As the Moon Climbs

I was re-reading Wonderbook yesterday and it got me thinking a lot about myself, and why I write. Specifically, it talks about something called the Scar or the Splinter, some nagging experience or relationship or hole in your life, something that has fed the writer part of you, one way or another.

In fourth grade, my teacher did a unit on poetry, and asked us to write our own poems for homework. I don’t know what my first poem was about–storms? vampires?–but I remember being incredibly excited about it. I busted it out in no time flat in after-school care, ran back upstairs to the classroom and showed it to poor, beleaguered Ms. Daquino, who was grading papers or possibly sneaking pulls of gin. I begged her for another topic, and she told me to write about her dog. I knew nothing about it, but this did not trouble nine-year-old me.

For the rest of the year, I would sit at the computer in my grandfather’s office, pouring my words into whatever word processing program came with Ye Olde Windows 3.0. Notepad, probably. I wrote by hand on lined paper in my Trapper Keeper. I entered poetry into our local youth fair and got blue ribbons–stickers, but still, first place!

This was important to me because I was in a new school, and I’d struggled to acclimate. The program was designed for smart kids, which I supposedly was, but things had never been a challenge for me before. I didn’t know how to cope, and my mom didn’t understand why I was getting such awful grades all of a sudden. There’s more to it than that, but suffice it to say that suddenly I’d found a thing I could do, and show to people, and get positive reinforcement. It made me feel awesome.

So for years, I wrote because people would tell me I was good at it, whether or not that was true. I loved reading, so the two things dovetailed nicely. No matter how crappy my grades were, I could bust out a poem and feel like a million bucks. But all good things must come to an end.

I can’t remember exactly when the midden hit the windmill, but I was a teenager, I’m sure. I think I’d found a forum for workshopping and posted something, flushed with excitement, ready for the accolades to pour in. I was Batman, and that workshop was Bane, and the sound of my ego’s back being broken probably registered on a seismometer somewhere.

I’ve had ups and downs in self esteem since then, but the scar remains. The splinter is still there, underneath. Every poem, every story, is me trying to get back to the place where I had a thing I was good at and felt good about doing. But that place burned down years ago, so really, all I can do is try to build a new one in the same spot. Or somewhere else, maybe with a better view and a more stable foundation.

So, I invite everyone to consider their own splinter or scar. The thing that makes you write, no matter what, that itches or causes phantom pains even if you don’t know what it is. Give it some thought and see if you can figure it out. It might lead your writing to new places.

And because a little introspection is never enough, today, Chuck Wendig sent out a call for writer evaluations. His questions, and my answers, are below.

a) What’s your greatest strength / skill in terms of writing/storytelling?

I think I have a decent ear for dialogue, but I’ve been told my imagery is what really stands out.

b) What’s your greatest weakness in writing/storytelling? What gives you the most trouble?

Writing a sufficiently complex story. Mine tend to be too linear: not enough variation in tempo, too few setbacks, no reversals or just the single twist at the end.

c) How many books or other projects have you actually finished? What did you do with them?

I’ve finished 140 stories (mostly microfics) and 120 poems in the last five years, give or take. Most of them went up on my blog, because at the time I craved attention and feedback. I’ve finished one novel and started another eight, with the most recent one still chugging along slowly. I started to revise the finished novel, but put it aside because it feels like a trunk novel, which is fine. Sometimes a thing is so broken, it’s not worth gluing back together. Lately, I’ve been collecting rejections for the stories and poems I wrote within the last year or two. I’m aiming high, but it’s still discouraging at times.

d) Best writing advice you’ve ever been given? (i.e. really helped you)

Worry about writing better, first and foremost. If you don’t manage that, you’re spinning your wheels with all the other trappings of the lifestyle. I wish I’d learned this sooner.

e) Worst writing advice you’ve ever been given? (i.e. didn’t help at all, may have hurt)

Build a platform/audience as early as you can. This led to a lot of wasted time that I could have used to practice my craft. It’s totally cool for people who love to write about writing or particular topics they’re researching, and flit around being sociable, but that takes a lot of energy for me. It wasn’t worth the investment.

f) One piece of advice you’d give other writers?

Don’t rest on your laurels, or lack thereof. Keep pushing. Be like the athlete who works to beat her own personal best. Plateaus happen, but there will always be a bigger mountain to climb somewhere, and it’s your job to find it and plant your flag on the peak.

