Posts Tagged ‘My Writing’

A response to “a radi­cial pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years”

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The Globe and Mail recently ran an inter­est­ing arti­cle of pre­dic­tions by Douglas Coupland.  I both agree and dis­agree with what he has to say.  Here are my thoughts on a selected num­ber of his predictions.

1) It’s going to get worse

Well, okay.  If you’re call­ing your arti­cle a pessimist’s guide, then you pretty much have to lead off with some­thing like this, eh?   I’m not con­vinced there’s any evi­dence that this eco­nomic cycle is any more likely to go down­ward than it is to trend upward.  And I’m pretty pes­simistic.  It’s a broad state­ment, and thus dif­fi­cult to really react to pos­i­tively or negatively.

2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic

The future never feels futur­is­tic because it’s the present when you’re expe­ri­enc­ing it.  It takes dis­con­nect­ing your­self from the daily grind and con­ciously think­ing about the dif­fer­ence between today and yes­ter­day to really evoke the sense of futur­is­tic.  If you mean it’s not a Gernsback future, well, we all fig­ured that out some time around 1999.  Your fly­ing car is never going to hap­pen. Time to accept that.

6) The mid­dle class is over. It’s not com­ing back

This, I agree with, as things stand now.  The mid­dle class as we knew it was built on an indus­trial econ­omy, one where sta­bil­ity was derived from repet­i­tive, lightly skilled jobs pro­duc­ing prod­ucts with a con­stant or ris­ing demand.  It’s a pre-​​globalist phe­nom­e­non, and as far as I can tell, one of the pri­mary effects of glob­al­ism has been a return to global poverty.  It seems through most of his­tory, wealth has been con­sol­i­dated in the hands of the few.  Sometimes it seems like the mid­dle class was just a blip that came along with the ride of var­i­ous forms of democ­racy, and as democ­racy begins to fal­ter as a result of trans­form­ing into de facto oli­garchies, we’ll head back to the pre-​​Enlightenment sys­tems of peas­ants, peons, an wealthy aris­to­crats.  As soon as money==speech, the mid­dle class was doomed. 

Of course, none of that means we have to like it.  When the for­mer mid­dle class finally catches on, things are going to get bloody, and I wouldn’t ven­ture a guess.  The Tea Party move­ment at that point will look like the voice of rea­son.  Might be a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions of declin­ing stan­dards of liv­ing before they’re finally shocked out of complacency.

Or one win­ter of food shortages—that would do the trick.

9) The sub­urbs are doomed, espe­cially those E.T. , California-​​style suburbs

They’re not doomed.  They’ll just adapt and trans­form.  I expect that all those idi­otic rules against sub­ur­ban farm­ing will get struck down out of neces­sity.  The sub­urbs are the future small towns and rural areas.  You may end up with whole­sale aban­don­ment in some places, but I have a feel­ing that they’re going to trans­form them­selves into vil­lages, not become pseudo-​​ghost towns.

17) You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual

I agree that we’re headed back to com­mu­ni­ties that are more inter­con­nected.  But my gen­er­a­tion isn’t going to burn out on indi­vid­u­al­ity.  For much of us, “being our indi­vid­ual selves” is a fun­da­men­tal cor­ner­stone of our self-​​identity.  maybe we’ll raise our kids to be more community-​​minded though.  But in 10 years? Not remotely likely to me.

20) North America can eas­ily frag­ment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989

I go back and forth on this notion.  I think it will very much depend, at least in the United States, on the exec­u­tive branch at the time.  We’ve kinda been through this already, and we fought the most bloody war in our nation’s his­tory to keep frag­men­ta­tion from hap­pen­ing.    I’m going to have to say “no way” on this hap­pen­ing in 10 years in the U.S.  In Mexico, though, that’s another story.

22) Your sense of time will con­tinue to shred. Years will feel like hours

I’m just mak­ing a wild guess here, but is Douglas Copland going through a midlife crisis?

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story”

Narrative struc­ture didn’t invent itself, you know.  We’ve been struc­tur­ing our expe­ri­ences as story since we could paint on cave walls, or even before.  The idea that our life will instead be how­ever many friends we have online, I just don’t buy it.  It sounds like some­thing Facebook would pitch to ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, not a real futur­ist pre­dic­tion.  Yes, your social net­work will be impor­tant.  But we’ll define our sense of self by it?  Is there going to be a fun­da­men­tal alter­ation of our brain chem­istry at the same time?

32) Musical appre­ci­a­tion will shed all age barriers

This may be the most inter­est­ing pre­dic­tion I’ve read.  I think it says some­thing about the gen­er­a­tion of new modes of music—what is the next rock n’ roll?  Is it rap?  Okay, then what’s com­ing after that?  The death of a musi­cal main­stream cul­ture caused by a frag­men­ta­tion of taste means gen­er­a­tions to come will have a harder time self-​​identifying with a spe­cific genre.  They’ll like bands com­posed of indi­vid­u­als their own age, but as far as age being linked to types of music?  I can buy this totally.

34) You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought

I don’t know, I already miss them pretty badly.  Then again, I was in high school and col­lege, and who doesn’t miss those years of their lives to some extent? A time of less respon­si­bil­ity always looks good from real adulthood.

37) People will stop car­ing how they appear to others

The num­ber of tribal cat­e­gories one can belong to will become infi­nite. To use a high-​​school anal­ogy, 40 years ago you had jocks and nerds. Nowadays, there are Goths, emos, punks, metal-​​heads, geeks and so forth.

Two social group/​tribes 40 years ago?  It’s not quite 40 years ago, but let me quote to you from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Oh, he’s very pop­u­lar Ed. The sportos, the motor­heads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dwee­bies, dick­heads — they all adore him. They think he’s a right­eous dude.

Are you telling me in 1970, there weren’t hip­pies or greasers?  Stoners or preps?

