Teh Real World

We apologize to our fan (Hi dude!) and those of you who like to savage our entries MST-3K style, but we are currently dealing with some Real World (tm) junk that has sucked out our very will to live.  It's so bad, I can't even write some flip, pithy bit about cephalopods this time round. If ever the rationale for writing entries out ahead of myself were apparent, this would be it.  I apologize.

I should be back in the game tomorrow for a Ray Bradbury themed potpourri.

10 Gems From Ray Bradbury

When I was in sixth grade (so probably 12 years old), I read a different KIND of book as part of my GATE program curriculum.  It was like nothing I'd ever read.  The world was familiar but at the same time, completely alien and strange.  The premise was a little crazy, but at the same time everything that kept happening seemed oddly close to home.  In the end I felt like I'd read some crazy bit of literature with all these meaningful symbols and metaphors (yes, even at 12--Las Virginas USD GATE program didn't fuck around) but I'd still read something that was fun and kept me turning the pages.  I knew, whatever happened, I had to have more of this science fiction stuff in my life, and that really began my journey into speculative literature that wasn't simply young adult fare.  That was the moment I knew that I could write what I wanted, and my subject matter was never going to have to "grow up."

It was about this guy who was a fireman.  Except he didn't fight fires, he started them...on books. 

Ray Bradbury passed away on Tuesday night, and like every other geek I am doing the blog equivalent of holding up a candle to try and remember him.  He was the closest thing a booky nerd like me ever gets to a hero.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers. 

You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.

Don’t talk about it; write.  

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

 If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day. That’s three or four hundred thousand words a year. Most of that will be bilge, but the rest …? It will save your life!

Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

 We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)

The Talent To Go Forth

[Ray Bradbury passed away last night.  The news broke a few hours ago. I'm having a bit of trouble being my usual silly self today when I think of just how much our light is diminished when certain candles flicker out.]


I heard this story several years ago.  I've no idea how many chains of transmission it went through before it reached me. I've no idea its accuracy.  It seems like it can't be "true." But I like it nonetheless.

Crap.  I ended another line in "orange."
Jupiterimages/liquidlibrary/Getty 

The Talent to Go Forth  

A 19th century Russian mother does not want to find her child pursuing art. This is a terrible thing.  Russia is a hard, unmerciful land, and those without good jobs can literally freeze to death--or even worse, have to go a weekend without vodka. Art for art's sake is a concept alien to those who struggle to put a few mouthfuls of hot food into their bellies, and Bohemians quickly adjust their priorities when autumn's air first snaps. So when Nadja found her darling ten-year-old boy writing poetry, she was furious. This was not proper behavior for a little man.

She told him to stop writing poetry.  He refused.

She took his paper, later when he wrote on the walls and floor of his room, she took his writing implements.  The boy took to memorizing poems in his head and smuggled pens and pencils into his bedroom.  She forbid him to compose any more poems.  He screamed and shouted.  He cried.  He refused to stop.  He said this was his passion, and that he didn't care about a proper job.  He would never work an office or a mine, but would instead be a poet.

Well, Nadja was having none of this nonsense, of course, but she was still the young boy's mother, and his pain and suffering was her pain and suffering.  She could not callously watch his heart breaking.  (This was something she reserved for his deadbeat father.)  His tears and howling had put the tiniest of cracks into her resolve, and so, the next day, she marched the young boy to the local university to discuss the matter with the professor of literature there, who was himself a poet of no small repute.

She gathered up his sheafs of paper with his scribbled poetry from around the house, and the two of them set off early.

"Does he have talent?" she asked, thrusting the young boy's poetry towards the professor.  "He wants to be a poet, of all things.  A poet!  I will not abide this nonsense unless he has great talent.  He must be able to to feed himself and put a roof over his head.  So unless he has considerable talent, I am going to call a stop to all this nonsense."

The professor gingerly accepted the poems, and put on his reading glasses to look them over.  Of course they were terrible.  The young boy was only ten, and was barely able to read, much less write.  They had small ideas and terrible execution.  They showed no aptitude or ability whatsoever.  If anything, the young boy was far behind peers of his age when it came to writing ability.  But the professor wasn't really looking at the poetry.

He was watching the young boy.

 The boy stood rigid next to his mother, chin trembling, with fists clenched at his sides so tightly they turned purple.

The professor thumbed through a few of the poems and handed them back to the mother.  "He has a remarkable talent, ma'am.  You should allow him to continue."

