Wren Handman's Blog, page 9

Why is Hollywood in Love with Torture?

I don’t get it. Isn’t the media supposed to have a liberal bias?

You hear that all the time: mostly from right-wing media personalities who are feeling slighted that their archaic belief structures are no longer accepted as the norm, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day (unless it’s digital, then it’s just blank). For the most part, Hollywood and other TV/movie producers are very much on the lefter side of social issues. Can you imagine a TV show about how being gay is wrong and homosexual couples don’t even deserve civil unions? I can’t even fathom how that would end up on the air. Even Nashville, a show set in the Bible Belt, has a much loved gay character who’s told over and over that he is loved, no matter who he is. Remember that show about how getting an abortion would be wrong and you would go to hell? No? Because they didn’t write it. Granted, it’s often brought up as a halfhearted alternative and then quickly abandoned so that the writers can continue with their ‘reluctant pregnancy’ storyline, but that’s more lazy writing than right-leaning politics. I don’t think it will be a controversial statement to say that I agree: story media leans left.

So if Hollywood and the media are so relentlessly left-wing, what the HECK is with all the torture?

Now, I’m not objecting to the idea of torture on TV. I mean, I do hate it, but I also don’t really like watching someone’s eyeball get pulled out (thank you, Tarantino), and I get that shock value is a cheap and easy way of keeping someone’s attention. So, fine, there is and will always be torture on TV. What I AM objecting to (as loudly and fervently as possible) is that in our media portrayals, torture always works.

Often, torture is portrayed as a terrible thing, dangerous for your soul; it’s a horrible necessity that the main character has to stoop to in order to “get things done.” Think of a show like Supernatural, where the main character reluctantly learns torture skills while trapped in Hell, and every time he tortures someone he feels like he’s losing a piece of his soul; or Arrow, where the main character reluctantly learns torture skills while trapped in A.R.G.U.S., and every time he tortures someone… yeah, you get the picture. The writers are telling us, “Hey kids, torture is bad! It makes a part of you die. But sometimes you have to do the necessary thing instead of the right thing.” It’s an interesting moral question to ask, and I don’t object to the moral ambiguity of “the necessary choice,” but it forgets one important fact:

Torture isn’t ‘necessary but morally bad,’ because torture doesn’t work.

Can I underline and bold that for you, too? Torture doesn’t work. We’ve all read the damming reports (and if you’ve been led astray by the aforementioned right-wing on this issue, try this article on for size), and even people who still cling to the party line that torture works sometimes also agree that sometimes, it doesn’t. People under torture will do anything to make it stop, so they will tell the torturer whatever that person wants to hear. Lying is commonplace, and confessions which later turn out to be false happen all the time.

Now, I will grant you that there are many people out there who don’t agree with me, or hard evidence, or reality. And as condescending as I’m being towards them, they do have the right to that opinion. Those people aren’t what I’m writing about. What I want to know is, where on Earth are the American writers who agree torture doesn’t work? How is it that an industry which is so known for its “left-wing bias” has skewed so totally and completely to the right on this issue? Is it expediency? Torture is an easy way for a character to be given information, and it’s edgy and dark! Is it copycatting until you forgot where you started? 24 had torture and it was popular, let’s have some too!

I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know that it’s a disturbing trend; and one I hope will start to swing back to the center. Writers, if you’ve going to force me to sit through gruesome scenes of traumatic torture on my cable TV, can you at least keep it to the villains?

Or have the victims start lying, like those who are really tortured do. There’s some moral ambiguity I’d like to see on TV.

Endless Sky

Breathe in.

Feel the mist against your skin. See the endless depth of the horizon, and know that even should you follow it there would be another mountain there.

Breathe out.

Sense the heartbeat of the sleeping lake, the cool press of its tendrils against your skin. The air is alive with motion, and yet somehow everything around you is still.

Breathe in.

You are the creamy white of the depthless sky. You are the purple blue of the painted clouds. Your feet in the water are planted, chilled and fed and blessed.

Breathe out.

 

 

Image by Sarah Monks. Sarah is a multi-talented world wanderer, who took this photograph while traveling through the wilds between Canada and the US.

The Amazing Invisible Woman!

Imagine what the world would look like if demographics were the same in reality as their representations are on TV.

How many black lawyers would there be if we hired based on the demographics of Law and Order? How many Asians would live in Toronto if our immigration laws followed the casting decisions of Rookie Blue? And how many women would be born tomorrow if we lived in the world of The Flash?

