Things that were not automatic

I am at the point now where I go a little crazy. I’ve been here for a few days.  It happens with every writing project as you get closer to the end, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but the rate at which said light gets closer is not everything you hoped for. I get a little antsy, but I still need to spend time with my family, and fulfill my church responsibilities, and blog (yes it feels like something I need to do), and work too.

I have written about how some things you just know automatically, and some you feel your way towards, but there are also conscious decisions that you make, and there were two things that I specifically worried about, and both of them ended up making things better, and in both cases it was because it led to better characters.

Timing was helpful. With the movie of The Hunger Games coming out, there was some controversy over some of the actors who were cast being of color. The most disturbing part was the objections of some to Rue being black, and at least one comment that it made her death less sad. I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, so I have no personal stake in how any of the characters looked, but I care a lot about that kind of ignorant racist garbage. I know it was probably a minority of the fans, but it shouldn’t have happened at all.

You have to take a lesson from things, though, so it reminded me of other things that I have read about exclusion of minorities in casting, and how seeing positive images is important, and just of how easy it is when you are white to just picture everyone else as that, and I wasn’t going to go down that road. I wanted there to be people of color, and minor characters began springing to life.

A lot of the richness from any work comes from the minor characters. The main characters can’t necessarily be altered from the original vision, but if they are surrounded by cardboard characters or if they are surrounded by people who seem just as real,  even if they do not figure as prominently in the main story, then that’s good.

Taking that extra thought made these characters become more.  There was going to be someone in Natalia’s place, but once she became Hispanic she had a look and a personality, and I knew what she was wearing, because apparently I care about clothes now. I don’t think anything in Harry’s personality is stereotypically Asian, so I don’t think it was making him Asian that made him who he was, but I think taking a second look maybe did do it.

Also, it ended up being kind of comforting for me. I was still really upset over the Trayvon Martin shooting. (I’m not exactly unupset about it now, but it was still pretty raw then.) So, we ended up with a black teenage boy. I couldn’t name him Trayvon, because that was too close, but I gave him Aaron’s middle name, which is Latron, and he is someone who lives, and will be fine, and as corny as that may seem, it helped.

One other thing was very important, and a huge risk in any kind of fan fiction: I did not want Jane to become a Mary Sue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_sue

This was actually a fairly new concept to me, because I first heard the term when some people were discussing whether Daenerys in Game of Thrones is or not. I have no idea about Daenerys (haven’t read or watched that either), but I understood the concept instantly. They mean when the character is the most special special that ever specialed.

The references to Wesley Crusher are appropriate. I remember an episode where he tried out for admission to a training program at the Academy, and he excelled in every test, schooled the guy who eventually beat him, charmed the girl, and then just was turned down but was very close. Okay, I get that if you want him on the show you can’t send him away to Academy, but then don’t make him so perfect that it makes no sense that someone else is selected. It’s common sense.

In retrospect, I think you could apply the term to Nancy Drew, too, although given how she was naturally good at everything and always outsmarting everyone, it was odd how often she needed to be rescued.

Anyway, I had just seen a Danger Days fan fiction where just in the opening the word “special” was used three times in reference to the main character, and okay, teenagers need to go through this, we covered that, but I should be past it. After all, just starting out Jane has medic training, rides a motorcycle, and has limited psychic abilities. Also, Gerard loves her, and even though it is not really Gerard, I think that still carries some serious cachet. What to do?

Well, a lot of it went back to the supporting characters. If someone should be trying to get plants started, and be nurturing life, that doesn’t have to be Jane. Otis can do it. (And it does not make him a magical black man.) If someone needs to start a tradition of consideration and gift-giving, that can be Lastri. (And hey, she’s Indonesian. She’s probably Muslim, and still a good person!) Jane does not need to be the one coming up with plans and strategies. Other people can do that.

And again, it made those characters better. They became more interesting and more distinct and more real. Suddenly I would realize what someone’s job background had been, and how they ended up in the Zones. A lot of it seems like you are just channeling, but you are the one constructing the channels.

Still, for things that you just don’t have any control over, there was something worth noting about the deaths. There was no way to keep Ray and Mikey alive, because the Jet Star and Kobra Kid track had them dead on Route Guano, and it not only killed them but it created a pretty solid image of how it happened. There is no track explaining it, but it was nonetheless clear that Gerard was going to die, and how and when. But somehow, nothing ever killed Frank.

One thing that I read on comments for “Save Yourself I’ll Hold Them Back” is that it is Gerard to Frank. Ray and Mikey are already gone, so the heart attack in black hair dye is the only person left who can make Gerard cry, and so he will sacrifice himself for Frank. Well, that’s totally not how I heard it, and not how I have it going down. Also while I am sure that Gerard would sacrifice himself to save Frank, I am not sure that Frank would let him. Regardless, maybe I don’t even know. Maybe there was something in the song that reached out to me and said “Frank must live!”

After all, who am I to question the power of Frerard?

Clothes lines

Having to think a lot about weapons was new, but I also found that clothes were surprisingly important in this, and that was kind of a switch too.

It’s not that I have never thought about them at all, because I usually had kind of an image of how the character dressed, based on who they were. Cristina in Jade Mask is a jewelry designer—very artistic, but also easy-going. She tended towards the almost Bohemian, with flowing skirts and long necklaces. Cady in Coulrophobia was a detective, and as a woman in a man’s world she tended to dress in suits. If I ever do write Against the Grain, Sheena* will stride into that copy shop with a Ramones t-shirt and short spiky hair, because she is a punk rocker.

Still, those are all just basic ideas. For this, I have had very clear ideas on how the characters dress. Some of that may be from the strong visuals presented in the music videos. Especially in Na Na Na, the Killjoys are just so colorful! There’s a kind of pageantry to their rebellion. (Actually, it’s so bright that I almost thought they changed clothes in Sing, but it was really just the difference between bright exterior light and blue interior light, which went with the mood.)

Oddly, Jane’s outfit went the opposite direction, to where the first impression is that she is all in black. There are actually some other colors in there, but the overall impression is just black and dark. She didn’t go into rebellion—she went into mourning and then ended up a rebel anyway.

Beyond that, yes, there were clear images of how they looked in 2019, but there were also clear images of how they looked in 2012, which were fine, but for summer term at a state school, the looks were a little formal. Most students wouldn’t dress that way. When they first meet, Gerard is in black pants, white shirt and red tie, and Jane is in a blue A-line skirt and a sleeveless white blouse with a ruffled scoop neck. I’ve been around college campuses in the summer—that’s not how people dress. These two people did, though. Maybe that’s why they were drawn to each other.

As a theme clothing continued to be important, because acquiring new clothes is not easy in the post-apocalyptic dystopian future. How did they get to looking how they looked?

One thing that had made a strong impression on me back in the day was Luke Skywalker’s transformation in the original trilogy. Starting in white, he went to khaki, and then black where he was kind of looking like Hamlet. It may have been intended to show that threat of turning into Vader, but I never took Luke’s corruption seriously. For me the color shift symbolized loss, as he lost person after person.

Jane kind of goes on a similar journey, as she gradually goes from the figure in white and blue to the figure in black. She starts a new journey when she is shot and has nothing but a hospital gown, and from that point on replacing clothes is not easy.

Eventually she gets a chance to get back some of her old clothes, and for a brief moment it feels like she can get back some normalcy, and that comes crashing down pretty quickly. She ends up in the same outfit that she started in, but it kind of highlights the differences too. No more manicure, or hair styling, or jewelry (with one exception), and there is a big scar on her chest that wasn’t there before.

It’s important that it happens with Jane because she is the one who worries about losing herself, about who she will be as the world changes and she changes.

Now back to the jewelry. The one piece of jewelry that she has at this point is a wedding ring, and the reason she has it is because Mitch had been hanging on to his and his wife’s rings after her death, and he gives them to Gerard and Jane. Everyone is giving to each other. Mikey’s jacket changes hands three times, and each time there is love.

That is part of Jane’s problem. People need to scavenge because it’s their only option, so much of her stuff has gone elsewhere. At the same time, that comes with love and caring and remembrance.

Conventional and Unconventional Weapons

My title comes at least partly from some exciting (to me) news, for which I am going to link to another blog:

http://www.mychemicalromance.com/news/

Still, it was always going to be something about weapons.

Part of the action-packed post-apocalyptic dystopian future is that there is a lot of shooting going on. In the music videos, they appear to be operating more as laser guns, with flashes of light from the muzzles and probably something like grenades coming out of the launcher. My problem was that I am not exactly sure how a laser gun would work.

This is in no way a criticism, but the videos are not particularly gory. People get shot and they go down, but I can only think of two instances where you even see burn marks on the shirt. With one of those, it is a dark shirt and he keeps moving around until he gets shot, so I can’t even swear that it wasn’t there before. Initially I thought I saw scorch marks on Frank’s stomach, but those were his tattoos, and I thought I saw a flash of red when Gerard was shot, but that was his hair.