And so young Alexander Pushkin was permitted to go on writing poetry.

Introducing Cedric

He's just so awesome.

Hi all.  Chris Brecheen here.  Sorry about the protracted absence.  I hope my competent employees and permanent-retainer guest bloggers--and apparently even my muse on Saturday--were able to keep everyone interested.  There's a lot to talk about, and quite a story behind what has happened between last Thursday and today.  Maybe some day, when I no longer shudder to think of the horrors I have witnessed, and the terrible things that happened to those poor federal agents, I will tell you all about it.

However, it was not all bad.  There was also a bonding type buddy-movie caliber bonding experience with one of the genocidal cephalopods.  His name is Cedric.  He doesn't believe in what his people are doing.  In fact, he kind of LIKES my terrible writing and even wants to join the staff here.  He has been a great source of valuable intel.

I have to admit that he is SO fucking good at admin in the front office, you would NOT even believe.  Eight arms apparently makes for kick ass secretaries.  Plus he's a Bronie so we talk about Applejack a lot when I'm on my way in and out of the office.

Anyway there is more to this....but I will leave you with a link (about writing) chosen completely at random.  I don't know if this resource can teach you about creative writing, but it says it's a resource.

A Writer's View of Inception (Spoilers)

[As of this writing, still no word has been heard from Writing About Writing's head writer and executive producer, Chris Brecheen.  The SciGuy is using terribly scientific and absurdly sophisticated audio analysis equipment to review the log of Chris's interrupted segment on Thursday.  As of yet, we have only a single lead.  We know that Chris and the two federal agents were not alone in the studio at the time of the incident.  In the mean time, we know that Chris had more written about Kublacon, but no one knows the password on his laptop.  We have had to dig through some of the hard copy archives to find a Monday-worthy article.]  

This article contains spoilers for Inception. 

Wants vs. Needs:  Why Inception Makes its Own Big, Burning Question Utterly Moot*

Occasionally I am reminded that I simply look at art differently than a lot of people. Well, really almost all artists I've encountered share this perspective, so it's not exactly an elite cadre. I also don't think it's "better" than just enjoying entertainment for entertainment's sake.  (Though I might argue that it fosters a deeper appreciation of well woven elements.)  I just think that when we look at art, we tend to look watch for different kinds of things--especially deliberate decisions on the part of the artist and what they might mean.

For example...Inception.

As the blog reviews, friends lists of Livejournal, and conversations around me exploded with discussions of whether or not Cobb was dreaming at the end, I realized that it was unusual that I didn't particularly care to know or guess. I LOVED the ending. It was perfect with perfect sauce.

Most people wanted to decode the movie.  They wanted to figure out what "really" happened. Websites and conversations alike meticulously categorized the "proofs" of one hypothesis or another.

I think the people who noticed all the little details are truly amazing. They noticed thing in a single viewing that make me think maybe Dr. House is kind of oblivious.  I would NEVER have picked up some of that stuff if someone hadn't pointed it out even if I watched the movie two or three times through.   However, I did not discuss the clues to try and solve the mystery but to delight in the intricacy of the confusion.   In fact, I think if Inception clearly fell to one side or another on the question of whether it was all Cobb's dream, the work as a whole would have been diminished.

The entire audience groaned when the spinning top cut to black. They wanted to know so badly!

What was going through my head, though, was the dichotomy between a character's wants and needs.

All good characters have both wants and needs. They have something they want and they have something they need. In a lot of stories this is pretty much the same thing. Rocky wants to go the distance. Rocky needs to prove to himself that he CAN go the distance. So if Rocky goes the distance he gets his needs and wants satisfied by the same goal.

Admittedly, a lot of characters that are more "simplistic" have wants and needs that are basically the same. Things get a bit more complicated and interesting when wants and needs aren't the same. Aladdin wants to marry Jasmine. Aladdin needs to find integrity. They're not lined up exactly, but the same five minute moment can resolve both.  When this really gets interesting is when you get wants and needs in direct opposition. Pixar probably provides the most well-known examples of characters where this is the case, and that is probably why their movies seem a cut above a lot of Disney stuff. Nemo's dad wants to save Nemo from all harm. Nemo's dad needs to cut the umbilical cord. A character cannot get both their want and need fulfilled and that creates the best character driven tension. They must sacrifice one in order to get the other. If this moment is sort of syrupy and sentimental, you get movies like Cars, where the character gives up winning for honor. If it is more gritty you often get moments like Fight Club where the character's needs overcome his wants...with a pistol. There are a lot of variations on a theme here--the better a story is, the less clear cut any "formula" tends to be. In Shindler's list Liam Neeson's character doesn't realize his need for humanity until it's too late and spends half the movie rationalizing it as his want--even though it isn't.