Don’t get me wrong – I like The Flash. I might even go so far as to say that I love The Flash. I am a superhero geek, and I devour content faster than TV writers can give it to me. I watched every episode of every superhero cartoon ever made when I was growing up in the Golden Age of (TV) Comics, ie the 90s. Now I watch S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil, Arrow, and The Flash, and those are just the ones currently airing. Most days I feel like these shows are made for me – but then, there are days like today.

I don’t know why it occurred to me. More importantly, I don’t know why it never occurred to me before. I guess we’re so inured to being invisible (women in superhero fandoms, that is) that we’ve stopped seeing it. How can we be offended, when offence takes aim at the things we love? The answer is simple: because we have to be. Because if we don’t speak out, point out, and call out, nothing will ever change.

Arrow is set in the same world as The Flash. As far as I’m aware it has the same creators. It also has a healthy, rounded out cast of strong (and more importantly) and interesting female characters. Sarah, Thea, Mrs. Queen (sniff), and okay even Laurel who is not my favourite character but granted is around a lot. And here comes The Flash onto the scene at the beginning of the year, and it did a LOT of things right. It has a strong multi-racial cast, with African-American principal characters (s! with an s!), a Latino principle, and a strong smart female scientist. Good start.

Here’s where it starts to fall apart.

It falls apart so, so, so hard.

The Flash has eight characters who I would consider to be “principle” – ie, people who appear in every episode. On the men’s side we have Barry Allen, the scientists Cisco and Dr. Wells, and the detectives Joe West and Eddie Thawne. On the women’s side we have the waitress/reporter Iris West, and the scientist Caitlin Snow. Okay. Six to two. These aren’t great percentages, but (I’m sad to say) I’m happy with those numbers. It’s true that women make up half of the world’s population, but we’re mostly at the point where having some interesting women who are more than just “the girl” is as close to winning as we get. Iris and Caitlin are both people in their own rights, with plot lines that are engaging and individuated. So why bother writing a blog post?

Let’s widen that lens, shall we, and look at characters who are in at least three episodes – not principals to be sure, but definitely recurring. On the men’s side we have Captain Singh, Ronnie Raymond, Henry Allen, Mason Bridge,  Dr. Stein, General Eiling, Captain Cold, Officer Vukuvich, Mick Rory, and Mark Mardon. There’s also Young Barry, though I’m willing to grant that he’s kind of the same character as Barry as far as counting gender goes. So let’s call it 10, to be fair. For women, we have Linda Park. Yup, one. Okay, there’s also Nora Allen, who we keep seeing screaming and dying in flashbacks, which I guess sort of counts. And there’s Felicity Smoak, who pops in from the wider world of Arrow three times over the course of the season. So if we’re being really, really generous, we’ve got a 10 to 3 ratio. …

Think that’s bad? Oh, my friends, you have seen absolutely nothing yet. For those of you who are for some reason reading this even though you know absolutely nothing about The Flash, it centres on the idea that a particle accelerator explosion gave a bunch of people super powers. Most of them like to rob banks for some reason, so Barry stops them. So almost every episode focuses on a new “meta-human” and the challenges in taking them down.

Guess how many of those meta-humans are women?

Don’t guess, you’ll just cry.

I had a hard time remembering how many meta-humans we’ve seen so far. Accounts on the Internet differed between 16 and 20, not including the Flash and the Reverse Flash (worst name ever, guys.) But all sources agree that of that number, a grand total of two of them are women. That’s it. Two. Only one of those two was a villain – the other one was just misunderstood. (Guess how many of the men have been misunderstood?) I don’t know why writers and producers think that women can’t be villains. I don’t know why they think women don’t have the same motivations that drive men (money, power, revenge.) I don’t know why they think we won’t want to see Barry Allen get into a fist fight with a women (what, are men still seriously not allowed to ‘hit a girl’? Come on, people!)

It can be hard to accept that the things we love are so imbalanced – but calling something out doesn’t mean giving it up. The problematic elements of The Flash don’t mean I won’t be sitting on my couch next Tuesday night with a bowl of popcorn and a frosty beverage, eyes eagerly glued to the screen. But it does mean I’ll shout it out; and maybe, if you all shout with me, eventually… people will start to listen.

 

She Said, I Said : A Definitive Guide to Point of View

I recently had cause to sit down and ponder the nature of points of view, and their pros and cons in different genres. A lot of us hit the default on point of view, but it’s actually a fundamental stylistic choice that can really help – or hurt – the story you’re writing.

