybody (i.e., that the earth is round), it becomes your responsibility to know the thing or suffer the consequences (ex., ridicule in the public arena).
All this is to say that, once again, a little bit of knowledge has ruined me. Specifically, it’s made being a parent harder, because I can’t watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse any more. (For the uninitiated, toddlers run in phases. One TV show, one movie, one character, will hold their focus for months at a time and then, like a fickle spring zephyr, the old stuff is on the garbage heap and it’s on to the new hotness. Well, it’s a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse hurricane season at our house right now, and avoiding it is nigh impossible.)
Sounds like an invented problem, you say. You don’t actually have to watch the shows with your kids, you rightly point out. Better yet, why let your kids watch TV at all? To which I say, “maybe,” “good point,” and “get off your damned high horse.”
But I think the underlying problem I have with this show is a lot more pervasive and insidious than “not liking it.” Rather, this show teaches poisonous lessons about life
So how has knowledge ruined me for this show?
My wife points out that it only takes having a brain to feel numbed by the show, and I’ll agree with that. The problem I have is that I can see the withered heart pumping the oily blood through its crumbling extremities. Which is to say, I know (a few things) about storytelling, so I recognize all the ways the show gives the finger to everything that humans love about stories.
In a nutshell, this is a kids’ show much like any other. A band of sillies get themselves into weird little dilemmas (we lost the magic thing! soandso has to prepare for something! there’s a journey to be taken!) and they solve their problems in a half hour.
Except there’s nothing satisfying in the way they solve problems, because all of their problems are solved by a floating deus ex machina that they call on every time something gets in their way. This deus ex machina is called “Toodles”, and at the outset of every episode, it girds itself with a handful of disparate items designed to help the characters out on their journey.
I feel like I’m not getting the full picture across. What we like about stories is seeing characters put to the test, seeing the unique ways they solve (or fail to solve) their problems, seeing how they grow as a result. But these characters don’t solve their own problems. They don’t bring a unique set of traits to bear on a problem, they don’t worry away at it like hamsters gnawing at corn cobs until a solution presents itself. They hit a barrier, they call on their magic problem solver, and he gives them something that lets them solve the problem immediately. It’s like you were playing Super Mario, and every time you came to a tough group of goombas, an invincibility star dropped out of the sky, or every time there was a tough series of jumps, a handful of platforms would suddenly appear for you to just walk across. Sure, you’d beat the game, but there’d be no point: nothing you did had an effect on the way the game played out.
But this isn’t a hallmark of kids’ shows. I’m not unfairly singling this one out. Blue’s Clues was a favorite around my house when my younger siblings were growing up, and that show works as a storytelling exercise. In every episode, the dog wants something, but the dog can’t talk to tell its master what he wants. So he marks a series of objects around the house with pawprints, and the master (with the help of the viewer) has to put those objects together to figure out what the dog wants. The dog uses its brain to find a way to solve its problem.
Then there’s the more contemporary Animal Mechanicals. My son loves this one, and I can’t stand it, but it still works as a story. You’ve got the usual band of sillies, but in this one, each character has a special ability: there’s the fast one, the stretchy one, the strong one, the one that’s got a swiss army knife implanted in his tail, etc. And those characters cooperate with each other, using their special abilities to overcome their problems.
But who gives a damn? I hear you ask. It’s just a kids’ show.
I’m not saying that kids’ programming should be the epitome of storytelling. But in just the way that a bicycle for a five-year old looks pretty much like an adult bike, just smaller, I think that stories for kids should parallel the stories we tell as adults. I mean, that’s part of why we tell stories, isn’t it — to vicariously experience the world, to teach ourselves ways to be (or ways not to be) and ways to solve problems?
That’s what the core of this rant is about, and that’s what really bugs me about the show. In literature, just like the world we actually walk around in, the world does not solve problems for you. All the world does is dream up more and more exquisite ways to challenge your abilities. But in Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, the storytellers solve all the characters’ problems for them before they even leave home.
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.
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