The num­ber of tribal cat­e­gories have always neigh-​​infinite.  It seems that we just care more now than we used to. With other forms of iden­tity, we put more weight on this one.

41) The future of pol­i­tics is the care­ful and effec­tive implant­ing into the minds of vot­ers images that can never be removed

Yeah, we all saw Inception  this sum­mer too.

45) We will accept the obvi­ous truth that we brought this upon ourselves

I thought this was sup­posed to be a pessimist’s guide?  That’s the most opti­mistic pre­dic­tion about a fun­da­men­tal change in human nature I’ve read yet!

So what do you think?  Do you agree or dis­agree with any of his 45 predictions? 

Five Movies That Inspire Me To Write Better

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I draw a lot of inspi­ra­tion from film.  I sup­pose it’s my gen­er­a­tion, that I’m influ­enced as much by the visual medi­ums of TV and cin­ema as I am the writ­ten word.  It’s eas­ier to become con­ver­sant in cin­ema than it is in lit­er­a­ture for the sim­ple fact that it takes less time to watch 100 great films than it does to read 100 great nov­els.  I envy writ­ers from the 19th cen­tury.  They had con­sid­er­ably less “canon” to digest.

Movies evoke mood won­der­fully for me, and it’s some­thing I often find I want to emu­late in my short fic­tion.  These are some movies that make me ache with a need to accom­plish for oth­ers what they did to me.

Amelie (2001)

image Directed by Jean-​​Pierre Jeunet, this film man­ages to cap­ture a tech­nochrome Paris that almost cer­tainly doesn’t exist.  It’s the pro­to­typ­i­cal slip­stream film to me.  It feels strange and won­der­ful, and from the very begin­ning in which we see a young Amelie, we’re made aware of how her world is very much not like ours.  It inter­sects in places… geo­graphic loca­tions, lit­er­ally, that you rec­og­nize if you’ve spent a lot of time in Paris. But they still seem some­how more alive, rich, than the reality.

The sound­track never fails to recre­ate a sense of whimsy in me when I lis­ten to it, a feel­ing of spin­ning in cir­cles like a sufi mys­tic, always spin­ning, on the edge of los­ing con­trol and col­laps­ing into fits of laughter.

It’s a love story too, a love story for misfits—as all char­ac­ters in Jeunet’s films are. This list could be entirely pop­u­lated with Jeunet films, honestly.

Whenever I think of strange cities pop­u­lated with peo­ple just a few degrees out of sync with nor­mal, I think of Amelie’s Paris.

O Brother Where Art Thou (2000)

image The Coen Brothers.  Sometimes, I think they’re the best work­ing cin­e­matog­ra­phers.  Sometimes they make films that leave me cold, and then they make a film like O Brother.

The Odyssey is my favorite epic. I’ve always iden­ti­fied more with Odysseus than any of the more tragic fig­ures of the Iliad, although I think per­haps the great­est descrip­tive phrase I’ve ever read is “the wine-​​dark sea.”   In the hands of lesser artists, retelling the Odyssey in a 1930s South would come across forced, unauthentic.

Oddly enough, this is another one with a bril­liant sound­track.  But it’s less evoca­tive of the feel­ing the movie puts me in.  Whenever I want to feel shame for my dia­logue, espe­cially comic pat­ter, I sim­ply put this one and and wal­low in it.  The Coen Brothers can write snappy dia­logue, sure, but the actors they cast into the roles really make it shine.

Everett is how I wish all my fast-​​talking char­ac­ters could sound like.

Jaws (1975)

image The movie that per­fected the art of the sum­mer block­buster and has rarely been sur­passed since.  This movie ter­ri­fied me as a kid, and I grew up in Kansas with­out ever hav­ing seen the ocean.  I was afraid to go near any body of water.  And when you think of just how rarely you see old Bruce, it’s pretty amaz­ing.  Of course, the film did tremen­dous eco­log­i­cal dam­age in cast­ing sharks in such a hor­rific role, but there’s not much we can do about it now.

The pac­ing in this one is just per­fect for me.  And it has what I think is prob­a­bly the great­est mono­logue of all time, deliv­ered by the late great Robert Shaw—you know exactly the mono­logue I’m talk­ing about:

You know the thing about a shark, he’s got…lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that ter­ri­ble high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin’ and the hol­lerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces.

The way that scene is wrapped in the rest of the movie reminds me of a Tootsie Pop.  A lit­tle bit­ter sweet wrapped in crunchy candy fun. And the cam­era tech­niques… I can watch on repeat that first major use of the Spielbergian zoom where Brody is on the beach and sees some­thing in the water.  It cap­tures that feel­ing of lean­ing for­ward in shock and fear, of bolt­ing upright at the real­iza­tion of some­thing ter­ri­ble.  Using the camera’s move­ments to evoke emo­tion is kind of like using sim­ple words to build up a mood with­out the reader catch­ing on.  I want to do that!

Hot Fuzz (2007)

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I’ve watched this movie a dozen times, and each time I notice some new trick of the script that blows me away.  Every early scene is chock full of easter eggs for later scenes—it’s absolutely a mas­ter­ful piece for demon­strat­ing fore­shad­ow­ing.  The dia­logue is used to great effect here.  The whole freak­ing first act is a giant gun on the mantle­piece, and holy shit does it go off in the finale.  And the way it toys with genre conventions—just bloody brilliant.

I wish I could write scene tran­si­tions like Edgar Wright directs in this film.  There scene where our heroes and drunk and headed to Danny Butterman’s place to watch films, and it cuts back and forth to the scene in the kitchen where the mur­der­ers are set­ting up a late night snack cracks me up and aston­ishes me every time.

A great use of a twist as well that doesn’t feel any­where near as cheap as some of the later M. Night Shamalayan movies.

