Tag: writing

Two Masters

Entertaining versus informing– which is the primary purpose of writing? Certainly there should be room for both in any quality writing, but sometimes it feels as though these two impulses are contrary, pulling in different directions and demanding that one choose between them. I don’t want to have to make that choice, in my own writing or the writing of others that I read. I want the factual and analytical pieces that I consume to have some narrative sense to them, some style and color. I want my entertainment to have some goddamn fiber to it– informing me not in the same way that nonfiction would be, but in the way of the heart, and understanding this world we live in. And dare I say moral thrust, or will that relegate it automatically to the dreary Inspirational or Religious categories at the bookstore (while such a creature still exists)?

This may sound like a reframing of the style vs substance debate in writing, or literary vs genre, but it’s not quite that. It’s lacing our chocolate with vitamins, and adding sugar to the bran. Plenty of great, successful examples of each type exist. Entertaining information can be found aplenty in the pages of New York, or The Atlantic, or New Yorker, or Wired, not to mention nonfiction books that have the pacing of fiction. Informative entertainment comes to us via Battlestar Galactica, with its meditations on war and fear, or the works of Michael Chabon (treatises on our impulses, suppressed or not) or Neal Stephenson (always eager to show us how things work, or worked at some point in history). This stuff is out there. It exists. I guess it just disappoints me how much of the entertainment out there fails to even make an effort at informing, and how we gobble that shit up en masse. Or at the other end of the spectrum, how useful information and insightful analysis gets imprisoned behind dry and needlessly abstruse academic language, or impenetrable coded scientific texts. How did we get all tied up in our specialty niches, unable to communicate with each other? How much could we share if we could speak a common language?

I’m not blind to market forces and popular demand. A lot of people would rather not think about anything deeper while being entertained. Perhaps the majority of the American public, if we’re going to face harsh truths here. Maybe I’m just a snobbish elite who should leave the tastes of real folk alone already. But Christ Almighty, we are ignorant in aggregate. Last year, only 58% of Americans reported believing that Obama was born in the U.S., despite ample supporting evidence. In 2006, 36% of Americans stated that they thought 9/11 was an inside job. In 2010, only 57% of Americans thought that global warming is occurring, dropping 14% since 2008 (what, does Al Gore need to release a movie every year to keep people interested?). In December, Gallup reported that 40% of Americans believe in strict creationism– that God created humans 10000 years ago. Those are the fact gaps. And as far as maturity of human emotion and understanding of our fellow folk… well, you don’t need stats from me to know how piss-poor those are right now.

So how about a little more vitamins in the sweets? How about more sugar in the muesli?

Another Role

Last night I had a dream that I played a minor character in the first season of The Office. And I was terrible. Not funny at all. In the dream, the roles of the characters in the office mostly relied on improvisations, and I just could not think of anything amusing to say or do. I was constantly wrecking scenes with my dull character. He was named Mike, a poor choice when the main character in the show is named Michael, and he had big hair and at first glance could sometimes be confused for Jim, another main character. That’s another bad sign.

I just hadn’t put in the time to think about what my character’s chief characteristic would be, I realized (in the dream) as I looked back a couple of years later as I reflected on my failed role, I think while I was looking at a magazine with a “whatever happened to…?” sidebar about my Office stint. I hadn’t done the homework before each scene shoot– I’d just gone in blindly and produced nothing of value on the spot. You can sum up each minor character in one or two words: Stanley is grouchy. Meredith is boozy and inappropriate. Kevin is lecherous and slow. Granted, in the real season 1 (in the non-dream, real world), these characteristics only gradually emerged and weren’t apparent in the first few episodes. But in the dream season 1, pretty much everyone had a sense of their character but me, and my lack of preparation was the cause.

Things did not end well for “Mike,” the original intern character. He had a flash of humor once or twice, like the scene in which Michael gave him a haircut, but still struggled to find an identity, and in the beginning of the second season he was killed by a bus.

Even in the dream, the fact that I’d had even a minor role for a few episodes on a national TV show seemed vaguely incredible, so I kept looking for proof that it had happened. The magazine helped. I remembered in the dream that I went to college with one of the actors/writers for the show (which is true), so it ultimately seemed plausible.

