Welcome

My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Potpourri, Texas Mom Style

I'm posting this Potpourri from Texas, where I am visiting my mother.

In that spirit, here are Texas and Mother themed links that have to do with writing.  It...uh...is sort of a LOOSE theme since there aren't a lot of spot on themes.  So bear with me.


Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that suppose to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing. 

Toni Morrison, Beloved


Mothers are all slightly insane. 
J.D. Salinger








The University of Houston has a great post graduate writing program.  Seriously...an aspiring writer should be so lucky.  It ranks 19th in the nation and earns some of its points with things that are extremely important to students like offering full funding and being in a local with a very low cost of living.

I'm not sure, but I think this is a homemade meme for The Uof H's writing program.

Here's a blog I actually follow called MotherWriter.  She's just getting started, so we'll see, but she is a freelance writer who home schools five kids.

Texas might love writing, but you know what they love even more?  Rewriting and Revising.  Here's a CBS podcast about Texas politicians rewriting history.

Cheap shot?  Okay, have some Shakespeare to wash the taste out:

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
~William Shakespeare

This is more about "Chris as a kid" than "moms" per se, but these are pictures of (some of) the books I grew up around as a kid.  I swear this is one of the reasons I fell in love with books (and one of the reasons I think e-readers will never extirpate books completely from tech-cultures).  I fell in love with BOOKS because of these books--with their bright colors and wonderful illustrations.





Later the mystery was held in the lush, decadent leather bound books on the shelf above.  I think they were just some Time/Live "Big Thinkers" series or something, but they drove me to learn to read more and more, dreaming of the time when I could wrap my brain around the ideas in those beautiful books.







A man loves his sweetheart the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest.  

Irish Proverb


Motherhood and art will always share a very special bond...


Friday, June 29, 2012

Assaulting The Ivory Tower

I remember exactly where I was when I decided there was no way in hell I was going to pursue a traditional MFA program*. I was sitting in Saturn Cafe in Berkeley celebrating a friend's birthday and discussing Creative Writing and the gaping flaws in the MFA system--how it had begun to look like Ponzi scheme, and their particular antagonism towards anything genre (as defined of course, by them).  Still, I admitted that there still might be a chance that I would still get a traditional MFA from a respected school because I love teaching, and it would be amazing to get to teach creative writing--even if I had to teach pretentious undergrads who all wanted to be Stephen King.

That's when I heard the horrible truth.  A truth so horrible, I had to run home and look it up on Google to confirm its horribleness.  But it was indeed not only horrible, but also true.

He told me MFA's were no longer the terminus degree of Creative Writing.  Now there are PhD's as well, and it won't be long before teaching CW at the college level will require a doctorate.

And that dashed it. That was it for me.  I wasn't going to spend years of effort, tens of thousands of dollars (probably of debt), compete with hundreds of other MFA students for the same couple of dozen opportunities, be contrite with a snobby faculty about their vision of "what is art," and lose my sense of what actually appeals to wide bodies of readers (and generally what actually tends to become an important work of literature) in favor of the Avant Garde self-congratulatory world of literary "high art"....and THEN, after all that, have to deal with the fact that academic inflation had made my fine arts degree even more useless and unmarketable unless I spent another half decade doing the same.

No thanks.

Don't get me wrong, I sing the praises of higher education, and I know a lot of MFA students (current and graduates) who value(d) their experience.  But there are huge problems with the current MFA system in Creative Writing.  Some are shared by the whole fine arts/MFA system in general, but many are unique to the newer creative writing programs and their more recent explosion of popularity.  None of these issues would be solved by a PhD program, and in fact I can't think of one that wouldn't be exacerbated.

So at the risk of enraging my more educated friends, I assault the Ivory Tower with a mirror shield in hand.

"Reasons" (not) to get an MFA in Creative Writing
The Big Changes ARE Happening in Literature, You N00bs.
The Mailbox: Are you jealous of the "real writers" in the MFA programs?
Bioshock Infinite: Your Argument is Invalid


*I haven't ruled out an advanced degree altogether.  I may do a MA in Lit or a non-traditional MFA program.  But it would have to be something I really wanted to do for its own sake--not a means to an end.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

House and Pet Sitting


Hi everyone! 

I have kept this link so that it's not a "dead link" but my updated pricing guide is here: 

http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2017/06/housepet-sitting-price-rates.html


Nora Ephron in Memorium (Thursday's Three +)

Nora Ephron was not a household name until Tuesday--not unless you had a fairly Hollywood-focused sort of house, but her death profoundly affected a lot of people who are household names, and they have echoed their laments far and wide. She wrote the screenplays for movies that almost everyone in the world has seen like Silkwood, Heartburn, and of course, When Harry Met Sally.

That's right, you owe the "I'll have what she's having!" joke to Nora.  

She also co-authored Sleepless in Seattle and Julia and Julia as well as being an award winning essayist, novelist, and playwright.  She also directed and produced a number of her films, but it is her writing that inspires me.  Without a throng of mindless zombie fans willing to defend excrement or an insane legacy that generated a can-do-no-wrong green-lighting of her every linguistic ejaculation, she still managed to produce work that moved a generation again and again.

Nora Ephron, we salute you.




"I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are."
Nora Ephron


"I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech."
Nora Ephron


"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."
Nora Ephron

And here's one more that I love, but I won't be putting in the reliquary:

"Like most of my contemporaries, I first read The Fountainhead when I was 18 years old. I loved it. I too missed the point. I thought it was a book about a strong-willed architect...and his love life....I deliberately skipped over all the passages about egoism and altruism. And I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect. I am certain that The Fountainhead did a great deal more for architects than Architectural Forum ever dreamed." 
Nora Ephron


Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Leela Bruce Kung Fu Fights the Active Voice Wanks


Leela Bruce here, and hello. Time for another round of Kung-Fu fighting really bad writing advice.

If you say something is a suggestion, most inexperienced writers will ignore it.  Completely.  Utterly.  They, of course, know better. Unfortunately, if you say something is a rule, they internalize it upon a steel plate of commandments within their brain, and in a few years when their writing career tanks and they become some kind of editor or agent, they run around power scoffing at anyone who breaks the rule--even when it is the better choice.

This is pretty much exactly how passive voice got such a bad rap.  Perhaps with a few more tweed jackets from Cornell thrown in there. (Oh that's right Strunk!  I'm looking at you!)

That's why today I'll be taking on legions of Active Voice Wank's.  What famed kung-fu fighter hasn't taken on dozens of opponents at a time at least once in their career?

First, a cerebral attack akin to starting out with battle aura (in order to ensure that everyone is too intimidated to attack me more than one or two at a time).  Think of active and passive voice like a transformer (that's transformer with a little T so I don't get sued, but I'm not talking about the electrical boxes).  Imagine you're a giant robot that can turn into a Lamborghini. If you need to get across town because someone thought they saw Harold Bloom, you don't go on foot.  You turn into a car, and zip across town.  When you GET to Harold Bloom, you don't stay in car form.  You transform into a robot so that you have prehensile thumbs with which to grab him by the lapels and a fist that you can drive into his trachea.  I mean maybe if he's in the middle of the road you can just run over him, but if he's behind some of those cement pylons or there are innocents, you're going to need a different mode.

Passive voice is exactly like that.  Exactly.

Now, let me start with some quick punches.  Passive voice is a grammatical construction.  It is not "anything you think feels weak or callow," consisting of verbs without "spine," it is not any sentence with "to be" as a verb, it is not any sentence written in perfect tense, and it is not it a way to refer to writing that generally takes a passive stance.  It's an actual grammatical construction that consists of removing the agent or actor.


[Okay here's a lightning quick lesson in passive voice--just to show all you active wank assholes that I totally know what I'm doing: 

You can't use just regular old high school grammar to unlock what the hell passive voice means.  Because "subject" is a word that has to do with the geography of a sentence and if you try to talk about what happens to the subject in passive voice, you will get confused since another subject comes along and takes its place.  English sentences have to have a subject (unless they're a command with the implied subject of "you").  Even if there really is no subject we put in a filler subject.  "It is raining."  It has NO antecedent in this sentence.  "There is a book on the table."  There has no meaning.  It just wouldn't be grammatical in English to say "Is book on the table."  (Which you can do in other languages.)

So saying "move the subject into the object position" with passive gets funny, since a new subject shows up to take its place.  It's easier if you understand the linguistics concept of an "actor" or "agent."  This is the person DOING the action of the transitive verb.  (Another reason that subject thing can get weird is that intransitive verbs can't be passive.)  So in a sentence like "I punch Dead white authors," I am the agent or actor.  

Got it?

Okay, so in passive voice the agent goes away and the object swings around into the subject position. "Dead white authors are punched."  It requires some tweaking of the tense that is a grammar lesson I'm not getting into here.  You can add the agent or actor back in with something called a By Phrase.  That would look like this.  "Dead white authors are punched by me."  You can see how this can get really clunky and weird when you're describing action.  But I'm not here to validate the Active Voice Wanks.  I'm here to do various kinds of spinning kicks into their spleens and pancrei...um.... pancreases....whatever.

The problem is, young writers do this a lot, so experienced writers tell them to expunge passive voice, as a reactionary swing, and all the really good reasons for using passive voice get thrown out as well.  And those writers go on to become passive voice equivalents of ED-209s.  Big, nasty, and with no ability to walk down stairs.   Um....metaphorically speaking.]


I'm not here to tell you why passive voice is bad, because the style and grammar equivalents of the Puddies from Power Rangers can tell you all about it.  Over and over. Suffice to say that if passive voice is used when it isn't appropriate, it sounds a little strange. (See.) What I am here to do is kick ass and eat sushi. And the gas station just ran out of sushi.

