Danger Zone

Super-late post!

This one is for everyone snowed in everywhere.  Thanks to my big brother for the idea, which came up in a discussion of snow days.  And of course also this madness.

In my defense, it turns out raptors are trickier to draw than I remembered!

Abstention

“I feel like I’m dissolving,” Dan said.  His forehead was flat on the table, and it was difficult to make out his words.

After a moment he lifted his head and looked at his friend Ben, sitting across from him in the booth.  Ben was reading a small paperback.

“I said I feel like I’m dissolving,” said Dan.

Ben glanced up at Dan, nodded once, and returned to reading.

“You ever feel like that?” said Dan.

“Like I’m dissolving?” said Ben.

“Yeah,” said Dan.

“I’m not sure what you really mean,” said Ben, “but no.”

“You’ve never felt like you’re not getting anywhere?” said Dan.  “Like all your energy just goes into nothing?”

Ben considered without lowering his paperback.  “Sure,” he said after a moment.  “Is that what dissolving means to you?”

“Partly,” said Dan.  “The other part is just that everything seems to be impossible.”

Ben shrugged and went back to reading.

“Thanks for listening,” said 

“Sure thing,” said Ben.

Dan sat and thought.  The bar was empty, it was early afternoon.  Dan stared at the half sandwich and fries going cold in their plastic basket.  Ben appeared to be drinking a cola.  

“I’ve got this piece I’m supposed to be writing,” said Dan, shifting in his seat and looking towards the door.  “It’s due today.  I mean earlier today it was due.  But I’m hoping that I can turn it in by the end of the day and it won’t be too late not to be turned away.”

Ben looked up, nodded, and kept reading.

“And I can’t finish it,” said Dan.  “I could barely even start it.  I’ve got no energy for it.  And it’s writing.  I love writing, it’s what I’m supposed to be good at.”

Ben kept reading.

“I’ve just got no interest in doing it,” said Dan.  “Worse, I’ve apparently got active interest in avoiding it.  Every time I’ve set aside time to get it done this past week, I wind up working on something else, usually without even realizing I’ve avoided it until time’s up.”  He looked moodily around the room again and sighed.  “It’s like I’ve got a compulsion against getting it done, no matter what.”

Ben nodded again without looking up.

“Has this ever happened to you?” Dan asked.

“I’ve never turned in something after it was due if I could help it,” said Ben.  “But as for the rest, I’d say something like that, yeah.”

“What did you do?” asked Dan.

“I wrote it anyway,” said Ben.

“I knew you’d say that,” said Dan dismissively, sinking into his seat.

“And what does that mean, never turned in something late if you could help it?” Dan asked testily.  “Who says I can help it?  I’m trying to tell you that I can’t help it, for some reason I just can’t get it done.”

“I didn’t mean to say that you can help it,” said Dan.  “I just meant I’ve never turned in something late unless there had been an emergency, or a mistake of some kind, something.”

“So you haven’t really had my problem before,” said Dan.

“How do you feel when you try to do the work?” said Ben.  “You sit down, get the work out, get ready to work on it, and what.”

“I don’t know,” Dan said.  He shifted in his seat, scratched the back of his hand, rubbed his eyes.  “I get restless.  I keep thinking of other things, I get distracted.”

“It sounds like you’re bored,” said Ben.

“I am bored,” said Dan.  “I feel like I’m bored to death.  I’m sick to death of this stupid piece, I can’t make it happen.  I just don’t have it in me.”

“I’ve been bored with work before,” said Ben.  “But it’s never kept me from getting something done.”

“I just wish I knew why I was so bored,” said Dan.  “This is supposed to be what I love to do.”

“Everyone gets bored when they do the same thing all the time,” said Ben.  “You run out of steam, it’s not your fault.  You just have to either find a way to make it interesting for you again, or keep pushing until you get through it somehow.”

“I’ve been pushing,” said Dan.  “It’s not working.”

“Let’s think about this reasonably,” said Ben, setting down his book and folding his hands.  “What’s the opposite of boredom?”

Dan looked blank.  “How do you mean, opposite?”

“Let’s say boredom is an emotion,” said Ben.  “What emotion is as different from boredom as you can get?”

Dan thought about this.  “Excitement I guess, or feeling interested in something.”

“Energized,” said Ben.

“Sure,” said Dan.

“And when you’re bored, you feel tired?” said Ben.

“Exhausted,” said Dan.

“Like you’re dissolving,” said Ben.

Dan pointed a finger at Ben as if to say ‘exactly.’

“So, you need rest,” said Ben.

“And how,” said Dan.  “I feel like I’ve been awake for weeks.”

“I didn’t mean sleep,” said Ben.

“I feel like I need it,” said Dan.

“When was the last time you slept?” said Ben.

“I went to bed early last night,” said Dan.

“I thought you said you just woke up before you came in,” said Ben.

Dan nodded morosely, ate a french fry.  A moment later, his forehead was back on the table.

“You need to finish this project,” said Ben.  “And you need to get out of the one coming next.”

“God, I would love that,” said Dan.  “How?”

“I can take it, if it’s still that Shilling thing,” said Ben.

“It is,” said Dan.  “But that’s my work.”

“You want to do it?” said Ben.