When I watched the last scene of Inception, I knew that there was an ambiguity about dream or reality. I was pretty sure they weren't going to SHOW us which it was. And I wasn't watching to "decode" the moment or find out what was "right." I was watching the character of Cobb, and thinking about his needs and wants. For what is basically a twist-filled action movie, Cobb is amazingly well characterized. (Proof that it doesn't take time--or pages--to characterize someone WELL.) His wants are very obvious from the first moment of the film--he wants to go home and be with his kids. His needs are a little more open to interpretation--happiness might arguably be a need, but I would say what he really needed was closure over the death of his wife. He sort of got SOME closure when he accepted her death, but it was very clear that he wasn't totally sure if maybe she was right and he was dreaming. He pegged his dream wife as not being nuanced enough, but that was actually not his true moment of wants vs. needs conflict.

This is why as the audience around me howled in frustration, I smiled and whispered "Perfect." The character of Cobb is a maelstrom of wants surrounding going home and the kids. His needs are buried so deep, they are literally in a basement of his mind.... metaphorically... literally... whatever. The end of the movie is perfect ambiguity because Cobb WALKS AWAY from his spinning totem. He doesn't even fucking care anymore. His need for true closure--"is this real or not?"--did not overcome his want. His wants won, and so true to the obsession of the character. That's such a rare end for a character arc that it was delightful to see. He walks away from his totem and doesn't stick around to serve his needs about all those nagging doubts. He has what he wants.

To me, THIS is the important part of the story. Whether it was real or a dream  makes no difference. What matters is that Cobb stopped caring. He makes a CHOICE. It is THE pivotal moment in his character and the movie. The online quest to discover the "truth" is interesting and fun, but not only does it not matter to the narrative arc, but if the audience knew the truth, it would have diminished any impact Cobb's choice created.

When I first wrote this for LJ, it sparked a handful of reactions both as replies and conversations in the following weeks still trying to establish the truth one way or another. I really think these efforts will be futile. Because the important part of the story is the moment where it stops mattering. In fact, Inception goes to incredible lengths to have just as many "proofs that it's real" with the "proofs that it's a dream". They've done a good job that even obsessed fans can't definitively settle the issue. They made sure the scales balanced perfectly. I think they probably went through with a fine toothed comb and made sure there was pretty much equal evidence either way. This was not a case of unclear storytelling. This is intentional and deliberate (and meticulously considered) ambiguity. While this has the effect of keeping internet bloggers arguing ad nauseum and provides some incredibly detail-oriented proof, I would be very surprised if one side could ever deliver the "clincher."  [Though I did see great article that Cobb's wedding ring is his real totem--if its absence wasn't just one of those mistakes they sometimes make.] You don't get that kind of balance "on accident." Inception doesn't want to be decoded. The "truth" is completely unimportant--not just unimportant, but antithetical--to that thematic moment and final act.

*And yes, I know what moot "really" means, and I'm using it in the sense of academically debatable, but not otherwise meaningful.

Potpourri (and Cathamel Writes The State of the Blog)

State of the Blog-  Cathamel here.  Chris has been gone two days, so I'm going to write this thing.  Sorry that I'm piss poor at writing.  I'm a muse not a writer.  No one told me I'd have to actually work.

Okay....so, I know Chris was all excited about reaching four thousand views.  Yay.  Pretend I wrote like fifteen paragraphs about that because that's what Chris would do.  

Plus I know he wanted to point out on the first State of the Blog every other month or so that he has a PayPal button if you're so inclined.  He's not asking or begging, but he wants you to know it's there.  You'd be surprised how easy my job can become when money is involved.

And imagine I put another six pages or something about planning on changing stuff and "moving forward" or some shit like that.  That's what Chris would write.

Also.....CHRIS IS STILL MISSING!!!!!!  I miss my writer!  I'm a muse without a writer .  If you see him, will you please tell him that Cathamel misses him and inspiring the cats to caterwaul is not really doing it for me.  But....actually, if you do see him, could say it like, "Cathamel is going to kick your ass and burn you in the face if you don't get back like five minutes ago!" I'd appreciate it.