I found a really interesting forum with people discussing the issue, and part of the problem is that a laser cuts, so you could slice through a person but you would need to keep moving the path and if it’s not impractical enough that way, it’s also that you require an enormous power source, causing big portability issues. Also, I needed the weapons to be something where you could have people building them in a basement.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/forums/reference-desk/threads/4282

The forum had some interesting thoughts on Gauss guns, but what I found most interesting was this part:

“The lasers that the various militaries are currently investigating, for use as hand-held infantry weapons do not use the actual laser beam as the weapon. Rather they use the laser to ionise a pathway through the air from the weapon to the target, then send a strong electrical current down that pathway - essentially like a wireless taser.”

We had just had an electrical storm, and I was suddenly thinking about a lightning gun where you would have a powerful surge of electricity that would split the air, hit the target, and then have a crash of thunder. Still, it’s an intriguing idea for something else, maybe, but it didn’t really seem to fit here.

I had also thought about something that I was thinking of as “pulse” technology, inspired by the solar flares that set up the catastrophic chain of events. They would function as just a pulse of energy that would temporarily disrupt the functioning of the target, but probably what works on people would not be the same as what works as vehicles, and it didn’t feel right either.

I ended up going with traditional guns and bullets, because I pretty much get how they work, especially in terms of how the injuries work, and that was very important, because there are times when I need people to be hit and live.

I also tried to be realistic about recovery times and the impact of injury. Movies and television tend to be really overly optimistic on that. I probably still have people recovering too quickly, but no one is taking two bullets, continuing to fight, and getting back on the force in time to wrap up the case. Remember, for the violence to not be gratuitous, there has to be a cost, and that goes for both physical and mental.

This is actually the first time I have had to do any weapons research since my first screenplay, and I finished that in June 2008, so clearly it’s been a while. Even then, I was just trying to figure out how soon someone would run out of bullets so that he would not be able to shoot Cristi, and the answer was not soon enough. Apparently the days of “Did he fire six shots, or only five?” are long past. It’s way too easy to be deadly now.

The other thing that was interesting though, and it goes into how you can pick up on the characters’ emotions, and I was surprised to feel their excitement about weaponry. Of course, that was not in a life and death situation, so maybe that’s why it has never felt that way before. Here it was just about getting the weapons, taking on new identities, and target shooting, and it felt pretty cool. Yeah, I don’t know where that came from.

Action!

Dialogue has always been the easiest thing for me to write, and even though I was not writing descriptions previously, I had done enough in the past that I was okay with them. I may be using too many adverbs, but I’ll have to see how I feel about that on the rewrite.

One thing that has always been a little different for me, though, is writing action scenes. It’s not so much that I struggle with them— I have rough ideas for how they need to go and they are good ideas (I think)—but I need to write them a little differently. Often in the past that would maybe mean that I would need to stand up at one point and go through some motions. No, it was never acting the whole scene out (so far), but just getting a feel for the follow-through of a punch or a dodge. An action scene is something more physical, so I need a more physical sense.

Part of it for me is that I want things to be logical. You can just edit a bunch of cool moves together, and especially in a comic book you could get away with that, because you just have the panels and you don’t need to show the connection, but it feels like cheating to me. Even in movies I favor a gritty realism, where I don’t usually like wire work or jitter cam or bullet vision or all of those things to make it look super cool.  Make the action cool and then let me get a good look at it.

Anyway, I was having a harder time with some of these scenes at the beginning, until finally it ended up becoming this multi-stage process. First I drew a diagram of the layout of the scene, and then a list of the characters in it, and where they were all starting, and how they needed to end up, and then I wrote in my journal about how things needed to go, and I how I thought they would work, and then I wrote the scene.

I thought I might need to do this every time, but sometimes I am only using parts of it. For example, yesterday there was a very complicated scene, where 14 characters were attacked by 18 in a good-sized building. I still did the diagram, and wrote notes on where everyone was starting and how they needed to finish, but I did not have a journal session after that, because I felt ready to go. I use the journal for other things though, and maybe those first times part of it was just getting back into the swing of things.

One thing, and this is not necessarily true of me, but it goes back to my desire for logic to follow, is that the scene needs to have a point. Maybe you are just demonstrating how the rules or the relationships work, or maybe you are advancing the plot, but the scene has a purpose, and that purpose needs to be met, and the scene needs to be viable. After that, it is nice if the scene is also kind of cool.

A good example is the scene where Grace is taken. There are certain things that were needed with the scene. You don’t want any of the four main characters dead, but they all need to be incapacitated, or they would never let Grace go. Also, for the purposes of something that was going to happen later, there needed to be one dead Draculoid.

Some things came from the videos. In “Na Na Na” Ray gets hit in the head with a bottle. That’s the kind of thing that could lead to a concussion, and unconsciousness, so that incapacitates him. Also, in “Sing” he is wearing an eye patch, so an after effect of the injury ends up being the loss of vision in one eye (detached retina—they’re usually not injury-related but it’s not unheard of).

At the end of ”Na Na Na”, everyone else seems to be unconscious, but Gerard’s eyes are opened, and his breathing is a little labored. I could not get the phrase “sucking chest wound” out of my head, so I looked it up, and it sounded right. After all, sometimes it’s not enough just to have a hole in you, it needs to be a hole that threatens to collapse your lungs.

Mikey, for reasons that I cannot explain, totally had a dislocated shoulder. He just did! I had no say in the matter.

That left Frank, and I initially was not sure how he got injured, and so it changed a few times, because at the same time you are establishing a flow of action where all of those injuries make sense, and are happening in the right order and proximity that no one becomes conscious again before the right moment.

Also, that eventually required an explosion, but it had to be done in a way that the cars and the people did not get blown up, and then the other gas explosion was too repetitive so that needed to be changed, and there’s just a lot to it. Still, when I was able to do the scene with about triple the combatants, and it went easier, I had to feel like I was getting the hang of this.

I hope I’m right, because I really need to punch up that motorcycle chase.

So which one are you?

“Your aunt is a very lucky woman Angelica. She has two lives. The life she is living, and the book she is writing.” –The Hours

Based on yesterday’s post on names, let me say that one of the things I admire about Jane Austen is that she had characters named Jane. Neither Jane Bennett nor Jane Fairfax seemed to be particularly similar to Jane in personality (I tend to imagine her as a bit more like Elizabeth Bennett, with a bit of Anne Elliott.)

I can never name anyone Gina. I mean, it is probably not as common a name now as “Jane” would have been in Regency England, but still, it just feels like saying “That’s me!” And I don’t want to say that.

With this Jane, I never thought of Jane Austen, or my dog, or anything like that. I wanted the name to be kind of simple and sweet—not fancy—and that’s kind of how the Simpson got there too, with no reference to Springfield’s favorite family. However, once I had Simpson I remembered my 9th grade biology teacher, so I decided Jane’s middle name could be Lenore, though there are no particular connections between the teacher and the plot either. She was cool though, and we had good field trips.

The other question though, and it is worth looking at, is how much of any of the characters are the author. I kind of hinted at this a little with Bigg City Heroes, but with my novel, “Cara”, most of the people in there started out as someone too, including Cara herself.

One thing you quickly see is that even as you start writing based on someone, they start changing and becoming their own people.  Also, at least for me, I usually don’t start based on someone real, and I don’t automatically base the female lead on myself. This is basically my way of saying that Jane is not me.

I’m a little defensive about that. Part of the awkwardness there is Jane’s relationship with Gerard, because remember, I have this taboo against being attracted to married men, and so I would not want to give the impression that I am into him that way, but also, not only is Jane not me, but Gerard is not Gerard. He looks a lot like him, but he became his own person too. They all did. They have different backgrounds, and the age ranges ended up being a little different, and new characters came in who were not anyone at all, but were still so real, and that’s great. That’s one of the most amazing things about writing, is how things come into being.

Now, it’s not like that for everyone. If an author has different main characters in every story, but they feel somewhat interchangeable, then you may have something different going on. There was an old sitcom, “The Single Guy” where Jonathan Silverman was an author and at one point he was dating a critic who gave him a scathing review. One of her criticisms was that the protagonist was a thinly-disguised version of himself, which he denied, and so she read the description of the character as he was looking into a mirror (horrible device for putting out a description), and Silverman was looking in the mirror, unconsciously mimicking, himself, I guess. I do not want to be that guy.

I also look askance as writers whose characters are always writers, because, really? But LM Montgomery made both Emily and Anne writers, and yet they were clearly different from each other. (”Journalist” doesn’t count as a writer, because that can function similarly to making the protagonist a detective.) I know they say to write what you know, but that’s a really good reason to know more than one thing. You need to be able to imagine lots of different things, and lots of different ways of being.

At the same time, this is where everyone is sort of you, because you can only write what you can conceive. Sometimes that might be because you have lived it, or observed it, or saw something kind of similar and then added some “what ifs”, but you need to have kind of a broad view. In that way, sure, Jane is me, but so is everyone else.

I think this might be why I sometimes come up with an idea for a story with a really cool, in control kind of character, maybe someone kind of like James Bond, and then it never goes anywhere. Maybe I can’t get into the head of someone smooth. Give me someone with messy emotions or weaknesses or fears, and then it all just springs to life. They aren’t always my particular weaknesses; maybe I’ve known someone with them, or read about them, or just imagined how it would feel, but it has a resonance that feels real, and so it works, and that character works.