Before we dive too much into the whys and why nots, a little explanation of the terminology: POV is essentially the voice of the narrator. There are three options for POV: First person (I, me), second person (you), and third person (he, she, they.) Each of those can be “limited” or “omniscient,” and each one can be present tense, past tense, or future tense. That gives you a lot of options to work with! The reality is that we almost never seen stories in second person or stories in future tense, however, because they’re a bit trick to work with.

The bulk of “traditional” fiction has been in third person omniscient past tense. That means that the narrator is outside of the characters, aware of the thoughts and motivations of all of the characters, maybe even of the past or future. Sometimes the narrator is “limited” – only in the head of one character, or only in the head of one character at a time.

More recently, first person present tense has been making huge strides, especially in the realm of young adult fiction. Almost every YA book you pick up is told from the present tense, and first person is rarely told in past tense, because the convention is that we’re hearing the story immediately as it’s being told.

So, what do we get from each of these POV styles – and what do we lose?

I recently published a novel called Command the Tides; I wrote the first draft many years ago, when I was in high school. It’s gone through not one but two complete edits since then, but something that stuck around was the point of view: it’s told in third person limited, past tense. During the second round of editing, I briefly played with turning it into first person. A lot of the fiction I was reading at the time was told in that voice, and I thought it might add a little punch.

Instead, I found that I was slicing through a lot of really valuable information about the world, because they weren’t details that I felt the main character would notice – it was too artificial to bring to the reader’s attention through the voice of the protagonist. Have you ever noticed how awkward it is when people try to describe themselves in first person narratives? Yuck. And don’t even get me started on the beauty of the landscape! I realized that a lot of fantasy is told in the third person for exactly that reason. There is a huge, dense, rich world out there, and sometimes that world is richer than the voice of a protagonist might allow. I’ve read some YA where the protagonist has waxed poetic about the shades of blue in the moonrise, and I’ve thought… gimme a break! She’s sixteen and being chased by bandits, you think she’s going to stop to admire the scenery? But with third person, you have the freedom to rejoice in the poetry of language even if your protagonist isn’t a classically trained intellectual.

First person does have a lot of strengths, though. I mentioned it’s very common in YA, and the reason for that is the brilliance of its immediacy. First person is happening NOW. It is in your face, in your breath, in a voice you can imagine in your own head. It is someone having a conversation with you, and that conversation is ongoing and mutual. The immediacy it gives you, though, is a pay-off for the narrow lens you’re forced to work with. You can, of course, have multiple first-person narratives interspersed throughout a single work, and you’ll often notice trilogies that start out with a single character, and branch out to multiple first person POVs as the series goes on (Divergent, for instance) as the story begins to demand more range.

So which POV is right for you? The answer is, of course, there is no answer. Every story is going to have a different aim and a different soul, and the POV will be a huge part of that. But I’m excited about a new POV that I’m experiencing a lot of joy working with – third person present tense. I mentioned earlier that third person is usually past tense, and first person is usually present tense. This is absolutely the case, but there’s no reason for it – it’s just the default of our conventions. Third person present tense gives you the freedom of a wide lense coupled with the immediacy of the knowledge that this is all happening RIGHT NOW. I used it for the first time in a novel called Wire Wings that I wrote in 2014, and I was blown away by what it allowed me to do. I don’t think I’ve ever created anything so… beautiful. And I think I’ll be using it a lot more in work to come.

The Winter Winds

In the stories, the talecrafters associate Winter with death. When we call a person cold we mean blank, emotionless, cruel. When we say a heart is frozen we mean dead, empty, deserted. The Snow Queen covers the land in eternal winter, and everywhere people freeze, shiver, and wilt. The Ice Queen places a frozen shard into the hero’s heart and he cannot touch the world. I don’t know why we associate Winter with death.

When winter is so damn beautiful.

Things don’t die in winter – they sleep. They close their eyes and breath for the first time in three seasons, and stop their wild rampant growing, their desperate coupling, their slow fading. Silence doesn’t mean no one is listening, and solitude doesn’t mean that you’re alone. Hibernation is a sweet soft slumber, a healing thing. In winter we can rest our limbs grown weary from springs revels, from summer’s births.