Dan made a sound into the table.  It sounded like he was going to start crying.

“So let me take it,” said Ben.  “You can owe me, I’m going to be traveling a few days next month.”

Dan sat up.  “What are you traveling for?”

Ben shrugged.  “Family.”

Dan said nothing further.

“One other thing,” said Ben, picking his book back up.  “I said you need rest, but I didn’t mean sleep.”

“Can whatever you’re going to say be done in addition to sleep?” said Dan, looking up with a bleary expression.

“You need to do some work on something that interests you,” said Ben.  “I recommend that it be more engaging than a crossword puzzle or mowing the lawn--”

“It’s February,” said Dan.

“--Shoveling the drive,” said Ben.  “Something that you actually have to use your brain to do.  And it can’t be entertainment.  I’ll be you watched more than five hours of TV over the weekend.”

“I watched more than that just after getting home on Friday night,” said Dan.  “I say I’ll unwind but it doesn’t help.”

“But pick something that you like doing,” said Ben, “something completely unlike what you’ve been struggling with.  No writing.”

“How do I know what to do?” asked Dan.

“You won’t feel like you’re dissolving anymore,” said Ben.

“Fair enough,” said Dan.

“First you’ve got to write that piece though,” said Ben.  “You’re not going to feel any better until you get it done.”

“How do I do that?” asked Dan.

“Think about how good it will feel to have it done,” said Ben.  “See if you can find a way to gripe about your problems while you’re doing it, that should help.”

“Thanks,” said Dan.

Setting: Impact

At the end of the last session on Setting, in terms of how to start a story, the matter came up of describing objects in or aspects of the environment that the characters are experiencing because they’re impressive in some way.  A huge ship sailing by, an odd blue plant growing near the road, a person who resembles a celebrity sitting across the room.  All things which we would notice in our day-to-day life, and which we might report to someone later on if we thought it was interesting enough (“I swear to God he looked like he was about to shoot blades out of his hands right there and skewer his coffee!”), but which wind up detracting from a story if there’s no real reason to bring them in.

This point of relevance to the overall story you’re trying to tell is the hinging point of the whole matter of setting and its role in storytelling.  (And it’s a pretty simple and straightforward point, so this winds up being a pretty short post.)

Setting is a tool to convey the reality of the characters’s struggle.

When you’re using language to convey a sequence of events, you’ve got to provide some context to your audience.  Where is this happening, and when?  If you don’t provide that information, the questions come automatically and will prevent the person from fully engaging until they’re provided.

Imagery and background exposition are often a huge part of why we sit down and start listening to a story.  For those of us who pick up stories in order to escape from our own lives for a while, the places the author takes us and the things we see and learn about there are personally valuable experiences and often worth repeating.  But the salt of the meat and the reason we keep listening is always to sympathize with the characters, or try to anyway, and to hear about what’s going to happen to them next.

Setting is the foundation of storytelling.  At least, a story without one portrayed convincingly and engagingly will have to compensate for the lack of one in terms of correspondingly exaggerated characters and/or plot (trouble).  Being able to portray the setting convincingly and engaging the audience with its details without distracting from the action takes careful practice, and I think goes a long way towards establishing a story’s and maybe even writer’s style, depending on how much is left in or out, and how important it winds up being to the characters.

But for now we’re more or less constraining ourselves to the question, How to Start a Story, so we need only worry for now about how to choose the setting that our story needs in order to be itself.  And if setting does its job correctly, in grounding and supplementing the details of characterization, and providing a stage for the action of the story, then it should really only need to be mentioned as it bears on these other two.

So, in the end, all other considerations of particularly interesting times and places aside, and cutting right to the root of the issue of how it’s most important to storytelling itself, the most practical answer to the question “when and where should I start my story” should be “wherever your main character was right before the trouble started.”

Illustrator's Workshop: Glowing Orb

For a change of pace from the Dennis and Brain adventures of the essay series, I thought I'd play around for a bit in trying to make a simple effect happen: creating a ball of light that seems to glow on its own.

This is obviously extremely rudimentary and more of a starting point for exploring how light works and doesn't work in a drawing, but I at least got a crude idea of what needs to happen in order for light to be more believable than not.

Mainly, the first two tries were in making a sort of field of light or a glowing patch of air around the light in order to give the impression that it was radiating the contrast of its light against the dark background clearly.  But this generally didn't so much make the room look like there was a bright spot in it as it made the air look foggy.

Next I tried adding a table surface underneath, with a well-defined edge, to give the illusion of a reflective surface just under the ball.  This worked a little better, but it didn't look very realistic.

Finally I decided to give up on clouding the air around the ball in general, since light is only visible when it's reflected after all, and put a few basic boxes in the space to catch the light in a semi-ordinary way.  This felt a bit closer, but I liked the gradient feel of the cloudy approach still.

So I did what I've been doing so far to create a sense of shadows in an otherwise bright-ish image; I put a black overlay layer on top, and erased away where the highlights and mid tones were supposed to be until they came through.

My preference would be to give the shapes better edges, and maybe a sense of texture, but that'll have to wait, as I found I was already out of time for now.

