James Alan Gardner's Blog, page 9

Sharing: August 16, 2018

More things I like:

Anime: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
I mentioned this in a previous post but I want to recommend it again…partly because I’ve now seen the whole series, and have started to watch it again from the beginning. So many little things in the series take on a completely different meaning once you understand what’s really going on. One particular character’s lines never mean what you originally thought they meant. Well worth watching and re-watching.
Casual Reading: The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
It’s big and expensive and frequently goes over my head even though I have a master’s degree in math…but I still had to own the book and don’t regret buying it. I’ve been working my way through it for several years now; I try to read a bit every day. It really is the best advanced-level introduction to the entire field of math that I know of. And here’s a cheat: if you think you might be interested, download the free sample of the book from Kindle. You’ll get lot of free reading so you can see if it’s your cup of tea.
Writing technique: Writing longhand
I do most of my writing at the computer, either in Scrivener or Microsoft Word. But if I really get stuck, I sit down at the dining room table and write longhand on loose-leaf paper. Writing longhand is a different experience than keyboarding. It happens at a different speed, and with a different mind-body orientation. If my brain is in a rut, or if I find myself inhibited when writing a particular scene, writing by hand almost always gets me out of the rut. Sometimes I write whole stories by hand. I think it gives them a different feel from the work I write by computer. Give it a try.

 

Lazy Good Intentions

We’re all familiar with the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” But does that mean we should act from bad intentions? Obviously not. Nor does it mean that we should never do anything at all. Doing nothing can have worse results than doing something wrong.

The problem isn’t with good intentions. It’s with lazy good intentions. Half-assed good intentions. You vaguely want to do the right thing, but you don’t want to do the work of figuring out what that thing is. You want to do what will make you feel good about yourself, without seriously considering the actual effects on others.

I was prompted to write about this because I’ve been reading work by people who aren’t straight and/or white and/or male. There’s a feeling among those of us with social privilege that if you act from benevolent intent, then it’s unfair for anyone to criticize you, no matter what the effects of your actions are. And of course it’s true that no matter how carefully you might try to make the world a better place, sometimes it doesn’t work. Things go wrong; bad luck happens.

But often, problems don’t arise from bad luck but from thoughtlessness. You don’t try to see things from other people’s point of view. You don’t try to foresee easily predicted consequences. You don’t do your homework about how your actions might be received, but blithely go ahead with what you want to do, just assuming that your good intentions will make everything work out right (or at least make it impossible for anyone to complain).

This is the epitome of privilege. People without privilege damned well have to consider the consequences of their actions. For them, good intentions mean squat, and they can’t expect the benefit of the doubt. People without privilege have to understand how their actions might be received; they have to do their homework, deal with any possible glitches, and never assume that meaning well is good enough.

Those of us with privilege (and hey, I’m a straight white middle-aged male) have to start thinking more about how what we do is received. I already know I have good intentions. Now I have to make sure I have good results…and that means paying attention to others before and after I act, doing my best not to make mistakes from glib assumptions and definitely trying not to make the same mistake twice.

[Image of “The Good Intent” by Glyn Baker, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_R...]

A Simple Exercise in Plotting

For those who want to work on creating plots, here’s a simple exercise I got from Impro by Keith Johnstone. It gives you practice at bringing things together into a (relatively) integrated whole.

Start with three sentences describing unconnected actions. For example:

The tree swayed as the wind increased. Two ships passed each other in the night. My brother got out the deck of cards.

(You can create these sentences yourself or have someone else do it for you.)

Once you have your three sentences, write three more sentences to tie all the actions together, as in

I got out my own deck, and as the ship where I was held captive sailed past my brother’s, we felt each other’s presences and simultaneously turned the top card. I could tell we had both turned over The Storm. The wind that had previously been scouring the land immediately veered seaward, heading directly toward us.

(I promise I had no idea that I’d go in that direction when I wrote the original three sentences.)

This is the sort of exercise can be used as a warm-up whenever you start writing. It takes less than two minutes, and can kick your imagination into gear. Note that you aren’t going for a finished story; you’re just bringing separate actions together into something more unified.

Don’t overthink the exercise, or try to do anything brilliant. As with most improvisation, it’s better to do what strikes you as obvious rather than straining for something clever. You’ll soon find out that your “obvious” often takes other people by surprise. They may even think it’s brilliant.

[Picture of ship Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young...]