Let me move from punches to some quick kicks. Passive voice is not a grammatical error. Get that out of your brain. While saying "The book was read by me," might seem quite odd, it is grammatically correct. Passive voice is a stylistic choice that has to do with clarity and the emphasis English speakers place on the agent, which culturally mirrors the emphasis English speaking cultures put on agency in general.*throw one attacker into another*


Reasons you use the passive voice:

1- You don't know who did something.  Maybe you don't KNOW who did something.  Coming up with ambiguous subjects rather than using the passive voice gets weird really quickly.  *sidekick*

("My house was broken into," sounds a lot better than, "An unknown person or persons broke into my house.)

2- You don't care who did it.  Often the action is much more important than who did the action, and an actively constructed sentence will draw emphasis from where it belongs.  *hammer-fist*

("The Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937," reads a lot smoother--despite being passive--than "A bunch of construction workers working for the McClintic-Marshall Construction Co. completed the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937.")

3- To emphasize the object or recipient.  Sometimes the object of an action is more important, and you can get a shift in meaning you don't intend by forcing it into active voice.  *spinning back kick*

("Our Marketing Strategy was adopted by several multinational conglomerate," properly emphases the awesomeness of the marketing strategy where "Several multinational conglomerates adopted our marketing strategy" pulls the focus away and places it on the companies.  The meaning clearly shifts.    "Fifty one votes are required to pass a law in the Senate," puts the focus on the number of votes whereas, "Passing a law in the Senate requires 51 votes," puts more emphasis on what happens if they get the votes.)

4- When it is obvious within a multi-clause sentence who is taking the action.  Sometimes your sentence contains multiple clauses, but it could become repetitive and strange if you insist on active voice.  *crescent kick#

("I punched the snobby academic in the face, but being pummeled didn't seem to affect his ability to accept other voices into the canon." It is clear who is punching, and you would have to have a repetitive sentence and force pummel into a possessive gerund to keep it active, which would be clunkier than the passive. "I punched the snobby academic in the face, but my pummeling didn't seem to affect...")

5-General Statements.  General statements often sound more universal and less personally directed in the passive voice.  *spinning kick that hits three attackers*

("Mail should be sent prior to 5pm," seems like a rule everyone has to follow. "Everyone should send mail prior to 5pm," or "You should send mail prior to 5pm," both feel like they are encouraging people to send mail rather than discussing a rule.)

6-Process descriptions.  An agent would often muddle the idea in a process description and cause confusion in meaning.  *flippy reversal*

("The two mixtures are combined to form nitroglycerin."  Describes how to make nitroglycerin.  "Combine the two mixtures," feels more like instructions since it is using the command exception to avoid having an agent at all, and adding in agents creates unneeded confusion. "The person in question combines the mixtures to form nitroglycerin.")

7-Verbs where the agent is obvious.  Certain verbs always have the same agent/actor.  Always.  *super power punch to the brain pan*

(If any of you write "My mother bore me on September 29th," you will probably get some very strange looks.  Pretty much that verb is always in passive voice.  "I was born on September, 29th.")

8-Academic detachedness (also journalism) confused for official or objective.  Careful, this is where newbs get into trouble.  Journalism and politics use a lot of passive voice, but journalists (usually) know what they're doing  ("Saddam Hussein was found!") when they leave out the agent/actor for emphasis and politicians are usually trying to obfuscate blame.  ("Mistakes have been made in this process.")  People think passive sounds "official" and "objective" and drift towards it because of this.

Don't.

However from time to time adding an agent to a sentence can undermine its intention, and then you need the passive voice.  The rule of thumb here is that if the by phrase in any way clarifies the meaning or intention of the sentence, you should probably put the sentence in active voice.  *foot sweep and subsequent ax kick*

("Kafka was thought to be a terrible writer in his time," convey's the full scope of meaning more than, "Literary critics thought Kafka was a terrible writer in his time," and doesn't take away the focus from what's important the way adding in all the necessary agents would: "Literary critics, agents, editors, MFA graduates, and 'high art' sophisticates thought Kafka was a terrible writer in his time.")

9-Diplomacy.  Sometimes saying who did it really points fingers and raises hackles.  This is sort of the nobly motivated version of what politicians do.  *Muay Thai spinning leg kick*

("We only militarized because we were attacked," tends to assign less blame than "We only militarized because you assholes attacked us.")

10-You are Herman Melville.  Seriously!  *The never-before-seen Melville secret attack*


Oh, and by the way, three of the Strunk and White example sentences of why passive is bad aren't actually passive, and George Orwell used the passive voice when he told people it should not be used.  *grabs last standing attacker by head and twists*  Just sayin....

As I stand in the wake of this fight, with hundreds of active voice wanks unconscious around me.  Some struggling for medical attention; others dead or dying; most saying some variant of "I got the crap kicked out of me," in an obvious moment of sheer passive irony, I just want to leave you with this:  passive voice doesn't just have "a few uses."  It has several.  It has many.  And it is positively bizarre to try to make certain constructions into active voice.  Doing so will change your meaning--sometimes slightly, and sometimes greatly.  Even a purely objective narrator needs passive voice sometimes.

And this is to say NOTHING of all the myriad of narrative voices within fiction that might have their own reasons (psychological, educational, or just wanting to sound official) for leaning towards passive constructions.  Don't be an idiot.  Learn what passive voice is and how to use it effectively and don't just join the h8er zombies that I've just decorated the room with who unimaginatively limit themselves.

This is Leela Bruce.  See you next month when I will Kung-Fu fight some more bad writing advice!

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Stepping Up my A Game--Well...My B+ Game, Anyway.

The Prometheus post just overtook my grammar potpourri post last night, so it's now the most page views I've ever gotten on a single post.  This is cool, but it has some implications.

In general I've watched my page views creeping up.  Nothing has gone viral or anything, but I now wake up to more page views than I used to get all day.  And even though I'm going to get fewer page views this month than last, that's because I stopped posting something every day, and started taking weekends off.  In terms of views-per-post, I'm still crawling upward.   Each time I get more views, I kind of start taking the whole blog project more seriously.  So a bellwether like "most hits for a single entry" kind of has the effect of 80's power chords in terms of motivation.  Somewhere between validation of the past and responsibility to the future, I feel a second wind to step up my efforts.  I know my "A game" is probably going to take more than triple digit page views and a hundred dollars a year to coax out, but I do kind of get inspired to take it up a notch.


I need to:

-Kick off the last few reliquary topics I've been thinking about adding
-Finish the Glossary
-Get more than two or three products on the resources review
-Flesh out the "lists" that are only two or three things long.
-Stop getting distracted by summer and actually write out ahead of myself so I can be better about proofing and stuff
-Clean up my short fiction and put some of it up here
-Stop talking about it


Monday, June 25, 2012

Introducing my new lappie.


Six men came to write with me one time.  And the best of 'em carried this*.



It's a MacAir full-bore auto-lock.  Double USB. Customizable Apps. 4GB Memory and 128 flash storage. A magnetic seal power cord. Weighs less than three pounds, and is renowned for how fast it comes on from sleep mode. It is my very favorite laptop.



This is the best laptop made by man.  It has *extreme* sentimental value.  It's miles more worthy than what you got.

I call it Vera.

*Pencil shown so you can see how mind-bendingly sleek it really is.

The damage from the data corruption through MS programs is bad.  Most anything I didn't save some version of in the last year or so is corrupted beyond my ability to open it with any word processing program.  I can AT LEAST read it on my iPad with some viewer programs in between a bunch of goobldy gook characters.  I can't really edit, but reading it is something, at least, and much MUCH better than the error message I get from Microsoft based programs.  That's what made me kill all the sand people in the entire village and then go back for some youngling stew.

Eh, only one short story wouldn't have need a complete revision anyway, so this will just force me to do what I needed to as part of the process.

My main concern now is that this never happens again.  Or I really will cry.  Lots of writers swear by Macs and I can't help but notice that while Microsoft programs were making 15 years worth of writing (including every college paper and most of my pre-degree manuscripts that I wanted to come back to) completely unintelligible, it was Mac stuff that actually came through for me--even in what limited form it could.  It was the Mac stuff that did what it was supposed to.

That's what I need.  Shit that works when I turn it on.  If it doesn't work, I need a new one.  Instead of if it doesn't work...."have you tried Googling coaxial cable trinton frask and then rebooting from a save point six steps back while reinterpreting the main tachion burst into a harmonic resonance with the ion flow?"  Cause I'm pretty sure people asked me if I'd done that.

I don't really understand the product feud over computer brand loyalty.  You don't see people who like Cheerios claiming that the Corn Flakes guys are all part of a crazy cult or the Corn Flake guys rolling their eyes, putting on their matching robes and going to the local Corn Flakes store to commiserate on how off base the word "cult" is.  And you don't see the news wondering if every new turbo charged Nissan Skyline is going to be "A Mustang Killer."

I don't see why computers have to be this issue that requires people to jettison their brains before they discuss.  If you are a computer whisperer, and you can make those fucking boxes of circuits and shit do what you want them to do, get yourself a PC of the MS or Linux variety and spend countless hours fixing things every time your different softwares have tantrums about their codexes or whatever and don't get along with each other.  If you get hives at any step beyond the ON button, and generally LIKE when your computer pats you on the head and tells you what you want and what don't want, enjoy your Mac.

I clearly fall into the later category.  I need my shit to work every time I turn it on and if it doesn't I have to kidnap ship engineers and tell their bridge crew "We look for things.  Things to make us write."  And when someone fixes something on my box of circuits--usually Uberdude--I nod and say "He is smart."

So as I salvage what writing I can, and start the painful process of rewriting everything else, I do so on Vera.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Trashing Prometheus is the New Black (Blogging About Blogging)


It's been less than a week and my post on Monday about Prometheus has gotten the second highest hits of anything I've ever written--even stuff with "slow burn" popularity like 5 Things You Can Do to Be a Better Writer Almost Overnight.  The highest ever was my grammar themed potpourri, but I think that had a lot to do with all the images within it.  I put images in Pintrest, and when they're funny little comics like that, they always get a couple of clicks back.  Since that post had a LOT of images, it picked up a lot of Pintrest traffic.  But mostly that traffic is stopping by to see if I am a vast repository of lulz, which I'm not.