I’m a sucker for just about any­thing Simon Pegg and Nick Frost do.   I am really look­ing for­ward to see­ing Paul, which sounds a bit off from the descrip­tions I’ve read, but I really trust Pegg as a writer after Spaced.  And it goes with­out say­ing that I’ll fol­low Edgar Wright into any film he’s even remotely attached to.  Scott Pilgrim really cemented his sta­tus as a top direc­tor for me.

Spirited Away (2001)

image I could once again prob­a­bly add any of the Miyazaki films to this list, but Spirited Away is one of my all-​​time favorite fan­tasy films.  The feel­ing of strange­ness and oth­er­word­li­ness it evokes is some­thing I try to cap­ture over and over again, and I’ve never done it to the level of my sat­is­fac­tion (I sup­pose I have a few more decades to get it right).

Part of the won­der for me here is that I’m not famil­iar with any of the source mate­ri­als Miyazaki draws on to cre­ate his spir­its, and so each one of them feels unique.  The coal sprites are just about the cutest damn thing ever animated.

And that train… I have dreams about that train.  I’ve rid­den on a train in the U.S. once and it was a thor­oughly unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence, but some­thing about the train in this movie is haunt­ing my imagination.

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There’s noth­ing remotely sci­en­tific about this list.  Ask me again tomor­row and I might draw out of mem­ory an entirely dif­fer­ent set of films.  Right now, I’m really ques­tion­ing whether I should have left Donnie Darko, my favorite sci­ence fic­tion film, off the list, but it’s late and I really want to get this blog post sched­uled, so I’m just going to have to leave my gush­ing over that one for another post.  And yes, I know this list is super-​​heavy with really recent films.  I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m sure it’s some­thing unpleas­ant.  Let us not speak of it.

So what about you guys?  What movies inspire you to write bet­ter?  What flick­er­ing cel­lu­loid dreams do you want to evoke in your words?

One Way to Leave a Lasting Legacy (that isn’t a successful writing career)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I went through a phase as a kid when I was obsessed with liv­ing for­ever. Strike that.  I’m still in that phase now, but I was more inven­tive about it before I felt my own mor­tal­ity so keenly. Since my father died, I’ve mostly given up any belief that I will live for­ever, but I still wouldn’t mind it.

Anyway, I dreamed up my own after­life sys­tem, prob­a­bly because I found the Christian notion of Heaven very prob­lem­atic (and either absolutely empty or entirely over­crowded).  In my after­life belief, you were alive again in a meta­phys­i­cal plane of exis­tence after death only for so long as the liv­ing thought about you or some­thing you had made.  The only souls that lit­er­ally live on are the ones that fig­u­ra­tively live on in their work. Of course, the sys­tem is not with­out its flaws.  Some might find the notion of an immor­tal ser­ial killer or even Hitler a bit dis­turb­ing. It ele­vates impact on soci­ety as the high­est achieve­ment in life. Most peo­ple, in this belief, would just slowly fade from mem­ory, and, as those who knew them passed on, depart the after­life into oblivion.

What can I say? Science fic­tion taught me to con­cretize the metaphor.

I sup­pose I’m pur­su­ing remem­brance after I die now through writ­ing.   The web­sites I built prob­a­bly won’t last a few years in their cur­rent forms.  There’s no longevity to that work at all.  I may get lucky with my pho­tog­ra­phy and cap­ture some­thing time­less, but right now, my buy­ers rarely know who I am. 

And even­tu­ally, I’ll pass on some genetic material—that’s a pop­u­lar way of liv­ing on. 

Kids.  I had another really bizarre notion as a child, this time about why peo­ple have kids. It prob­a­bly grew out of hear­ing adults say of the deceased, “She lives on in her sons,” or some such words.  I fig­ured your soul mys­ti­cally down­loaded into your child’s body the moment you died in your own.  I was 11 or 12 when the idea came to me, right  when you have this deep sus­pi­cion that adults are all lying to you about some­thing impor­tant. I couldn’t rec­on­cile what hap­pens to the child’s mind in that sit­u­a­tion though–I thought maybe it lived on sort of mixed up in there.  The other flaw in my bril­liant meta­phys­i­cal con­struct: one has two par­ents, and par­ents can have more than two chil­dren.  It could get pretty crowded inside an only child, or, what, stretched out over 9 kids?

Invasion of the body snatch­ers, super­nat­ural style.  And the invaders are your par­ents!  I was kind of dis­ap­pointed when my dad died and his voice didn’t sud­denly pop into my head and start telling me what we did next.  The things you remem­ber from your child­hood when a par­ent dies are unpredictable.

Lately, I have been schem­ing a bet­ter plan for metaphor­i­cal immor­tal­ity.  I’ve been work­ing on this one all morn­ing, and I have to say, I think it’s my best shot.  The writing’s not going any­where lately.  So here it is, my plan to live on in mem­ory forever:

I’m going to “bury” my “trea­sure” in them there hills.

And no, that’s not sex­ual innu­endo.  We already talked about hav­ing kids a few para­graphs ago.

Step one: Establish the illu­sion that there is a trea­sure in the first place. A few weeks or months before my death (it helps in this sce­nario if I die slowly from some­thing like can­cer), I’ll trans­fer some money into gold coins and leave a few lay­ing around my home for rel­a­tives and friends to notice. I’ll post on future blog­gos­phere and Twitter IV updates denounc­ing our depar­ture from the gold stan­dard, and announce my intent to trans­fer all my assets into high value gold coins. Maybe allude to win­ning the lot­tery or mak­ing a lot of money on the futur­is­tic stock market.

Step two: Take long, soli­tary hikes into the hills car­ry­ing a shovel and a burlap sack.  While on these hikes, I’ll plant my seed money (so to speak).  A few coins here and there–not more than a few hun­dred dol­lars worth, but enough so that when they’re found, word of the Old Man Tolbert’s lost trea­sure will spread in the media.