Potpourri

Publisher's Weekly "fixes" the Top 100 Novels List.  I think the problem isn't the dead white males the lit snobs like or the speculative fiction that others like.  It's that you just bloody well need to read more than 100 novels.

I mentioned Martin this week, so I figured a quote from him wouldn't be amiss.

Yes, this is a real warning.

Successful people actually do certain things differently than most people.  Here are nine of them.

Here is a page called Something About Writing Killer Short Stories which should probably be more properly titled Eight Things You Ought To Already Know.  It's amazing to me sometimes that I write every day here and still have so much I haven't even touched yet, but the various lengths of writing tend to incorporate very different conventions.  However, I also think this page suffers from a serious case of over-generalization, and any one of these "rules" could be ignored if you earn it.

Here is a pair of articles about the recent study that found modern writers tend to write differently from many of the classics.  One suggests it's because writers aren't reading them.  I highly doubt this is the case though.  Great social upheaval and great linguistic, artistic, stylistic upheaval go hand in hand.  It's kind of how culture works.  We can't pioneer a new culture that rejects so many assumptions of the past without pioneering a new culture too.  I'm much happier with how Salon approaches the topic.





















Here are 25 words we don't have in English, but probably need.  Although I'm hearing Schadenfreude starting to be used more and more (and spell checker recognized it just now), so we might have Avenue Q to thank for the fact that this should really be a list of 24.

Sort of a classic Ted talk about creativity.  Ken Robbins is crazy funny if you haven't seen this one before, but his basic message is about how our current school system is destroying creativity.

If you've got a half an hour, this is spectacular.  It's a series called Art Through Time.  This particular episode is about writing.  It talks about the relationship between sound and meaning and how different cultures have viewed the artistic expression of writing.  Total nerdgasm.  (It's not a Youtube video, so I can't embed it.)


[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are?  Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one).  There are four caveats to this.  Please read them before you send me stuff.  If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do.  Most everything here that doesn't have an embedding code within its source is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

Kublacon '12...as a writer Part 2

So most of the games I played in had a power differential between characters.  Even if the character sheets themselves were balanced (which is not even remotely the case in many games), certain characters are simply more powerful.  Perhaps they have more allies, more information, or have character goals that largely involve maintaining the status quo--which is always easier than rocking the boat.  I played a game on Sunday where every character wanted the dying man on the table to die--including the doctor watching over him--but it still took an act of subterfuge to do so.

In that same game I played a relatively minor character trying to secure my inheritance from my cousins.  I managed to accomplish all my character goals and even stuck it to the crazy widow (not literally) while doing so.  However, in doing so, I also allowed my grand-uncle to become an evil immortal, and my grand-aunt to bind a demon to her.  I had no idea about these "higher paygrade" plots until the wrap up of the game.  The only thing I even heard in character was about a "family curse."  So I spent most of the game doing my own thing outside of the main plot line.  Though I was doing my own thing VERY WELL, I was pretty much oblivious compared to the full story.  Killing Christian Vozza accomplished my goals...and ushered in horrific evil.  My bad.

Most games have a dynamic like this at some level.  Not every character understands every plot, and some characters just aren't that central to what could be called the main arc of the game.  They dig their claws into their own sub-plots and hang on, but at the end of the day, even if they tear off a huge chunk, it is not the whole game. I could only experience that plot from a minor character's perspective so I crashed into my minor plot with the force of a big rig....with a piercing ram.

I should take a minute to step down from the "...as a writer" podium for a second, and just make a caveat as someone who has played in LARPs for over a decade, and run and written several as well.  It's hard on a GM to write a balanced game.  They try, but any perfectly balanced game would come out feeling contrived.  For a game to feel real, there have to be social dynamics that aren't fair, wealth disparities that aren't fair, and even sometimes character sheets that just aren't fair.  We've all know the person that is just better than us.  Stronger, smarter, better looking, more erudite, more sophisticated, and more charismatic.  (Mine is named Dr. W.)  It's just not fair, but that's life.  In real life not every good looking person is dumb, and not everyone who is smart is hopelessly weak.  And those who struggle to maintain the status quo (in our culture's case white, heterosexual males) have an easier time of it than those rocking the boat to actually affect change. And so LARP's have to ride that sweet spot between realism and balance.