On "Boyhood" and Unimportant Storytelling

image courtesy of imdb.com

I was talking with my wife the other day about how in 2014 I'd hoped to see all the movies and know what was going on in the world of filmmaking.  Yet, when they announced the nominations for this year's Academy Award for best picture, I sheepishly realized I hadn't seen a single one.

Before going further, I should note that I put less stock in the Oscars than the Oscars do. I don't really believe in the Academy Awards as a means of establishing who and what are the best in the business that year.  I believe the Academy Awards are a means of establishing who won the Academy Award for that year, and not much else.

This is probably because I'm an underdog-snob.  Usually the movies I'm rooting for win in technical departments but not much else.  (Of course, there was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, but that's another post.)  So I'm aware of the awards, and I'm curious to see who won, but usually it either reinforces my skepticism over the merit vs. popularity issue or baffles me outright.  In the end, the award's existence makes me aware of movies I wouldn't be aware of otherwise, so in that it's useful.  (I'm not sure if that's just because I'm a slacker of an amateur movie critic or what, but so be it.)

Nevertheless, suffice to say that I felt out of touch.  So help me, I at least wanted to find out if any of these movies were any good.  So this evening we rented a copy of Boyhood, a film that's got pretty much universal approval from the various critical aggregates around the web, and which I felt had generally some pretty good buzz. At least I remember someone saying it was good, I'm not sure.

And we watched it.  All of it.  All two and three-quarter hours of it.  Hoooooooaaaahh.  

I guess what I'm surprised about in retrospect is how many critics recommended that I watch it.  As someone who likes movies, I am glad I watched it, but I'm also glad I don't ever have to watch it again.


Did I like Boyhood?  I think I did.  Did I enjoy watching it?  Unfortunately, no.

I don't rate myself as an experienced enough amateur movie critic to call this post a review.  Generally I think it's out of line for me to hand out unfavorable reviews when I don't have any suggestions for how to make it better.  And in this case the scope of the project alone daunts me into humble diffidence; I think I understand what the filmmakers were trying to do, and they took a big chance investing twelve years of time in a project that might not work out.  I don't think I've ever spent twelve years working on any one thing, so my hat's off to them there.

For this reason I'm just going to call this a blog post, take it or leave it.  Not a review.  And since it's not a review, I won't bother with a synopsis or an introduction of who's in it as would be standard otherwise.  If you haven't seen it, skip ahead to the next bold text.

But I do have experience as a movie watcher, and as a storyteller, or at least as someone who's trying to figure out what makes stories stores, and what makes good stories good.  And that part of me wants to write some more about this movie, and about what went wrong (possibly) with the storytelling, and what went wrong (I think) with the critics talking about it.

First of all, I said before that I like it, but that I didn't enjoy it.  Does a movie have to be enjoyable to be good?  Of course not.  City of God and Requiem for a Dream spring to mind as examples of well-known movies which are excellent but not light or easy viewing.  

"But they're hard to watch for a reason!" part of me wants to say.  Both movies were made to portray something the filmmakers obviously think is wrong with the world, maybe not because they're trying to fix it but because they think the wrongness is important to be known about.  

Watching Boyhood, the two most frequently experienced emotions were waiting for things to happen and gut-clenching dread when they did.  The drama was all on a domestic and human scale (the whole thing takes place in several cities/towns across Texas), and largely typical of many, many families in the first world today.  

And the problems it conveys are real problems, that real people have to deal with all the time.  I guess the main thing that bothered me about this aspect of the movie is that almost everything that goes wrong happens to side-characters, and is resolved by side-characters, while the character at the movie's focus is in the backseat, watching everything happen. 

Which I guess in the long run is also fine, and true to life; all this stuff is going wrong when the main character is a kid, and you don't have control of what's happening to you when you're a kid, the grown-ups do.  But is there a counter-point to this?  You see the kid grow up, sure, but do you see him develop as a character?  I mean, he starts talking more, but when he does, the movie noticeably changes from a quasi-documentary feel back into a movie with a script again.

Once you look past its central conceit of the time-lapse, there's not much above-average material left to the (nearly three-hour!) movie in terms of acting (Ethan Hawke excepted), or narrative structure, or cinematography, you name it.  Almost every beat of the familial melodrama is slow-pitched a good fifteen minutes in advance, and the intense scenes essentially start training the viewer to feel a pang of relief when the action jumps ahead to the next stretch of time and nothing horrible wound up happening.  Maybe that's just me.

There were some things I liked about it; it played some interesting tricks with characterization in those side characters, and in that it felt very true to life a lot of the time. It has a knack for making successful people into deadbeats and deadbeats into successful people, once you get past appearances and spend time with them, sort of.

If the film makers were going for the feel of life, I think they more or less succeeded.  The trouble as I see it is that life in general, and this one in particular, can largely be bland, disappointing, and unpleasant.

But if capturing life was what they meant to do, didn't they succeed?

So what's the problem, then?

First, I think the success of Boyhood on sites like Rotten Tomatoes helps illustrate one of the main things wrong with the Tamometer way of looking at movies.  

As everyone knows, or should, a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes does not mean that the movie is perfect and un-improvable.  It just means that, of all critics polled, 100% gave it a "see it" rather than a "don't see it" review.

