Tars Tarkas Jeddack of Thark and Savasana
I’ve been in a cave this week – a cave of work, of budgets, of elearning systems, of gamefication explanations and analysis, of wireframes, and harm reduction, of SBIRs NIDAs SSICs and NDRIs. Some days I live in a sea of acronyms and abbreviations. Other days the hull of my ship is made of tinsel. I am tired and not about to catch up on sleep any time soon.
Lying in savasana each day for a few minutes at the end of my yoga practice helps me to settle into myself and rest.
It has been one of those kinds of weeks. But tomorrow is Friday and new movies come out on Friday and even though I don’t go to movies much anymore (I love them but don’t have time for them) Friday has always been a joyous day for me because I can look at the reviews of movies and dream about what I would like to see. That and of course it’s the weekend.
John Carter of Mars comes out in less than a month. I have waited for this movie for almost forty years, since I read the ERB book and was first transported to Mars as a boy. I hope it will be good. I’m taking my son to see it with me.
Three words I found today in my work:
Posh
Ripping
Blighty
What words have you found in your imagination?
The Keys to the Intercom
Writers create worlds out of words. It sounds obvious but it isn’t. I didn’t realize the amount of world building that went into a historical novel until I wrote one. If you’d have asked me before I wrote Open Wounds whether I’d ever write a historical novel I’d have told you, you were out of your mind.
I just finished Garth Nix’s Mr. Monday: The Keys to the Kingdom Book 1. My son read it and told me I had to read it too… so I did. And he was right. It’s a good book. What impressed me the most about the book is the world building Nix did. He created a world in which a line of script is alive and letters changed can change life to death and visa versa. Nix’s world has its own logic to it. It makes sense out of Nothing, and Nithlings out of Nothing and Fetchers out of Nothing. It is a book that makes me see a world that I’ve never seen before – one that springs out of Nothing.
World building is not relegated only to Fantasy or Science Fiction, but also historical novels and realistic fiction. Even realistic fiction has to create a believable here and now just as historical fiction has to create a believable then and there.
I’ll give you an example. In the 1930′s-40′s the subways in New York City didn’t have intercom systems in the cars. You knew what stop you were at by the conductor shouting it out from his window and from looking out the window or door yourself. I’m betting on crowded days people missed a lot of stops. It’s a simple detail but it gives time and place and helps to build the world that Cid Wymann lives in.
When world building you create worlds out of words that readers take and surround with atmosphere, beating hearts, and long harsh howls.
Symbiotic Stew
I travelled to Phili on Monday.
I took the day off from my job to teach a 1hr distance learning writing workshop to 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders at three Pennsylvania High Schools. There were about 40 kids in attendance at the three sites. I taught from the UPENN distance learning center, called MAGPI and it was a very cool thing to do. Each school shows up on a huge TV screen as a small 1 foot by 2 foot rectangle. I teach from the MAGPI studio – a small ten by ten space with three cameras, my laptop and Powerpoint, some notes, and a copy of my book to read from. The MAGPI folks don’t pay me for teaching and I cover my own traveling expenses,but I get to teach classes on writing to young writers and that makes it worth every penny.
Today I talked about first lines of novels and how they start the relationship between reader and writer. I’m into this relationship idea. Readers read and interpret and writers direct the interpretation through the words they write. I know this sounds very basic – like I should have gotten this before -but I didn’t. I just had it in my head that writers wrote and readers read – separate from each other. We’re not. We depend on each other, need each other. We’re symbiotes in a way.
The kids were great and I enjoyed speaking with them. They came up with first sentences for their own to-be-written novels that were terrific. I hope to see one in book form one day. It’s the second time I’ve done a workshop with the MAGPI folks and they’ve invited me back for a third workshop in the spring.
On my way home I stopped at a nearby public library and met Dan, their YA specialist. I gave him a copy of my book for the library. He had a big smile on his face when I gave it to him.
I love libraries.
A Guinness Walks Into a Partagás Smoking a Bar…
Writing is painting pictures with words.
That’s all we get.
Words.
No facial expressions, no visual cues, no body language, nothing… unless you write it in. Otherwise you leave it to the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. That’s the way it works. Some writer’s are sparse in description and some are heavy. Some like to control what the reader sees and some like to leave some space for them to see on their own. The writer directs. The reader follows. If the reader doesn’t follow the book gets put down.
It’s an amazing process of collaboration led by the writer. I don’t think I ever realized this before – how collaborative the act is.