Sharing: August 4, 2018

More links:

Anime: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
“Puella Magi” is Latin (sort of) for “Magical Girl”, and this anime series is a very dark vision of what being a magical girl might be like. A cute talking animal offers to make “contracts” with girls who show promise. They can have a wish come true, no matter how miraculous, in exchange for which they must become magical girls and fight witches. Yes, becoming a magical girl is the price, not the reward. And things go downhill from there. (This is a 12-episode series now available on Crunchyroll.
Manga: Knights & Magic
This starts as a run-of-the-mill Gary Lou series (i.e. about a male version of a Mary Sue). However, it eventually changes to deal with the engineering process, showing the effort needed to turn a brilliant prototype into a practical, reliable product. It’s an unexpected swerve, and more interesting (to me) than just a normal Fantasy Mecha series. (FYI, the series is ongoing, available on Crunchyroll.)
Hobby: Cross-Stitch Embroidery
I don’t do as much cross-stitch as I used to, because my eyes aren’t as good as they once were. (My left eye is well on its way to having a cataract, but the optometry clinic says I shouldn’t deal with it yet. Apparently, for best results, you’re supposed to leave cataracts until they really start hampering your vision.) Anyway, I still do an hour or two of cross-stitch a week. It’s pleasantly relaxing, and like an oyster making a pearl, I end up with pretty pictures as a side-effect.

 

Karma

Continuing on with my thoughts about Buddhist principles, it’s time for one of the biggies: karma.

Most Westerners grew up in an environment strongly influenced by monotheistic notions. This is true even for people not brought up to be “religious”. Thus, many Westerners see karma as some external source of “divine” justice doling out punishments and rewards based on the things you do. If, for example, you hurt somebody, some external force of fate will soon hurt you back in order to balance the books.

But this is a crude and materialistic idea. It requires a godlike something to maintain an ongoing ledger and to have the power of manipulating the universe to smack down people who deserve it. It also tacitly requires something like eternal life or reincarnation to make it work…because let’s face it, a lot of truly nasty people live fairly comfortable lives, whereas other people who haven’t done much wrong can be subject to horrible suffering. The only way to justify this with conventional notions of karma is to say that what you go through now may be influenced by something you did several lifetimes ago…and if you do bad things now, you’ll eventually get punished, maybe a dozen lifetimes down the line.

To be fair, this is exactly what some Buddhists believe. They would say that karma may not get you in this life, but it will hit you hard in the next or the one after that. However, I have trouble believing such an idea. I have trouble with reincarnation in general, even though people I respect completely believe in it.

So let me suggest a different take on karma: one based on plain old neurology.

When you choose to do something, you strengthen neural pathways in your brain so that the thing becomes easier to do again. When you repeatedly choose not to do something, the existing pathways in your brain for that action will gradually weaken.

That’s it. That’s the mechanism of karma. Nothing external. All internal.

When, for example, you give in to anger, you strengthen your mental pathways for giving in to anger. You make it more likely that you’ll give in again, with all the consequences that might follow. On the other hand, if you don’t give in to anger, you strengthen your ability to resist anger. Your “give in to anger” pathways will slowly weaken.

This doesn’t mean you’ll never get angry. It means you’re less likely to act on your anger. The Sanskrit word “karma” literally means “action”. The actions that you do or don’t take will strengthen or weaken your patterns of behavior.

Remember that in Buddhism, pain and suffering are two different things. You can feel pain without suffering, and you can suffer even when you aren’t in pain.

Greed, for example, is a cause of suffering because it’s an unwholesome fixation on getting something. You can’t stop thinking about it. You need it…and even if you get it, you want more. That’s suffering. And giving in to greed just makes things worse. It makes you more likely to give in to greed again in future…which leads to more fixation and more suffering.

Resisting greed helps you resist greed in future. Even better is cultivating more wholesome patterns of thought and behavior (good karma). If you counteract greed with generosity and feelings of gratitude for what you already have, you reduce any suffering from current greed and make future bouts of greed less likely.

So karma isn’t imposed from some external force. It’s a set of patterns you’ve built up inside you over the course of a lifetime. Unwholesome patterns make you fixate and suffer; wholesome ones loosen you up and (gradually) free you from fixation.

The ideal is eventually to have no karma: no automatic patterns of behavior running your life. You may still have unpleasant experiences—that’s part of what it means to be human, including your eventual death—but they just are what they are. You don’t add extra suffering to whatever pain comes along.