Step three:  On my death bed, let out my inner impres­sion­ist painter and scrib­ble inscrutable maps.  Dozens of them.  Become agi­tated if any of my dot­ing fam­ily ask what I’m doing and tell them “you’ll never find it!  Not even with one of these!”  Then wink at the one grand­child who’s in on the scheme with me, in return for a hefty inher­i­tance and a promise to reg­u­larly bury a few more gold coins every decade or so. Hmm, I should prob­a­bly put that in a secret will or something.

Step four: the hard part.  The tim­ing here is cru­cial.  My last words.  When I feel death creep­ing in, after hav­ing lived a long full life at the age of 154, I’ll have my many descen­dents and friends draw near.  I’ll apol­o­gize for my sins, and say that my pain has brought me clar­ity in these final moment. “It was wrong of me to deny you my trea­sure.  You… you can it…”, wave a fist­ful of crude maps,  and then die.

I think I can pull it off.  And if not, well, at least I have some­thing to occupy my thoughts as the end draws near.

So what’s your backup plan for liv­ing for­ever if writing/​creativity doesn’t work out?

The Writer’s Trait of Reacting Uniquely

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This quote really struck home for me recently, via some­one on Twitter who I can’t find any­more because I fol­low too many people.

‘To be a writer, a cre­ative per­son, you must retain your abil­ity to react uniquely. — Dwight V. Swain

Reacting uniquely to things got me in a lot of trou­ble in col­lege, where I had a rep­u­ta­tion of being pretty obnox­ious with my line of ques­tion­ing in class.  I was required by my adviser to take a phi­los­o­phy class. Fine, I thought. I could han­dle that.  Philosophy seemed inter­est­ing.  But in class dis­cus­sions, I couldn’t help but find that most of the ques­tions they were ask­ing had been answered defin­i­tively by bio­log­i­cal sci­ence, or could be any­way.  This did not endear me to the future phi­los­o­phy majors who appar­ently don’t like being reminded reg­u­larly that we’re bags of water and meat.

It’s not that I was react­ing uniquely in gen­eral, but I was react­ing to the mate­r­ial in a way that was both unique and some­what (hell, totally) inap­pro­pri­ate for the con­text of the class.  Some might say I was pio­neer­ing cross-​​disciplinary think­ing, that I was a vision­ary ahead of my time.  Mostly, I was that  annoy­ing nerd who wouldn’t shut the hell up about evo­lu­tion and genet­ics when oth­ers wanted to talk Kant.

Yesterday, I talked about how I felt as if my thoughts were grow­ing more shal­low with time. Part of this fear has been also that my reac­tions to the world have grown less unique.  Have they really? Or have I just real­ized how many more peo­ple there are that react like I do? Then there’s the fear­ful thought that per­haps I never had unique reac­tions at all.

Reacting uniquely, think­ing uniquely, is some­thing our soci­ety actively selects against early on.  There are rules, unspo­ken ones, about how we are expected to for­mu­late ideas and opin­ions, and if we step out­side of those, it’s pos­si­ble to be socially stig­ma­tized.  But hav­ing a unique per­spec­tive is a big part of what makes a suc­cess­ful cre­ative, as Swain said.  Personally, I’m deter­mined to make a bet­ter effort at cul­ti­vat­ing this aspect of myself.

It takes effort to get past sur­face reac­tions, to lis­ten deeper to what our sub­con­scious has to say about things.  When I do this, I’m some­times fas­ci­nated but what a part of me believes.  Sometimes, I’m appalled at what I find out, things that make me seem not nearly so cul­tured and evolved as I think I am ratio­nally.  But the deeper truth, even if it’s an ugly one, has more impact than the sur­face obser­va­tion.  The trick is to put the reac­tion into writ­ing in an hon­est way, no mat­ter what.  Recording your reac­tions hon­estly is just as impor­tant as the abil­ity to react uniquely, I would argue, even if it makes you look like an asshole.

The only way I can think of to work on this is to slow my thoughts down and prac­tice more self-​​examination, so that is what I am doing.  Listen to myself, and lis­ten to oth­ers.  Take more time to for­mu­late ideas and opin­ions.  Question my reac­tions for deeper motivations.

How about you?  Are there any tricks you would like to share with the class?

On Types of Writers Block

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

When I first began writ­ing in earnest, I didn’t believe in writer’s block.  You know how it is.  When you’re com­pletely lack­ing in self-​​consciousness about your works, it’s much eas­ier to get things done.  Doubt hasn’t entered the pic­ture then, nor a dozen other ever-​​present con­cerns, experience-​​driven instincts, and mild pho­bias that you develop with time.  These things are internal-​​process bar­na­cles that form as an outer crust on the hull of your cre­ativ­ity.  They weigh you down a bit, but when the wind is right, you sail straight enough despite them.   The sail­ing is smooth and easy at first with­out them, but you prob­a­bly have no real des­ti­na­tion in mind, and the sail­ing is so smooth that it’s down­right bor­ing to any pas­sen­gers along for the ride.

Since my days of proto-​​writerhood, about 8 years ago, I’ve dis­cov­ered that writer’s block is real enough, and not only that, it comes from a vari­ety of causes. Because writ­ing is a damned bor­ing thing to talk about lit­er­ally, I’m going to flog this naval metaphor as I explore the forms of block I have encoun­tered in my years at sea.  (The irony of me rely­ing on this—me, the kid who didn’t see the ocean for the first time until he was 19—is not lost.)

No wind

The most com­mon block to my writ­ing is a lack of wind in my sails.  The dri­ving force behind my work goes away, and leaves me in the Sargasso Sea of the blank page.  Why does the wind aban­don me?  Why does the wind do any­thing?  The fac­tors are too com­plex to pick apart.   The wind of my inspi­ra­tion can come from a lot of dif­fer­ent places, mostly deep inter­nal aspects of my self that I don’t really feel com­fort­able exam­in­ing too closely.  It feels like frag­ile machin­ery that would be too easy to dis­turb when it’s work­ing right, and when it’s not, I never want to risk tin­ker­ing for fear of break­ing some­thing completely.