Oh, endless winter would be cold, it’s true. But can you imagine an endless summer, the scorching heat of the desert? How our skin would crack and peel, how the world could burn in summer. And the muggy wet burgeoning of spring? Endless, eternal growing? The world would fill up, spill over, choke itself and lie gasping. Autumn, now, is a quieter danger. What is autumn, after all, without winter? The march towards a place you never reach; the slow rot that the hard frost never stops; everything muddy, everything putrefied, everything brown and sick and whimpering.

And we forget, don’t we, the warmth of winter! Fingers safe in mittens, roaring bonfires in the snow, cups of hot chocolate in tingling fingers, oh the warmth of winter. Why would we make fire if there was no chill to fight? Winter whiteness only highlights the season’s colours; the bright needles of the evergreen trees, the splashes of crocus in the snow, the perfect blue of the sky just after a storm. White winter paths and flurries in the air, the magic and wonder of winter.

In the stories, we call a person cold and it is a terrible thing. But I am the cold of winter, and there is always a laugh on my lips.

 

 

This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.

Been a Long Time (long time)…

Hello my lovely Wrenlettes,

As most of you are aware, my novel Command the Tides came out this month. That has left me buzzing like a busy bee, and not writing my Lucid Dreaming stories as I no doubt should be. Please forgive my silence, and enjoy this small excerpt from the novel. Updates shall continue apace in the next two weeks.

—

“David, help Ryan cover the trail. I’ll help Sarah take Darren. Taya, take my sword and cover us.”

“The girl? She’s like to cut off her own feet as an enemy!” Liam hissed.

Taya felt her face grow hot. As always when she felt embarrassment closing in, she covered it with anger. She grabbed Jeremy’s sword by the hilt, drawing it out with one smooth motion and swinging it down so the point touched the ground just an inch in front of Liam’s foot. She felt Jeremy take a staggering step backward, startled.

“I will not only cut our enemy, I will cut the feet off of our enemy and leave them to bleed in the dirt. I haven’t let us down yet, and I certainly don’t intend to start now. And if you ever call me ‘the girl’ again, I will show you exactly what I am expert at cutting off,” she snarled, and then she hoisted the sword and spun on her heel, storming away before he could react.

She stood at the edge of their sad, sodden company, the hilt of the sword resting snugly in the palm of her hand, her back straight and her head held high, and the only thing going through her mind was the fact she had absolutely, completely, no idea how to use a sword.

In the Beginning

In the beginning, there was man.

Which, of course, is completely nonsensical. If life comes from woman, shouldn’t woman come first?

In the beginning, there was woman.

Then again, woman might be the place where life begins, but she can no more create it on her own than man can heat sperm in an oven and bake a child (yes, he has tried that. yes, he did fail.)

In the beginning, there was Kiava. And Kiava was lonely.

It always begins with loneliness, doesn’t it? We are given the world like a pearl spat from an oyster, polished and buffed from something ugly and small, and even so this miracle isn’t enough. It isn’t misery that loves company, it’s joy. Misery can exist alone; not so its kissing cousin. No, joy needs sharing.

Kiava was lonely, but Kiava was the world. So Kiava closed the eyes of the world and sighed, and pieces of the world split away like atoms in fission, and made the world again.

Is that lonely, to think that we were all once part of some greater whole, that we have lost our brothers and our sisters in the stars? Or does it mean we understand that the same things that make the cosmos make us, that science can be beauty and connection and spirituality? Does it mean that we are creatures of wind and sun, and every time we break apart we are still something? That losing a piece does not make us smaller?

And the pieces of Kiava knew themselves, and knew each other, and grew up and forgot the places they had come from, and the places they had been. But Kiava smiled, and was the world.

And is that not a wonderful beginning?

 

Photo and sculpture by Amy Fox. Amy is a writer, sculptor, painter, producer, actor, improvist, editor – and apparently she occasionally also sleeps. Check out The Switch, her latest project!

Railroad Track

Maybe it’s ‘cause they’re going somewhere, and I’m just standin’ still. Maybe it’s ‘cause the sound they make fills me with a thrill.

Maybe it’s just ‘cause I’ve listened to one too many songs. “Third boxcar, midnight train.” “And I found myself attached to this railroad track. But I’ll come back to you some day.” “Just a small town girl. Livin’ in a lonely world. She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”

I find myself having a love affair with railroad tracks. Not like how they do in Japan these days, where you marry your chair or a cardboard cut-out of Brad Pitt. Not like that; more in the way where I find myself there sometimes at 3am after a night of drinking. The way your fingers find your exes in your contact list and want to call them even though you’ve got nothing to say – that’s the sort of love affair I’m falling into. “Down around the corner. A half a mile from here. You see them old trains runnin’. And you watch them disappear.” My feet want something that my brain can’t seem to handle, and I wander up and down the slats, sometimes lying down and feeling the warmth of the last train come through.