[The picture is the so-called “endless knot” often used to symbolize karma. By en:User:Rickjpelleg, first uploaded to en.wikipedia on 20:13, 28 October 2005 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.]

Denial

It’s been a while since I talked about Buddhist concepts, so let’s look at denial.

The Buddha observed that being in denial is a major source of unhappiness. If you ignore truths about yourself or the world, you end up out of sync with reality. This is a recipe for suffering—sooner or later, reality wins. So denial is a defense mechanism that’s guaranteed to fail eventually…at which point you have to face the truth anyway, or else double-down on denial which only puts you farther out on a limb.

Being in denial is often unconscious. Once in a while, we might recognize that we’re deliberately ignoring something important, but usually we suppress that recognition as quickly as possible. We distract ourselves with other things, or we tell ourselves stories to cover up or deflect uncomfortable feelings. And it’s certainly the case that sometimes we just aren’t ready to deal with some truth. It’s too raw, or we feel too battered to cope. It can be a mistake to confront something huge when we’re not ready.

So what to do? This is where meditation and meditative practices come in. There are many many forms of practice aimed at many many results…but in Buddhism, two types are especially important:

Focusing and calming the mind. Left on its own, your brain hops all over the place; or maybe it goes round and round in circles; and sometimes it just zones out into numbness and blah.

So the first meditative practice is almost always working to focus your mind on a single thing. You might focus on your breathing, or a sight or a sound or a repeated phrase…but always something simple. You practice doing that for longer and longer until you’ve trained your brain to focus and settle down.

The classic metaphor is letting mud settle out from muddy water. Stay still long enough and the mud will go to the bottom, leaving the water clear.
Once you can focus and set aside distractions, then you begin a different type of meditative practice: just watching your body and mind with awareness.

Body awareness is enormously important. Some people think that meditation means denying your body, but we’ve already said that denial will mess you up. You aren’t trying to repress your body, you’re trying to feel it fully.

So for example, if you find yourself bored, what does boredom feel like? Tension in certain places? Itches? Sleepiness? Restless thoughts? But the point is not to suppress any of your natural experience. Simply notice it and be aware, without making up any stories around it.

Building up awareness is your tool for avoiding denial. By increasing your awareness of body and mind, you eventually can notice when you’re lying to yourself. “I’m not angry!” (Then why are my shoulders so tense?) “I don’t care what he thinks!” (Then why have I spent the last ten minutes going around and around inside my head inventing ways to crush him in an argument I know we’ll never have?) “I didn’t mean anything, it was just a joke!” (Then why am I so fiercely insisting that she’s the one in the wrong for being offended?)

At the same time that you’re building up awareness, you’re building your capacity to face what’s what. As I said before, denial is a defense mechanism, and some people have gigantic burdens to defend themselves against. Meditation doesn’t make your problems smaller, but it makes your capacity for truth larger. Eventually, it may let you face anything (including the biggie: you and everyone you care about are going to die).

BUT NONE OF THIS IS EASY. The first time you try “focus meditation”, you’ll discover what Gandhi called Monkey Mind. Your thoughts skip all over the place, despite how much you try to focus them. Even after days, weeks, and months of practice, you can still get distracted sometimes. As for “awareness meditation”, that’s a lifetime of work. As soon as you become aware of some pattern of denial you’ve been caught in for years, you realize there’s another one just beneath it.

For this reason, it’s really helpful to find support: a teacher and/or a like-minded group of people who can keep you going, and also call you out when you go into denial about no longer being in denial…because it’s shockingly easy to lie to yourself at every step along a spiritual path. You can get stuck in comfortable ruts, or just as easily get stuck in ruts that aren’t comfortable but are familiar—patterns of behavior that you know aren’t helpful but you still fall back on anyway.

And getting stuck in ruts about meditation is just as easy as getting stuck in other patterns. You can believe you’re doing great paying attention to your body and mind, when really you’re just running through patterns on autopilot.

Speaking of patterns, this gets us to karma…but let’s leave that until next time.