When faced with a lack of inspi­ra­tion, I shut down almost entirely as a writer.  I sit in mySar­gasso Sea and pass the time as best I can.  Read, watch TV. Sometimes, I draw.

When I’m clever, I remem­ber the god­damned boat has oars, and I heave to as best I can.

Right now, I can’t even find where I put the oars, but that’s another story entirely.

Wrecked on the rocks

Oops, steered this one wrong.  Now I’m stuck in the muck, marooned on the rocks.  I write myself into a cor­ner often, espe­cially when I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed—when I’m writ­ing for the fun of the jour­ney and not the destination.

The best way for me to avoid this is to know where I’m going ahead of time.  For a while there, after con­ceiv­ing of a story, the very next thing I attempted to do was envi­sion the point or the finale.  What would it build to?  With that in mind, I could set sail.  And if I saw a bet­ter des­ti­na­tion along the way, there was no rea­son I couldn’t change course!  My plans or out­lines are never set in stone.  They’re there just to keep me from the rocks.

There’s a leak

Sometimes you set sail with a story made of lit­tle more than a vague idea and a half-​​sketched out char­ac­ter con­cept.  And it isn’t until you’re in deep waters that you dis­cover your ini­tial con­cept is full of holes (made by the worm­rot of the implau­si­bil­i­tus, incon­sis­ten­tia, or been-​​there-​​done-​​that-​​allia species).  Now you find your­self sink­ing, maybe bail­ing for your life with a lit­tle hand wav­ing, but the boat’s tak­ing on the waters of dis­be­lief and some of your pas­sen­gers aren’t going to see the jour­ney to the end.  “No thanks,” they say as they dive off and swim back to shore. “We’ll take the next one.”

I scut­tle a lot of story boats this way delib­er­ately.  The ini­tial rush of an idea, those hard fast winds that come early; too often, I would set sail imme­di­ately with­out any plan­ning at all, buoyed by the excite­ment of the fresh­ness of it in my mind.   More often than not, when I dis­cover the flaws in my half-​​assed idea, I would sink the whole thing and move on.  I’ve prob­a­bly aban­doned five times as many story ideas as I’ve ever fin­ished.  I was a strong swim­mer in those days, but now I would just as soon arrive in a leaky boat and start work on patching.

I try to never patch-​​edit while I’m work­ing on the first draft. That’s a sure fire way to end up com­pletely bogged down.

Listening to the Crew

When things aren’t going well, the crew, made up of internal-​​editors, voices of self-​​doubt, and so on, they tend to get rowdy.  Sometimes, even when things are going well, they’re a noisy bunch, and it’s tempt­ing to give in and lis­ten to the nasty bunch of swine.

If I had my way, I’d make them all walk to plank at the start of a voy­age, but they’re not com­pletely worth­less.  Best to gag them, tie them up, and throw them into the hull until you’re done with your maiden voy­age, I say.

NOT Listening to the 1st Mate

My friend Jay Lake calls his sub­con­scious Bob, but I tend to call my sub­con­cious “Potatohead,” because he’s really not too bright.  Sure, he’s cre­ative and all, but he doesn’t have any con­cept of the real­i­ties of being a human being.  Impractical, is what I’m saying.

But when it comes to sail­ing, Commander Potatohead was born into a life at sea.  He may not know how to bal­ance a check­book or even earn a decent liv­ing, but the bas­tard knows how to sail bet­ter than I ever will.

I don’t always give him his due.  Me, Captain Ego, I want to be right all the time, want to be in charge.  I don’t like lis­ten­ing to the sea­soned advice of Mr. Potatohead who really knows these waters bet­ter than any­one.  When you fail to lis­ten,  you often end up  with a mutiny on your hands, marooned, or stuck in a Sargasso Sea.  Again.

That’s not even tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the dif­fi­culty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion! While I speak the Queen’s English, Commander Potatohead speaks some patois that I’ve never even heard of before.  I’m pretty sure he orig­i­nates from some­where in Polynesia—some obscure island nobody has ever heard of.  So we can’t really talk.  We resort to draw­ing vague pic­tures, ges­tur­ing wildly in some ridicu­lous game of conscious/​subconscious Charades.  And worse, we don’t keep the same sleep sched­ules, so we have to leave mes­sages for one another on scraps of paper, rope, what­ever we can find.

Frankly, it’s amaz­ing we have ever com­pleted a voy­age together at all.

* * *

But we have. And I’ll be damned if I am going to let any of these things get in my way to com­plet­ing my jour­neys in the future.  I don’t care if I make it to the other side leak­ing like a sieve, tied up and held hostage by the crew,  being slowly inched over the edge by a Commander Potatohead wear­ing an eye-patch—I’m going to make it.

When I look at cre­ative block in the abstract, it’s much more intim­i­dat­ing.  Abstract con­cepts aren’t eas­ily defeated, but when I con­cretize the idea into a giant tuber wear­ing an eye-​​patch, it sud­denly seems so much eas­ier to overcome.

Maybe that will work for you too.  Yarr.

Writing is a Sail Boat, And I’m Stuck on the Reefs

Labeling Oneself as an Artist and Why I Have Avoided It

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve strongly resisted the label of artist for a long time, because I don’t feel wor­thy of it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to avoid the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions that are entwined with the label in my back­wards, red­neck brain.

Who is an artist? (the ingrained notions)

Here’s what I grew up think­ing of artists–not actively think­ing or delib­er­ately decid­ing to believe, but just absorb­ing in Kansas/​Midwestern culture.

