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.

There are no suspects.

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:

1. We introduce the characters, who always have an intimate relationship (parent-child, siblings, lovers, etc).
2. Someone starts murdering people.
3. 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:

1. Man invites woman to a pool in the woods to propose to her.
2. Man drowns woman when she says no.
3. 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.

Step One

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.

Step Two

Reapply for EI. Have PA reapply for EI.

Via Slog, Dan Savage (scrivener of the fantastic sex advice column Savage Love) liveblogs his first ride on Seattle’s new light rail system which goes almost, but not quite, all the way to SeaTac. This is a giant mistake in transit planning.

There’s no point in clicking through, just thought I’d re-up a couple of teh lulz, and some astute software design criticism. See? Smart users know when your software is shit, and why (emphasis mine):

9:19 AM: Getting a ticket was relatively painless. The computer ticket dispenser thang is a little slow and not very intuitive. The buttons on the computer screen don’t let you know that they know that you’ve pressed them, so you press them again which is not the right thing to do. A Sound Transit employee sees my fumbling to make the machine work and runs up to help walk me through the automated ticketing process. How much does Sound Transit pay her to stand there waiting for doofuses like me to screw up the automated ticketing process? Is it automated if you need an employee standing by at all times to assist? Why not just have a teller?

9:30 AM: Get on train. Just one bum. Well, maybe not a bum. Slovenly, unshaven, asleep… spilling coffee on himself. Could be a writer. Novel use of flannel shirt pocket as a cup holder.

Michèle Adams is returning to teach at SFU’s film pseudo-school, Praxis (named after the Klingon McGuffin moon that blows up at the start of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which is why I attended*).

I was top in the class for keenerness, film knowledge, and neuroticism, all of which she helped me improve.

Michèle is both firm and gentle. Before Jaded‘s reading I asked her to make sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself with a quick read. While she obliged I found an abandoned grad student lounge, had a nice lie down with a drink of water, and took some deep breaths. My history of having creative writing evaluated by teachers, especially film projects some of you might recall, has been traumatic enough to emotionally scar.

My honors english classmates rejected my fiction as well (“characters who die can’t narrate”) but I just chalked that up to idiocy, especially after American Beauty. However I generally respect the opinions of experts. I want critical acclaim — I’m a narcissist, after all — but striving for it makes me over-nervous. This is something I have to get past, one of my fears. Like most hacks I want to have written something.

But it all turned out for the best: She liked Jaded well enough. If you’re looking for an intro to screenwriting Michèle is the one to pop your cherry. She’s kind, but not easy; fun, but not (completely) frivolous; and so understanding that her insight into my thinly-disguised main character saved me some money in therapy.

The class was an oasis in the middle of my final EA death march. If you’re into film I suggest you attend and network. That’s how I met my buddy who’s now a minor character on Stargate: Universe, as well as a pile of actors, editors, and general film and videogame people. Try to shoot some shorts with your classmates.

The price has come down since I attended too, natch.

* No, not really.

Spacekat’s little bro has dual degrees in chemistry and computer science and is a wicked break dancer.

He worked at a company that computationally simulates protein folding and when he left he turned some of his knowledge of algorithms for finding near pattern matches to building the world’s best near rhyming dictionary.

I’m working on a long-form poem for y’all, just because I love you that much, and B-Rhymes is insanely useful. It finds near-rhymes for words and ranks them by both nearness and rhythmic similarity. I’m going full-out: trochaic octameter (I am too verbose for iambic pentameter) with internal and cross-line rhyme.

The app can’t do multiple words yet, that might be exceptionally difficult (see Em’s stuff below). We’ll see how she goes, but a dictionary that matches even single-word rhythm makes things a million billion times easier.

Eminem is famous for his rhythmic, internal, near rhymes. For example, from Drug Ballad:

Everything’s spinnin’ you’re beginnin’,
To think women are swimmin’,
In pink linen again in the sink,
Then in a…

Think about the complexity there. Fun, no?

The poem isn’t my secret project, but that might also require a good deal of rhyming. All-in, B-Rhymes is a godsend. He hasn’t updated it in a while — maybe I’ll bug him about it. With a small amount of polish it’d be very bOING-worthy.

Everybody knows about big design patterns in fiction like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and Christ-like figures. There are also little, culturally-specific patterns like how bad guys are bald with goatees.

The Internet has created a huge encyclopedia of patterns, each with a cutesy name and copious examples. TV Tropes is known for sucking casual surfers in for hours, so don’t start clicking unless you’ve got some time.

For example, just a few of the patterns in Sweeney Todd: A tale of revenge set in a crapsack world. The villain protagonist used to be happy but that man is dead and now he’s a Nietzsche wannabe and heroic sociopath. The antagonist is a dirty old man and hanging judge who kicks the dog a lot. Sweeney’s psycho supporter is Stepford smiler Mrs. Lovett, who pushes motive decay to get human resources. Anthony, a wide-eyed idealist, is a pawn in Sweeney’s quest for the ingenue Johanna, a distressed damsel. They break the cutie, Toby, when he’s locked into strangeness. The story ends with a no doubt the years have changed me reveal of Chekhov’s gunman and then they kill em all.