When a movie took twelve years to make, and actually winds up being pretty readable as an introductory look at the middle-developmental stages of a human in the US, I don't think there's many critics around who will say "don't see this."

Professional critics watch movies.  A lot of movies.  More than one a day, often, and they're writing about them all the time.  Most of the time I'd say that this amount of practice gives anyone a pretty keen edge for separating good work from bad, and being able to clearly get across their reasons for thinking so in 1000 words or less (which is way more than I can say for this post, by the way).

But the one thing I think critics are genuinely unprepared for, by watching movies all the time, is for something that's actually new.

Think about it.  Especially when it comes to genre movies, as most movies are, like romantic comedies, action flicks, or coming-of-age high school films, what you're likely to see will be very, very similar to what you've seen already.  Producers, the people paying for the movies to get made, like successes, and formulas and tested tropes tend to succeed with us popular movie watchers way better than new things a lot of the time.

So when these poor, sensory-deprived people get hit with something as behind-the-scenes monumental as Boyhood, how can they say no?

So I dug a little deeper, and took a random sampling of the positive reviews.  It's possible that the buzz was because everyone gave it a 7/10, and since EVERYONE gave it a 7/10, it's a 10/10 on Rotten Tomatoes.  Right?

Wrong.

The two biggest disadvantages I think I have in not enjoying this movie is that I'm still comparatively young (this is probably naive, but I feel like my emotional/maturity age is still stuck hovering somewhere around 25) and I don't have kids of my own.  

A lot of what the critics are saying about this movie as positives simply never occurred to me.  People barely recognize the young man at the end of the movie, and the critic felt touched, because they watched him grow up.  I didn't feel that at all.

But at least part of my suspicion plays out; most everyone talks about the technical achievement of the aging on screen, and how this changes the way you watch the movie how you watch it.  I didn't get that.  I think the closest I came to understanding what they're talking about is that the main person in the movie went from not talking much and having zero control over his fate to talking a lot and having (making use of??) considerably more of his fate.

So what?

Really, what's the big deal?  Why am I so down on this movie?  Why am I criticizing the critics?? They're better at this than I am, and they have every right to say what they said.  This whole post is starting to feel like an unfortunate episode of Seinfeld where George follows some poor stranger home, to where they live, in order to have the last word on some trivial point.

I guess I'm just wary of something I've noticed time and time again in movies over the years: Importance.

Importance happens when a movie has so much buzz, either as a topically relevant biopic, or an edgy exploration of something no one wants to talk about, or some other gimmick, that no one is able to say anything bad about it while it's popular.  It's too Important.

Does anyone remember Crash?  Not the one about sexy car crashes (not joking) that Mr. Ebert loved and was always bringing up at the oddest times, the one from 2004 where everyone in L.A. is basically a horrible person, for different reasons.  It won the Oscar for best picture, and for that reason I watched it, and I didn't like it at all.  And now, today, this year, who's watching it?

A better example, if we're going to get hung up on the Oscars, is Forrest Gump, which by any measure is inferior to both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, both of which it beat in the box office and at the awards.  It's aged okay, but it's not really the classic that everyone at the time took it for; it's mostly sort of a slide show of Things That The Baby Boomers Lived Through that will probably decrease in relevance gradually and go out as my generation exits the stage.  The other two, I hope, will be remembered and watched long after that time, because they're really excellent movies and deserve attention.

Were Pulp Fiction and Shawshank important?  Maybe, in a sense.  Tarantino was a really big deal in the 90s, to be sure.  We're still getting over how many people copied his style; remember The Boondock Saints?  But Shawshank?  It's typical Hollywood hogwash.  It's a story with villains, and a hero, and a struggle that he's trying to overcome, and even a moral lesson.  It has a narrator, for Christ's sake.  If it deconstructs anything, it does so through dialogue, and by having people just say what they think, rather than obscure hints and cross-scene allusions.  But it also happens to be very, very good storytelling.  It's just also unimportant.

But it's entirely fruitless to get hung up on awards.  Milestones are important.  Writing down what movies "won the award" each year will at least give movies notice into the future, whether they win or not (probably less so now that they're nominating, what, seven or eight pictures a year? Who can keep up?).

But Boyhood feels like exactly that kind of movie.  No one can say anything bad about it because they've never seen anything like it before, and probably won't again.  It's this incredible mutant, half-documentary thing that was incredibly brave to make, and has the unfortunate legacy, I predict, of not eventually really having much of a point.  The main character ages, we wait for him to become sympathetic and not just quiet and thoughtful, and then the script gets thoughtful, and we see more little hints of what year it is pass by, and we keep waiting.

Ultimately I think this is one instance of professional critics being short-sighted by hype, and confusing "difficult to make" with "valuable to the craft."  And because this movie is unlikely to ever be made again,  Unless the trend catches on, and we're all watching reality films in twelve years like we watch reality TV now, I feel like this one will be of long-term interest only to film students and their professors.

But there are lots and lots of different reasons for watching movies.

There are probably as many different reasons to watch movies as there are movies to be watched.  Entertainment isn't everything.

But I suppose what I learned from all this is that I like unimportant storytelling, if it means the storytelling is good.  Important will only get you so far, and then the next Important thing comes along and washes you away.  Is that so bad?  Not at all, especially if you're an earnest and thoughtful filmmaker with a clear goal and twelve years of perseverance.