Artists are peo­ple who do not have real jobs.  They are as likely to spend their time drink­ing absinthe, doing drugs, and sleep­ing around as they are to do any­thing hon­est and deserv­ing of com­pen­sa­tion.  Artists do not con­tribute to the growth and wel­fare of soci­ety in mean­ing­ful ways.  They are prob­a­bly not very smart, because if they were smart, they would have gone into a pro­fes­sion like engi­neer­ing or med­i­cine where they could actu­ally do some good and make real money to sup­port their fam­i­lies.  Artists, above all else, are irre­spon­si­ble, child­ish, and poor.  POOR!

Conversely, artists are tal­ented (even if that tal­ent isn’t val­ued very highly).  They can draw any­thing they can imag­ine effort­lessly.  Their imag­i­na­tions are supe­rior to almost any­one elses’s.  They speak a secret lan­guage of color and form, and really, if you want to rearrange your liv­ing room and get some new cur­tains, an artist would not be a bad per­son to ask.  They’ll prob­a­bly help for beer money.

Why I am not an Artist (the rationalizations)

I’m cre­ative, sure.  I do a bit of writ­ing, but writ­ing isn’t art, because art is visual, and writ­ing is lan­guage.   And yes, I know how to oper­ate a cam­era, but art­work should con­vey emo­tions, tell a story, and my pho­tog­ra­phy doesn’t con­vey any such thing.  Anyone can pick up a cam­era and point it at some­thing.  Anyone can take enough shots, throw­ing out the bad, to make them­selves look like a mod­er­ately decent photographer.

I’m a web designer, but design is not art.  Design is com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and it has strict rules (rules that I strug­gle every day to learn and under­stand bet­ter).   And any­way, I pri­mar­ily excel at writ­ing code and solv­ing tech­ni­cal prob­lems, less so than mak­ing things beau­ti­ful and artistic.

Despite my ingrained beliefs about artists as pro­fes­sion­als, I grew up secretly wish­ing I could be some kind of sci­ence artist, but I  wouldn’t ever really because I wanted to con­tribute and make money. And finally, for some rea­son, I can­not ever be an artist because I can­not draw any­thing that I pic­ture in my head.

Why I am an Artist (the realization)

First of all, most of the bull­shit I grew up believ­ing about artists is just that–bullshit.  Artists are as intel­li­gent as any­one else, if not more so,as respon­si­ble, and they are no more likely to drink heav­ily and do drugs than any­one else.  They con­tribute to soci­ety in less quan­tifi­able ways than say, an engi­neer, but they act in a way as society’s con­science, as it’s out­let.  As a means of self-​​reflection.  Artists play a role, and while I don’t quite under­stand that role, I know they have one and it’s deeply impor­tant.  Being an artist is a real job, and has all the bag­gage that jobs have.  It’s also really, really hard to make a liv­ing at.

Being any good does not deter­mine whether one is an artist or not.  And art encom­passes many more skills than just draw­ing.   My pho­tog­ra­phy may be some­thing any­one can do, but every once and a while I make some­thing nobody else  but me could make.  I’m actively try­ing to sell prints of my work actively, so I guess that right there makes me an artist in the same way that actively pur­su­ing pub­li­ca­tion made me a writer.

Design may or may not be art, but I’m a work­ing cre­ative indi­vid­ual.  Sometimes, what I cre­ate is art.  Sometimes, it’s crap.  Well, more often than not.  But I share more in com­mon with work­ing illus­tra­tors and painters now than I do with my friends who spend their days slic­ing DNA in laboratories.

So, yeah.  I am an artist.  Whatever that means–I’m still learn­ing. It’s not all that I am, but I’m done not call­ing myself that just because I can’t draw and I grew up believ­ing some kind of dumb things about who writ­ers are.  My life is cen­tered around cre­ative acts of one form or another, so.  There it is.

Have any of you ever resisted label­ing your­self like that, for sim­i­lar mix­tures of rea­sons?  I’m curi­ous to know if this is dif­fi­cult just for me, or if it is for others.

PS:  I keep try­ing to fix that draw­ing thing.  I’ve been stuck in the first cou­ple of chap­ters of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” for a cou­ple of years.  Maybe this year will be the one that I finally get past the weird trac­ing stuff and start learn­ing how to stop myself from draw­ing on the left side of the brain.

A New Blog Project: Project Game Writer

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

After attend­ing the Game Developer’s Conference Writer Summit in Austin a cou­ple of weeks ago, I have been increas­ingly deter­mined to make a slow career shift from web-​​related work to the video game indus­try and writ­ing.  I’m not going to stop build­ing web­sites yet.  But I want to start writ­ing in the field.

I’ve been think­ing about the pluses and minuses for myself, and I’ve made some lists to exam­ine my interest.4

First, why do I think I could break into the video game indus­try as a writer and be good at it?

  • I have a proven track record as a writer with my short story mate­ri­als, as well as the Dr. Roundbottom project.
  • As a web designer, I’m used to work­ing cre­atively in a col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment.   The tran­si­tion to being part of a team in writ­ing will be an easy one for me.  I will be your word monkey.
  • I have expe­ri­ence writ­ing for voice act­ing and direct­ing voice actors both through Escape Pod and Dr. Roundbottom.
  • I am tech­ni­cally skilled and can write code, so when it comes to hook­ing dia­logue up to a game with in-​​house edit­ing tools, I can pick that up quite quickly and eas­ily.  I built sev­eral mod­ules for my own enter­tain­ment with the Neverwinter Nights tool set, so I’ve already had some expe­ri­ence here.
  • My writ­ing often has a strong sense of voice, which is impor­tant for many types of game writing.
  • I love video games, and games of all sorts.

And why do I even want to break into the video games indus­try as a writer?

  • I enjoy work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tively with oth­ers on larger projects.
  • The pay per word is gen­er­ally much bet­ter than straight fic­tion writing.
  • The audi­ence is there.  Top games sell mil­lions of copies.  I’m not going to be able to play in front of an audi­ence that size with short fiction.
  • I love writing.
  • I love video games, and games of all sorts.