Someone over on Chuck Wendig’s blog has a problem that I’ve struggled with myself: should I write short stories or novels? Except in some ways, the real question is, why does my writing suck so much and should I give up already? Here is my answer, with some modifications.

I think the allure of short stories, in a sense, is the instant gratification. You get an idea, you write it, and BAM! Story. It’s not like a novel, where you write and write and oh my god, I’m still writing, when will this be over? You can show it off to people and not have to worry about explaining that, okay, this is chapter 15 and before this a bunch of stuff has happened and… At the same time, this can also lead to short stories becoming disposable like tissue paper. You can make a masterpiece out of it, with effort, but mostly you use it and trash it and move on.

So, deep question: what do you really want? Do you want to write better short stories? Do you want to write novels instead? Do you want someone to tell you it’s okay to write short stories that never go anywhere and are just for funsies? Do you genuinely want to stop writing and take up some other hobby, like gardening or spelunking?

Let’s go in order of easy answers. The simplest thing is to give up and move on. All it requires is that you not write. It’s okay to not write. A very limited number of people will be affected if you stop, mostly you. We can talk about how you’re depriving the world of your stories and stuff, and while true, the world won’t miss what it never had. But again, is that REALLY what you want? I doubt it.

Is it okay to write short stories for fun? Of course. Writing can be fun. It’s like sex that way. Or masturbation. Whatever. The point is, if you just want to write a thing and you enjoy doing it, there’s no requirement that you show it to anyone else, or edit it, or do anything but bask in the afterglow. So if all you need is someone to give you permission to do a thing that you like, then voila. Permission granted.

If you want to write novels instead, that’s okay, too. We all have a limited amount of time to work with, and we have to make choices about what we do with that time. If you write 350 words a day, then you have to decide whether that will be 350 words of short fiction or long form. At that pace, you can write roughly one novel a year, or roughly 20 short stories. As a wise Myke Cole once told me, there aren’t many people out there building a career or making a name for themselves on short fiction. So if that’s where you want to go–money, fame, mobs of screaming fans, or any muted variation thereof–novels are the car to take you there.

If you want to write better short stories, it won’t be easy, but you have many options. Classes. Critique groups. Books on writing. You have to really internalize the notion that writing this stuff is as much work as writing novels. A shiny idea is just an egg. You have to learn to sit on something a while after you write it instead of getting super excited and kicking it out of the nest like a newborn bird–it will not fly, as I know from experience. You have to learn how to take a thing apart and put it back together so that it works, to build the mechanical bird that soars instead of flopping around on your table. You have to learn how to take rejection, grit your teeth and keep submitting. Don’t worry about the suffering of the editors too much; they’re doing their job. Worry about sending them something worth reading. Worry about your bird, not the color of the sky.

I say all this as someone who almost stopped writing recently because of a really rough critique of a story I poured my soul into. It sucks like a Dyson. But I dug around in the pockets of my soul and came up with enough change to get my ass back on the train to Writertown, population: People Who Write. So if that’s you, here’s a dollar. See you there.

Brandon Sanderson recently wrote a piece with the lofty title “Postmodernism in Fantasy” that makes some interesting points. He claims (as far as I can tell, feel free to comment) that virtually all fantasy after Tolkien is in some sense postmodern. Or perhaps he means that all fantasy written after the fantasy that was written as a reaction to Tolkien is postmodern.

His main criterion for what makes a fantasy novel postmodern appears to be how much it subverts or breaks away from the body of work that is primarily imitative of Tolkien. He explains that previous attempts at postmodernism typically yielded unsatisfying results because they were only modifying particular tropes or modestly tweaking expectations; they were either still too similar to the source material to appeal to people seeking originality, or they resorted to twists that undermined the genre rather than expanding its scope. His example:

“Well, it starts out like every other ‘farmboy saves the world’ fantasy novel. You know, the plucky sidekick rogue, the gang of unlikely woodsmen who go on a quest to find the magic sword. But it’s not going to end like that. I’m going to twist it about, make it my own! At the three-quarter mark, the book becomes something else entirely, and I’ll play off all those expectations! The reader will realize it’s not just another Tolkienesque fantasy. It’s something new and original.”

This book idea, he claims, fails because it will alienate readers who enjoy the beginning and therefore feel betrayed by the twist at the end, as well as readers who are immediately bored by the beginning’s lack of originality. He says it’s a fine line between subverting established tropes in an entertaining way, while conforming to those very tropes because readers expect and desire them.