I'm sure I'll remember Boyhood for the rest of my life, and not as a traumatic incident or anything like that.  But I won't have to watch it again.  And I don't think the guy who made it really wants me to, I think he would say that to make his point, one viewing is enough.

But, am I still out of touch on movies?  Does anybody else who saw it feel this way?

Hyperbole

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Roam part 2

Photo by Todd Quackenbush
image courtesy of unsplash.com

(Link to Part One)

One thing about growing up in the middle of nowhere is you can pretty much pick a direction and start walking, and eventually you’ll find something more interesting than where you’re from.  After I left my friend’s place, I started heading west.  

I stuck to small side roads and cut across country, not feeling cold or wet made this easier, and I wasn’t really sure if anyone could see me.  I felt hungry and tired all the time, but never thirsty or sleepy; I eventually realized that my hunger and fatigue were in my head, or mind, I guess.  I didn’t really understand the rules yet, and a lot of time went by before I really paid any attention to where I was or where I was going.  Another thing about growing up in the middle of nowhere is that when you do decide to head out on your own, things will mostly look the same for quite a while.  

For me it was big, flat, grassy country, low hills in all directions, but nothing else.  And the sun in the sky for what seemed like days and days at a time.  The occasional truck going by in the distance slowly, slowly.

After a while, I started to pay attention less to what I was feeling and thinking, which I can’t honestly remember much of now, actually, and started paying attention to where I was and what was around me.  It was about this time, maybe coincidentally, that I got out of the flat lands and first saw the mountains.

You see them in movies and on TV, and in books I guess, little cartoon-like paintings in textbooks with brown sides and white-blue caps.  But a mountain in real life is nothing like a small image.  For one thing, a mountain isn’t just one thing; sure, all its pieces add up to one huge shape that it’s easy for a person’s eye to grab and think about, but once you get up close you realize that a mountain is really a place, or rather a huge collection of places.  They have forests and rivers, bare sides and ravines.  They aren’t just taller than ordinary hills; for the most part they’re made out of ordinary hills.  A mountain is a sum, a collection, a collaboration of earth and stone and living things.  I climbed right to the summit of the first mountain I saw.  Well, it was kind of hard to tell which of them exactly was the first one I’d seen, so I went to the middle one.  It took me about a real day and a half to find the way up, a lot of it was steep and rocky.  When I was on the top, I sat cross-legged in the snow, and imagined what the wind must feel like, and I watched the sun go down, blinking as seldom as I could manage. I didn’t feel like I’d conquered it, or made myself better than it, by getting to the top.  I felt like I was another piece of it.  A lot of my time in this weird exile of mine has been spent trying to get my mind as blank as I can get it for as long as I can; the first time I realized I could do that, and that it felt good, was on that mountain.  The sky was blue, blue like a flower near the land, and blue like a dark stone at the top, and I forgot to feel hungry.  But eventually I got curious about the higher mountains I’d seen farther off, in the distance on the other side as I’d climbed up.  Curiosity tipped me back down out of the sky.

I decided not to leave the mountains, however.  When I realized I’d reached the top of one that was taller than its neighbors to the east and to the west, I went north instead.  It’s sometimes hard to navigate when the sun hardly seems to move, but I managed.  It was even harder at night; even when there was a moon, you’d be surprised how shadowy it can be in rocky places.

The best thing about traveling north was that there were no people.  That might sound odd, since the worst thing about all this has been the loneliness, but I’m not sure I was completely sane at that time.  There are big patches of time that I can feel, but I can’t really remember anymore.  I was sad all the time, and trying not to take cheap shots at myself for the sake of self pity; I was learning that it didn’t do any good.  I had finally started to believe that what was happening to me wasn’t going to go away, that I wasn’t going to wake up the next morning and realize it had all been a crazy dream.  And that made me sad, pretty much all the time, but the weird thing about feeling that way is you get used to it, and it sort of wears away, gets comfortable, until you don’t notice it anymore.  Anyway, I think being alone helped me find out how to feel like myself and be okay with it, mostly.  I didn’t talk much.  Eventually it passed.

It was also during this time that I learned that I can’t really be hurt, at least not easily.  This wasn’t because of an encounter with a bear or a mountain lion or anything dramatic, I just fell down a lot.  I mean a lot.  I fell off hillsides, boulders, high crags.  Sometimes I fell a long way; I would basically just land on my back or shoulders (sometimes I’d land on my feet and legs, but feel them give way and wind up on my back or shoulders), and get back up.  I fell when there wasn’t really anything to fall off of.  I rolled down a roughly thousand-foot slope of rock once.  I can get dizzy, but I can’t get sick.  It’s uncomfortable to be so durable, but I guess it made my journey possible.  I’m not sure I’m especially clumsy for a ghost, but who knows.  I’ve never met another one to compare.

Gradually, the nights got longer, winter was coming in and I was covering a lot more ground as the mountains and hills got shorter and shorter.  Navigation was tricky.  I had figured out what I mostly thought was the north star, by following an imaginary line drawn from the very front two stars of the big dipper (one of three constellations I could actually find back then).  