Most pages get 90% of the hits they're ever going to in the first 24hours, but the movie reviews tend to keep a trickle going.  The Disney Movie reviews bring in a glimpse or two every week. It's entirely possible that the Prometheus review will pull into the #1 position in the next month or so.

Of course the other posts that consistently do quite well are the ones I post about conventions, though they are more likely to do very well right when I post them, and never really be heard from again.  I think most people are just interested to see my perspective of mutual experiences, and storytellers want to see what kind of insight I might have into their games.  So this has made me think a little about what gets hits and how to incorporate that in going forward.  I figured the Prometheus review wouldn't do well because it was so long, but that didn't seem to be a factor.

Something to consider when I'm dumbing down and shortening up the next thing because I don't want it to be too monolithic or I think an audience will tune out.

In some cases, I really have to redraw all the maps of Bloggerville that have come before me because I'm not taking the paths they have pioneered.  Quite a few people (friends who are bloggers themselves in many cases) have ponied up some truly spectacular advice about trying to get more traffic and what I could probably do to make Writing About Writing more popular.  I don't want to seem like I'm ignoring those people, or that I'm ungrateful for the advice.  I know how I feel when I give someone my heartfelt input and they basically say "Wow that's really great, but I'd rather strap myself with C-4 and jump off a very tall building onto some spikes while shooting myself in the head with an explosives-detonating-plunger bullet than listen to your advice.

It kind of stings.

I wanted to mention here why some of that advice is on hold and some of it is on long term hold.  I don't want to seem unreceptive.  I'm not.  The fact is that I'm listening to every bit of advice. But after I get that advice I have to put it through the "priority file" and see which of four boxes it lands into.

1-Ideas to incorporate now; 2- ideas that need to wait until my site is really off the ground; 3-ideas that are ideologically different than what I want to do here; 4- ideas that are too divorced from writing.

Some ideas are simple, elegant, and easy to incorporate.  Ideas like reviewing movies from the perspective of their writing or talking about fiction that's all the rage. I give them a shot like throwing spaghetti at a  wall.  Whatever sticks, I keep doing.  In some cases this information exists, suggesting what to write about to get more traffic, but a lot of THIS stuff is passed over for the more technical tactics, which leaves me in the position that the information I'm most interested in is least available and I have to struggle through myself.

There's also a big chunk of low-effort steps that I'm GOING to do...but not yet.  I've actually been doing my homework, and I have some ideas, but the blog is still in the proto-stage.  I need to finish up the glossary.  I'd like more than one or two items on the lists in the Reliquary.  I would like a couple of dozen products reviewed.  And before I "get serious" about the blog, I'd like to have something more than one of the Google templates as my background.  I tend to step up my game each time I get more people reading, but that's a slow feedback loop, and mostly I intend to focus on finishing up the foundation before I start trying to build upwards.

If I wanted to get the maximum number of hits, I would start a site with porn on it.  Seriously.  That's what gets crazy traffic.  I'd post homemade porn only available on my site and watch my views skyrocket.  But...that's not writing, or if it is, it the internal conflict and central themes usually involve the forgetting of one's pants.  So a large part of my initial moments of creating this blog were actually focused on some pretty hand on forehead soul searching about what I wasn't going to write and what I wasn't going to let myself get caught up in.  As many jokes as I make about being a total page-view whore, like the kiss-on-the-mouth rule, I have some pretty serious boundaries around what I won't do.  I want to stick to the writing, and many of the gimicks.

One of the things I'm interested in with the blog project is finding ideas to write about that are popular without getting too buried in the "web marketing" end.  I joke about being a total whore for page views, but honestly there are some things even this whore won't do.  As I did my homework, researching blogging and how to get more traffic and stuff, the thing I noticed right away is that you could get really caught up in a sort of internet marketing stuff.  Gimicky ways to get page views, fretting constantly about SEO's, and trying to pimp out your pages to dozens of other pages so you ascend the ranks of a Google search.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying this wouldn't work.  I'm sure it would.  But it's also not writing.  It seems analogous to those guys (who DO exist) always out there networking with agents and publishers, but who don't really have a lot written or spend a lot of time writing..  I'd rather do less of that, have fewer visitors, and focus on the writing.  I'm still interested in the sort of content that people want to see, which is why I am watching closely to see what posts are popular, both right away and long-term.

I've seen some people I know go way too far down that rabbit hole.  For every hour they spend writing, they spend three trying to get that writing it's maximum possible exposure.  That's a slippery slope, especially if you prefer to focus on the writing end.  So I'm being very careful to weigh some of these suggestions against their This-Is-Not-Writing factor.

Is it a good balance?  I don't know yet.  Could I be incorporating something small that would make a big difference?  Almost certainly.  But what I do know is I'm watching the analytics closely, and learning more every day, and it seems almost certain that I'll be trashing more bad movies' writing in the future.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Television: The Anti-Writer (Thursday's Three)

I've been watching too much TV lately.  I don't have cable, so what TV usually entails is being sequestered by Unsupportive Girlfriend to watch a dozen episodes of Scrubs on Netflix or something. I always walk away from days like that feeling mentally sluggish, and so grateful that we don't have real television.  But I can't blame only her; I usually watch something while I'm cleaning house, but I've been doing a little more watching than cleaning lately as I re-watch the Alien movies.

I like having Netflix.  Netflix you have to consciously queue up each new episode of something.  The TV won't keep running if you DON'T turn it off.  There also isn't a recursion process where the "must see" shows keep multiplying until you have two hours of absolutely crucial TV each day.

I don't think everything that comes on Television is bad, just like I don't think every published book is good.   There are good shows with good writing, good acting, and good direction that are art forms worthy of being watched, not because one wants something to do when they kick off their shoes after a long day of work, but because these shows are actually GOOD.  There are also crap shows that rot your brain.  But throwing out all offerings of a given art or entertainment is usually a little self-sabotaging.  Back before Internet could pick up the slack, you could always tell if someone didn't have Television because they seemed tragically out of touch most of the time.  They couldn't catch pop culture references or follow a conversation with real people.  If that's the kind of writer you want to be, by all means ban all forms of television from your life, but it is probably better for you as an artist with an art form that is eternally seeking to connect with and relate to people if you find a few shows with snappy writing and watch a little once in a while.

Just don't get carried away.  NEVER EVER EVER forget that the entire purpose of most television is to bring together an audience, usually to look at advertising.  This is art and entertainment that is formed around the liquid center of commercialism.  At best it will be forever constrained by that limitation. You will rarely find a show that bucks this system the way other media will--even film.  (One of the reasons shows on HBO or Showtime are often so spectacular is that they can maneuver free of these constraints.)

Also, never forget that television can inform your work, but it is an audio-visual medium, not a linguistic one, so you are just NOT getting the same benefit to yourself as a writer when you watch even the best, most well written TV as when you read a book.  It should be a side dish in your artistic fare (maybe even a spice), but reading should always be your staple.


Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Robert MacNeil


People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.
Joss Whedon


I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
Steve Jobs




Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Guy Goodman St.White Discusses Plato--Genre Hack

Good evening.  I'm Guy Goodman St.White, your quite British sounding host, and this evening I would like to take a moment to discuss a rather prolific author instead of a single work.  That author would be Plato.  Along with his mentor Socrates and his student Aristotle, Plato laid much of the Western tradition for philosophical and scientific thought.  He is perhaps most well known for the allegory of the cave and his theory of perfect forms.  We can probably also blame him for twenty-four hundred years of people who think "I believe X" somehow makes it true.

Whatever grudging nod we must give Plato for his work laying the bedrock of Western philosophy, it is eviscerated, however, if we observe him through a literary lens, for he insisted on being a prolific speculative fiction author.  Every time those Greeks turned around, Plato was scratching out some new manuscript that embraced a total lack of realism.   Honestly it give us pause to wonder if something wasn't very wrong with Plato that he couldn't keep his head out of the clouds of his own rampant imagination.  What he needed to do was stop visiting the world of make believe so often where he wrote down all that speculative stuff, and focus his attention and due diligence on creating philosophical thought.  Certainly it is not as if the two are related or anything.  He easily could have given us more philosophy if he'd stopped devoting significant measures of his time to such tomfoolery.  

Instead we are subjected to his nonstop deluge of genre.  Plato delights in writing alternative histories where he portrays conversations with Socrates that never actually occurred.  Such debased lack of realism might be forgivable if he placed the historical character into gritty and banal situations of deep characterization with which to explore the human condition and the "greekness" of their love, but instead--in a profound example of everything that is wrong with alternative histories--he uses the interaction only to explore the philosophical and social issues of the time...and get preachy about them.  

Were this the extent of Plato's dabbling into speculative fiction, we could almost forgive him his trespasses, but he insisted on also penning Utopian fiction.  Perhaps the best well known of these is The Republic, in which Plato goes on at length about his perfect wonderful island that doesn't exist.  And of course, a less well known work of Plato, Timaeus, is where we see the first sighting of one of, if not THE, most recognizable and oft-recurring single element in speculative fiction's absurdly unrealistic portrayal of Earth, Atlantis.  Oh yes.  You can blame Plato for every terrible Atlantis movie you've ever seen, for this ridiculous glob of drivel, from which thousands of horrible speculative fiction works have spawned, was his brain child.

I told you western philosophy wasn't worth it in the final analysis.

So thank you very much Plato for all your ideas about morality and politics, but we'd just as soon you didn't come back to the cave if all you were ever going to rattle our chains with was your new sci-fi paperback about magical-land.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Wallpapers of Awesomeinity

40+ Best Wallpapers of 2009

Some of these wallpapers have amazing panoramas with really interesting subjects.  It's hard for me to look at them without immediately thinking of the stories that are trying to jump off the page to be told.