I am indeed a pretty bad actor in the non-dream world. I’m not nearly expressive enough in my main role as Jeff Deck, sometimes to the point of monotone. I’ve had a few notable roles, though, which helped me almost cross that canyon to a different, more demonstrative person. There was the singing, dancing evil priest in my friend’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar senior year at college. There were my dual roles in Winnie the Pooh, as the Narrator and the Owl (the latter played with a hammy British accent inspired by imitating one of my professors). And one of the most important roles: the semi-autobiographical part of the Brave Tailor in my friend Dana’s wedding play (for real!).

In those roles, I did feel myself approaching a different mental state, a stepping outside myself to inhabit another body– not unlike the feeling during fiction writing, but in a physically enabled sense. It’s like occupying a different dimension in which you are allowed a wholly different set of thoughts. Then, if you can take those thoughts with you when you return to your actual life… why, I wonder if acting can be complementary for writing.

Certainly it’s given me a thrill during the few fortunate circumstances so far when I’ve been able to witness someone acting based on a character I’ve written. The character comes alive in a way that was barely possible before and suggests new directions and dimensions. Returning back to The Office, I think they do incorporate a certain amount of improvisation into each show (though I might be wrong), and that must come from the actors already knowing their characters intimately, perhaps glimpsing those extra dimensions from the inside.

Scribing on the Go

Since so much of my writing mind has been fixed lately on a tale involving the wondrous future of mobile devices, maybe it’s only fitting that I now scrawl this on a webOS WordPress app, hoping against hope that these words will not capriciously vanish into the ether, the Cloud, or the Plane of Phlogiston.

Maybe this is the future, reclining on the red couch in my office (our office, Jane would hasten to add), for what could be less intimidating than to peck on a few keys as I lie under a fleece blanket? Certainly feels surmountable, in comparison to the dread that my perfectly innocent desk and chair setup evoke sometimes (the dread increases the longer I’ve been away from my task). All the resources of the internet are right here if I need them. For example, a few lines back my brain went dead at the thought of what the word was for the material of this blanket, so I just opened up the browser app and typed in “blanket material.” And of course, the intimacy of this phone-based textual format cannot be denied; I might otherwise be embarrassed to admit that I’d forgotten a word like fleece!

Linking and images also promise to be straightforward. Here is your dossier on the fine product of sheep. And here is an unrelated picture:

Super Bowl Nachos

…OK, so that took a little while. And I would prefer that the Super Bowl nachos were horizontal rather than vertical. But hey, that’s still kind of like magic.

Obviously working on a phone is unsuitable for any kind of in-depth editing or long-form writing. Typing is rather slow going, or at least it is with the tiny keys of my Pre. But for a quick blog post to let the world know that you’re still alive and still care, this seems like just the ticket. And getting back to the theme of writer’s dread, which we all have to face sooner or later (save perhaps that tiny minority of loathsome, never-blocked authors whose output stacks higher than the Andes), maybe this format is ideal for the crappy first draft of a scene or chapter that you just can’t get down to otherwise. Just don’t accidentally publish your tender, early story draft as a blog post!

Some progress

Not that this will become a series of writing about writing, but I thought I’d follow up my last entry with the news that I did actually make some progress storywise yesterday. It was a long day of fairly mundane driving through Minnesota and Iowa, pretty but staid country, and among listening to my music, Benjamin’s music, and the first few chapters of Robert B. Parker’s “Rough Weather”, my mind drifted back towards stories.

My old thesis advisor and writing mentor, Ernie Hebert, once told us that if you get stuck in a story, or can’t start it in the first place, you should take a drive and your brain will work things out as you go.  At the time, I thought this a prescription for distracted driving, but I’ve really come to appreciate this advice.  In particular, driving with evocative music can be a great jumpstart for my brain.  Music that tells a story or sets a specific mood (see Tom Petty for the former or The Clientele for the latter).  After a good seven hours on the road, my mind was raring for the next opportunity to write.  Almost as soon as we checked into our hotel in Omaha, I sat down at the desk and set to Sea Story No. 2.

Now, in a noisy cafe, I may pop on my headphones and move Sea Story No. 1 forward, just for yuks.  There’s a conundrum to solve on a sinister coast, and I know just the characters to tackle it.