(I can’t really find any more now, but I thought I’d sound smarter if I implied that I could.  You don’t learn much by going to a library and waiting next to the constellation books for someone to open one up on the spot and look it over for you.)

Like I said, navigation was tricky.  Sometimes I would stop and wonder if I were heading the right way, and think I’d become lost and have to wait for sunrise.  Which took a long time.  I can’t feel the cold, but I can certainly feel bored.  I’ve come up with a lot of odd ways to pass the time since I went on the road.  I spin in circles, try to stand on my head and not fall over.  I get out my two quarters, one dime, two nickels, and three pennies count how many heads or tails I can get in a row, or draw pictures with them on a flat stone, or act out little stories with them.  They may or may not each have names, but if they do I’ll keep them to myself (God help me).  When the sun came up, I’d set off again.

Eventually the trees ran out, and the mountains ran out, and the grass and moss ran out.  Then there was a lot of flat empty land, long and dry and empty.   The days were getting short, although of course that was a relative thing; the sun still stayed up for what seemed like weeks, but it didn’t get very high up before arcing back down again, and it was always behind me now.  Then, after a lot more walking, the land ran out.  

The ocean shone in the distance like a grey line of light, then got bigger as I drew close.  When I got to the beach, I was stumped; I’d come all this way, and didn’t really want to turn back, but how could I go forward?  I stayed by the shore for a long time, looking out into the water.  For some reason I didn’t want to get wet, although I’d been rained on countless times without feeling it or having the least effect on my permanent wardrobe.

Finally I decided to swim in the ocean, just to see what it was like.  This was after two or three real days had passed on the northern beach.  I have no clear idea of where I was, somewhere in either the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, or Alaska.  I disrobed, putting my things in a neat pile on the sand, and went to the water.

It’s impossible to describe exactly what it was like to learn that water is basically the same for me as solid earth is for everybody else.  I can tell you about how it feels on bare feet, smooth and indifferent-feeling as glass, but with a faint pulse, like a steady hum of music from a speaker you can’t hear.  I can tell you what it looked like; imagine the clearest ice in the world, and lots of it, all the way to the bottom, and you walk around on it and look down.  But I guess emotionally my only reaction was a non-reaction; I didn’t understand, and then didn’t believe, what was happening.  I thought I was doing something wrong somehow, when I first put my foot down and couldn’t put it down any further, and I nearly fell on my face, like when you imagine one step to many going down the stairs.

After a few minutes, or hours, of awkward trial and error, I came to grasp what can be said, and has been said here, in a few words, that I can walk on water.  Which actually was kind of a bummer, because I had enjoyed communing with nature on the mountain top, and was looking forward to being part of the ocean.  But I guess not.  I went back to shore and gathered up my clothes.

Before the sun set I’d tested the water again in my shoes (you never know), and then set out.

It took a long time to go through everything that happened on the ocean that winter, but it can be recited in a few words.  I walked, and I sat and looked at the stars, and I thought a lot.  I thought about my situation, and my solitary position, and what it meant or might mean.  I came up with many, many questions, and very few answers.  I thought about my life before the accident, and everything I’d left behind.  I thought about nothing as much as I could.  The sun stopped coming up.  The sea froze over.  I sat in one place on the ice.  Time passed slowly.

After a long time, when I’d started to think that another change had happened, and I’d entered another phase of my exile, the horizon lightened, then grew dark, and one day the sun came back.  When it did, I started walking towards it again.

Since then I’ve basically made it my mission to see the world.  I’ve got all this time, I might as well use it.  

First I decided to cross the pacific.  That was a bad mistake.

Setting: Where

Last week the series on when to set a story ended somewhat abruptly, but we'll return to that before we're through discussing settings in general.  Moving on, it's a good time to discuss where a story will be set.

As mentioned earlier in the discussion of beginning stories, determining setting is an odd thing, because, at least for me, it's not really something that a conscious decision is made about.  Instead, starting a story is, in general, a sort of inter-connected problem with three components, where an idea for a setting, a character, or a problem suggests itself practically out of nowhere, bringing the other two parts of the system with them at virtually the same time.  It’s hardly ever a matter of “I like this story, but should it be set at place X or place Y?” so much as “I was thinking about place X, and an idea for a story came to me,” and so forth.

However, as with the previous topics of the How to Start a Story theme, it would definitely be profitable I think to talk about the different kinds of locations stories tend to be set in, and what the consequences in terms of workload and impact on the story various kinds of settings will have.  The better one understands the tools of storytelling, the more effective the story.  Or something, just bear with me.

Kinds of Locations

Like with the sketch of the aspects of selecting time periods in which to place the action of a narrative, the meat of the discussion here is basically in the different types of locations that suggest themselves when a story is crossing that imaginary threshold between the possible and the interesting.  But the run-down will be brief this time; as always, time is limited and we’ve got to keep moving forward.

Here and Now

The simplest and yet often most difficult setting to write your story in is where you are when you’re writing it.  Unless there’s something difficult and dangerous going on, or you’re inhabiting a place that is unusual or unique in some way, it will likely be a struggle to find a story in a place that’s excessively familiar.  Especially when you’re trying not to write something semi-autobiographical, and want to distance yourself from the characters somewhat.

However, that said, I highly recommend that anyone who seriously wants to be a writer sit down and write about their surroundings once in a while; daily isn’t necessary, but if you’re never pulling the things you write about from your direct experience, it’ll be much more difficult to start to get a sense for which things are worth describing in day-to-day life and which get taken narratively for granted.

Distant Lands - Real

This category exists in two sort of sub-categories, which I’ll call direct and indirect.  Direct distant locations are those which you don’t have convenient access to while you’re writing, but where you’ve been enough times or where you had a memorable enough experience to give a reliable feel for the place.  Basically somewhere you may have gone on vacation, or found yourself stuck in unexpectedly, or  traveled through once on the way to somewhere else.  Think over where you’ve been and what you’ve seen; if you remember a place, odds are there’s something there worth writing about.  Get to a pen or keyboard and explore that.

Indirect locations are trickier, especially here in the information age, because it’s easier than ever to imagine that we’ve been to places that we’ve never actually seen.  I suppose it used to be part of the real charm of National Geographic (in most aspects it still is) and James Bond movies, for instance, that you got to experience faraway and fantastic places as if you’d really been there yourself, while sitting comfortably either in your home or not far from it.  Right now, however, this minute, if I want to know what it looks like at least to stand and look around at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, I can open a new tab on my web browser, plunk the little Google Maps man down across the street, and look at what the summer leaves looked like on the trees on whatever particular day it was that that particular set of photos was taken.  We are immersed in an inordinate wealth of visual and auditory information, basically whenever we like, and the temptation to use that information as a substitute for actually having been there.  It will likely take further research and a lot of imagination to bring a location you’ve never been to to life, but of course it’s worth trying out.  

Distant Lands - Archtypes

Moving further away from the concrete particulars of our own living rooms, past real places we’ve never been to and even further towards the opposite end of the spectrum, we find ideas of places, sort of generic categories of places rather than specific places themselves, when we really only need to hint at the kind of location in order to get the story moving.

To me the foremost example of these is “at sea,” because to everyone but the experienced sailor, the ocean is the ocean.  There can be waves or a calm, and you can be in a life raft or a operational vessel with a destination, but this setting is otherwise virtually featureless.  It’s followed closely by “in the desert,” because although there are actually many different kinds of desert on our planet (and many kinds of seas or oceans actually, but I’m no expert), we all get more or less the same mental image when someone says that it’s where the story is taking place: sun, sand, scrub, cactus.  

Then there’s “In a forest,” which is getting more towards the specific end of the spectrum, as most of us have been in enough different forests (I assume) for a little bit of additional descriptive language to be helpful in nailing down the actual feel of the place (sunny or gloomy, dense or open, evergreen or leaved, etc.).  

Finally we have the two most deceptively not-generic locations; In the City and Small Town, USA.  The former is actually a great deal more generic than the latter, believe it or not; when I imagine a city, I get a more or less clear picture in my head which could stand in for any number of places I’ve been.  Small Town USA, on the other hand, although they might feel like they’re all the same, are actually usually pretty different, once you start looking around.  Maybe.  I’m not sure.  All I know is they’re usually glossed over in almost any story that features one; the characters all want to get out because they feel like it’s nowhere.  But like it or not, it’s where most of us live, and it’s as unique a place as we choose to see it to be.

First and foremost, these settings are ideal for simple stories where the specific historical or real-world context of the story’s action plays very little part in the actual meaning.  

The danger here is making things too generic, because unless the characters and their problem are so overwhelmingly sympathetic and engrossing respectively that we forget to pay attention altogether to the background, it will probably get boring pretty fast that there are no distinguishing features to their environment whatsoever.

I would think of these as a starting point for developing a more complete fictional location as the story develops, if of course it stays in just one place.  One good thing about stories is that there’s no real limit to the number of different places you can try to incorporate into your narrative; the only real limit is your audience’s patience and their sense of probability.  So find yourself a forgiving audience and go nuts, see what happens.  Jetpacks to Jupiter, anyone?

Invention

Finally there are locations which you get to make up yourself.  The opposite of writing your own place, this relies entirely on your abilities as a imaginative, selective, and believable describer of surroundings and on the audience’s capacity to suspend their disbelief.  

While this category can be easily the most fun, because you can set stories in ball pits for instance and no one can stop you, it’s also the most potentially dangerous for writers to get trapped in, because in the end, the setting has to be the background of the story, and can never really be the story itself (with very few exceptions).  

The temptation here is to get so lost in the wonder and novelty of your details that you lose sight of the other two key aspects of building the story: the characters and their problem.

If you’re going to go this route, I can give one or two fast tips to help keep things in focus.  First, give things a reason for being what they are, even if it never comes up in the story proper.  You want your world to make sense, and not to just things be the way they are because they can be.  The more reason, logic, and internal consistency are at work in your imaginative setting, the easier time you’ll have persuading the audience to come along with you and explore.

Always keep in mind that your story will wind up being a team effort between the words you choose to put down and the imagination of your reader.  Try and develop a sense for the probable in the things you come up with and describe, and remember that stories are largely about balancing things that aren’t likely to happen (if the characters or problems are ordinary ones, where’s the story?) with details that are so likely that we’ve experienced them ourselves, or believe we have.

Remember also that good design is often it’s own excuse for being in a story, but is almost never an excuse for dominating the action of the narrative.  If something is particularly striking in the eye of the characters, confine yourself to saying so only when it’s relevant to what’s actually happening at that moment in the character’s efforts to solve their problem.  If you find yourself twisting your character’s actions or thoughts to get a better look at something rad you thought of, but which has no larger part in the actual course of events, then cut the rad thing, it’s taking away from your story and not adding to it, no matter how badly you want to show it off.  Either find a way to make it relevant or save it for later.

This leads us more or less into the penultimate topic of setting discussion: Impact of setting, but that’s another post.

Illustrator's Workshop: Where Setting

On Winter

photo by Kelly Sikkema
image courtesy of unsplash.com

Winter wears me out.

I don't really have the right to complain, not anymore.  I was raised in upstate New York, where we got snow, but I've since moved twice, both times further south.  In fact I'm now living in a city where the snow birds, some from upstate New York, regularly show up in numbers at local restaurants -- it's a little weird.

To be honest, part of what put me in mind of this post was discussing the winter weather in New York and in parts similar -- colder than usual temperatures staying around longer than usual, tons and tons of snow, and wind speeds that make air that will probably kill you into air that will kill you if you're not careful.

But it's not really the weather I'm talking about when I say that winter wears me out.  I don't really mind the cold much, I sort of try to wear enough clothing and not worry about it.  Really I think it's the dark, and, like everything else, I think it's the time.  Darkness and time, not much more to it than that.
In winter when I get up in the morning, on time to get ready and go to work, it's still night time outside.  (My shift starts at 8am, I do not have a job that actually starts early in the morning.)  The car is scraped off and warming up, and we're on the road, and it's dawn but not sunrise.

(Nota bene for learning writers: the difference is that dawn is a light form that starts way before, and sunrise is exactly what it sounds like.)

And then the day is over, and I get home, and it's basically sundown. In February I have a little under an hour before it's dark outside.  I cook dinner, or my wife does (she's really good at it), we watch a little TV, I might try to write some, and we go to bed.  Vary the amount of time that each of these steps take, and you have about all the variety my winter evenings have.

Why don't I do more things with my time?  Why am I limited to just these things?

Of course I am not really limited, it's all really just a matter of habit and routine, something most people know about really.  If we wanted to we could do other things with our time, we've got four or five decent hours of time between when we get home from the day job and when it's reasonably time to turn in.

So why don't we?

The best answer I can come up with, other than the laziness of a comfortable routine, is that it's just tiring to try and get up and get things done when it's already night outside.  

Part of it has to be biological; less sunlight provokes subtle physiological changes that have a bigger impact on our personal psychological landscape than we'd probably like to admit, like the surreptitious effects of dehydration, low blood sugar, or caffeine withdrawal.  To say nothing of vitamin D, I think a world that is generally darker (and yeah colder too) has a big impact on our spontaneous available energy level, whatever that means.  Suffice to say that for millions of years, for many species of animal life on the planet, dark time equals sleep time.

I've read articles that suggest that it's really just a matter of adaptation.  Up until a hundred years or so ago, call it a hundred and fifty to be on the safe side, there was no such thing as cheap and reliable artificial illumination in most parts of the world.  It's only since electricity and the incandescent bulb and its spiritual successors ramped up that we've had those four or five hours between the end of the work day and bed time to work with.  

Have we adjusted to the change well?  Is it good for us to use that time, instead of turning in shortly after the sun, sleeping half the night, rising for a snack around twelve, and bedding back down again like (I've read) the seventeenth and eighteenth century-dwellers did?

Who knows.  As a storyteller I find myself imagining 11th century Norsemen, living through the winter with their families in low, thick-walled long houses, deep in Scandinavian night, and endlessly rehashing the long sagas of their gods and wars by the low firelight.  I think about the stores of frontier cottages in the middle of this country, and how much time and care of the rest of the year went into making sure that there was enough for another winter to be survived.

I've never really struggled through a winter in any sense other than mild inconvenience and the bland chilly malaise I'm right now trying to get a handle on.  To the people who came before me and made lives and families in the world, Winter was something like a great rival, the big challenge that defined the highs and lows and work of the rest of the year.  

Nowadays there are the occasional high risks and bad surprises, but for most people most of the time, in the temperate zones anyway, the worst we can expect is having to wait an extra day before getting back down the road to the closest supermarket.

So how can we turn all this energy, or the lack thereof, into profit?  Should I just start going to bed at 7 at night, and taking a break from hibernation around one in the morning to write a little?  My nature is generally more disposed to self-annihilation in the first hour or so of being deprived of bed, so that plan's probably out, when I turn in, I turn in for good.  So sleep from 7pm until what, 4 in the morning?  And have two or three hours of nighttime to work with before work instead of after it?  There may actually be something to that, if I could make it stick, but who knows.

In the end the answer will be to stick it out, and to wait for spring.  That's another big part of our culture, I feel like, and certainly part of most every story I've ever heard.  Things get bad, get worse, then they get better again.  We pass the solstice around Christmastime after all, and that's when our sense of the big dark cold has barely started.  It's a siege, a long and slow assault on our senses, to get through the world's rest to the other side.