But there are some poten­tial down­sides to the video game indus­try for me:

  • Long crunch hours could sap my will to live if I’m not pre­pared for them.
  • The pay may be more than fic­tion writ­ing, but it seems often less than web design (at least at this stage).
  • Am I really pre­pared to write My Gorgeous Pony: The Magical Adventures II?
  • Not entirely sure I have the full range of writ­ing tal­ents to make it.  I need to learn how well I can switch gen­res to gen­res that I don’t nor­mally write for.

With all that in mind, I’ve pur­chased a cou­ple of books on the indus­try, and they include chap­ter exer­cises.  As part of my process of explo­ration, I’m going to post the exer­cises and my attempts at them.  I plan to do 2 chap­ters of the Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing book a week, but I may shrink some of the projects in size or skip the larger ones that would take a con­sid­er­able amount of time. You’re all wel­come to play along at home with your own copies, and com­ment on what I do.     Or you can just ignore it entirely–that’s cool too.

At the very least, I hope you’ll keep me work­ing on it and poke me if I don’t keep on the project.  Wish me luck.  I’m going to need some of it in addi­tion to tal­ents I’ve yet to develop.  But it’s an excit­ing prospect, and one I look for­ward to exploring.

To Rewrite or Not to Rewrite? That is the Flowchart.

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I recently received a rewrite request for a story I had sub­mit­ted.  Over my time as a writer, I’ve received rewrite requests that I’ve accepted, and rewrite requests I have turned down–for a lot of dif­fer­ent rea­sons.  I real­ized that my think­ing that goes into the deci­sion of whether or not to do so is some­what com­plex, and I got to won­der­ing if it was some­thing that a flow­chart could describe.  After a lit­tle bit of play­ing around this morn­ing, I have cre­ated just such a flowchart.

rewriteflowchart

Click on the thumb­nail image to view the full size chart.  Did I miss any steps that you would have con­sid­ered?  Do you think I am insane for draw­ing up a flow­chart for some­thing like this?  Share your thoughts in the comments.


Writing: Your Subconscious and You

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have a very rocky rela­tion­ship with my subconscious.

On the one hand, my sub­con­scious is the font of my best ideas.  Even when I writ­ing some­thing that has come mostly from ego-​​brain think­ing, it inserts cool things, catches ideas that I missed the first time around.  It’s some­times like hav­ing a bet­ter writer sit­ting on your shoul­der catch­ing your missed opportunities.

On the other hand,  my subconscious’s inter­ests are not always mar­ketable inter­ests.  My sub­con­scious feeds me sto­ries about Kansas about once a week.  The state needs to start writ­ing me checks for the PR.  Lord knows they need a pos­i­tive face what with all the wackos that pop­u­late my home state.  So I write a lot of sto­ries about Kansas or set in Kansas. I’ve yet to find a mar­ket for that stuff, and I doubt any­one wants to read about it.  And yet my sub­con­scious per­sists.  I’m wrestling with Potatohead (that’s what I call my sub­con­scious) right now about a story that involves mole men and Kansas.    Excited to read that one? Yeah, didn’t think so. I keep telling him, we need postsin­gu­lar­ity sto­ries that use the entire galaxy as their set­ting.  We need fan­tasy sto­ries that take place in the New York sub­way sys­tem.  What does he feed me?   A story about a woman whose abu­sive dead hus­band comes back made out of pota­toes after being buried int he garden.

Yeah, I actu­ally wrote that one.  The rejec­tion Nick gave it at Clarkesworld was enough to put me off writ­ing for a year.  Not one you’ll prob­a­bly ever read. There are a lot of these.

On rare occa­sions, one of us presents an  idea that the other finds just as fas­ci­nat­ing.  My story “The Yeti Behind Me”  is a good exam­ple.  The idea of ghosts of extinct ani­mals popped up in con­ver­sa­tion.  I felt the indi­ca­tion of Potatohead’s inter­est in the form of an explo­sion just behind my right eye.  Potatohead is not sub­tle.   But if we agree on some­thing straight away, I know it’s got legs.

Problem has been, lately, I have stopped trust­ing Potatohead.  He’s fix­ated on the same things much of the time.  He’s not giv­ing me ideas that I can get excited about.  And vice versa.  I spend all day think­ing of story ideas and ask­ing “Hey, Potatohead, what do you think of this one?”  His response is gen­er­ally a resound­ing “meh.”

I feel like the two parts of my brain are at war lately  Each one knows some­thing use­ful about writ­ing, but they are not agree­ing on things nearly often enough for me to feel like I’m mov­ing for­ward with my “career.”  I can write sto­ries based pri­mar­ily on the input of one half, but those sto­ries are flat, and aren’t going to take me anywhere.

There’s one other, unre­lated thing about Potatohead that ticks me off.  When I’m asleep, peo­ple can talk directly to Potatohead.  I have had long and var­ied con­ver­sa­tions in my sleep that I con­ciously have no rec­ol­lec­tion of.  The thing that gets me into trou­ble is, Potatohead doesn’t know that I/​we are married.

Sarah has come to bed late on sev­eral occa­sions, only to see me shoot upright in bed and demand “Who is that?”

“It’s me,” she says.

“Me WHO?” Potatohead asks.

“Sarah,” she says, begin­ning to be a bit more exasperated.

“Sarah WHO?”

And that’s the last straw.  “Your WIFE,” she snaps.  “Go back to sleep.”

“Oh.  Okay,” says Potatohead and down he goes back to where he came.  And the only indi­ca­tor I have that this con­ver­sa­tion ever hap­pened is that my wife is pissed at me all morn­ing for no appar­ent reason.