Inspiration

Though writing fiction is a technical skill, which requires a huge and unforgiving skill set be all but mastered, it is also an art.  While we have the tools to encourage the flow (with things like reading constantly, writing every day, and writing at the same time every day), sometimes we still find inspiration on foreign shores. A strain of music, a beautiful film, or a picture may spark something in our creative process that kindles a fire.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Nine Things Prometheus Can Teach You About How NOT to Write



                                                                 
SPOILER ALERT: So I'm going to write about some things that Ridley Scott's Prometheus did that a writer will want to be wary of.  I'm also going to compare Prometheus to Alien a few times, so if you haven't seen that one, you might want to--it's a classic!

Oh and if this is too long as one more "What's Wrong With Prometheus" blog (and it totally is because I was high on Ritalin and rage when I wrote it), just read number eight. That is the part that is probably most relevant to writers.


For starters, let me make a little disclaimer here.  Prometheus is not a terrible movie.

Too subtle?

PROMETHEUS ISN'T A TERRIBLE MOVIE!

It's just a very poorly written movie.  However, film as an art form is an amalgam of many different sub-arts and there's a lot more to a film than its writing.  A lot of great movies have mediocre writing, and a lot of movies with spectacular writing are quite bad. Prometheus contains deep, philosophical themes.  The acting is competent and at times even spectacular. Fassbender's portrayal of David is sublime–he successfully pulls of an android with no emotions....who hates.  It is an absolute visual orgasm from beginning to end. And it is undeniable that Prometheus will get you thinking about sacrifice, the difference between life given for life freely or taken by force, and the paradox that creation and the creator has with being both these things.  Given that for most movies, one disengages at the exit door and never looks back, a movie that keeps you thinking is something.  Sadly, it is difficult to consider the deep philosophical themes about creation because they get eviscerated in a haze of "Wait...WHAT?" that pervades every scene.

The point is that this isn't the place where I'm going to talk about how the soundtrack was overbearing.  And I'm not going to talk about the juxtaposition between gorgeous and sweeping panoramas and enclosed spaces.  And I'm not going to talk about casting Guy Pearce as an old guy. I'm going to focus on the writing.

Ah, the writing.  Where to begin?  I wasn't even remotely surprised when I got home and found that it was the same writers who did LOST. (There's another melange of unanswered questions, contrived exposition, and rule-less world building.) In terms of writing, Prometheus is an absolute train wreck from beginning to end, exhibiting within almost every minute of it's convoluted plot, the pitfalls to writing science fiction, the pitfalls of writing horror, and the pitfalls of writing totally not absolutely indisputable prequels, and at many times all three simultaneously.

Remember I don't do Thou Shalt Not's when it comes to writing.  I'm a firm believer that a skilled writer can Earn it.  ("It" being anything.)  But be wary!  It might be possible to earn a Greek mythology reference for your ship's name, but it will be a lot harder for you to get away with establishing no "rules" for your monster.


1- Be aware of genre cliches.  

Let's start simple...but HUGE within Prometheus.  Science fiction is considered a cliche ridden landscape for a pretty good reason. That shoe often fits.  The same goes for horror, and if you're doing sf/horror you have twice as many cliches to worry about.

A- One cliche is the film's title: the symbolically appropriate mythological ship's name.  It may very well be intensely clever and absolutely appropriate, but it's getting so old that it really doesn't matter how fucking perfect it fits.  It was neat, and clever....the first three thousand times.  It's unfortunate because Prometheus is the one who fashioned humans out of clay and gave them fire (only to be punished eternally for it) and in the Western Classic Tradition, he has come to embody searching for scientific knowledge regardless of the consequences.  Pretty damned appropriate, right?  The scientist guy even says "I'll do anything!" all dramatic like right before he drinks down the Stuff of Doom that ends up with him so sick his ship mates say "Kill it with fire!."

The thing is, there are so many effective and surprising and delightful ways to reference world mythologies without being so ham handed as the name of the ship and title being the mythological figure who embodies one of your main themes.  There were all KINDS of mythological references in Prometheus, from "babies bursting out of creators' heads" to someone opening a box (of sorts) that unleashes all kinds of hell, to the overwhelming theme of children killing and supplanting their parents (both parasite children and just outright brats). There was foot washing. There was a crucifixion scene (after a fashion). There were calls for kings to die because it was their time. The engineers kind of LOOK like titans. (Prometheus of mythology is a titan.) The dude drops his cloak all Christ like and then pauses before drinking from the cup in the opening sequence. In a totally advanced tech universe, they still use fire (get it? FIRE-nudge nudge) to kill half the baddies. There's a line that is practically Shiva's motto about creation and destruction and the fact that one cannot exist without the other. It's Christmas during the movie. And there are an awful lot of abdomen wounds (think about it--an abdomen wound would cover the Greek mythology sacrifice of Prometheus and the vulture/liver thing as well as the spear that pierced Christ). Yeah, actually religious myth imagery was everywhere.

And yet....

And yet...


You still have the problem that the whole "name your ship the theme character" has been done over and over and over and over...and over and over (and over) AND OVER.  

Plus seriously....SERIOUSLY...why would you ever ever EVER name your ship Prometheus and then zip off to look for the creators of human life.  Remember what happened to Prometheus? This would be like going on a mission to travel beyond galactic rim and naming your ship The Icarus. You're just begging for disaster.

The thing is, you can do this without being so blunt force trauma about it as "Starship Jesus" (which ends up on a mission to save the human race) or some transparent shit like that.  Here, let me show you how to do this, how to do it well, how to do it subtly, but how to do it in a way that is still absolutely delightful when you discover it: the planet name: LV 223. Now check out Leviticus 22:3  "Say to them: 'For the generations to come, if any of your descendants is ceremonially unclean and yet comes near the sacred offerings that the Israelites consecrate to the LORD, that person must be cut off from my presence. I am the LORD." Okay now remember how they were searching for their creators (their gods if you will) and how the room with the ooze was obviously a room of some serious, possibly sacred, significance and the atmosphere reacted to their presence?  Remember how the Architect looks just...OFFENDED at their presence–like they're unclean. 


Cool huh?  That one was fucking awesome.  That writer gets a gold star.

B- Another cliche is the really old guy motivated by clinging to life who sort of kicks off the whole party under mysterious circumstances that turn out to be him wanting to live forever. The wizard is an archetype and he's often portrayed as way too old to still be alive (The Emperor from Star Wars is a Wizard), but his sci-fi mirror seems to have only one portrayal over and over again.  Usually he's basically exactly the same character. This guy always funds the project in secret, reveals his agenda to live forever in the third reel, and dies horribly anyway. Yawn.  Seriously this has been so overdone that the minute I saw they had used makeup to make Guy Pearce REALLY old, I knew he was alive and trying to live forever. Wouldn't it be refreshing for someone to fund one of these expeditions out of genuine philanthropy or pursuit of knowledge for a change. You know bizillionaires actually DO that sort of thing sometimes.  Or maybe they could just be upfront and honest and a reasonably likable person. "Hey I figured what the hell, right? And as long as I'm driving across the galaxy doing my hail Mary to live forever, you guys can tag along and do some of your science stuff too right?Why waste a trip? Plus, I could use the company. Now, who wants a kitten?" Or wouldn't it be neat if it worked instead of always ending in that ironic death, and the person got to live forever. Instead they're always enigmatic douchecanoes who are essentially evil and die as a cautionary tale by being smote with the flaming sword of cliche law.

C- The ostensible asshole gets it in the first real. Seriously, why is being a jerk always fatal in horror movies? Jerks survive all the time in the real world, and even win and get the girl and retire with nice annuities and everything. It should not be possible for me to know within five seconds of a character's introduction that they are going to die first. (Of course the surreptitious jerk always makes it to the final reel and then gets his comeuppance. That was Weyland in this movie, Burke [Paul Riser's character] in Aliens, and Ash in Alien.) The fact that I am able to accurately predict who will die first means that we left "trope" in the rear view mirror, and are well into cliche.

D- Here's one I hate. Why doesn't anyone ever tell someone when they're obviously really, really sick? Strange planet with strange black goo? Little silver fishies coming out of your FUCKING EYEBALL? Last night you totally did your girlfriend? You should probably hide it! Endanger the mission, everyone in it, and the love of your life by pretending everything's cool. This is just bad writing that puts the needs of the plot (for the bad virus not to be discovered) over realistic characterization that no one with fish tendrils coming out of their eyeballs would just say "Maybe I'll just take a Sudafed and power through--Sudafed works on fish eyeball syndrome, right?"

Very few stories can successfully pull off a believable motivation for a character not going to a doctor...or at the very least saying, "Hey babe, I might have been sick last night with alien death flu when you had my mucus membranes all up inside yours. Might want to get yourself checked out. I mention because I care."

E- The "sterile woman who is knocked up by an alien" cliche.  Seriously, I know we have a cultural soft spot for miracle births, but this one's getting old.  Like....Lazarus old.

F- There is a "Hi, we're here to be horribly killed" cliche in space horror, and it gets worse with every bump in special effects technology.  (You don't want to have a lot of deaths when each one is a logistics nightmare and special effect budget bleed, but when the death scenes are cheap and easy, suddenly its, "let's show those bad boys OFF!")  You always have four or five characters you "get to know," and a couple on the side, but then the rest seem destined essentially to die in order to raise the emotional stakes and show how badass the monster is.  It's lazy writing.  If you need more victims to show off your monster's dazzling array of killing powers, you are not relying on the right kinds of things to build tension.  Alien scared the crap out of us despite having only six deaths because it played into some deep cultural fears we have and because every death was a fleshed out character we'd seen bantering and joking and being themselves--not some cargo worker whose name we didn't even know. You don't need to raise the body count to raise the stakes.  In fact, it's counter intuitive, but it actually makes things easier on the audience if the body count is higher instead of lower because A-we don't CARE about people dying if we don't know them and B-when we're desensitized to the circus of fatalities, the deaths of the characters we DO know don't hit us as hard.  What will raise your stakes higher is threatening a character that people really know and relate to, and keeping the death spaced enough that each one hits home and drawing out each victim's anguished attempts to not die rather than the usual "Bam-your-dead!" crap. What will really raise the stakes is if you can find a cultural trigger that makes people deeply uncomfortable and hits them where they live.