I think one of the most important personal attributes for a writer (beyond language skills) is empathy—to be able to feel what things are like, and would be like, and could be like.

This has its downside. I feel things a lot when I am writing. I have said Jane is not me, and even more emphatically, Jane’s parents are not based on my parents. Also, I was writing out of sequence anyway. That being said, the reason I wrote the scene where Jane’s mother dies when I did was because I would be on my way home on the train, and I would keep going into the scene, and starting to cry because it was so sad for Jane and I needed to exorcise that scene from my brain by writing it out. Yes, I had to rewrite it, and will need to do so again, but for the actual pain part, the first writing tends to be the most important.

It isn’t just bad emotions. There are good emotions too, and I get glimpses of the feelings of first love and ecstasy and relief and warmth. It would be very easy to just always live in worlds of my own making, though I think they would lose their quality in time. On my own, I need to make sure that I spend time in the real world, and with real people.

I think this could be a real pitfall for actors too. They’re not only bringing up the emotions and motivations, they are going through the physical movements. Obviously, they need to have their own safeguards in place, and if they don’t, this could result in sad little lives, disaffection, or serial costar relationships. I wouldn’t want to be a part of that either.

I guess what I most hope for is that I produce a good read or movie that people enjoy, and then they go live better, and if I didn’t help them, at least I didn’t hurt them. Ambitious!

What’s in a name?

Writing based on other people’s characters has its own pitfalls, and then when those characters are based on real people, that can add a layer of awkward.

I’ve had experience with this before, with the Bigg City Heroes franchise. Everyone in that came from a real person, even the villains (though their identities were a little more disguised). The audience understood that these characters were supposed to be them, and they were fine with that. They also understood that it was fictional. After all, no matter how closely the superpowers sprang from the personalities of those involved, none of us truly had superpowers.

At the same time, artistic license was taken, because the characters became their own people, and one thing that I found was that I could not feel right using actual last names. Real first names were fine, but somehow the last name made it too real. That ended up being the same thing here, so it is Gerard and Mikey White, and Ray Torres, and Frank Ayers. (Though Ayers doesn’t sound right, so I am still hoping to think of something better. Current page count 342.)

That little bit of distance is important. Maybe that’s part of why the band took on alternative identities for the album too. On a similar note, I did think of using the wives’ names for the love interests, but there were two problems with that. One is that Frank has three potential love interests (Mikey sort of has two), and a future where anything can happen. He could end up with Beth, Michelle, or Lark, or someone completely different, and that’s fine. That’s the point of still being alive—the future is unwritten! However, name one of them Jamia, and there is no question that she’s the one.

Also, and I don’t know parent and sibling names anyway (though the internet would probably tell me), but this could correlate for them too: everything is just so grim! In the long run it ends up optimistic, but there’s a lot of death and destruction along the way, and yeah, it’s good to maintain some distance.

There is one name that will probably leave some confusion. In the story, Ray has a brother named Bob, and it would be easy to think that is Bob Bryar. That was not intended. The truth is, around the time that I really liked “I’m Not Okay”, but had not yet gotten into the band, I thought Ray’s name was Bob. I thought it was just a mistake, but now I think there was probably something about Bob that I thought was referring to Ray, and that’s where it started. I don’t know, maybe Bob should be Bob Bryar. He’s my favorite of the drummers, in that my favorite drum work is on Black Parade, and that’s him. But I sort of pictured Bob Torres as looking more like Ray.

The other name that really bugs me is Liu. That’s one I came up with, and it sounds right, so I don’t feel like I can just discard it, but it bugs me because it’s a Chinese name. On “Party Poison”, the dialogue (which could totally be her) is in Japanese. In “Sing”, she has a sword that also seems to be Japanese. I think it’s too short to be a katana, but that is outside my field of expertise. (Though there will be a fun post on weaponry coming up.) The point is, she shouldn’t be Chinese, but she is. I think somehow it is wordplay with “Liu” and “lieu”, because she supplants the regular leadership. Finding a name that feels right is hard, and once a name sticks, it’s hard to move past it, so I’m still calling her Liu, but I think I have a Japanese person with a Chinese name. Maybe she’s half.

Also, I haven’t actually written anything about Jimmy yet, and I still think maybe I should not add that layer in because this thing just keeps getting longer. If I do, he is named for Jimmy Urine, and it’s because the Agent Cherri Cola storyline did not fit, but different pieces of it ended up in other places, and that would be the final piece.

Looking back

I really hadn’t been thinking about the anniversary itself at all, maybe because the 11th seems like less of a milestone. I only realized the date because of a reference to the day of service. Now there are all these thoughts swirling around in my head, and I do not know that they will come out right, but that’s kind of normal.

Even before remembering the date, I have been thinking about September 11th a lot, and it is because of the comic book. There are just a lot of elements in it that are reminiscent of the attacks and their aftermath. Last night I was writing a scene where Liu is appealing to Mitch’s patriotism to get him to do her dirty work, and there are actually a lot of correlations throughout, some of which I had not initially noticed. I’m sure the election has been influencing things too.

This really isn’t at all surprising. My Chemical Romance even forming as a band is a direct result of September 11th. It is not necessarily obvious when you are listening to Bullets, but with “Skylines and Turnstiles” you can really hear it, and there are other echoes of it throughout the album.  It was a huge event anywhere you were, and if you were close, if you saw it in person, that can only have increased the impact.

Obviously I have been listening to Danger Days more, but to some extent I feel like Danger Days is a follow-up to Bullets. Some of the imagery is the same, especially on “The Only Hope for Me is You”, and there’s a really important question in there: “What have we learned?” The answer would appear to be not much, which is kind of mind-boggling. How did we not learn?

I was in bed (I was working the late shift), and my mother came and told me, and it did not make any sense, but I remember sitting on the couch and watching the footage of the planes hitting over and over again (that wasn’t healthy) and trying to understand.

There was extra security at work, but I still did my shift, and I went for a walk at lunch like I always do, and I don’t know how many times I had walked and seen helicopters from the flight school overhead, but I remember that the next time I saw one (it might not even have been that day, because nothing was normal that day), I suddenly felt afraid. I knew the likelihood of anything happening there was small, but there was a new sense of vulnerability that took a while to subside.

I was at work, but no one really did any work. The phones were silent, and the only email to answer was stuff that had already come in. We talked in small groups, and surfed the web. At the time I was pretty active on the IMDB forums, and I remember people asking about users from New York. One poster asked about someone he did not get along with—they disagreed on a lot—but now he was worried, and when the other user showed up he was touched and the other was relieved.

I think there are a few things that went wrong, including some people shamelessly exploiting the circumstances to push unrelated goals, and other people being weak, but maybe the real issue is that we don’t change easily. Something affects us, and we feel differently, but without a real effort, or something happening below the surface, we revert back to form, usually within a year.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though that ends up being much easier. I remember talking once with someone in the singles ward who was frustrated, because people had so many needs, and most of them would have felt a lot better if they were serving each other, but they were not. They were only thinking about themselves.

I really wanted to help her, and I didn’t have any easy answers, but the only thing that I could suggest was to maybe enlist some in serving the others. Make cookies for person A and invite person B to help you. Maybe it gives people a chance to feel a spark, and see, yes, this does feel better. This is a good thing.

Which I guess is really my way of saying that I think having a day of service is a really good idea. There are a lot of great ways to celebrate being alive, but that one might be the most useful.

Method Writer

Happy birthday Mikey Way!

This seems like a good day to talk about how I did some of the writing, especially because Mikey’s voice was probably the hardest one to find. Seriously, he talks a lot less, especially in older clips. He does seem to be a little more talkative now. Though, I think maybe when Gerard is your brother, it could be easy to let him do the talking.

Anyway, I was playing the music a lot, mainly because I wanted to listen to it, and often bringing the songs up on Youtube if I did not have the appropriate CD with me, or if I wanted to listen to some of the other songs. Often I would see little interview clips too, and I would click on those, too, which is where I really started to like them as people, as well as musicians.

At the same time I remembered reading about an actor who was covering for Alison Sweeney while she was on maternity leave. And no, I am not using “actor” as a gender-neutral term. In one of the most creative ways of covering a maternity leave ever, they had Sami disguise herself as “Stan” to wreak havoc.

The only time I have watched “Days” on a regular basis was in my first year of college, when my roommate was really into it, but when I was subscribing to Digest I would read about it a lot, and I read an interview with Dan Wells where he was saying that he would have tapes of Sami playing in the background while he was doing stuff so he could pick up her speech patterns and everything. I did tune in once, probably just to see him, and it was uncanny—he was crying like Alison would have cried.

Anyway, I made it a point to have MCR running in the background a lot. Previously, I would start a writing session by playing any pertinent songs, and then I would just play other songs too because I was still writing so I might as well still be listening, which could have led to some overlap, but I started focusing on the interviews more too, just to hear them speak.

One thing I have out of that is that there was a clip where they were talking about their “Danger Days” characters, and they said Kobra Kid has a kind of a short fuse; he’s misunderstood, and that directly influenced the character.

Because there is kind of an immersion thing going on, while I am doing other things, probably a lot of it is unconscious—that maybe I heard one thing that registered and another thing that registered but I did not realize that I put them together, but there are also things that I totally know why it went that way.