Worlds can be brought to life with just the right details. Civilizations can be raised up from the dust or from beneath the ocean’s floor. Think of the images you just pulled up to see those civilizations in your mind’s eye. Each of your images is different depending on your own life experience and how that influences what you see based on the words I chose. Our experience of words is part subjective, colored by our life experience. Now that is cool, if you think about it for just a moment. That’s also why, when a book is made into a movie some people say it is exactly as they saw it from reading the book and others say that it’s not like what they read at all – even though they read the exact same book.
How do you know when you have found truth in painting your picture with words? How do you, as the writer, know you have chosen words that show something authentic, that you have directed effectively enough to tell a good story?
I edited a script for an e-learning system today and was faced very quickly with an example of how this works. Dialog for a character ran like this:
I acknowledge that there are challenges in conducting service placement.
I read the sentence out loud to the writer and saw a look of understanding come over her face as soon as I said the word acknowledge.
“It doesn’t sound right,” she said, shaking her head.
“Then let’s make it sound right for the character,” I replied.
She wrote: I know as a provider that there are going to be challenges in doing my job.
She changed it to sound right – to sound authentic to her. Writing scripts I tell my staff to read them out loud. “You’ll hear authenticity in dialog,” I say. I find it works the same way with narrative.
A full read through of my manuscript, out loud, to myself, is the final step in my revision process. That is my final check on directorial authenticity. It takes me a day or two with breaks for coffee or English Breakfast tea, sometimes toothpicks for my eyes (not in them) and a bunch of pee breaks. My butt is usually sore by the end, as is my throat.
But when I finish – if it’s really finished – if the words paint a picture that is authentic to me – then it’s time for a Guinness and a Partagás underneath a pale sliver of moon.
Of Cyclops and Men
Three words I typed today:
Bowlers
Polyphemus
Knuckles
I laid out a puzzle for myself to solve and solved it in my narrative. A small section but a pivotal one. Funny how plot points come and go.
Four Letter Words and Vicodin Cocktails
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I just finished my first book of 2012. Last Words by George Carlin is in the can.
It was an incredible sortabiography (his own word), telling his memoir through the story of his creative life as a comic. The second half of the book is a tough read. Carlin had a bad cocaine, alcohol, vicodin habit and only really got sober the last five or so years of his life. What especially fascinates me is his writing about his creative process. He wrote things down to capture them and hone them over and over again until they were perfect. He lived most of his life on the road performing and working, writing and capturing, honing and perfecting.
And he came up with some good shit. He was also highly political but only evolved into that over time. And he was one angry, angry man. His rage fueled many of his pieces and large parts of his performances. It provided focus for his fascinations. It provided incredible articulation. I think he had tremendous insight into the human condition and into how storytellers in particular, manipulate their audiences to follow them down into other realities.
Carlin also specialized in the use and etiology of curses. I learned about curses from Carlin. I knew about them before but he demystified them for me. He introduced them to me as full-bodied words and made me laugh at the ridiculous censorship we place on them. He increased my vocabulary ten-fold even if it was mostly in my mind.
I use the word fuck in my book, Open Wounds. I haven’t counted how many times.
When people ask me if the book is okay for their teen I always tell them it’s a 13 and up read or a 15 and up read because of the language and the violence. Most people don’t mind but some do. I think the word fuck is used sparingly in my book, not because I thought it would get me in trouble if I used it too much, but because it was only needed when it was needed by the characters who used it. I remember watching the movie Platoon the second time – with my grandfather – and squirming in my seat at the number of times the word fuck or some derivation of it (fucker, fucked-up, fucking, motherfucker, fuck-wad, etc…) was used. Almost every other word that came out of every character’s mouth included some version of fuck. The first time I saw the film I didn’t notice the language at all. The second time, with my grandfather beside me, I couldn’t hear anything but it.
I also remember reading a book last year by Cynthia Kadohata called Cracker: The Best Dog in Vietnam that, although I enjoyed, found it strange to read a whole novel about soldiers in Vietnam and not read one curse. I wonder if she consciously chose not to use the word fuck. I remember asking myself how not one soldier in her reality could get through a conversation without saying fuck at least once. It felt like a spice was missing from the narrative – some dark mole sauce.
I had one person, a friend, tell me his daughter, who was a teen, put my book down because she found the word fuck in it. Another, an adult, told me she finished it but was really shocked that the book contained such language.
What would George Carlin say to all this? Well, his now famous list of the seven words you can’t say on television no longer has any relevance. Because any and all of them can be and have been said on cable and HBO for over a decade. He stopped doing the bit after his own first HBO special.
One in which he used material that he had captured on paper, honed through practice and rewriting over and over again, and finally… perfected.