G- The person who has faith survives.  UGH! Done. To. Death. (So to speak, I suppose.)  Start killing off those fuckers in the first few chapters (or the first reel).  Your writing will be fresher for it.  Let the asshole cynic atheist with the James Randi T-shirt and the Richard Dawkins pajamas actually make it, just so people can honestly say they didn't know what was coming.

H- And oh my fucking buttlicking CHRIST what is it about epically inept "dream teams" that populate every one of these movies. How do these people get "hand picked" by a multi-trillion dollar corporation to undertake the most important mission ever if they are so incompetent. Presumably if it were your job to do the assembly, and you had a one TRILLION dollar budget, you would not go down to your local community college and grab an MA who is coasting towards retirement. You would find someone premier in the field.  You would find someone who is educated. You would find someone who is really fucking smart, and who has demonstrated that they can apply what they know to new situations.

So why do all the people on these epic uber mega super duper dream teams suddenly take a hundred-point I.Q. drop the minute they reach their destination?  Do planets (or derelict ships) in sci-fi horror have everything-you-ever-learned dampening fields?

I'm not talking about pressure under fire--in which an academic might easily lose their cool.  When monster shows up, we don't expect Dr. Classroomguy to continue to continue wearing fuzzy sweaters and thinking the disembodiments are "terribly interesting." It's cool if they lose their shit and make terrified judgement mistakes at that point.

I'm talking about doing THE actually worst thing you could do in a given situation:


  • Hey, I'm a biologist in a room with the first dead alien ever seen?  Man I'm bored, and not the least bit scientifically interested in the heretofore unseen alien--I should wander off from the main group!  
  • Hey our android CAN read this language!  No need to actually do it though.  I was just checking.  
  • We have tracking sensors on every single person in the group.  Not only that, but I'm a geologist who maps caves.  I even have these nifty map making balls  Ooops, I somehow got lost!  
  • We recovered this alien head?  Hey without doing any tests or anything, let's just randomly run some current through it, and see what happens! That usually works, right?
  • Hi, I'm an archaeologist who has explored for one hour in one part of one building on a planet of an unknown civilization in what is clearly the greatest discovery in all of history ever and I even found a giant head in a room with OBVIOUS religious/cultural significance that would make any legit archaeologist have a spontaneous careergasm, but I'm going to drink myself into a stupor and have a tantrum because I didn't find one alive.  
  • Hey I'm on an alien planet and I just spent the afternoon with my helmet off in a room with black ooze, and now I have fish swimming out of my blood-filling eyeballs–I'm sure it's nothing. 
  • Strange hissing pissed off alien phallus rises up out of the black ooze? I know! I'll try to pet it! Relax, I'm a biologist, so I know that angry wildlife can't possibly hurt you if you use the "hi there little guy" line.  
  • Hey guys, let's just randomly take off our helmets like we've never even heard of germ theory and not put them back on even when we find evidence that everyone in this place has died horribly?  
  • Hey let's touch the black goo–that's not really dangerous, right?  
  • A giant alien tried to send bio weapons to earth, killed like four guys in five seconds without so much as an explanation, and then instead of just getting on one of the "other ships" and leaving, it actually took the time to actively hunt me down personally–I should totally pop over to their home planet to say and ask "why you mad bro?" 

I mean suddenly these doctors and engineers and "hand picked" people seriously have worse judgement than the teen agers in a slasher flick.  Where did the experts go?

These aren't tragic flaws that lead to a downfall (like in Alien when Parker wouldn't shoot the alien because Lambert was in the way, and he has a soft spot for her, so instead he runs in and gets himself killed); these are the best of the best making literally the worst decisions they possibly could IN THEIR FIELD, short of just jumping out the nearest airlock or doing a swan dive into the black goo. Stop it, writers! Seriously. That's lazy ass crap, and every blog in America is right to call bullshit on Prometheus for it. If your character is smart, have them be smart. If their flaws lead them to make a mistake, that's good characterization. But you can't just turn off their brain during the death scenes because it's more convenient for your body count. Besides imagine how much more intimidating the baddies will be when your characters are doing everything right and still get killed. After Prometheus I was genuinely unafraid because I knew I would never act like such a dipshit. After Alien, I couldn't sleep because....it didn't matter if you did everything right.


2- Clunky Exposition in Dialogue Sucks

When I say clunky, I don't mean like a 1970's computer.  I mean clunky like a centipede with those wooden shoes from Holland. Seriously there were lines that I just had to crawl under my seat and power-wince at their delivery. Exposition dialogue is a subtle maneuver in written arts where the writer does a dance (hopefully so well you don't notice) between giving the audience well needed information, and actually being something someone might say.

Instead the lines went something like this:  "Hi, I'm the suchandsuch scientist.  How are you?"

"I'm just here for the money, motherfucker.  Don't even try to be my friend."

(No, really, I'm not kidding.  I'm doing it from memory, but it was that bad.)

Uh....what?  Seriously? Who the fuck talks like this??? No one. That's who. No one is that unpleasant when they first meet another person who is generally trying to be friendly with them unless they have a gaping open wound AND have recently quit smoking. The goofiest thing of all was this was not even important exposition. The information that was apparently so vital that it had to be delivered as a response to "hi" did  NOTHING to inform his (*cough*) character development. It wasn't a motivation that lead him to his death. It was just pointless back story introduced clumsily through a way that people just don't talk.

When Vickers is talking to Weyland, it was absolutely obvious that she was his daughter. Absolutely. And even if the writers didn't trust the viewers to be smart enough to pick up on the hundred and fifty clues they dropped in the space of one scene, they could have made half a dozen references in that dialogue that would have clued in the clueless in a realistic way. The subtle casualness with which people let the word "dad" or such slip is a perfect example. Instead she says something dramatic, pauses, and then says "Father!" in a deep, melodramatic voice.

Nobody fucking talks that way. ("Why of course I'll pick you up a couple of Red Bulls while I'm at the store......FATHER!")

(Actually, I noticed more than a few clues that Vickers might be an android--the age disparity with her father, the fact that her bio-bed isn't calibrated for females, her physique was given more attention than any other characters', her ease at exiting cryostasis without being sick, the way she avoids lying(?) by sleeping with a guy, and a few others.  We do not see her body after the ship rolls over her and that is a notoriously huge red flag in speculative fiction, so I'm wondering if she's not sitting in a Vicker's shaped indentation in the ground thinking "I really hate this planet.")

And don't even get me started on how they revealed Shaw was barren. I don't...  I can't even...

It wasn't like one or two steaming piles of clunky exposition. It just kept happening. Every scene, someone said something that transparently put their back story or motivations. The captain towards the end basically says straight out "I will sacrifice myself if I have to in order to keep evil black slime bioweapons from going to Earth."

Guess what happens ten minutes later?

And with absolutely no tension either since we already KNOW what he's going to do, he sacrifices himself to keep evil black slime bioweapons from going to Earth. There are so many more sophisticated ways in his portrayal we could have discovered that he was the sacrificial lamb of the story, but instead they had to have him say it outright.

Remember, every character needs to be written as if they are the main character of their own story. Having archetypes populating the space between the one or two characters you care about with their clunky dialogue just makes no one care when they start to drop dead. Believe me if you come up with more than a cookie cutter victim for a character, it can make it so much more gut wrenching when their life is threatened and heart wrenching when they die than if you contrive of fantastically elaborate death scenes. And guess what? They don't even have to have noble goals or be particularly good people. They just have to be identifiable and believable goals. No one is a heartless asshole mercenary in their own narrative--or if they are they only acknowledge it as their gruff exterior because their true inner being is tragically misunderstood. I basically didn't care about ONE SINGLE PERSON in that movie except David, who was in a running competition with evil snakes and/or zombie frogmen for who could be the biggest butthead, and Shaw, who was the main protagonist. Why?  Because they had identifiable internal conflicts and they were fleshed out the most and they weren't just there to show how the monster works.


3- If you're going to have a hard sci-fi explanation for stuff, get it right. Or at least don't get it completely fucking wrong.  

If you are writing about a technology that is way more advanced than reality, you need to do one of two things. You can handwave a bit and trust that the audience will forgive you. (Hey, we never demanded that anybody explain the transporters in Star Trek--which would need the energy of a sun PER transport according to E=MC2!). The other thing you can do is get the science as right as possible. What you can't do is try to cut through the middle by getting the science WRONG but expecting the audience to play along.

Prometheus is filled with talk of DNA, genetics, and pictures of swirling helices, and dividing cells, and all about parasitical organisms. There is this black goo that (apparently) breaks down DNA to seed a world with if ingested from a cup in a large quantity, but makes fish swim out of your eyeball if you only have a little, but makes worms becomes phallus snakes if they swim in it, but people become zombie frogs psychos unless if they fall into it...or something, Prometheus places the Engineers' tech level well beyond forefront of our current biological knowledge. They could have just had the black goop be Stuff That Just Works™ but they opted to go with all the scientificy looking stuff.

And then proceeds to ignore everything about how genetics works.

Okay...you dump your DNA into a pool of water and kick off humanity by dissolving yourself with some black goop that shatters your DNA. Won't that fuck the whole seed idea a little, the DNA being all broken apart like that? I'm not expert, but DNA is pretty much the building block, right.  Shatter it along the amino acids, isn't it kind of not your DNA anymore? Further, I'm assuming that is like the bedrocks of life or human life, and not that humans just kind of sprouted up out from around the waterfall the next day like lilies. So how is it that we evolved to be "exactly like them" (sic) when we surely faced different evolutionary challenges. There is absolutely NOTHING to suggest that the final product of your seeded DNA and a billion years would look anything remotely like you–in fact, that goes against every current understanding. Also, in the billion years between then and now, YOU will have evolved as well. Lastly....seriously....you can't say we're an exact DNA match to the engineers (complete with a little screen that has an identical overlay and flashes the word "perfect") and then have the engineers be nine foot tall albinos with black eyes who are like three times stronger than us and immune to bullet wounds. That's not an "exact match." Or did you fall asleep the day they taught biology in biology class?

