I am writing at the moment, but not for this blog. I’m keeping a mental health journal documenting dreams and pills and mood states, mostly in narrative “I went here and did this and felt that so took this”, sometimes in poems I won’t bore you with.
Within the last week I’ve felt annihilated, one of my worst moods ever — worse, by far, than I’ve felt in around five years. Then I felt happy, for the first time in however long — actual happiness, not ironic victory: a mild, pleasant sense of well-being.
Now, once again, I feel hopeless.
If you conceptually graph “challenge of” versus “skill at” a task you get something like this:
I can’t remember the last time I felt anything like being on the right side of that graph. Maybe “Boredom”. Maybe. Mostly I feel as though I move from Apathy through Worry to Anxiety and back. I feel that everything I do — including what I’m writing right now — is just really terrible and unskilled.
And, it turns out, there’s no pill for that — which was one of my big fears. This might be one of those mitigable-but-insoluble psychological problems that is going to cause me pain for the rest of my life.
I’m entering a screenwriting competition tonight. I left myself five days to get the thing done but for wonderful reasons I’ve procrastinated that time away.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. This situation reminded me of Time Management for Anarchists, not least because one of the characters I’m writing is militantly anti-employer. TMA has been the organizing theology of my life since the comic (now hard to find online, so I did it for you) was published.
I’m not always a righteous member of the faithful — I’ve gone through long periods of apostasy, atheism, and sin — but I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ hard to avoid the tyranny of evil men.
I’m incredulous towards Canadian poetry (hence the “bah, humbug” in the title). Just as in painting, where I think cleaving to our G7 heritage limits us, I think Canadian poetry typically overuses weather themes to the point of extreme boredom. It’s the poetry-is-to-television equivalent of watching the Weather Channel (not Service, though — his stuffis gold).
“Oh, Canadian poetry”, I teased a Canadian poet once, “Let me guess: The bleakness and isolation of the farmhouse in Winter is a metaphor for the bleakness and isolation of the souls of its occupants?”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, do you?”
“Not at all,” I said, “but that’s how I feel.”
Anyway, I always hold out hope for art — hence the “?” in the title — so I’ll be attending to see how slamtastic the festival is, and hopefully hear some good stuff.
I expect any Canadian spoken word festival to have a healthy complement of Maritime and Acadian accents, if not outright French. In my experience that’s where really exciting usage which is uniquely Canadian comes from. I’d really like to see something Aboriginal too, like the rappers on APTN.
That might be a tall order for Victoria, but we’ll see.
When I complain about the CBC that kind of reporting is what I’m talking about. You have to listen for it, it’s subtle, but it’s there and the bias is clear.
“Is the Monarchy an anachronism?”
When the title character of the Scottish play and his best friend are described as cleaving the Danish lines like “cannons double-cracked” that is an anachronism because the technology for double-cracking cannons didn’t exist contemporaneously with those characters.
But the Canadian monarchy currently exists. It cannot be an anachronism because it is contemporaneous. It’s crazy-making to argue the point, you get to definitional tautology that quickly. The answer is “no”, but only in the sense that the question is ridiculous.
Q: “Is the Monarchy a stylistic error in chronology?”
A: “How much scotch did you have for breakfast?”
The question frames the debate poorly (unless you hate royalty). CBC: If you want to get rid of the institution, just say so. Don’t ask if it’s a foible of timekeeping and leave dangling the implication that such “eccentricities” should be “corrected”. Asking questions like that is what salespeople do, it’s called yes-laddering, and it’s disgusting, manipulative journalism.
Ask this, it’s neutral: “Should the monarchy exist?”
Anyway, I have to stop there. It’s time for bed and I promised myself I wasn’t going to care about the news media.
I’m writing something loosely based on Jared’s review of (500) Days of Summer. I’m thinking that the way into the character is to have him not be willing to give up that piece of himself that one must to make a relationship work.
I don’t remember where I read that, probably something on AVClub — that a meaningful connection to society involves a subtle, healthy death of the individual’s character. So what if you just didn’t? You’d end up in a series of relationships doomed to fail. “Tom” loves his anima, and is on a futile quest for her. He can’t give up the construct, the ideal.
But how do you illustrate a failure of character? He has to come close and miss his chance I suppose. A series of breakups to show his learning process and then a key breakup to show his lack of learning.