For example, I listened to Pencey Prep a lot for Frank, and his backstory is basically somewhere between 8th Grad and 19, which I guess is why he is 16 when his backstory really kicks into gear. Those two are right next to each other on “Heartbreak in Stereo”, and they are also the two songs that are really associated with specific times of life, so that could be it, but also, yeah, that’s just how it worked out. It felt like it fit.

Ray also could be a little more talkative in interviews, but his was actually the first voice that I really heard, because there’s a bit at the beginning of the “I’m Not Okay” video where he is talking to Gerard:

“You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini and croquet. You can't swim, you can't dance, and you don't know karate. Face it, you're never going to make it.”

Now, that seems a little negative, and he does end up being kind of the naysayer at times, but at the same time, it’s sympathetic, and so Ray just ends up kind of being the voice of reason. Sometimes that involves being negative, but it is also often being conciliatory, and practical, and he is the one who is going to hear you wake up from a bad dream and be there to talk about it.

(Actually, I really like his voice, both for speaking and singing. I find it soothing. Also he is my hair twin.)

I think it has made the writing better, but it was also a good listening experience. There’s worse company you could keep, and I found things I didn’t know about. For example, one thing that kept coming up as a related video was “Safe and Sound” by Kyosuke Himuro. It was coming up because Gerard Way is featured on it, but also, related videos let me realize it was a song from Final Fantasy: Advent Children.

Some of my favorite things in my early Youtube days were Final Fantasy Fan Videos, and actually the very first that I found was an Advent Children one for “Rest in Pieces” by Saliva. Actually, I like both videos for Safe and Sound. The live one makes me want to dance in the rain, and the clips one makes me want to fly. It looks completely impractical, but I guess gravity works differently around Midgar.

Also fun was finding their Yo Gabba Gabba appearance. How can anyone not love them? I do not get it. And that led to finding out that they had done “All I Want for Christmas is You”. Frankly, I’d been looking for another version of that, beyond Mariah Carey. I am starting to feel guilty about being down on specific artists, but just because you can yodel doesn’t mean you should do it on every single song. One of these days I am going to write about my frustrations with Ballroom Blitz, but I’m still analyzing it.

Anyway, good times happening, with good music in the background, and learning more about the band, and now I am dreaming about them. I think it’s just temporary. I’m kind of doing the final push to finish, and usually I am writing until midnight and then crashing, so it’s on the brain. I’m currently at 322 pages, and I sort of have page goals (330 for today), but it is more that I have scene goals, where today I want to cover the backstory on Mitch, Jacob, and Lastri, and get up to where, well, actually this will make no sense if you don’t know the story. Suffice it to say, I have a goal, and I have been pretty much meeting my goals for the past week or so.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Today’s fun fact is that scientists have determined that the age when children start becoming less cute is four. This is because what we find cute is the large eyes and small noses, and four is when their faces start getting bigger while their eyes stay the same size, and their noses actually get bigger faster than their faces. So basically, kids become less cute when they start looking less like anime characters. It has nothing to do with discovering that they can drive you crazy merely by asking “Why” after every single thing you say.

Obviously I did not capture everything I have thought or felt in the writing in yesterday’s post. Actually, I wrote six more pages after I posted, so it wouldn’t have even been possible. When I was writing the post though, I pointed out that the two scenes that I was writing about both came from people trying to comfort Latron.

Latron is only 17, and even though he is being treated like an adult, he is really a kid, and so it makes sense that he will take some things harder, and that the others will look out for him, and that got me thinking about how children become so important in the narrative.

Again, this starts with the album. Not only do the Killjoys get themselves killed to rescue the Kid, but there is imagey in the songs “Na Na Na” and “Sing” that reference children, so it was there. It ends up being important in the story not just because of Grace, but with other children too. That’s why you need to fight, and why you sacrifice yourself, but also why not everyone can sacrifice themselves, but someone has to stay alive to take care of the children.

Initially it felt kind of ironic that I was going in this direction, because really, I don’t have a lot to do with children. I don’t have children, I don’t have nieces or nephews, and even though a lot of my friends have children, when we get together it is child-free, because I may care about their children, but they see their kids all the time, and look forward to the break. They see me to escape.

It’s not that I don’t like children, but I don’t feel like I am particularly good with them. I’m good with babies. They curl up on me like lizards on a hot rock, and they make little baby grunts in their sleep, and yes sometimes there are nasty fluids and smells and even solids involved, but there are cloths and wipes for that and you just deal with it. Past that age, I lose my touch.

First they start being able to wander around, and intoxicated with the novelty of controlling their limbs, and the freedom that it brings, all they want to do is go back and forth over the same stretch of ground, and they have no use for me.

After that they start talking, which should give us some common ground, but I find that they tend to communicate in high-pitched squeals that I can’t understand, and trying to get them to repeat it just makes things worse, especially with the shy ones. Plus, they older they get the more likely they are to start swarming in herds, and nothing good comes of that.

Finally, just as they start speaking intelligibly and learning the rules for socially acceptable behavior, they turn into surly teenagers with chips on their shoulders who could not possibly want to have anything to do with an unrelated adult who could easily act as the embodiment of exactly how disappointing adulthood can be.

Really, I am not good with children. That being said, I really care about them.

I guess I have been more aware of this recently. After a long time in the singles ward, hardly ever seeing children, now I have been in the regular ward for over two years, with lots of children.

Initially you just notice that some kids are really cute, and some are big showoffs, and some could really use some discipline. Add time to that, and there are all these other things, like noticing that a girl is so friendly and loving, but in an awkward phase, and suddenly she’s not awkward anymore. Boys who were really nerdy have gotten taller and fuller, and with the one, with his sense of humor, I could see that he was not going to stay that geeky, but yeah, now it has happened. With the little kids growth spurts happen, and maybe you suddenly doubt that you have the ages right, because the two youngest boys are now bigger than the third youngest, and catching up on the older ones, but how did that happen?

And somehow what I find in all of this is that I care deeply, and I feel protective, and that when I worry about the state of the world in general, a lot of it does come down to the children, even though I know I care about adults, and I’m actually capable of talking to them.

I remember reading something several years ago, and I could not even tell you what hot spot of the world it involved, because there have been so many with prolonged warfare, but there was a concern because the children were growing up with no happy memories. They had never known a time of peace and safety, and it was messing with their development.

I think of that, and then I think of this music video that Westboro Baptist Church put out, God Hates the World (set to the tune of “We are the World” /irony). After a big group chorus it ended with a little girl singing the refrain alone. My initial thought was that it was a tragedy to have this cute little girl being taught like that before she could know any better, but then the nagging thought was that she wasn’t actually that cute. Honestly, she looked a little inbred, which does not seem impossible considering her affiliation, but maybe she was just older than four.

So there’s that, and all the local stories of child abuse and neglect, and neglected education, and all I can say is let’s not do that. They are developing. They are learning how to be. They need support. If you need to ruffle feathers or risk embarassment and report child abuse, do it. If some people who are not the best workers or parents are getting government benefits and it keeps their kids from starving, be grateful that there’s something in place. Fund schools, and health care, and community safety, and things that will give kids a chance. Give something beautiful a chance to grow. They really are the future.

I am weird and awkward, but even I know that.

Things I have been getting from the comic book

This could end up being pretty hard to convey. It may not even be necessary—I mean, the writing is my journey, so these things are for me. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be good for anyone else.

Remember, starting out I was recently in love with a band, obsessing over a music video, and feeling somewhat depressed about both the sorry state of the world and the persistence of my having to walk it alone. Put that way, it sounds pretty pathetic, but I started writing, as I do.

And I really needed it. I needed to work my way back into writing, and there is always a certain amount of fear with that for me, which I think is a big part of the procrastination. This was low risk, though. At the time, I was sure that I would never try and sell it to anyone or make a dime off of it, so there were no career or aspirational fears, and I was sure I would not put it online, though maybe if friends asked to read it I would let them. (Now I am pretty sure I will put it online, but I don’t know where, and I’ll worry about that when I’m done. And it will be scary, but I’ll do it anyway.)

The first issue that came up—besides some struggling with the action scenes, which I will cover later—was realizing how dark the material was. The odds were so insurmountable, and death was so much a factor, that it felt like the only way you could possibly have any kind of a happy ending was to go all Last Battle, Narnia-style. The problem is that the Narnia series has religious symbolism throughout, so when you have a mega-religious ending, it makes sense. In this case, it wouldn’t.

A lot of writers I like will stay fairly positive with their long fiction, but get really dark in short stories. I have been darker in short form, but this was turning long—much longer than I expected. I initially thought it would maybe be about 120 pages, because that would be a standard script. I’m at 309 now, and I’m guessing it will end up at around 360. I guess it’s a trilogy.

Okay, things were looking dark, but part of why I was drawn to the material was that the world is dark and it was hurting me, so it made sense to sort through that darkness and see what I could find.

The first thing I found was that there was a lot of love there. That includes romantic love, and that’s important, but there was so much more, with familial love, and friendship, and friendships that become family, so that no matter how many people you lose you are not alone, if you will let yourself not be alone.