If you want to hand-wave, hand-wave.  Call it a "Faster Than Light" drive, "spin it up," maybe through in some technobabble about "tachyeon bursts" and "ionization flow," and poof, you're there.   (Notice how they didn't mention how they traveled 60 [or 16--I may have misheard] light years in 2 years and we didn't demand to know what sort of fuckery was going on with that--if you don't bring it up and then get it wrong....we won't poke holes in it.)  No one is going to get in your face about an object with finite mass going faster than the speed of light in science fiction. But if you start meticulously describing how the FTL drive works and it involves antiprotons--you better know what those are. This movie could have simply said "they seeded the galaxy and here we are" and left it at that (kind of like that ridiculous Star Trek: TNG episode), but their focus on DNA and genetics (because of the highly genetic "tricks" of parasites, I'm guessing) made it look like someone doesn't know how evolution works...and worse didn't care. Maybe the maps, and the allusion of Prometheus point towards the fact that they may have "steered" evolution as well (one MORE thing the black goop can do?) but we have no actual reason to think that.  It might make a little more scientific sense that way, at least, but they should probably reveal that in the movie instead of assuming a picture of some balls on a wall make it self evident that they can outsmart evolution.

The problem was that it wasn't just the genetic stuff either.


  • The hyper intelligent android kept shining his flashlight at holographic projections and holding it on them–dude they ARE light; your flashlight will actually make them harder to see.  
  • Early on they say with a cool sort of reveal voice: "There is a star in the system."  I hope so.  That's what a system is. 
  • Prerecorded holograms shouldn't be able to accurately follow the people around them with their eyes. 
  • Jamming an electrode into a head will not work–especially if it has "similar neural pathways" (or whatever they said--I'm going on memory here) as us. Just...no. 
  • Shaw is apparently NOT killed by the falling spaceship because she was next to a rock and the ship hit the rock and gave her a little crawlspace.   A gazillion ton spaceship isn't going to just hit a rock and stop moving, the acceleration might be small, but the mass is enormous so a LOT of force is coming out of that interaction.  Either the rock would shatter, get smooshed down into the ground, or the ship would warp along the hull, but either way Shaw should be paste.   
  • Speaking of the physics of things falling....if two gigantic ships are accelerating AWAY from you at a distance of perhaps two kilometers or more, and one rams the other...from behind--as they crash, the bigger ship will not suddenly reverse direction, come back, and fall on YOUR head. I promise that's one thing, at least, you don't have to worry about.  
  • Another problem with the crash sequence: the ship tumbles around for a good five minutes, but David's head is right on the floor where Shaw left it when she goes back.  
  • The squid proto-facehugger thing grows to perhaps a thousand times its biomass in just a few hours with no apparent source of food.  Did it just absorb those molecules out of the air?  
  • How does David age the baby at "three months" if it's not human? Does he know what alien babies look like?
  • If you have an incision as large as the one Shaw got that is sutured with medical staples and not sealed shut, you would be in bed for a month before you could even start physical therapy.  No way she doubles over in agony and then two minutes later starts hopping chasms (successfully) and dodging starships (also successfully). 
  • Vickers says she didn't come half a billion miles to get laid.  (I laughed out loud in the theater at this one).  That's not even exiting the solar system.  You came a lot further than that, lady.


You get a few freebies in sci-fi if everything else is working.  One of the reasons we didn't give a shit that the monster in Alien grew without food is that the rest of the movie was consistent so we were willing to imagine that maybe it raided the mess or found some Pop Tarts in a locker or something. Does anyone even need to MENTION how many movies have sound in space? For the most part, people don't start to really care unless you take the time and effort to put inaccurate science in, are careless, and really start racking up the inaccuracies. If you basically need magic for your story, don't worry about it, but just make sure it's not really explained and leave it at that. You will be forgiven.  If you try to explain stuff, you have a finite number of errors before even the Humanities guy starts blogging about how foolish you made yourself look.


4-A contained story should be contained

I always go back to the text.  Even if the "text" is a movie. My formal tools of analysis of art involve finding proof in the actual work for things I assert. If I want to say David is contemptuous of humans (and he is), I can't just make the claim and let it stand. I have to talk about something like the length of pauses and choice of words during the scene at the billiards table. (Beautifully acted, by the way.  Just brilliant.)

I understand that we live in a new era. Multimedia is very accessible to a lot of people. It is entirely possible for ambitious artists to create an experience that goes beyond the celluloid and a few bits of revealing information about Prometheus exist only online. I'm not some curmudgeon insisting that everything must be contained within the celluloid, but I am going to insist that everything be contained within what exists of the art.

And sadly, most of the online content only informed the movie a little--it didn't explain the mac truck-sized plot holes. Mores the pity.

There is a bit you can find on the internet about how Jesus was one of the engineers sent to Earth as an emissary. You can find this if you dig around for a while in an interview with Ridley Scott. This information didn't make it to the final draft of the script. That's the significance of finding the body that died 2000 years ago. Now of course we all know how Jesus's "mission" ended up. That's why the engineers are so upset with humans. And doesn't it just all make sense now?

Excuse me but....WHAT?  First of all, no. No it does not all make sense now. At this point it has BARELY achieved the status of one of those things that is interesting to think about. A FEW things make a little more sense, but not everything. Even if the audience somehow were given this information, it MIGHT explain the anger a little (though not genocidal hatred from a race prone to sacrifice) but every other unexplained bullshit thing is still unexplained.

But if this was really where you were going...how could you leave that out?

A corpse that happens to have died right around the time of the crucifixion is not enough of a clue to make the connection to Earth history and an event that happened on a moon sixty light years away. If we had some way to know that one affected the other we might be able to put two and two together.   It wouldn't have taken much. A record of a transmission that they had killed the emissary and they must all die, and the archaeologist asking in a "that's-not-a-moon" tone of voice, "When did you say he died?"

And for realz....if JC were a nine-foot-tall black-eyed albino who was immune to things like being STABBED, I think the book of Matthew might have had a couple of differences.

So real talk here:

Sometimes with certain directors (and Scott is one) you have to accept that probably something REALLY important ended up on the cutting room floor so that a scene of graphically depicted violence could go an extra thirty seconds of dazzling visuals, and you will probably get it explained when the director's cut comes out.  However, it makes for bad writing to leave really vital things out. No one should ever have to dig up an interview with the director about earlier drafts of the script in order to get a piece of the puzzle.  All the pieces should be
in the art.  That art might be greater than simply the film itself, but it should still be there.

Prometheus didn't trust its viewers to figure out that Weyland was Vicker's father without a silver platter, but you're going to make us figure out why the engineers are upset with nothing but the most oblique clues that probably no one who didn't read that interview would have otherwise gotten. That's just....mean.

The mark of good science fiction revel is that when you get all the pieces of the puzzle, you realize you were looking at it all along. You kick yourself for not noticing. You have a light bulb moment. You say "OH!" You go back and reread scenes and they make SO much more sense. It's one of the most fun parts of good sci-fi. But that "reveal" should come from having the pieces that you already had put together in front of you, and NOT from having a new piece handed to you that wasn't "in the box." And seriously...doesn't that seem like that particular insight might be important enough to mention more directly. If the entire movie is a mystery about why your creators hate their creation but we will make only a single, passing, oblique reference to the actual reason and consider it good, that's not okay. It's like how all of Ash's weird behavior and furtive glances and quarantine breaking in Alien makes sense when you realize he was an android who had his programming overridden just like Mother did. It MIGHT be okay to have an unsolved mystery like that if there were no direct and immediate consequence.  But considering that reason got four people and an android pretty much insta-killed, it was poor writing that the audience wasn't told.


5-There's making your audience do the heavy lifting and then there's not helping them at all

[Take this next section with a grain of salt. And this was written in 2012 before even a DVD release. Prometheus has already been confirmed as the first in a trilogy, so we can view the work paradoxically as a discrete entity and as largely incomplete.  It is entirely possible that within movie two and three further information will be revealed that will explain some of the unanswered questions.  I mean these guys wrote Lost, so surely we can expect that in the fullness of time they won't leave any unanswered questions.... Oh wait.]

Closely related to the last point of having your work be contained is not giving them an answer at all. Scott may have told us (not in the movie though) that we killed Alien Jesus, and that's why the Engineers all have bees in their bonnets and a hard-on for killing humans, but there are giant gaping things that were not even hinted at.


  • If the bioweapon "got away from them and destroyed them all," why were the Engineers running TOWARDS the chamber with the black ooze and the creepy we-worship-Xenomorphs architecture while looking behind them like they were being followed? =
  • Why would aliens seed Earth with a map ("no....an INVITATION") to a bioweapons research facility?  That's like having Wookies on Endor.  That does not make sense.  Why not put a map to their home world or diplomatic center?
  • Why did David poison Holloway?
  • If they knew they were going to meet some aliens, why would they bring an unarmed ship?  These are still humans right? Humans who bring weapons when they think there might be big rats in a basement.
  • What in the name of all that is HOLY was up with the black goop?  Was that crap just liquid Deus Ex Machina or what?  [If you're in a sci-fi world you have to establish "the rules" and then obey them. The black ooze is basically everything that's wrong with speculative fiction. It, apparently, can do anything....anything at all.  It breaks down Engineers into the seeds of life, gives humans tendrils in their eyes and makes them impregnate women with little proto-facehuggers, makes nasty parasite snakes out of little worms that swim in it, turns dudes into psycho-killing-machine zombie frogmen things. The end result is a cluttered feel to Prometheus of what the hell is going on--too many baddies and not enough coherent sense to how it worked. To top it all off, by the end, we still have no idea what it is, or how it works. The one clue that it might be reactive to the particulars of the host body (when Shaw says their presence has changed the atmosphere) is never further explained.
  • The scariest horror movies always establish pretty quickly how things work and then don't move the goalposts. One of the coolest things about Xenomorphs is that we know their "rules": smart, but not technological, acid blood, second shooty mouth, tendrils that trip you, etc...  And on top of that, before they start doing their thing, we see the space jockey who has gone through the same thing. They are not just "anything goes" of death dealing.  Honestly, that's less scary and far less coherent. When you know what to expect...that makes it worse.]
  • Why did the engineer become totally violent?  (Which might be a different question than why do the Engineers hate humanity...which isn't really answered in the film anyway but in an interview with Scott about earlier drafts.)