Some folks say that’s just how life in a small town is. “Don’t look in the mirror when I wash my face, ’cause nothin’ ever changes.” Nothin’ ever changes. Some folks think melancholy grows in corn and wheat and barley, that we drink it down with our mother’s milk. There’s this song, this good one, and this line that goes “The waitress was sitting outside smoking in her car. She had that look of total fear in her eyes. And as we drove away from there she looked at me and she smiled.”

When did I become that waitress?

Sitting in her car, smoking and dreaming about the world those tracks lead down to, smiling at the people come passing through because that’s a face you’re never gonna see again, and there’s something painful and beautiful about that. A face you’re never gonna see again. It makes me think maybe I should start looking in the mirror. Maybe there’s something in my eyes today won’t be there tomorrow.

‘Cause “if they freed me from this prison, If that railroad train was mine. I bet I’d move it on a little farther down the line.” Cuz I’m in love with that there railroad track, and when I finally go I’m not coming back.

 

 

This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.

 

Cast in Bronze

They spoke of her in whispers; if at all. Her name was a curse they feared, her story too full of resonances to be spoken. Deep dark things call to each other, they said; and the fighting light calls them even more powerfully.

Instead they drew her face in broad strokes on their garden walls; cast the curves of her cheekbones in bronze. Where brave men trembled slightly she was granite, soapstone, marble. Where soft feet beat patterns of retreat on bloody cobblestones she was charcoal, chalk, ink.

She breathed oil paint and turpentine in the upper-left corner of a child’s bedroom mural, almost hidden among the branches of an orange blossom tree. She breathed out a laugh in mosaic chaos around an old fountain in the centre of a square, her face abstract but full of life. On a love letter quickly scrawled on the ripped out page of a book she gave quiet consent to hope of a better world; and in the graveyard where the world-that-was stood sentry she hovered above the names of the dead and mourned them with her empty veins.

They drew the planes of her forehead, sculpted the pucker of her lips. They traced with longing and pride the set of her jaw, the determination and laughter and broken despair in the tilt of her neck.

But her eyes they never painted; her eyes were always closed. For a martyr must, surely, look upon the world they’ve left behind with disappointment.

 

 

Photo and sculpture by Amy Fox. Amy is a writer, sculptor, painter, producer, actor, improvist, editor – and apparently she occasionally also sleeps. Check out The Switch, her latest project!

Little Soldier Boy

“Why are you doing that?”

“Training.”

“What are you training for?”

“Revenge.”

The old man tsked, and shook his head, and looped another coil of rope around his strong, naked arm. “Do you see the muscles here?” he asked, indicating his strong shoulders.

“Yes,” the boy said, though from where he stood on the boat’s roof, his grandfather’s shoulder was hard to see.

“Do you know how I got these muscles?” the old man asked.

“Being a soldier,” said the boy. His arms were like sticks, and when he moved from one position to the next, his leg shook.

“From being a soldier,” the old man agreed. “And do you know why I have these muscles now?”

The boy pondered the question. The simple answer – from being a fisherman – was no doubt not what his grandfather would want. “Feeding your family,” he said.

“From feeding my family,” the old man agreed.

Pleased, the boy jumped down from the boat, coming towards where the old man stood. The rope was coiled now, and as the old man placed it into the boy’s arms the child bowed from the weight of it. He struggled – stumbled, and dropped the rope. The careful coils spilled across the worn boards of the dock.

The boy cried out, and dropped his head into his hands with a wail. But when he lifted it a moment later, still sniffling, he saw that the old man was smiling; and looping a coil of rope around his strong, naked arm.

“You aren’t angry,” the boy said in surprise.

“Why would I be angry?” the old man asked. “Come here.”

The boy came, and carefully the old man laid the rope across the boy’s shoulders. He showed him how to gather the heavy coils, how to balance its weight against his body so he would not drop it.

“Do you understand?” the old man asked the boy.

“No,” he said.

The old man kissed the child’s head and smiled. “I know. But finish your training – and you will.”

And the old man stepped away, and watched as the boy slowly coiled the rope around his arm.

 

Photograph by Sarah Monks. Sarah is a multi-talented world wanderer, who took this photograph while traveling through Asia.