In my Black History Month reading, I read Black Like Me, and I think I have already mentioned that he talks about the one thing that really gets you through all the hate and persecution and oppression is the small kindnesses that you show each other. It resonated because at some point in the writing a tradition of gift-giving had started, where they were always looking for ways to help each other. I haven’t actually written the scene where it’s explained yet, and I thought it was going to be Otis who says it, but maybe it will have to be Mitch or Jacob, but the point will be that it is a horrible life, and those remembrances are the things that make it better.

You do write things that are true, and you don’t necessarily know that you know them until you write them. I have three favorite things there.

One happens when Natalia is comforting Latron after another death, where the two people he has been the closest two have died within a few weeks of each other. He is a teenage boy, possibly with some anger issues, and certainly some tendencies to be macho, and she says she want’s to hug him, but she’s not sure if he would like that. He does want it, but what if he just gets attached to her, and then she dies too?

“That’s why you need to love as many people as you can.”

And then she and Deanna and Grace all hold him, but the moment does not become too maudling because the other guys are all standing around awkwardly. Then Deanna tells Latron that being male will make his life harder and stupider, which is equally true.

The other scene that kind of surprised me also comes out of comforting Latron. It’s the night before the big push, and he is looking at an old War Memorial and feeling that they will all be dead and forgotten, and Gerard gets the idea to take some spray paint and create their own memorial on an empty wall. Initially it is just them, but every one else joins in, until the wall is covered.

I think the idea actually came from “Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back”. There’s a line in there, “It’s not about all the friends you make, but the graffiti they write on your graves.” The song has a totally different tone from the scene, though there is a transition.

In the start there was a feeling that I had of these internal primal screams where you just want to yell out the name of the person you have lost, especially with Mikey and Ray. You feel like you can’t yell it, because once you unleash that pain who knows where it will go and what it will do, but keeping it in is no good either. Spraying the names becomes a release. It is based in mourning but it becomes celebration, and everyone feels kind of euphoric.

The after effect of that release is that everyone sits around talking and sharing memories. The barriers are down, and they can talk now, and it doesn’t hurt anymore, at least not the same way. It is art, and it is communal, and it is healing.

The other thing came fairly recently, and it has not spawned a scene, but it sort of covers the entire thing. I was thinking about first aid, actually, and emergency preparedness and what to do in certain situations, and the thought clearly came to me, you can’t fix death. The immediate follow up thought was, you don’t need to.

You know, just accomplishing something, and achieving a goal, would feel good anyway, but there’s been a lot more to it than that.

The gift inside the writing

Okay, trying this again.

I have written that I think that working on this project is making me a better writer, and that is true, but when I wrote that post, I had intended to write about the way this has been helping me emotionally.

What I found was that to do that, I need to go over what writing does, and I don’t have a direct path for that—it is going to be lots of little stories that put together I believe add up to something. Because of that, I’m afraid that this post is going to be more of a shaggy dog post than usual, but there should be at least one point in here by the time it’s done.

Remember my schoolmate who could not complete thoughts, and I thought he should try journal writing? So these are some things that have come from people who write more.

This is from Alan Moore. I read it when I was researching comic books:

"One word balloon in From Hell completely hijacked my life… A character says something like, 'The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind'. After I wrote that, I realised I'd accidentally made a true statement, and now I'd have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician."

I disagree with his statement and his conclusion, but it totally makes sense that he would state a belief that he had not fully crystallized in the process of writing.

There was a similar quote from Gerard Way, which I could not find again, about “The Kids From Yesterday”. There is a line in there: “You only hear the music when your heart begins to break.” If I remember correctly, what he said is that they realized it was true and it had not been said before. Now, you could spend a lot of time arguing about what that means exactly, and in what ways it is true. The greater point I am trying to make here is that when you are writing, things come out that you didn’t know were there.

Now let me go to something that I had a friend, who is also an English teacher, wrote up for a newsletter:

“It was my first year teaching the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, and we were well in to the book and had already gone through class period after class period trying to move beyond summary and identification of themes and into discovering how the author uses language and images to create an intended effect.  It was at this point when a quiet student in the back slowly raised his hand, then put his hand back on his lap, only the raise it again with a little more courage the second time.  He had noticed that the end table next to one of the characters’ bed was made of drift wood and wondered if it connected to the death earlier in the book which happened on the shore of the ocean. All the other hands in the room went down as every student looked back at their book with silent respect, wondering both why they hadn’t noticed it and what this could mean about the character.  After a fascinating and rather lengthy discussion on the motif of the ocean, another student, more brazen than the first, raised her hand and challenged the entire discussion.  “Did Amy Tan really do all of this on purpose or are we simply overanalyzing?”

We discussed that question that day but I still think about it frequently. The conclusion that I have comfortably settled on is that, as readers, finding connections between things is important and even if Amy Tan, or any good writer, did not intentionally create the connection, because of the nature of being a good thinker, she had been unconsciously creating connections between everything in her life and mind as a matter of routine and this manifested itself in her writing.”

(A Student of the Scriptures by Jennifer Wecker, November 2011 Aloha 1st Ward Relief Society newsletter)

Let’s get back to that letter writer I mentioned yesterday, wanting to stress that not everyone could be a great writer, defined as someone who could make other fall in love with the English language and get hooked on reading. Actually, I’m going to link to that:
http://blog.oregonlive.com/myoregon/2012/09/letters_a_writers_lifetime_int.html 

A writer's lifetime

I applaud letter writer Dick Bohrer's dedication to helping people learn to write ("How to teach writing," Aug. 28). To a degree, he's correct: Great teachers can help aspiring writers find their way using tools such as structure, constructive editing and rhetorical techniques. With effort, poor writers can become proficient, and average writers can become confident enough to express themselves with charm and grace.

The picture darkens, however, when one speaks of becoming a good -- much less great -- writer, one who writes from the soul, who takes a reader on an original journey and who burrows deep into his or her own fears and suffering to return with resonant truths about the human condition. That, unfortunately, takes a lifetime, even for writers of innate talent. And some, despite years of admirable work, may, sadly, never get there.

With the right teacher and willingness, most of us can learn to write, and we are indebted to professionals such as Mr. Bohrer. Very few of us, though, will ever be able to say we write well, to be one of those authors who leads us to love literature.

That can't be taught using recipes. It must be earned.

STEVE PATTERSON
Southeast Portland  

Possibly correct, but I am going to make a few contradictory points. One, there is considerable room for disagreement on what makes a great writer. Joyce and Fitzgerald and Hemingway work for some, but not me. I’m sure there are people who don’t love Austen, and it would be wrong for me to call them wrong, even if I kind of secretly think it. And some of them arrive at it sooner than you would expect. It is not just the polishing of the writing style, but also who the writer and the reader are. Most people would not consider Rowling a great writer, but she’s turned lots of people on to reading, and there are messages and truths in her books, despite being fiction.

In addition, there is something great about a person being able to shore up their memory, or express love, or discover themselves, or do any of those countless things that are accessible to everyone by writing. Teaching writing, and having good techniques for doing so, has a far broader importance than producing the next Twain.

One of the things I remember from Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” is that when she would tell her coworkers that she was an undercover writer, they weren’t necessarily surprised or impressed, because they were all writers. Maybe it was just that they kept a journal, but it was a very normal thing for those around her to be recording their lives. Okay, she was a professional; they weren’t, but they still had something there. I love that.

So, that is my roundabout way of saying that writing brings things out of you, and it is valuable. Next time I will see if I can with more clarity express what this writing has done for me. If I have not yet made this clear, it does not always come out right the first time.

Braaaaiiiinnnnssss

This is going to be pretty random. It will serve an important function because I need to take a break from writing about writing the comic, maybe to actually get it done or something, and I find my desire to write about politics is becoming stronger.

It actually works together though. Where I was getting stuck on writing about writing was trying to explain how the writing helps with clarity and happiness—how much there is inside the writing. I had several stories, and also there was a recent article about how teaching writing has been neglected in schools, but is really important and is starting to become a point of emphasis again.

The article drew some interesting comments including one about how they can only maybe get most of the kids to be good writers, because very few people can be great writers. I think they were missing the point on multiple levels, but one of those points was being missed in a way that is pessimistic about human potential.

I saw something opposite going on last night with President Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. He gave details, he explained things, and people ate it up! They loved it! Sure there are people who are complaining that the speech was too long, but there seem to be more people who thought that was just fine.

Personally, I was surprised to see some of the reaction to certain points that he made, because they are things that I thought would be well-known among the politically active, and if you are attending a political convention you probably are active, but maybe it was just nice to hear, or they were thinking about people watching at home, or they had missed some things. There’s a lot of information out there right now. It would be easy to miss some.

The point is, in a time that is characterized by the misleading blurb, it was nice to see details not only given, but appreciated. The RNC was built around a line taken out of context, and it was easy to do because a complex statement was being made, and there is this idea that only sound bites matter. Wrong. You may need to change your approach, and you certainly need to pick when to go for detail and when to short and sweet, but people don’t have to be dumb and that may be the most hopeful thing out of last night for me.

(I realize I am asking the universe to flood me with stupidity now, but I’m just going to take this moment.)