If anything the throngs of nerd support is proof that if you write a compelling story, people will be willing to do a really close reading for clues.  You can make them very subtle, but they do have to be there. (Though you do still have to explain the connective tissue that explains why aliens a zillion miles away give a flip about Earth history). You can count on your audience to be intelligent enough to "get it," which is why lines like "....FATHER!" are particularly goofy.

Lots of people have lots of theories as to why some of the characters did certain wildly irrational things.  You can find ten answers to every one of these questions online with a quick search. In some cases these explanations fit pretty well, and in some cases they are REALLY grasping.  (I mean seriously grasping!) 

As writers though, we have to keep in mind that unless the art itself contains some kind of clue, a person can conjecture all day, but they are just making shit up.  And if we are reverse engineering our explanations to fit the art, the artist has failed.   Throw them a fricken bone.

For example, David poisons Holloway with some of the black ooze. Why? Why infect a human at all, but especially the ONE GUY who's probably the lead of the project. I've seen a lot of people guess that he was experimenting with it, but we don't really know that since he doesn't do other experiment kinds of things like examine it under a microscope, and he didn't stick around to monitor Holloway's condition or examine his body afterward. I've seen people guess he has lost his first law directive since Bishop says (in Aliens) that earlier models were twitchy. But there's no other indication of this. If anything David doesn't completely break down but has a strange habit of shifting back and forth between savior and traitor. Some say he got an Ash-style directive to preserve the life form for bioweapons testing. Some say "Try Harder" didn't come from Weyland, but that David was actually in contact with the engineer. Some say he knew that Holloway would impregnate Shaw, even though there's absolutely no way he could have known they'd have sex or what would happen if they did. But all of those theories are just guesses with no real support. Maybe one of those is true.

But there aren't clues, so we just have theories that kind of fit.

Clues for careful "readers"=awesome.

Random shit that births a zillion unsupported nerd theories=bad writing.

I shit you not, I read a guy say that the squid grew because it was in a medlab and found biogel to eat. You know what...if that helps you sleep at night, that's AWESOME but good writing (which is done differently in film, of course) would involve a few desiccated gel packs in one of the shots or something.  At least then some of this absolutely ludicrous rationalization could be chalked up to little fanwank nerds doing OCD "deep readings"...like they do. But without ANY clue, it's just people racing to defend something they don't WANT to be bad.

Notice how I didn't ask where the phallus snake things CAME from? That's because if you're watching carefully, you see that there were some worms or something that fell off of one of the team's suit. That's all you need. One little clue that actually happens in the "text."  I wouldn't say this is WELL explained or that it made good sense (like I'll mention soon), but I didn't feel like it dropped on my head out of nowhere. You don't have to ponderously explain every last phenomenon, but you can't have stuff just happen for no apparent reason.

Your readers (or viewers) are--quite obviously--willing to work extremely hard if they want to to search for clues and grew up watching Aliens on DVD and want it to be good, so you do not have to spoon feed them everything. However, they should not have to make shit up on your behalf.

[Ironically (as a total aside because...you know...this article is totally not long enough) the best explanation I've can come up with for David poisoning Holloway isn't offered online (at least not that I've seen), but comes right from the "text."  David's first on screen action that isn't completely banal is watching a movie about a double agent that he says he "likes."  The writers were EXTREMELY careful in avoiding having David proffer value judgement such as "like" with anything else so that line really jumped out. It is referenced enough times that you MUST give it some weight in understanding David. Lawrence of Arabia is a story of divided loyalties and a soldier who increasingly "follows orders" but goes about doing so in HIS own way. David is insubordinate through most of the movie. He touches things they say not to. He turns off cameras. He stays when they tell him to leave. He grabs shit they tell him not to grab. When they get firm with him, he will technically follow directions, but when he does, it's often very literal and passive aggressive--he does what they want in his own way and in his own time. Just like his hero, ol' Lawrence. Further, passive aggression seethes off the screen in the scene in the billiard room. You can't watch that scene and continue to believe that David has absolutely no emotional center–there's SOMETHING going on there and it's very obviously not a warm and fuzzy feeling. David also has a curious fascination with creator/created dynamics, and in almost every creation myth there a "the rebellion" of the created against their creator and of course that's a huge theme throughout the film of the created destroying their creator. Add together these elements of divided loyalty and doing things "your way," an almost teen-rebelliousness, and contempt for the creator and you have the one reason I have NOT seen anyone give for why David killed Holloway.

It was personal.

David was ordered to try harder, and he used that as an excuse to do something that he kind of wanted to do. He basically murdered Holloway because he hated Holloway's dismissive and condescending attitude towards Androids. He stretched the boundaries of his instructions into a rationalization for licence. Anyway, that's my two cents, but it's at least based on the text.]


6-Try not losing your sense of history....after five minutes

Even if I hadn't known that several people had a hand in writing Prometheus, that would have been my first guess.  Hugely emotional moments are suddenly swept aside not in a way that is even contrived, but more that borders on spooky. It almost felt like a chain story when the writer before obviously goes somewhere the writer after didn't want to go, and so they just ignore it and focus on their own shit.

Yeah, it felt a lot like that, actually.


  • After David poisons Holloway, he doesn't really interact with him again. This is one of the reasons I don't think he was trying to do an experiment or bring home samples. He doesn't look regretful or satisfied when Holloway sacrifices himself. It's like it never happened.
  • After David basically sedates Shaw and attempts to force her to have an alien baby, she is strangely cool about it the next time she sees him. She doesn't even call him an asshole or throw a vase at him or anything when he makes that awful pithy remark obviously intended to provoke her.
  • No one particularly seems to care that Weyland is alive. Shaw is a bit surprised, but then kind of says "Okay, cool." Not only was there no REASON for that plot point, but there was no real reaction to it either, so it was absolutely useless. He lies to the entire ship with a complicated ruse, and when he turns up, their basic reaction is, "Whatevs, that's cool. Only ten people have died so far, so it's not like we have any reason to be upset that we're out here under false pretenses."
  • When Shaw aborts her alien baby, she's stumbling around covered in blood and no one says "Hey, are you okay. Or "What happened to you?" To which an interesting answer might be "Yeah David tried to make me keep an alien baby...maybe you should have a little chat with him about that."
  • For that matter, no one seems to care about what Shaw did either. She lays out two crew members and breaks into Vicker's uber-expensive biobed that she's been asked not to touch, and not one person mentions it.  Ever.  It's not even a matter of "Hey why'd you do that?"  "Alien baby." "Oh okay, fair enough. Carry on." It just NEVER comes up again.
  • Something David says about knowing it wasn't the air that made Holloway sick gets Shaw suspicious, but she never really says or does anything about that outside of that one moment.


It was like someone kept hitting the damned reset button on everyone's emotions.  Or like writers kept passing off the script to someone who didn't want to deal with baggage from the last part cause they were so impressed with themselves for what they had to add to the equation.

Of course, knowing the Prometheus script was a collaboration explains some of this, but it doesn't excuse it. You can't have major things happen that ought to be seriously affecting the arcs of all the characters involved but are just never mentioned or referenced again.  If you want your audience to share any emotional impact from moments (especially moments as agonizing as the bio-bed scene), you have to have these caliber of events resonate with consequence. One of the reasons Alien was so scary is that you could see how things were really getting to the people who were left. They started to lose their shit, and with everyone that died, they became more like deer in headlights. By the end of Alien, Ripley is so unspooled she is singing a kid's song to herself, just to find the strength to put on her restraining belt.


7-An ambiguous ending is fine, but an unexplained, five-character killing spree is not

"Why do they hate us?" is a big question, left unanswered, in Prometheus.  (Even if you take that interview about earlier drafts and Alien Jesus as canon, it still doesn't quite explain everything).  The nature of seeking one's creator is an even bigger question left unanswered.

But that is not what the writer needs to avoid here. Not as such.

It's really okay to leave these questions unanswered.  In fact, I can't think of any speculative fiction where someone has found the answer to an existential question that it didn't come off as kind of corny. How many of us actually breathed a palpable sigh of RELIEF when "God" in Star Trek 5 turned out to be a prisoner.

Of course, when grappling with the big questions, if they don't get answered, you don't have any kind of urgent consequence.  There is no answer, you are frustrated, life goes on, you keep looking, and it is the SEARCH that gives you purpose.  That's the human condition.

So I want to make sure it's clear that I'm not insisting Prometheus reveal to us the answer to every question raised in the movie–even one as big as driving the entire second half of the film. That would be kind of awful really–much POORER storytelling. However, some questions do require answers because they have an immediate and sudden impact on the lives of the characters. If you watched a movie, and suddenly four people dropped dead, you would be very irritated if you never found out why.

Which is essentially what happened with the Engineer when they woke him up. I mean...anyone who's seen a horror movie (ever) knew that visit wasn't going to go well, (if for no other reason than they had the old guy who wanted to live forever with them) but the writers still didn't explain WHY. If your unanswered question has it's own body count, that isn't delightful ambiguity. That's fucking bullshit is what it is.