I was going to include some foils, some other guys — one that didn’t have an anima-seeking drive and another that just stuck to his dysfunctional relationship because he realizes the futility of throwing away a relationship with history for another with the same problems. I figure that might — might — be confusing the issue. They’re important to fully explore the problem space, but it’s a film not a fucking “for” loop. In any case, they’ll be good for soaking up time — I’ll write it so they can be shot or not depending on how things work out. Last time we got about ten seconds of footage for every team-hour of effort put in.
I’m trying to write more with a view to the whole shooting process. I find I’m a lot more creative with a tight budget. I want to shoot this thing mumblecore, around town, for around $10,000. Writing Hollywood features is difficult — I feel like I should have technical knowledge of explosives or gunfighting or something.
Okay, so there are my parameters — that’s basically my arc for the main dude: Show learning, show the failure thereof. He has to be offered the opportunity to change and then reject it.
Books on writing praxis suggest an old-fashioned way of bookmarking things for future reference. Basically: boxes.
When mystery writers come across interesting gyrations of the news, stories that contain an inherent “what if”, they file them away. When Woody Allen wrote humor something would pop into his head and he’d dash it down on whatever came to hand and chuck it in a box. Recording ideas as-they-occur is key.
“Save it and put it in a box” is a common theme. Eventually the clippings and jokes generate their own internal heat, mulch down, and then one day you sift through and find a story idea glistening in the peat.
Typically I’m too disorganized to go through these things once I’ve collected them. I’ve never been good at the “review” stage of pack rat projects, which is why GTD doesn’t work for me. But now I’ve found something that works.
A few months ago I saw this video of Adam Savage’s (MythBusters) obsessive Model Dodo/Maltese Falcon project:
Notice his rapid-fire clicking through the slides, which seems to work for him. Notice his “CREATIVE PROJECTS” folder, which replicates the “save it in a shoebox” system digitally. Apparently he’s done it on a massive, automated scale. I imagine he has it rigged up to automatically save pix off the nets matching keyword-rules he enters in some byzantine RSS image-grabber. I’m not that teched out, I build my card houses low to the ground.
I’m happy with drag-n-drop — when I see something neat I drop into the trusty old Finder something I’ve dragged from Fox or ‘Fari. I don’t use the bookmarks bar because “out of sight, out of mind” is a self-truth I’ve become comfortable with. I take salad drawers out of fridges and I don’t “bookmark this page”, both to avoid rot. Putting the virtual shoe boxes visibly into the file system keeps me in constant contact with them. I keep my tomatoes on the shelf.
One of my box stories is the recent murder of William Sparkman. My fantastically elaborated narrative is this (the investigation is ongoing and it might be hyped out of proportion; I’m just waiting out the truth before adding iambs):
* * *
Bill Sparkman headed into the Deep South as a US Census worker, into the Kentucky backwoods, rural Clay County, a place whose largest exports are moonshine, marijuana, and meth.
One sweltering afternoon he came upon a group of Southern Gothic inbrednecks out of Gummo or Deliverance picking banjo out on the stoop of their kudzu-choked clapboard.
“Hi there fellas, I’m from the Federal Government.”
Visions of a Black President and Ruby Ridge course through moonshine-addled brains tweaking on the latest batch of Cousin Jimbo’s crystal.
“What an ugly thing to come out of such a pretty mouth.”
* * *
When Billy didn’t show up at work for two days a search was organized. They found him just outside a cemetery in a remote part of Daniel Boone National Forest, bound to a tree by his neck. Not hung, but tied so tightly he’d asphyxiated, gagged, with the word “FED” carved into his chest.
Murder Ballads are an old European narrative form. They’re little poems that follow the ballad form (alternating rhyming lines of four iambs and three iambs) and tell the story of a murder using a rigidly-defined structure:
We introduce the characters, who always have an intimate relationship (parent-child, siblings, lovers, etc).
Someone starts murdering people.
The payoff.
The payoff is the part where creativity is allowed — there’s lots of variation. The murderer can get away, so that it’s a tragedy to society, or can discover extra information that makes the story tragic to them. In “morality play” versions, usually the ones that are based on true stories, the killer goes to jail or is executed. Sometimes there’s revenge from beyond the grave.
In the very best the narrator is revealed as unreliable, or deluded somehow. There’s a poem somewhere in my ocean of open tabs that sneaks up on you. At first it seems as though it’s not a murder ballad, just someone singing about his wife bringing him dinner. Then in the last stanza you realize she’s poisoning him.
Here’s an example of — I was going to say “of an oldie”, but they’re all oldies — Sam Cooke singing “Frankie and Johnny”:
The structure is so immutable and yet so versatile that poets could use murder ballads to tell stories of actual killings and could create tales of supernatural terror with little more effort than swapping out a couple of verses. God bless pronouns.
Some don’t even need that small amount of effort, some just change names. The most common ballad is:
Man invites woman to a pool in the woods to propose to her.
Man drowns woman when she says no.
Man is caught and executed.
I’ve seen that told as a general horror/tragedy story, as a true story, and as a supernatural story. It’s ridiculously common. Recording the ballads seems to have done them a great disservice: they’re a European oral tradition that thrives in the remix. Writing down a specific configuration of the replaceable, interchangeable parts entirely misses the point and leads to a combinatorial explosion of unnecessary documentation. Fucking modernists.
We sipped mushroom tea with lemon,
While reading French Tarot.
We brunched at half eleven,
And then traipsed to and fro.
The rainbow sands were shades of brown;
The shellfish tide, blood red.
The white sunlight erased the ground,
But we marched straight ahead.
The ladies spoke of Sultan Steve,
And his hobby canoe.
“I have no time to grant reprieve,
My thwart has gone askew.”
We veered for Tigh-Na-Mara,
Stomped tide pools on the way,
And turned around once we had reached,
The Penzance trebuchet.
The ladies looked for licorice creams,
And drifted out of sight.
We sat to chat and talk of dreams,
And watch the clouds in flight.
He counted logs as he walked by,
And gave a name to each.
We listened to the purple sky,
And Nixon on the beach.
“How needlessly reductive,
To name all that has none.
Our man Nixon is friendly,
But he’s not very fun.”
We wandered back into the camp,
To sit and play with fire.
The ladies rolled a joint to tamp.
The mushrooms had expired.
This isn’t the poem I’ve been talking about, just one that’s been in the back of my mind. It’s roughly in ballad form, which means the first and third lines of each stanza have four iambs and the second and fourth have three. I deviated from this where I felt the rhythm dictated (usually where I end a line with a three-syllable word). Rhymes skip lines, mostly, but hopefully that’s obvious.
Write. I beat myself up about this one a lot. “Writer’s block” is a polite phrasing for my problem: A complete lack of focus. Charlie Kaufman writes all weird to keep himself from getting bored, I have to attempt something similar. “I haven’t worked on that manuscript in over a day — time for a giant plot twist.”
At first this one depressed me because I thought: If I really liked writing I wouldn’t have to trick myself into doing it. Except that I do write. I’m doing it right now. According to WordPress in the last three years I’ve written 900 posts, and at circa 300 words per post that’s 270,000 words — enough for three novels, or two with lots of throwaway. I don’t even want to think about how many 90-page screenplays that is. And this amount of writing isn’t that hard.
If I plugged away at manuscripts like I plug away at posts I’d be mid-career right now, or know that I’m no good at it. As it is I have like nine things I’m currently making no progress on. Classic ENFP — fuck! I need a PA. I should put an ad on the UVic job board: “Writer seeks assistant/intern. No pay.”
You can’t really get around this step either. Writers Market only lists people who buy things that you’ve already written, duh. I’m having trouble with that concept, and I blame school and the workforce. Usually you get an assignment and then start work. Of course, this leaves you totally inexperienced when it comes to the desirable careers. That, it seems, is how they get you.
I like to finger-wag in my stuff too, which is bad. We didn’t all grow up Catholic, some people like stories without torture and punishment. I start at the end but theme should come out in rewriting, not prewriting. Solution? Do a bunch of character sketches. Eventually I’ll meet some people I can tell a story with, who aren’t just thinly-veiled aspects of my own personality.
Breakfast today was a handful of multivitamins and echinacea supplements washed down with black coffee and white wine. Good characterization, sure, but the hard part in writing about yourself is that the character needs to learn something — and learning things about yourself is difficult. It’s much easier to fix other people’s problems, and doubly so when they’re of your own invention.