And so does fiction.

We haven't dug deep into the conventions of plot yet, but a plot must be a struggle between two relatively balanced forces.  This may not refer to the external plot, but it has to refer to something.  There has to be a lack of certainty within the reader as to what the outcome will be and a possibility for change.  A LARP where one side can't lose would be boring for all but the most masochistic and/or sadistic (depending on the faction they were on) and a story where the outcome is a foregone conclusion would be equally uninteresting.  One of the reasons The Last Starfighter sucked so epically bad was that the bad guys seemed pretty much put there only to get the absolute shit kicked out of them.  To this day, one of the most recognizable pop culture lines is "Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzztclick.  We die."  Cause that's pretty much all they did.

Yet in life, those things occur all the time.  There are people incapable of change.  There are forces so utterly unbalanced that the outcome of conflict between them is comically predictable.  There are people who are just better than you.  These things are depressingly realistic, but they don't make for interesting stories.  (Even in "high art" writing, when things are overly banal and gritty in their realism, there is usually a balance of internal forces that often doesn't exactly mirror reality.)  When we know how stories end, we read them because they tickle that part of us that yearns for something different to happen, but even the most predictable Greek tragedies have moments where it could have gone differently...where you yearn that just this ONE TIME the character will overcome the circumstance of their tragic heroism.

Fiction and LARPs have the same basic problem of creating a situation of balanced forces that is convoluted but appears to be realistic.  One of the most artistic things writers do is find ways to explore emotional themes of balance within while the physical realities are either more realistically imbalanced or are pedestrian to the point of banality.  Woolf's exploration of the balance between possessive love and liberating love in Mrs. Dalloway would be a classic example.  Externally all they did was wander around and have lunch and shit.  The balanced forces were within.

One of the ways to be true to this is to be true to characters.  When you see a story as a dichotomy between two forces everyone seems to fall on one side of a line or another and balancing those forces can get really ham-handed.  (This is one of the main reasons you tease theme out of what you've written in later drafts instead of bursting in, themes blazing.)  But in reality you don't have a single plot arc.  (You do, but that's not your only arc.)  You have multiple character arcs that are all about different forces and different goals and different outcomes.  Each character is not a tool in your plot, they are their own main character and even minor characters are working hard to kill their uncle and secure their inheritance.  Metaphorically speaking.

Each character struggles against their own demons and the dance between multiple characters doing so becomes the story.  You can have a minor character...a weaker character...whose internal struggles are much more balanced.  This is why you get a huge trend in speculative fiction of peripheral characters being the favorite.  They are the ones struggling against themselves--they are the interesting characters.  The main characters are often pushing up against the external plots.  They aren't conflicted except by what's outside of them.  And their story becomes much less interesting.  Notice how often the main character is not the beloved character in a story or series, and how often the beloved character is one of deep, defining conflict.

There's a reason for that.  Those are the characters the writer doesn't need to manhandle towards executing their preconceived plot, so they become the ones with the most latitude for a compelling story.

The best way to approach this is to remember that everyone is their own main character, and everyone has demons and struggles.  Your main character should be as frail as your minor ones, and your minor characters should chase their goals as passionately as your main one.  And not everyone is going to view the central conflict as a dichotomy upon which they must take sides.  They may not even care.  How many of our worlds "big bad problems" (tm) do you work as hard as possible NOT to think about while you deal with your own shit?  If you didn't answer some variant of "all of them" or "almost all of them," you are probably lying or in an asylum.  It shouldn't be different if your world's big bad problems are dragons or death cruisers.

A great working example of this is G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire.  Don't ruin it for me.  I'm not even caught up with what's been written yet, but I immediately realized that it was a much different kind of fantasy story than those I was used to with their roving band of companions all basically on the same page (even when the wizard is totally evil).  Intricate weaving of motivations means that sometimes enemies are working towards a common end and sometimes allies are undermining each other--with or without knowing it.  There are very few "plot points" in those stories.  Most everything that happens is the progression of characters going after what they want, changing, adapting, and evolving.  Not all of them are balanced, and some are just better than others.  That's just the way life is.

But the struggles inside each one of them are balanced, and you don't know how it's going to go (especially since Martin has no deus ex machina-caliber love for his characters) with any of them.  In that way Martin creates a world of balanced imbalance and threads that needle of paradox that makes literature (and apparently LARPs) so wonderful.