Even if we take the Alien Jesus thing as true, (and there's no reason anyone in the audience SHOULD know that because it wasn't in the movie) that only explains the broad brushstrokes.  It still doesn't explain why the guy is so upset he kung fu fights everyone in the room to death.

He wakes up, kills everyone, and we never know why. This is not the answer to an existential question left for artistic reasons. This is not the answer to a big plot question you can intend for your audience to take home and wonder about. Give your readers something. Have the Engineer deign to explain why he is now going to kill you. Drop a hint.  Bring his head back to life like you did the other one and say "WTF Y U Mad Bro?" like you did Ash's. SOMETHING.

In Inception we have an unanswered question that is left to the audience to go home and think and talk (and blog...and blog....and blog) about. No problem!  But the death of five people and the entire last reel of action wasn't riding on that answer either. You don't need it to make sense of the movie. As a writer you can leave unanswered questions, but not if they've left major "real-world" significance in their wake and not just existential crises or intentional ambiguity.


8- Write your story.  Then worry about themes in later drafts.  You shouldn't do it backwards, and if you do--if you ever do--don't force your story to do what it needs to for the themes

Powerful themes will not overcome your plot holes, and being vast and existential will not save you if your logistics are seriously flawed.

Does Vicker's death work thematically with the movie?  Interestingly enough, it's possible.  Any time a character escapes certain doom only to be killed a couple of minutes later by something else, you're probably dealing with some kind of significance in the writing (or they just would have died from the certain doom).  Her character is so focused on certain things (namely succession and survival) that she is often unable to see the bigger picture (like the danger of the mission or the fate of all humanity).  So it is entirely allegorical that in the end her inability to see land stretching to the left and right but only what was right in front of her was her demise.

Perhaps. But COME ON!  Who the fuck doesn't dodge left when they're being rolled on by a giant doughnut? Vickers. That's who.

The key to good writing is to have the world make sense and be consistent and strangely, almost magically, it points the way towards your theme.  Even POWERFUL themes should work with a story not force the story. This is PRECISELY why you write the story first and tease the themes and symbolism that you discover out in later drafts. And Prometheus is a monumental example of what happens when you start with themes and symbols first and try to cram your story into those containers.

People will forgive a lot.  Just look at the comments section on any article about this movie (even this one, like, every time I post this), and people have already invented complex–often convoluted–explanations, FAR removed from what happened in the actual movie to excuse things that made little or no sense. But there is a limit to their benevolence, and Prometheus crossed that line (about half an hour in).  When the STORY doesn't make sense, it doesn't matter how profound your themes are or how incredible your imagery is.

When David is telling Shaw about her pregnancy, he is lit (ostensibly by the bio bed) from a light from beneath him.  He speaks in a soft and inhumanly calm voice that informs her that even though she is barren, she is with child. She has been knocked up by their creators. (Though if you know your bible, the Elizabeth there who had a birth despite being barren is different than Mary. However, there's some verses about how the baby "leapt" within Elizabeth's stomach at the voice of Mary that are SUPER creepy in the context of that scene.)

The problem with this scene is that David is so completely out of character that even though it is interesting and profound Biblical symbolism it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb. David isn't terse or sardonic. He isn't curiously poking and prodding at everything. He isn't pulsing with the passive aggression that absolutely defines him. He isn't scrambling to learn more. He doesn't offer pithy insight or witticism that generally serves to make things worse. All the things that define him as a character suddenly drop away for that moment. He simply has this serenity--you might even call it an ANGELIC serenity (nudge nudge) about him.  Despite how profound this moment is as an example of stunning religious allegorical images within science fiction, it is terrible from the standpoint of the writing because David is so completely un-David like. You want a scene like that to have a slight "discordance" to it that draws your attention to something strange going on--like a song that shifts into a minor key just for a moment. You don't want it to change so completely that the reader is left wondering what in the name of flaming emu testicles is going on.

By contrast Ash does something that makes sense with the surface story when he attacks Ripley. There are only a few small details--what he grabs as a weapon and how he uses it--that serve to clue in the careful viewer to the symbolism and themes being suggested.

Another key scene that is guilty of this is the ship ramming sequence.  The co-pilots stay, ostensibly because the captain can't drive.  That makes NO fucking sense, and he was trying to slam into a ship the size of a football stadium that was close and travelling at low speeds. Their choice to come along was, at best, completely superfluous.  And, honestly, it wouldn't have taken much to show that there was a bond between them that couldn't be broken or something, but instead both of them kind of shrug and say, "Hey, I'll stay and get killed too! What the hell. Nothing good on TV anyway." Of course, the reason there are three people on the ship is so that when Janyk  (Does that name seem in any way FAMILIAR to you folks?) sacrifices himself for the good of all humanity (nudge nudge) he says "Hands up!" and suddenly you have a clear symbol of Calvary with Jesus and the two robbers at his sides. The two co pilots on the sides with their hands almost in a crucified position are lower than Janyk in the middle doing the same. (And yes...your savior was a black guy--deal with it.)

The problem was this imagery came at the cost of good writing. The contrived motivations for the pilots to suicide themselves were poorly executed and so the whole scene seemed contrived to achieve that payoff.

Want a GOOD example a subtly done moment that works with the theme?  Holloway says, "Here's mud in your eye," before drinking the drink infected with "life creating properties."  Prometheus created humans out of mud so there's an interesting allusion there that the black goop might be like a sort of "mud of life" type thing that creates and destroys. But where that moment nails it is what happens next.  A little tendril thingie comes out of where?  His eye. That one was well done because it didn't alter the story to make it fit but just subtly tweaked the knobs a bit to make a line particularly significant.

There were many, many problems with the consistent logic of Prometheus.  You have to realize that YOU may know your story internally and externally, but your reader (viewer) will first encounter your surface action and only go deeper to look for subtext, imagery, and themes if that surface level is working.

Several problems:

  • A giving, sacrificial race that can't even be bothered to stop for a moment and explain WHY they're about to go on a multi-murdering spree.
  • How can the same group that sent Jesus (assuming that whole Alien Jesus thing is true) turn around and wipe out the entire planet and species because of the actions of a few.  Isn't that a little....un Christ like?
  • With all that tech monitoring them, those guys should not have gotten lost.  Unless you need a contrived reason for no one to know something is rotten in Denmark for several hours after a fatal attack.
  • No ship carrying bio weapons of mass destruction would have a holographic recording  that spontaneously plays of someone inputting the access codes.  For that matter, there is absolutely no sane reason that the most dangerous bioweapon in the universe would be in an unlocked room in unlocked jars.
  • There is absolutely no reason for Weyland to pretend to be dead. None. Ironically no one seems to give a shit when they find out he is alive. None. So not only is that plot point pointless, but they didn't even use it for developing tension.
  • Weyland should have just frozen himself cryogenically and spent the rest of his trillion on curing whatever was killing him. Seriously his choices made no sense other than to have a "father who won't die" symbol on board.
  • No one asks David what the words say.  Seriously wouldn't that be the FIRST thing you would want to know? Unless of course you wanted a contrived reason to stay ignorant of everything's purpose and of the implications of such a place until the body count started.
  • Why were there worms? Is space travel really so messy that they track worms everywhere they go? I'm not sure if they were brought in on one of the bio-suit or were already there, but in either case they don't really make sense, except to have evil manifest itself in the form of a serpent.
  • The alien beating Weyland with the head of David is absolutely bizarre and perhaps one of the most problematic moments in the whole movie from a surface standpoint (as I mentioned above). And that's really saying something in this movie. However it is also one of the, if not the, most profound and poignant images in the film if divorced from the surface story. It's magnificent as a metaphor–a moment embodying some of the deepest central themes. The engineers have been destroyed by their creation (we assume), and there's an implication that it is human's fault. So he destroys a human with ITS own creation. A beautiful chiasmus, but nonsensical when the execution of a theme is given precedence over the surface story.

You probably aren't ever going to write anything with an established fanbase as rabid as the Aliens franchise, so you won't have fanwank nerds crawling over each other and themselves to defend your inconsistencies. You will have to do better about having your surface story make sense and THEN go back and add in all the themes.

9- Don't have zombie frogmen things that show back up at the ship for no apparent reason that makes any sense whatsoever (after falling into the black slime with the second evil pissed off snake), beat up characters we don't know or care about in a confusing action sequence that is as difficult to follow as it is to muster any give-a-shit about, and then themselves get killed in a moment with absolutely no emotional stakes and no discernible explanation and then never mention it again.

This one's pretty self-explanatory.



Final Thoughts...

Overall the problem with the writing in Prometheus was that instead of characters we actually care about, monsters we actually fear, motivations we can actually understand, and a story we can actually follow, the plot was little more than a vehicle hastily stumbling and staggering from one allegorical image to the next, in the pursuit of its Deep And Meaningful Themes™. The dialogue is a melange of contrived exposition, horror movie cliches, and uncharacteristic ineptitude punctuated by moments of subtext, clarity, and profundity that borders on genius.  The writing team did not work and play well with each other nor did their seem to be any oversight of the collaboration to smooth those things out. It's like they wrote a container in which to hold all the neat things they wanted, and didn't worry that the filler between was cliche, confusing, hackneyed, and full of holes.

Despite all the pixels I've killed trashing the writing, and an article that is nearly as long as the script itself, I still thought it was an amazing movie. I'll probably see it again before it leaves the theaters (possibly even in the twice-as-expensive IMAX) just so I can catch some things I missed. It is gorgeous and allegorical allusion orgy that is just the sort of thing that gets lit-nerds like me all hot and bothered.

Sure it hurts to watch a movie with writing this bad.

The trick is not minding that it hurts.


If you're enjoying this blog, and would like to see more articles like this one, the writer is a guy with a rent and insurance to pay who would love to spend more time writing. Please consider contributing to My Patreon. As little as $12 a year (only one single less-than-a-cup-of-coffee dollar a month) will get you in on backchannel conversations, patron-only polls, and my special ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.