Speaking of comments so long they should be posts (@Jared: Yes, I have thought that ), here’s my response to Jared’s comment on my review of Eastern Standard Tribe:

Yup, calling it a frame story works.

I was deconstructing a little as I read. EST is actually a pretty simple story told out of order. Here it is chronologically from memory, leaving out all the little B-plots and glossing over piles and piles:

1. Art hits Linda, we meet the Tribe as he finds a lawyer.

2. Art talks business with Federico, we learn about inter-Tribal politics, Doctorow gets to talk about music licensing, user interface design, and the game theory of institutional loyalty.

3. Art goes to Boston while Federico steals his work, lets Doctorow rhapsodize about East Coast / West Coast culture.

4. Art goes to Toronto so Doctorow can talk about Canada.

5. Art goes back to London to axe Federico in the face and lets Doctorow talk about air travel.

6. Art is committed to the mental hospital, letting Doctorow talk about the ethics and logic of involuntary committal.

This is glossed over quickly, but the normal consequence of axing someone in the face is, I imagine, jail — not psych. evaluation. Oh well.

7. Art has his first group therapy session, letting Doctorow double-barrel us with his social theory of Tribes and another big dig at the mental health system.

This is where our suspension of disbelief gets thinnest (the argument turns into a “by-assertion” piece), but it goes by quick and is greatly helped by our identification with Art and his unjust treatment.

8. Art escapes to the roof, finds the pencil, and props open the door. Let’s Doctorow talk about hacking, UI design, and indoor smoking laws.

9. Art sits on the edge of the roof with the pencil up his nose, thinking about lobotimizing himself. Lets Doctorow state the theme of the book: Is it better to be happy or smart?

10. Art notices the door is closed and tries to escape, ends up blowing up a car with the brick dropped from the roof. Lets Doctorow talk about physics, Boston, and indulge in some descriptive prose.

11. Art tries to escape the roof again, ends up badly injured. Meets the mechanic. Lets Doctorow get in some body horror and black humor.

12. Art in the infirmary. Lets Doctorow talk about the institutional user experience, medial ethics, and what constitutes a “good person”.

13. Art with Family in the hospital. Lets Doctorow talk about Canada and family some more.

14. Art finally escapes and finds happiness through watching his enemies fail and fixing the usability problems of the hospital.

Whew, okay. Except the story is told out of order. Here it is, quickly scanned from the text just now:

9. (Frame story.)
1. (Plot starts.)
10.(Frame.)
2. (Plot / shop talk.)
8. (Frame.)
2. (Plot / shop talk.)
7. (Exposition!)
2. (There’s apparently a lot of shop talk.)
11.(Frame.)
3. (Plot / exposition.)
12.(Frame / exposition / setting up resolution.)
4. (Plot / family.)
12.(More shop talk.)
4. (Plot / family.)
13.(Plot / frame / family / setting up resolution.)
4. (All family/Canada stuff.)
6. (Art’s committal. Frame-story tie-in.)
5. (Reason for committal.)
13.(Sets up escape.)
5. (Face-axing split across chapters.)
14.(Escape / resolution.)

Being told out of order gives the story foreshadowing, tension escalation, and dramatic irony for free. Doctorow can then rant away, but that kind of structure is one readers tend to find unsatisfying, supposedly.

Plus, the pencilobotomy is a setup with no payoff. Better if he leaves it up his nose, resolves not to do it, and then lobotomizes himself accidentally in the fall. The doctor fixes him up as normal, but Art is now a modern Phineas Gage. The Greenwich Mean Tribe actually did know he was a counter-agent and now employ him and Szandor to “improve” the user experience of mental health facilities in the ESTribe’s territory.

But then, my outlook on life and fiction has been darker recently. I like to look for little Hades-traps wherein people can be punished forever simply for existing. It’s the Catholic in me. Today I told Fred: “You’re born and then life horsewhips you to death. Best learn to enjoy the whipping.” Good fiction is a mirror and that quip seems to reflect the face of the time ghost, at least in our dark little cadre.

The theme of the story-as-written seems to resolve itself: happiness versus intelligence is a false dichotomy. However Art doesn’t really learn anything. He just gets proved right in the end, so the message to people who want the question answered is: Keep banging your head against life, smartie, in the end it’ll all magically work out.

Your enemies will get arrested because they’re inherently bad (after all, they’re your enemies and you’re the good one). Eventually you’ll find a business partner who won’t fuck you out of your ideas and who’ll give you unlimited credit — just because you deserve it, you see. And if you’re ever suffering unjust treatment by The System just make sure you have friends in the right places.

All-in I enjoyed the read but left unsatisfied. The book’s a bag of cyberprep potato chips.