[The picture of the couch at the top of this post is from the Wikipedia article on Denial. I believe it is Sigmund Freud’s couch. Freud was in denial about a great many things. Photo by ROBERT HUFFSTUTTER [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons]

Sharing: July 25, 2018

More links to good stuff:

Book: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
An excellent book describing how systemic racism is rendered invisible and how white people can learn to see it, even though acculturation tries to make us blind to racism’s presence.
Web Site: Crunchyroll
A subscription service for anime and manga. I’ve been on an anime/manga binge for the past few weeks, and Crunchyroll supplies access to all I can watch/read, for a small price per month. (Too bad they don’t have Evangelion.)
Libraries
You may be aware of a kerfuffle on Twitter in the past few days, caused by a Forbes article suggesting that libraries should be replaced with Amazon. The article was an obvious troll searching for hate-clicks, which apparently are a vital income source for many media companies these days. However, the kerfuffle still shows that some people have no idea what libraries have meant to many people and still mean today.

I go to my local library almost every day: for fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, audiobooks, piano music, and more. Like many a writer, I have very little disposable income; I couldn’t keep up with what other writers are doing if it weren’t for the local libraries. Yet I know that I’m better off than many of the other people using the library: people using library computers, for example, to search for jobs, and others using library services to improve their English or get help on filling out forms. Libraries are a huge benefit to the community, especially those of us who aren’t rich. If you haven’t visited a library lately, I heartily recommend that you go on a summer outing and give your library some love.

Writing Description and Exposition: Combo

Last week,I showed an example based on the principle that A descriptive passage is the story of a particular character’s encounter with a person, place or thing. I noted that things would be completely different if I wrote a description of the same thing but from a different person’s viewpoint. So today, let me do that.

It was the second time I’d ever been in a lawyer’s office.

The first time was in a flea-bitten fire-trap in a neighborhood where even the rats carried switchblades. The lawyer was a guy who smelled like he washed his clothes in cheap whisky…but to be fair, I smelled the same way at the time. (It was not a good period in my life.) But surprise, surprise, my “legal eagle” knew his way around a courtroom. Or maybe he just got lucky. Either way, he kept me for going down on a bogus count of B&E, manufactured by a cop who lost his temper because he couldn’t get me on thirty-some real B&E’s I’d committed around the city.

But my first lawyer died the very night he got me set free. I took him out for a celebration drink and he keeled over right beside me in a dirty little bar. It scared the piss out of me. Also the alcohol. I got into a program and came out embarrassingly sober.

Mind you, I didn’t give up being a thief—I just stopped stealing while drunk. Which is why I went for years without being caught, and why (when my luck finally had a hiccup) I could afford to hire the incomparable Bethany Pruitt.

Her office resembled the kind of place I now used my talents to burgle: up-scale, chic, but not matchy-matchy. I particularly liked the two paintings on the wall in the reception room. Both were dreamscapes full of stylized figures of naked people. I walked up to the receptionist and before she could even put on a professional smile, I said, “Those paintings are lovely. May I ask who’s the artist?”

“Nellie Chang,” the woman answered immediately. “She shows with a gallery just down the block. Ms. Pruitt greatly admires Nellie’s work.”

Useful information. I made a mental note to visit the gallery after hours and pilfer a few canvases. Art can be hard to fence, but I knew several buyers who’d be happy to acquire the work of an up-and-comer in the early stages of her career. Good investments, and all that.

The receptionist and I had a nice little chat about who I was and whether I had booked an appointment. I’d taken the liberty of hacking into the company’s computers to place myself on their appointment calendar, but apparently that didn’t count. To my astonishment, the office still operated on paper, and I wasn’t written down in the official appointment book. The situation took several minutes to sort out, after which I was escorted down to a room with an even greater quantity of paper shelved on the walls in the form of law books. It all seemed so twentieth century! Still, it’s harder to change words on paper than in The Cloud, so for all I knew, Bethany Pruitt ran the most secure legal firm in Manhattan.

Now notice all the things going on here. The first few paragraphs provide exposition in the form of a story: how the narrator nearly went to jail. We get a sense of the character’s voice, attitude, and profession. Then we return to the present to get on with the business at hand. We don’t know exactly what the narrator has done, but we can guess that (s)he stole something and got caught. The specifics will no doubt emerge in conversation with Pruitt.

By the way, the artist Nellie Chang should play some role in the ensuing story. I have nothing in mind—I’m just making this stuff up as I go along—but if Chang gets this much attention on Page 1 of a story, readers will expect to see more of her. The first few pages of a story always create expectations in the reader’s mind; you have to recognize that and deal with it. (You don’t have to fulfill reader expectations, but you have to address them. You can have Chang appear in all kinds of ways, some more predictable than others…but you have to use her somehow or readers will wonder why you mentioned her at all.)

