Jason Arnett's Blog, page 22

On Creativity

Pondering the imponderable.From this article on the literature of creativity:

Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.

 A fascinating dissection of things that essentially try to answer the burning question: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

The best answer I've seen to that one (I mean, besides the really terrific one that Wyllis Cooper presented in the Quiet, Please episode titled "Where Do You Get Your Ideas?") came from Phillip Pullman via Austin Kleon:

When I’m reading, I’m looking for something to steal. Readers ask me all the time the traditional question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?” I reply: ‘We are all having ideas all the time. But I’m on the lookout for them. You’re not.’

And yeah, that's true of me, too. I'm looking for those connections. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't.  Sometimes I can translate them out to the world and sometimes I can't. The point is that I try. Well, not so much try as do and sometimes win and sometimes fail.

That's creativity. I can't be afraid to fail, I have to put stuff out and hope that it reaches someone, anyone, and that then I hear back that it's reached that person.

So the answer is to look for a connection and then make a connection with a like mind. The biggest hurdle to creativity is the Internet Hivemind. It's so much easier to go along with what everyone else is doing, saying, thinking, reposting, that to be outside that Hivemind is rather daunting. That's why we get so many versions of the same thing including reality TV shows, comics, books, films, etc…

Maybe the real answer is to eschew the Hivemind, walk to the beat of your own drummer and then respect everyone who does that. To not be afraid to walk to that beat and trust that while someone else is walking they'll cross your path and you'll be inspired to do something else, something more. Right?

So share what's on your mind but be open to what everyone else is doing. That's where ideas come from, where creativity comes from. Maybe.

It's at least worth thinking about.

The Filters

Something happened yesterday that I can't talk about here. I don't mean to say that it was super important or anything like that, it's just not appropriate for me to discuss it in a public forum like the blog. Filters up, I guess.

Don't box me in, man.Sometimes I read things that friends or people I know post on Facebook or Twitter or their blogs and I wonder - was that aimed at me? Sometimes I think 'yes' and other times I can obviously say 'no'. It's the in-between things that get me. That can affect me. (To be sure, I don't think every poison arrow is meant for me. I understand that I read too much into things sometimes, but still, the takeaways from the posted pieces are powerful. That's all I'm saying.)

And I suppose that's the point of those items being posted. Whether the poster had me in mind, or others, doesn't really matter. The point wasn't lost on me.

When I read something that's terribly mean but true, I cringe. It doesn't change the essential truth of whatever it was said, but I wonder how the poster felt when he hit that button that let us all see the inner workings of his mind. Probably that's dangerous but it's cool, too, to gain that insight. To know that person had turned off the filters that day is interesting, revealing.

And we all do it. It happens in your day job, in your home life, when you're out with friends. We all want to comment on how stupid this or that is, wonder how so-and-so can possibly STILL be drawing breath or anything that's mildly gossip-y. Or even really gossip-y. Why is that, I wonder?

In the end, if someone has an issue with me or with something I've done, I much prefer that there be a conversation about it. It doesn't need to be a confrontation, not at all. Simply point out that I'm at fault for something and let me work to fix it. Or not. Sometimes I get carried away. We all do.

I'm all about learning and growing and being not just a better writer, father, husband or worker, I want to be a better person. That's why the filters go up before I sit down to type anything out into the Internet any more. If it needs to be said, fine. If it doesn't, let it go. Or wait until I'm with others, in person, who would be interested to know.

Maybe that's enough for all of us.

Velocity Readout 005: Wolverine

He's the best there is at what he does. In this case, being sneaky.

listen to ‘Velocity Readout 005: Wolverine’ on Audioboo

Velocity Readout 004: Frankenstein's Monster

listen to ‘Velocity Readout 004: Frankenstein's Monster’ on Audioboo
The monster hosts a dinner party and the history of his cinematic appearances is discussed.

Holy Motors

I mentioned this film to some friends last night. It's so surreal and so worth watching.

On Demand

I use Netflix but no other streaming services. I'm still considering adding HULU because they have more TV that I'd like to watch and they seem to be more current than Netflix in that department. I also get DVDs from Netflix because, well, because not everything streams all the time.

Case in point: a lot of anime, American cartoons from the 80s and 90s (mostly WB stuff) and quite a few films that I saw only once or twice and would like to see again.
Yesterday I went searching the video store down the street from my house (one of only three in a college town!) for a copy of the 1954 version of Animal Farm. Yeah, Animal Farm. I would have taken the 1999 Henson remake but I wanted to show my son the animated version I saw when I was a kid. He'd never been taught the book in school - which seemed odd now even though the USSR is broken up it's STILL relevant - and we'd make an event of it. 
They didn't have either one. Okay, I kind of understand the store not having it because it's not really popular. Fortunately, Netflix did. But only on DVD. Again, not a problem for me because I do both. 
But it got me thinking again how - even with the Internet and the digital revolution - some films are just not easily accessible. Due to everyone wanting a piece of the pie and the few companies engaging in digital delivery, it all comes down to money. 
Sure, 85 episodes of Macross streaming is A LOT, I get it. But would it pay for itself if you could offer it that way? Maybe. I know Doctor Who does, even the classic stuff, and probably hundreds of other TV shows. And yes, I understand that it costs money to stream everything. That's a lot of storage especially when you've got distribution centers all across the country already. I get it.
So it makes sense to have the double option. Stuff you've already got on DVD you're sending through the mail via USPS - who I'm on record thinking of as invaluable - doesn't necessarily need to be streaming. So when I get disc after disc of Batman The Animated Series delivered to my house it's almost like Christmas.
People binge-watch stuff now, though. Yeah, we used to do the all-day Star Wars marathons with our VHS tapes and a couple cases of beer back in the day but that was an event. Something pretty special. Every day I know people who watch four or five episodes of a series (or more) streaming. 
Maybe Netflix is watching out for us? Maybe we're being told we shouldn't be sitting for as many hours as we like watching TV and that's why the Macross Saga and Batman aren't streaming?
Nah. It's money. 
So they get my money and my local video stores are gone. Stores that used to curate to tastes are replaced by the Internet. Stores where I used to visit and walk around for half an hour or more are gone.  Where I used to rent three or four movies at a time to binge-watch on a Sunday afternoon I can stay sat on my ass and just click a button now to watch all thirteen episodes of House of Cards. But I'll have to walk out to the mailbox to get my DVD of The Handmaid's Tale when it comes.
Hm.
Signing off. 
I've gotta get up and walk around.