How does one force his or her two minds to sit down and come to some kind of ami­ca­ble agree­ment?  We have crap that needs to get worked out if we are going to con­tinue to make a career of work­ing together.  This part­ner­ship is turn­ing sour, and I need to straighten things out quickly.  I also need to get it through Potatohead’s half-​​brain that ask­ing “Sarah WHO?” is not a good thing for either of us.  If any­one has any sug­ges­tions, I’d love to hear them.

BREAKING: F&SF’s Gordon Van Gelder Does Not Want to Drink The Blood of Your Children

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Last week, we had a lovely mini-​​controversy over the poorly announced inten­tions of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to launch a work­shop for newer writ­ers run by Gardner Dozois.

The details that we were able to gather were:

  • The work­shop will be online.
  • The work­shop will be lim­ited at first to around 100 writers.
  • Gardner will be able to choose up to 3 sto­ries a year from the work­shop sub­mis­sions to appear in F&SF.

The details that we do not know:

  • When will the work­shop launch?
  • How much will it cost?
  • How much face-​​time will you get with the work­shop admin with 99 other students?

The issues that  weren’t clear to some:

  • Whether or not Gordon would pay for the sto­ries that come from the work­shop like any other story
  • Whether the cost of join­ing the work­shop would in fact include the price of the soul of your first-​​born child?
  • Whether this is a vio­la­tion of Yog’s Law, in which money flows from the writer to the pub­lisher? (“money flows to the writer”)

The con­tro­versy to me was exactly the same as Amazon’s screw-​​up a few weeks back regard­ing the data­base and adult/​gay con­tent being removed from list­ings.  It boiled down to this:  poor infor­ma­tion con­trol and release.  It was a PR fubar.

Perhaps I assumed the bes in that work­shop­pers selected for the pub­li­ca­tion would be paid just like any new writer, that Gordon was not plan­ning to sell my unborn chil­dren into slav­ery to the Mi Go  and that Yog’s Law was per­haps sim­ply bent, but not in a way that was unprece­dented.  Ultimately, I shouldn’t have to assume, nor should any­one else.  Once again, the issue is that, in the absence of real infor­ma­tion, the inter­net will invent a con­tro­versy.  WhateverFails are spon­ta­neously gen­er­at­ing every­where on the web because a rumor has got­ten out of hand and real infor­ma­tion has not stepped into to fill the void.

What could F&SF Done Differently?

Gordon and his staff prob­a­bly should have acted quickly to cor­rect any mis­in­for­ma­tion being spread (and to their credit, they did so, but I don’t think they did it com­pre­hen­sively enough).  He should have issued a full press release in the first place, out­lin­ing every detail of the project, from cost, to dura­tion to “here’s the web­sites, go sign up.”  The first any­one should have heard of this project should have been when every detail was sorted out and  ready to go.  If you are vague on any aspect, it just gives peo­ple an oppor­tu­nity to see bog­garts where there prob­a­bly aren’t any.

Information about this seemed to leak via hearsay on one blog, and the con­tro­versy built rapidly in this infovoid.  Damage con­trol would have been to imme­di­ately release all infor­ma­tion.  Unfortunately, I think not every aspect of the project as nailed down, so it seemed that they were rushed to release what they knew so far, which wasn’t and as far as I know, still isn’t every­thing.  I put my name on the list of inter­ested par­ties and I look for­ward to learn­ing more.

In gen­eral, I think F&SF needs to con­trol its online pub­lic rela­tions bet­ter (I imag­ine Gordon might think ‘great, yet another new job I don’t need and didn’t sign up for.’  Sorry, man. ).  The prob­lem is, and jus­ti­fi­ably so, they see relat­ing with the pub­lic online to be an antag­o­nis­tic thing.  n this posts, I am care­ful not to say ‘Gordon should do…” which is way too easy with F&SF.  I’m try­ing to say “the orga­ni­za­tion should do…”  Because I know F&SF has a team of peo­ple, pri­mar­ily dri­ven by Gordon.  Being the only editor-​​owned mag­a­zine of the Big Three in the field, its easy to place the blame or put a face to any per­ceived prob­lem with the ‘zine.  Gordon, for bet­ter and for worse, is F&SF in the pub­lic eye.  You can’t nec­es­sar­ily do that with the Dell Magazines. Their edi­tors gen­er­ally aren’t mak­ing the busi­ness deci­sions.  So the crit­i­cisms of F&SF often come across as too personal.

That’s unfor­tu­nate.  F&SF is a good mag­a­zine and Gordon is a great edi­tor.  The orga­ni­za­tion needs to reset their inter­ac­tions with the online world entirely, and design­ing a good PR plan would be a nice place to start, in my opin­ion.  I have some ideas of how to go about that which I will go into in more detail at a later date.

What Could We the Public Done Differently?

We should be bet­ter at real­iz­ing when we have par­tial infor­ma­tion and we should be less eager to jump to con­clu­sions based on that par­tial infor­ma­tion.  Perhaps our first instinct should not be to write a blog post or to start a com­ment thread on a forum.  Perhaps, when we have sus­pi­cions or are con­sid­er­ing cast­ing asper­sions, we should con­tact the par­ties involved over email or phone and ask our ques­tions.  If we don’t get sat­is­fy­ing answers, then maybe that is the time to scream from the rooftops.  Also, apply some com­mon sense.  What in Gordon or Gardner’s long career would ever make you think they weren’t going to pay writ­ers?  Yes, it’s impor­tant to make sure you get paid as a writer–but these guys are NOT the enemy. I have dis­agreed with Gordon on mat­ters elec­tronic in the past, but I know that he is a con­sum­mate professional.

This lat­est con­tro­versy is made up of mis­takes on both sides.  The bur­den of pro­vid­ing clear, accu­rate, and com­plete infor­ma­tion rests with the publisher/​project run­ners.  The bur­den of the rest of us is to not jump to assump­tions with­out ask­ing ques­tions first when we receive only par­tial information.