Actually, for me, that was not the most amazing thing to me about President Clinton’s speech. Julie and Maria and I were out running errands, so we came home and found Mom watching it, and she turned to me and said “I think I want to register Democrat.”

Until recently, I was the only registered Democrat in the household. (Maria recently had to redo her registration after a signature question from one ballot, so she changed it then.) Everyone else has been voting pretty liberal, but they had never bothered changing their registrations, and I was the only person in the family who started out as a Democrat. (Always the rebel.) Mom usually votes with us, but then she feels guilty about it. I think she crossed some sort of internal barrier last night. Thank you President Clinton.

For now, as long as we are being random, I want to get back to that zombie dream. I was telling a friend about it, and she was surprised because she knows about my aversion to zombies and wondered if there was some self-loathing going on. I didn’t think so.

What happened was a bunch of zombies (mostly familiar faces, including me) were confined in this basement. We were still pretty self-aware and undecayed, but probably were going to be losing that. There was food, and some were getting really into the squishiness of the food, where you could see how a transition to brains would come easily to them. One of the other zombies attacked me (wanting to eat my brains), and I fended her off by choking, but it was clear to me that things were just going to get worse in there, so I seem to have led an escape.

In the parking lot, everyone was wandering off to try and lay low and blend so we could stay free, and it was here where I felt my knee become disjointed, which felt really gross. (For zombies, “walk it off” has a whole different meaning.) Anyway, some zombie guy with long blond hair was apparently stealing a motorcycle to get away, and he called after me and advised that if I wanted to stay inconspicuous I better not smoke or drink, because I would never be able to pull off those behaviors. I’m not saying he didn’t have a point, but really what he wanted was to team up, and that’s pretty much where it ended, though I believe I was going to go with him. For one thing, motorcycle!

Looking back at the dream, besides relief to have all components of my knee joint fully functional and in place, there is concern that I might have done the wrong thing. If we really were going to be deteriorating more, and start with the brain-eating, then for the good of society we probably should have stayed confined. Right there, though, that thought involves some rationality and altruism that is unlikely from someone turning into a zombie. Clearly I can’t be trusted in a zombie apocalypse, but who can?

I guess there is really just one overriding thought for the entire post: A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

The next obvious question

It seems reasonable to wonder, having spent so much time on studying and writing and appreciating comic books, if I am going to go back. I already said I would read more, but will I write more?

My initial thought was that there wasn’t really a place for me. I feel like what I am writing has a very female energy. There is a lot of action, but the action is not as important as the relationships, and there is a lot of talking. Then I remembered that as I was starting this all of my conversations were happening with women who were fans of comics. Yes, the adolescent boy factor is important, but it is only one factor. So I had to rethink that issue.

I still suspect the answer is “no”, because to me it makes more sense for the field to be led by more visually inclined people. I am somewhat visual, but I really am more verbal. So many times I will look at the art and see the sheer joy of the artwork, where it is just a celebration of form and color, and I can’t offer that. The story does matter, and the words, but it is the pictures that lead.

Where I can totally see getting involved is if an artist needed help. If they had a vision of the kind of world they wanted to portray, but were not sure what to do with it, I could totally work with that. I think this is backwards to how it normally goes, but still, I think it could work.

Of course, I have been wrong before, and I find that in my next round of comic book study, I really want to know more about the mechanics of it, like how the artist and the writer collaborate, and what software they use, and how long things take, and a lot of other information that technically should be useless to me, but I find myself very curious about.

Also, I started wondering how much material I actually have. In Final Draft, I am currently at 289 pages. For a movie, that would be 289 minutes of screen time, but I wanted to know about how many comic pages it would be.

My first thought was to just pick a couple of pages and draw them. I thought about how frustrating my stick figures would be, or if I tried to do better than stick figures, how that would be even more frustrating, and so I discounted that idea, but I keep coming back to it. I may end up still doing it, merely as an experiment. Oh, but it will be ugly.

For the original question, what I did instead was took one of the comic books I bought—in this case, Infinite Crisis Crossover JLA World Without a Justice League (123 Feb 06) and opened up a new Final Draft file and started typing. One page in Final Draft took me through the first two pages and into the first panel of the 3rd page. Let’s say it is basically 2:1, and what is really scary is that particular issue is only about 20 pages. (I may have accidentally counted some ad space. There were a lot of ads.)

So, I guess if I was going to do this, I could be super-prolific—my power is not shutting up. But I’m not going to do it. I think.

But why a comic book?

One thing I should be hitting on in other posts is how much of what you write seems inevitable and foreordained. It’s not really that you are just making things up, but you are trying to make them “right”. There are directions you could go where they would not fit. Sometimes it makes obvious sense, and sometimes it is not obvious, but you can figure it out, and sometimes I suppose it could be a complete and total mystery, though nothing comes to mind for that yet.

In picking a storytelling form, there are things that feel right and not right. “Cara” was always going to be a novel, and “Jade Mask” was always going to be a screenplay. That’s just how they felt. Sometimes it is more obvious than others. With “Between the Lines” and “Out of Step”, there are dance sequences. Trying to describe them in writing out the screenplay is hard enough, trying to get the reader to get the whole feel of it in a novel would be kind of weird. It could happen, but you have something that is visual, and auditory when you add in the music, so maybe that makes more sense filmed.

Sometimes it is less obvious. There was something I tried writing as an essay once, and it wasn’t working, because that form required more specifics, and I was trying to convey a feeling, and a more universal feeling, and then suddenly it was a poem and that worked. When I first started writing “Hungry” I struggled, and so I stopped writing it is as a screenplay and wrote it as a short story, and that worked, and then I was able to go back and write it as a screenplay.

To some extent, if it is more mental it makes sense to go with a book, and if it is more action-oriented go with a screenplay, but people come up with some really interesting things sometimes by ignoring that. Probably they could also come up with some colossal failures that way, but hey, maybe it’s the risk that gives you that rush.

Working from “Danger Days”, that material may be inherently suited for comic book form, because they’re coming out with a comic book from it, so maybe that is just the way it is. That being said, there are some specific benefits that I am getting from working with a different form, and that is working out well.

One thing that I was liking about the form starting out is that it gives you some extra freedom. Narration in a movie often feels lazy, but there are places in comics where it can totally work. In books you have to describe everything to have it be seen, but in comics you can actually show it. Together, you have more ways of conveying the point. I like that.

In my case, I also have to deal with the reality that I do not expect for this to be drawn. I will put it out there to be read, but there will not be artwork with it. Also, people who read it because they like me, rather than being fans of the band, will not be coming in with helpful background knowledge. Combining those issues. I have to do a good job of clarifying and describing in the writing.

This is where I think this project is going to be really useful. When we were studying plays in high school, one thing that was hammered into me is that the play is neutral. What I mean by that is that how the inflections are done, and what the sets and actors look like, and various details like that are blank, and then things can be decided by the director and the actors.  I got it in my head that this is how you have to write a play, and I brought that mindset into writing screenplays.

One conflict I ran into on my collaboration was that my collaborator was totally the opposite. Of course, she came from a novel-writing background, so she was used to putting in details, but she put everything in there from small facial gestures to colors and fabric types for clothing.

I felt like she totally overdid it, but at the same time I was underdoing it. One thing to remember is that the director and actor and set designer and costumer are all free to make their own changes, and from everything I have heard they totally will. However, you need to at least create a picture so there is something there to capture their interest.

Previously I would write dialogue and action, and I believe I did them well, but there was a bare minimum of description—only what was absolutely necessary for rooms and objects, and nothing on how people looked or how they felt.

I guess what I am saying is that even though I am writing this as a comic book, and what I write in the future I expect to be primarily screenplays, I will write the screenplays more like I have written the comic book.

The world is ugly

I think I need to add a little to yesterday’s post. I think it was important to lose the assumption, but at the same time, that could be a temporary thing too. Maybe I just wanted it too much and needed to get over that.

Just as an update, and everything I am about to write is true, though don’t take it to seriously, an inmate friend of Aaron’s tried really hard to be my pen pal, upon learning of that, another friend offered me the recently homeless veteran she is helping get back on is feet, and I may have been hit on by a comic book store owner, so obviously I do have options, and I am just too picky. I can live with this.

The screenplay that I have in mind to write next is about someone who has given up on love and then is pursued, and yes, I totally see the irony, but there was a strong idea that came, and I think I can develop it. Whether it ends up being sweet or bitterly satirical is something I don’t know yet, and then there was the idea to for for zombies instead, and the other night I dreamt that I was a zombie, so who knows, and actually I think I had a love interest in that dream, though I was kind of preoccupied with my leg becoming disjointed. But I digress.

Anyway, there was something else bringing me down, and it’s not like it had never been an issue before, but it was getting much worse. A lot of it goes back to February, crystalizing around the Trayvon Martin shooting.

I had been starting to read quite a bit about ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), and was pretty uncomfortable with them. The Stand Your Ground law was the type of legislation they were sponsoring, along with many other things that did not bode well, and now there was a dead teenager whose killer appeared to be getting away with it. (That’s still up in the air, but it didn’t look good.)