Velocity Readout 003: Doc Savage 1

listen to ‘Velocity Readout 003: Doc Savage 1’ on Audioboo

Velocity Readout 002: Shadow

listen to ‘Velocity Readout 002: Shadow’ on Audioboo
listen to ‘Velocity Readout 002: Shadow’ on Audioboo

Impression Made

My wife and I went to the French Impressionist exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins museum last week and I came away feeling very inspired. Not so much by the art and photographs but by the subject matter of the exhibit.

Several photographs showed things being built, things that are now about two hundred years old.

Add in the scenes of nature, including glaciers, that are now likely gone and it's a kind of sad commentary that things change so much but also a reminder that they do. Cautionary, actually.

As a document about a place in time, a fixed point if you will, it's a beautiful piece. The history is fascinating and plenty of context is available. I highly recommend spending the $8 a head and going if you're in the area.

But what really stuck with me as we drove home that day was all the details of daily life I saw in so many paintings. These are things that describe perfectly what a day was like at the beach or just trying to get work or run errands. Life wasn't all that different two hundred years ago than it is today no matter how much we might wish it. The concerns are the same even though the details aren't.

Walking through the exhibit I kept thinking to myself 'world building' over and over. The details of a bridge or the figure in front of the castle posed there to show the size of the massive structure stuck with me.

Details.

The first draft and even into the second one of any story I'm writing doesn't include a lot of detail about things. I don't like to tell the reader, for instance, what color the skin of my main character is. To me, it doesn't matter. You can infer whatever you like by the name of the person or how someone else might react to them, but my stories tend not to be about any one person's race. Yes, I've used multiple races in my science fiction, one has to. The delineation I like to use is the one where people are people whether they're carbon based bipeds or something else.

As for the worlds that surround the characters in my stories, I will only give the reader enough information to fill in the blanks. I can't stand reading books that are all about the minutiae of the story. It tends to slow me down and minimize my enjoyment of the story. So I don't write that way.

But after viewing this exhibit, I realized where I can add details that enrich the reader's understanding of the world I'm creating without bogging down in endless descriptive paragraphs that people like me tend to skip.

People have lives, they do things. Right? That's where little details can sink in and reveal something about character.

Like when they visit an exhibit at the museum.

Finding New Books

A teeny-tiny, itty-bitty slice of my 'to read' shelf.My resolution to read more books written in this century poses a bit of a problem: finding them to read.

I mean, not really, because I know where to look for books, whose recommendations tend to speak to me and my ear is sometimes to the ground listening for the title that will appeal to me. But that begs the question - where do other people find new books? Would there be some books there that I might like, too?

So I'd like to know, really, where you get recommendations from. Is it GoodReads or LibraryThing? I mean, I don't want to be locked into reading only things that my friends recommend though I've read several that came to me that way. This article mentions a couple of websites in comparison to the Los Angeles Review and that's cool. (It's also terribly, terribly dour about the 'state' of books and reading. Bah. Still.)

I remember seeing authors on news programs talking about books that were fiction though I can't recall anyone in particular. It's much more common to hear an author on NPR than anywhere else, I suppose, but where else? (Seriously, though, if you haven't you owe it to yourself to check out their Book Concierge. Whoa.)

My particular desire is to find good, current science fiction but I like to read some non-fiction history-type stuff, too. Sometimes biographies. (The one on my shelf is about T.E. Lawrence and I just finished Peter Biskind's My Lunches with Orson Welles. I highly recommend one about Roald Dahl, too, called The Irregulars. Moving on.) Right now I'm reading Gene Wolfe's latest: The Land Across (so far it's fantastic).

And, despite owning two collections of his short stories, I've never read anything by Wolfe before. Been too steeped in the past trying to get a handle on where SF has been to understand where it should be going. I suspect reading James Gunn's Transcendental will bridge the two.

Also - YA. There's some great stuff there, too. I've got a trilogy on my shelf to read and I'm really looking forward to the follow up to Mark Frost's The Paladin Prophecy. Yep, THAT Mark Frost. As an aside, good YA is as much fun, as entertaining as any comic book written in the last twenty years and often it's better. That's not to say that comics are bad, they aren't. I read some good ones last year.

Let me know in the comments.