The success of the books was in hitting the right balance for the right people; those like myself who love the old epics, and like some resonance with them—but who also want something new in their storytelling. That careful blend of the familiar and the strange, mixed up and served to people who have tastes like my own.

But, as Jeff VanderMeer points out, postmodernism is not reducible to some cosmic scales with convention on one side and originality on the other. Even the definition of postmodernism on Wikipedia states, “Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance…” It has many elements but not necessarily all at once, and even those elements are up for debate. I like the way he sums up his argument:

Perhaps the most important point in all of this (and this now has nothing to do with anything Sanderson said in his post) is that writers don’t choose the way they view the world–that’s inherent in their psyche. When you view the world a certain way, you may gravitate toward certain approaches and techniques–with digressions because no one is all one thing–but it’s not a cynical matter of deciding to be experimental or deciding to be postmodern rather than a modernist, for example.

My humble opinions: It’s one thing to know your genre–modern marketing requires it of any writer. It’s also wise to know what has come before in order to avoid excessive repetition and inadvertently retread well-worn ground. But as far as classifying your work beyond that? Leave it to the literary critics. If you’re choosing your themes and techniques to deliberately conform to some nebulous, decentralized, disorganized and ill-defined literary movement, I submit that perhaps your priorities are skewed.

“If I did Titanic today, I’d do it very differently. There wouldn’t be a 750-foot-long set. There would be small set pieces integrated into a large CGI set. I wouldn’t have to wait seven days to get the perfect sunset for the kiss scene. We’d shoot it in front of a green screen, and we’d choose our sunset.” –James Cameron

“Reading those comments by James Cameron just makes me feel sad for movie making today.” —afscot

Why is my buddy sad? Because he thinks it’s weird to fabricate something that exists in the real world for the sake of convenience. Film makers are relying more and more on technology to substitute for the real when the real isn’t readily available or would be more expensive to procure or create. Forget shooting on location in some remote jungle for weeks when you can set up a green screen and do the same work in a few days. Don’t worry about building some elaborate contraption to make your actor appear to be missing limbs, or setting an actual stunt person on fire, or blowing up the Statue of Liberty in miniature; computers can handle everything. Depressing, isn’t it?

Not really. Movies are fictional, after all, and they always have been. Anyone yearning for some mythical good old days seems to have forgotten that once upon a time, movies were filmed on sound stages with staged lighting and painted backgrounds that were swapped out as soon as the director said, “That’s a wrap!” It wasn’t until the 1960’s that one could say most films were shot on location, and that didn’t mean they were bereft of the various trappings of the studio stuff. Even Italian neorealism and cinéma vérité required specialized technology and careful setup, not to mention the eventual manipulation of the raw footage through editing. No movie can truly said to be “real,” only a more or less realistic representation of reality as we know it. Why, then, cannot “as we know it” become “as we wish it to be”?

Still, is there something to be said for shooting “practical” instead of digital? Naturally; until recently, and arguably still today, technology had not sufficiently advanced to be able to trick the audiences’ brains into accepting the animated as something that actually exists. However, movies like Avatar push the boundaries of the impossible back to make room for a few more possibilities. Does it matter whether the enormous eyes and blue fur of a character are digital or pasted on and sewn together? Does it matter whether the spaceship flying through an alien jungle is a miniature or a computer model? Both are equally unreal, and yet can be equally satisfying.

In time–perhaps now!–it may very well be easier and more cost effective to simply fabricate a sunset than to have a film crew standing by every day for a week to capture an hour or so of footage in the hopes that it yields the perfect shot. If anything, the film makers of the distant past would probably find it sad that anyone would wait on that sort of thing when they could just have an artist paint a backdrop and be done with it.

A debate is brewing–nay, raging violently–at chez moi. It revolves Charybdis-like around the film Vertigo, which one or two of you may have seen. If you have not seen this movie, do not continue reading because I am going to say things about it that may, inadvertently, spoil the experience. Or maybe they won’t! This is because the question at hand involves the use of dramatic irony in the aforementioned film.

Dramatic irony can be a tough trick in these spoiler-soaked times. When people are so deeply concerned with being surprised by movies, letting them in on the secrets can have the same effect as a magician showing where the rabbit comes from. At the same time, as one of my professors once said, if most of the audience is going to be smart enough to figure out your twist–to guess for themselves where that bunny is hiding–then failing to take control of the reveal leaves said audience thinking that the filmmaker is an idiot who believes they are equally stupid and gullible. Resentment surges! Ticket sales plunge! Armageddon is at hand! Use of exclamation points spirals out of control!

Vertigo is an interesting case in that, after what seems like the climax of the film, the narrative continues because the mystery has not truly been solved. Could it have ended there? Conceivably. The audience would likely have grudgingly accepted that supernatural forces were at work and poor Jimmy Stewart did his best but it wasn’t enough. Would it have been a disappointment? Almost certainly. But at that point, the movie is only half finished, and the second half involves a somewhat bizarre exploration of the psychology of grief, shame and guilt. But of course, it is also the half where the mystery is solved, with a suspenseful doubling of the end of the first half that may be one of the best uses of dramatic irony in a film, or at least in a Hitchcock film if you’re not feeling too generous.

Then again, maybe it isn’t. The scene that makes the difference between dramatic irony and mystery, that lets the audience in on the secret instead of leaving it hidden, is what I’ll call the letter-writing scene. After a stay in a psych ward and a lot of moody moping around, Scottie has managed to find a girl that he swears is a dead ringer for the dead one. The makeup artist for the film did her job well because Kim Novak as Judy Barton bears only the most passing resemblance to her role as Madeleine. As a side note (or not), Harvard is currently conducting a study on whether people can recognize certain notable celebrity figures just by their faces, without any hair, and apparently it is harder than one would think. So for Scottie to pick Judy off the street as a lookalike for Madeleine is, perhaps, stretching things a bit. Perhaps not, given how obsessed he is.

He follows her up to her apartment, where she does what I think is an amazing job of being nothing like the Madeleine character. I was fooled. I thought, Scottie has really gone off the deep end. He is being intensely creepy to this poor girl. Why is she tolerating it? Why hasn’t she kicked him out? Maybe I wouldn’t have kicked him out, either. I try to be nice to Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they aren’t grief-stricken men pleading with me, so who knows?

No one knows, and no one will ever know, because then we have the letter-writing scene. Scottie asks Judy out on a date and she says that she needs time to change. Instead, what she needs is time to write a letter that completely explains how the first half of the movie came to be, what went down and why. If you were expecting the big reveal to come at the end, too bad! Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Everything after this scene is rife with dramatic irony. It’s so thick, you could cut it with a butter knife and spread it on toast. Side note #2: allegedly, Hitchcock was once asked how long he would allow an onscreen kiss to last. He replied with a relatively high figure, something along the lines of three to five minutes. The questioner was shocked. So long? “Well,” Hitchcock said, “I’d put a bomb under the seat first.” Think Touch of Evil, which begins with just that, and then has the longest take of your life as the car with the bomb under the seat drives all over God’s creation before finally exploding. Vertigo is kind of like that after the letter-writing scene. You know what’s going on, but Scottie doesn’t know, until he does, and then it’s heart palpitations and bitten nails until the end.

But what if that letter-writing scene had never happened? What if Hitchcock let us keep thinking that Scottie was a nutjob and Judy was a slightly-too-nice girl humoring a nutjob? Would it have been more satisfying when Judy pulled the telltale necklace out of her jewelry box and Scottie recognized it? When Scottie laid out the whole nefarious tale as he climbed the steps of the bell tower? In short, would it have been more satisfying to be surprised than to be in on the secret?

The answer to that question perhaps hinges on whether or not the audience would have been surprised or whether they would have figured it out themselves long before the end. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, so it’s difficult to pretend for the sake of argument that the scene didn’t happen and the rest of the movie played out as it did. You already know what happened, so is it possible to determine whether or not you would have known if it were different? All you can do is try to think back to the first time you watched it and remember whether the letter-writing scene surprised you. If it did, maybe you would have been happier without it.

The scene accomplishes another goal, I think, namely to endear Judy to the audience by showing that she really did have feelings for Scottie and wished they could be together. And then for her to consciously decide not to run, instead to stay and try to make a go of it, only to die in the end is perhaps more poignant than if she had been left an enigma until the scene with the necklace. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have the one movie and not the other, so unless someone wants to re-edit it and run some tests on unsuspecting viewers who have never seen the original, the question of which would be preferable is academic. Thank goodness for academia.