ALEC is just one part of a huge issue with corporate interests overtaking public interests, and with the poor economy and increasingly negative political discourse, things weren’t looking very good. I looked into the possibility of boycotting the Koch brothers, and it didn’t look like there was any way of making a dent. I had not heard of Sheldon Adelson at that time, but yeah, he’s not really making his money from anything that I do. It was feeling very difficult to make any sort of positive difference.

Okay, from a religious point of view, I do expect things to get very dark and scary, and a lot of my interest in emergency preparedness comes from that. I want to feel able to handle situations, and I want to be able to be helpful to others.

The good news is that I totally know what to do during an earthquake, and we probably do have one coming at some point. I know how to suppress fires and search buildings and render first aid and do all sorts of useful things. What I was finding was that I was not sure how to function in a world where the only thing that mattered was money. I was feeling a very oppressive atmosphere and I did not know what to do about it.

I know some of it is the sense of no control. The last time I renewed my CPR/First Aid certification, I remember thinking at one point that along with my desire to handle things, I had to know that there were situations where my skills would not matter. If you’re decapitated, I will not be able to help you. If I’m the one knocked unconscious, I hope someone else is there and knows what to do. There are things you have to just let go.

Fortunately, things came to ahead right around the time of General Conference, and as the issues of being an old maid in a bad world weighed me down, I did find some answers. One was that I needed to be better about scripture study. I have had very good periods, and I have learned a lot, but sometimes that makes it easier to be casual and not worry about skipping. I need the inspiration though. I need the renewal, because I may be taking multiple beatings, spiritually speaking. I can’t prevent the hard times from coming, but I can prepare to recover, time and time again.

The other point was that I need to get over disliking people. I have always held that we need to love everyone, but liking is a gift. This is fine, except I have taken a sort of perverse pleasure in disliking those who annoy me. I don’t have to like you and I don’t. Ha!

The truth is, when you are feeling like that, you are not feeling particularly loving. It might have worked a while ago, but it would hold me back now, and so I need to let that go. When I see those people now, I mentally say “I am just going to love you.” I don’t believe it with everyone yet, but I had no illusions about it being easy.

Those were very decent answers to have, and things to work on, but the story was still necessary too, and that’s what we will go over next.

What was wrong with me

Maria has been very resistant to my love for My Chemical Romance, at least partially because I could not stop talking about them. I addressed this somewhat in the Geed/Nerd/Dork post. I have better control over it now. I may mention them once or twice a day still, but I’ll try and make it fit the conversation.

Anyway, at one point I was talking about them, and irritated her, and she turned to me and said, “You only like them because you’re depressed. You should let me hook you up with some Smashing Pumpkins or Morissey.” I replied, “That would make sense if I wanted to wallow in it. I’m listening to this band because they make me feel better.”

I had her there. Also, it was kind of a lie, because even if I did want to wallow in depression, I would not really choose the Pumpkins or Morissey to listen to. They are depressing, but I don’t like them. And I feel bad saying that, because they have both been influential for My Chem, but we covered all that in the Musical Chemistry post. Some bands just strike a chord, and other bands don’t, and sometimes someone is the right band at the right time.

As it is, there was one thing that had been consciously weighing on me, and one thing that was under the surface that needed to come out. The unrealized bit came up as I was trying to understand why I couldn’t just leave Jane dead, and I realized that historically, I pretty much always let couples get together. There was the one where the neurologist fell for the boxer with the aneurysm, and that ended pretty badly—I don’t know what happened there. I never really wrote it out though, so it almost doesn’t count.

I was thinking about why that factor was so important to me, and how romantic love was so important to me though still consistently absent, and it hit me that I am not getting married.

Now, I decided years ago that it was fine if I did not get married. I would still have a rich, full life, and that has been true so far, and there is no reason to think that it will not stay true. Despite that, I still had always thought that it would happen—eventually there would be someone. In that moment, it struck me that there was no reason to believe this.

I had sort of been coming to see that, and I had certainly been realizing that even if I do get married it will not be like I had always envisioned, because I would be getting such a late start. I hadn’t really dealt with it though.

I am very grateful that I had made that other realization, about life still being worthwhile, long ago, because that softened the blow, but it still stung. I had the series on marriage not that long ago, so you can read back on that, but there were things I was looking forward to, and I had to stop.

It didn’t affect the writing too much. I do still have a tendency to prioritize happy romantic relationships. I thought about the specific issue with Jane living, and had to think, okay, do you just always give your characters what you don’t get? Get your satisfaction vicariously through fiction? That didn’t seem right, but that didn’t seem to be the case either.

My concern was that in letting her come back it was making things false, and then as I was writing it, it did not feel that way. Ultimately I think the reason that it’s okay that Jane lives that time is because she still dies later, and so many other people die, including people who love and are loved. It’s rough out there in the post-apocalyptic dystopian future. That will lead into the other thing that was wrong with me.

Sing

In going back to how this all started, I have a basic timeline. In February I blogged about annoying love songs, and the ones I really liked, and Lisa S gave me her alternative list, which I included in the blog, which is why people who are searching on “alternative love songs” keep ending up at that post, although it is not what they are actually searching for. I hope they still find the two lists worth checking out.

In exploring Lisa’s songs, and falling hard for “Saturday Night” by the Misfits, I started playing it all the time in rotation with “I’m Not Okay” by My Chemical Romance, and somehow that led to listening to other songs of theirs a lot.

I say listening, but the way I was doing this was bringing up the videos on Youtube while I was working. I was not watching the videos—I was just listening to the songs while I was working on other things. Clearly this is less practical than using Spotify or Pandora or something, but I will get there.

Anyway, I was not seeing the videos, but I would sometimes notice comments on the video as I was navigating. On “Sing” I would notice a lot of expressions of dismay about Gerard dying, and how sad it was, and then someone replied that hey, it wasn’t just Gerard. Well, the lead singer getting a disproportionate amount of attention is nothing new, but it made me curious about the video.

Remember that at this point I was really in love with their music, and still in the early heady stages of it, and this is roughly how fully watching the video for the first time went.

Gerard dying is sad, but I was expecting that.
Aw, Mikey. Well, brothers, yeah, okay.
Frank, don’t be a hero! Too late.
Wait, only Ray makes it out? Oh.

I can see why the director was getting hate mail, but Gerard is listed as a director too, and I’m assuming the band was okay with it, but yeah, it was rough. I still flinch.

The issue is that I couldn’t get over it. I kept thinking back to it. Once upon a time, I would watch things where characters you liked died, and I would not understand why, if you are making something up, you would choose to go that route. As I matured, I got that. Sometimes it’s just necessary—the mega-happy ending doesn’t feel true. However, I still couldn’t let this one go.

The last time I had been affected this way and provided an alternative outcome to something was back in fourth or sixth grade when I read Les Miserables. Frankly, I was too young for the material, but I was fine with most of it except I just couldn’t bear that Enjolras had died. It’s not that I wasn’t sad about Fantine and Gavroche and Eponine, but they were bearable and Enjolras was not. My workaround was actually really weak, involving a trap door into a river.

So, now having seen the video, it was eating away at me and I could not bear the deaths of the Killjoys. I did come up with one solution, and it felt like it worked because it involved the sacrifice of someone else, so there was a price, and it was not too easy. Then I couldn’t leave that person dead either, and I was like, What is wrong with me? And there were answers.

Now I get it

It is time now to start shifting into writing about the graphic novel, still awkward since I have not finished it yet. There are a few posts that I can definitely safely do before having it completed and posted, though I hope the long weekend sees some progress.

Also, it is an election year, and now that the convention is past, all of the coffers can be unloosed (previously only funds raised for the primary could be spent), so I am expecting an inundation of ugly, ugly ads that will make me curse the names of Koch and Adelson and raise my generally low blood pressure. There may end up being some political posts, is all I’m saying.

Speaking of awkward, when I was writing earlier about this project, I believe I expressed some embarrassment about feeling a need to create fan fiction with no commercial value. The need was there, so I was going to do it anyway, and I was going to do a good job of it, but it seemed so pointless.

I justified it as needing to get it out of my system, but also as a way to get back into writing. I had not done any screenplay writing since October or November of 2010. This way I could get back into the habit, and if I was rusty or weird it didn’t matter, because it was not going anywhere. Now I think there is more to it.

I got on Facebook in late 2008, shortly after coming back from Australia.  I had been blogging since late 2005. What you may not know is that about a year before that I had started on a writing project that had been poking at me for quite a while.

I called the document “Everything”, because it really was. I went over my faith, my fears, my family, and other things that did not begin with F. I had the feeling it would end up being about 200 pages, and it ended up being almost exactly that, except one page is a table of contents, which I added on about halfway through, when I realized I would never be able to find anything.

I have said before that writing is therapeutic for me, and cathartic, and little bits of writing here and there were helpful, but this spoke to a need for me to feel unified. It was about whom I was, and was I even being the person I wanted to be, and a lot of it was about seeing myself clearly and working out junk.  Mainly, though, I just felt it was something I needed to do.

Obviously, it took a while, and I could not even tell you how long. I have some dates scattered here and there for some parts, but it was spread out. What I do know is that within a few days of finishing I had the dream that became Jade Mask. That was my first screenplay, and over the next two years or so, I wrote six screenplays and a television pilot and workup. And of course, then things changed around and I fell badly off track.

I have documented the ups and downs of that whole time period, and getting back into it now and how writing to Aaron has helped and the blogging has helped, but getting back into the creative writing side has its own needs, and maybe one of the biggest needs is to work through the emotional static so the reception can be clearer.

One reason I mentioned the timelines for starting the blog and starting Facebook is that there was something I did with the blog before going to Australia that felt very important, and that was going over my romantic history. Romantic history implies something it wasn’t, because generally it was only what I felt, with no follow through or reciprocation. Anyway, that was an important part of “Everything”, and then it felt very important to blog it, and I felt like I needed to finish it before we left on the trip.

I believe the reason I felt like I needed to get it done then was because soon I would be connecting with these people again through Facebook, and while I knew there was a chance some people could stumble upon the blog before, if I had been in touch with people when I was writing it, the pressure would have felt too great. Recently I went through it again, though that was more about my emotional state than individuals.

The point I am trying to make is that there is a cycle to our periods of growth. I remember a friend expressing frustration once that she thought she was done with something, and here it was again, but that is so normal. Even if you face your problems and weaknesses head one right away, you can still only deal with them at the current level of your maturity and experience and knowledge. Yes, those things should grow during the struggle, and that may be more noticeable growth, but the life continues and your horizons expand, and you deepen, and suddenly you find there are corners you have not explored.  You make peace with an issue to the level of your ability, and then you have more ability and it’s time for another round. If you think that’s frustrating, try repeating things over and over again without the growth.

Anyway, what I am getting too is that “Danger Days” is the new “Everything”. It’s different in that it is fictional, and yet all of me is coming out, and I am working through things, and I suspect it’s going to unleash another sustained period of productivity. And so I am impatient that I am still not done, and yet I am also cherishing this time and this new round of growth.

Wicked

Not only did Julie, Maria, and I recently go see “Jersey Boys”, but we also saw “Wicked” when it was in town. We may have been the only three people in the theater who did not enjoy it. (My sisters did like Jersey Boys.)

Seriously, the crowd was laughing and clapping and oohing and having a great time. I know a lot of my snobbier acquaintances complain about how Portland audiences are too easy, and give unearned standing ovations, so that could be a factor, or the problem could be me. Well, us, in this case. Towards the end, my sisters needed to go to the bathroom, and they just didn’t come back. I stuck it out, but did notwait for all the curtain calls, because I am evil. (But I am not “Wicked”.)

There are a few reasons it did not work for me. I didn’t mind the steampunk angle. It is a little played out by now, but it is a look that fits in well with Oz, and I didn’t mind that.

What probably would have made everything better is if the music had been great. I remember Maria watching the “Hairspray” DVD, and I was working something so I only caught bits of it, but that music totally got under my skin, and I ended up listening to various songs over and over. There was nothing like that in “Wicked”. “Defying Gravity” got close, but did not make it.

What really got me though was the way it assassinated the characters of everyone you knew and loved from Oz. Okay, I did not just see the movie—I have also read several of the books by L. Frank Baum, so it is a little close to my heart. I don’t mind the idea of giving the Wicked Witch more of a backstory, and developing her character, but couldn’t it have been done without doing dirt to everyone else?

I should have agreed with the messages of equality and justice, but they were too clumsy and heavy-handed, and again, unnecessary character assassination. Yes, if you humanize someone who has a bad end, it can make that end unsatisfactory, so they turned that around, but it was not worth it.

I think the real problem is that Gregory Maguire is a nasty little man, and it came through in the novel, and infected the musical, which needed better music, dialogue, and performance.

The reason I am mentioning this now is to go into the counterpoint to yesterday’s post. The hangups of the writer manifest in the writing, but also the hangups of the reader manifest in the reading.

I noticed this early on (though I did not understand it), when I started reading Bantam Classics. They always included a helpful foreword with literary analysis, and I always disagreed with whatever the analyst was saying. No, that is not it at all. If Mister Rochester is now safe for Jane because he has been castrated, why is it that now he can have children? Look, if he says he was in love with Priscilla and not Xenobia, I believe him. He never acted like he was in love with Xenobia. And going back to Jane Eyre, no, he would not have to have syphilis himself and risk infecting Jane because Bertha was cheating on him after the marriage and she could have contracted it after he had stopped sleeping with her.

Actually, Jane Eyre is a good bridge to the other part of this: parallel fiction. Sometimes readers have such strong reactions to novels that they need to write other novels explaining that everything was wrong.  Therefore, you have books where Maxim De Winter actually truly did love Rebecca, and killed himself to be with her again, and Bertha Mason was a spirited girl driven mad by her husband’s harshness and racial prejudice, and Grendel was not nearly as much of a monster as the people he ate, and Lolita was truly the seducer and controller in the relationship with Humbert Humbert, because you know how sophisticated 12 year old girls are.

I get loving work and being inspired by it, but it seems odd to be when the inspiration seems to be to discount everything that happened. Well, maybe they actually hated the original works, and felt the need to correct them. It seems disrespectful though.

Of course, the obvious point is that even when you enjoy a novel, you may not be enjoying it in the way the author intended. I guess it’s just a chance we have to take. But when you read something and you feel affection for the author, like you could be best friends, it’s not impossible. There could totally be compatibility, or it could all be a delusion.

The fun part of all of this is a lot of my writing about writing makes me feel like my current project is crazy, or at least ill-advised. I think it’s not though, so I will see if I can make a case for that tomorrow.

Bad Writing

You can have a relatively good grasp on the English language, and still write poorly. This may mean you are a bad person.

Okay, that’s a little too harsh. I am thinking about other creative writing I have read. Personality comes through in expository writing also, but interesting things come out in fiction.

In writing about fan fiction specifically, I think I have mentioned (besides the obsession with sex, though apparently that makes it specifically “slash” fiction) that there is often too much emphasis on how special the protagonist is.

When it’s written by a teenager, that makes perfect sense. That’s a time in life when you are trying to establish your identity and find your strengths, and your direction in life, and if that ends up playing out with a bit of popular culture that resonates with the writer, that’s fine. It’s normal. One hopes that at some point the writers will develop an understanding of their unique worth, developing their talents and working through weaknesses, and learn that each person is special, and they don’t need to be more special than anyone else, but that’s a lot of maturity and it takes time. It takes time to develop writing skills too, though, so it works out.

Sadly, this maturity does not always happen. I am thinking of writing I have read. It was not fan-fiction. It was also not published. It was just stuff that people wrote to be creative, and maybe they had thoughts of doing things with it somewhere down the road, but it was not very good. I may or may not be related to these people.

The one writer only had three short pieces. One was an essay, and the other two were short fiction about a rabbit. The fiction showed a lack of judgment regarding puns and repetitions, going far too long with one list, and not being funny, even though they were totally supposed to be funny. All of them displayed some resentment, and some concern over specialness, which was unfortunate for an adult male. Those things totally made sense if you knew the person, because that’s how he was in life.

The other had a few short stories and some poems. I remember my initial impression was just being shocked at some of the content, because I thought we had the same morals, and yet her characters did not act in a way reflecting that.

What strikes me more looking back is how often things changed. When the singer got into drugs, first it was shady maneuvering on the part of the bad boy, and then it was totally an accident, that he never intended, and he wasn’t so shady and the other love interest wasn’t so good, and then she was a burnout and then she was not and there was just no consistency. The other story was like that too, where the father was bewitched, or just evil, and the heroine was strong and plucky, but just really needed to rely on the hero. 

Again, when you know the writer, that makes perfect sense. She has no core, and so she floats around a lot, trying to find what works in the moment, and I know that now, and I figured it out long after reading her writing, but I hadn’t realized how far back it went. When I was a teenage girl and she was a young adult, I didn’t know it, but it was there.

Some of it I relate to. I totally get the paradox of the desire to have a strong heroine, and yet the allure of a rescue. At some point though, you realize that you can’t always have it both ways. Having the heroine rush into the burning building, and get people out, but then what? She goes back in and gets smoke inhalation? She almost made it out, but not quite? If the need for a rescue means she did something stupid, I don’t want it. You just can’t have it both ways all the time, and independence and competence are good.

To be fair, part of that for me was realizing that no one is coming to rescue me, and I just better be strong and independent on my own.  And it’s not that it never makes sense for the hero to swoop in on a white horse—sometimes it does. Unfortunately, this particular person has never moved beyond wanting other people to fix things for her, and most of the time it is stuff that it is not even possible for someone else to fix.

Even reading her recent poetry, there is no center. Things go back and forth, and they follow a pattern of kind of how things should be, but it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work in the same way she doesn’t work.

I know all of this sounds very harsh, and well, it is kind of a fraught relationship, but my point is that personality and character and opinion bleeds into your writing in ways that you are not even aware of. It is a very personal thing to share your writing, because hey, that’s me there, and yet the urge is there to share. Of course, the readers are bringing their own selves into it also, with interesting results there too, so hey, that’s just human relationships, with the regular set of human complications, which I will probably write about tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, there is a moral to this story, that I absolutely want to share, and it’s not just for writers. You can’t get away from yourself, so you better be someone that you can live with.