I hope this helps illustrate some principles about description and exposition. If you have any questions about description or exposition, feel free to submit a comment!

[Photo of paint brushes by terri_bateman [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons]

Sharing: July 18, 2018

More things I like:

Anime: Darling in the FRANXX
A lovely story about teens slowly discovering how to live, love, and be honest with each other. Oh, and sometimes they get into giant robots and kill monsters on behalf of a vague yet sinister government agency.

A few of the details are offputting—there is some problematically gratuitous sexual stuff, like the doggy-style set-up for piloting the mecha—but the overall story is sweet and honest about the confusions and joys of adolescence.
Comic book: The Wicked + The Divine
Every 90 years, 12 classical deities are reborn as the darlings of their age: perhaps poets, perhaps warriors, perhaps socialites, but always celebrities. They live for at most two years before dying. In our modern age, they’re rock stars…and like many beautiful people, they make terrible life choices. The latest divine incarnations may drag the world down with them.
Movie: Ant-Man and the Wasp
Complete fluff, but fun…with a lot of inventive applications of shrinking/growth powers. (Yes, I’ve thought a lot about shrinking/growth powers. Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

 

Writing Description: Examples

In the previous posting, I said that a descriptive passage is the *story* of a *particular character’s* *encounter* with a person, place or thing. Let’s look at an example of how to use this idea.

Jance always hated visiting his lawyer’s office. It was too quiet. It was too beige. It was too perfectly designed to look like what it was.

The receptionist at the front desk might well have been an actress hired for the part: not too young, not too old, very good-looking but always dressed with immaculate professionalism. She always said exactly the same thing when Jance entered. “Good morning, sir, how can I help you? Certainly, sir. If you’ll just take a seat? And who shall I say is waiting?” Then the woman would dial the phone and speak in a voice too low for Jance to hear.

Because Jance was who he was, he never had to wait. The receptionist would rise from her desk within a few seconds and say, “If you’ll follow me, please, Mr. Jance?” She’d open the inner office door (solid mahogany, not just mahogany veneer over a cheaper wooden core) and lead him down a thickly carpeted hall on which every side-door was shut. She’d always deposit him in a conference room lined with shelves holding austere looking law-books. She’d pull out a chair for him to sit at the conference table, then leave him alone in the windowless room. He’d then spend precisely three minutes contemplating the books, always wondering if they served any purpose except to look impressive. Surely everything was computerized now, even in the fusty old legal profession. Immediately afterward, Jance was always angry with himself for thinking the same thoughts every damned time he was forced to come here. But he never had time to shift his thoughts in other directions, because three minutes to the second after he arrived, Bethany Pruitt would come through the door.

This passage is told from the point of view of Jance. Jance is not a neutral observer; he has an opinion about everything he sees, or at least about everything he pays attention to. But notice all the things he ignores. For example, he doesn’t give any actual physical details about the receptionist (hair color, skin color, height, etc.). Instead, he regards her as part of the office decor, hardly a person at all. He acknowledges that she’s “very good-looking” but he’s more specific about the office door than he is about her.

The passage describes the office more or less in the order that Jance would see it on a typical visit: first the reception room, then the corridor, then the conference room. At every stage, Jance makes note of things that annoy him. Presumably, there are other things to see and hear and smell, but they don’t register with him. jance may be actively looking for things that he can view negatively. And he’s clearly the sort of person who cares very much about how long he’s kept waiting—on multiple occasions, he must have timed precisely how long he sits in the conference room before the lawyer arrives.

Putting this all together, we get a clear first impression of Jance’s personality, at the same time that we get a description of the office. What Jance sees and what he feels in response tell us a lot about who he is. It also gives us a clear first impression of the office, but presented in the form of a story: the story of Jance’s typical visit.

If a different character visited the same office, the description might well be completely different. Imagine, for example, a character who has never been to see a lawyer before, and is nervous about doing so now. That character would notice different details…or maybe the character would scarcely notice anything because he or she is so worried about his/her legal problems. Such a character might find the receptionist’s cool attitude reassuring rather than annoying. Probably too, the character would have a different set of experiences, perhaps being left to wait in the reception area much longer than Jance was.

If I wanted to show off, I might write a description of the same office from several different characters’ points of view. However, this post has gone on long enough, so perhaps I’ll do that later this week.

[Photo of law office by Berenice Abbott (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons]