A.R. Knight's Blog, page 10

Ben Bradlee and character depth

There’s a movie out now, The Post, that acts as a sort of prequel to the 1976 film All the President’s Men. Both of these concern The Washington Post and, in major and supporting roles (respectively), the newspaper’s editor at the time, Ben Bradlee. Played by Tom Hanks in the newer one and Jason Robards in the older (in an Oscar-winning turn), the editor certainly received his due from Hollywood. He’s a hero in both stories, and pushes the protagonists towards their eventual goals. That’s fine. That’s swell.

What’s interesting is that Bradlee, in both films, bursts onto the scene and chews it up whenever he’s on camera. Crass dialogue, gruff demeanor, burns through a pack a day. Bradlee takes no prisoners in the name of journalistic excellence. And yet, in neither film do we get much insight into how he became who he was. Neither film follows Bradlee as an origin story. He just is.

I wish it was that easy. That a character could jump fully-formed into the picture and be true to him or herself in every situation. Could act authentic and all that. In my experience, that’s rare. Your newest creation, Deidre Jenkins, might break through the door with a pair of knitting needles and demand her stolen ball of yarn, and the sheer awesomness of that scene might keep the readers around for another few pages, but when Deidre blows off your young knitting hero, telling him that his dream of knitting the perfect scarf is a fool’s errand, you’d better have a reason for her to think that. An experience from her past, perhaps. Maybe Deidre knitted a scarf for her friend, and, when leaving a train, the scarf caught in the doors and… you get the idea.

Point being, Deidre has to have enough of a past, enough real to make her actions plausible. Even if none of this detail (and, in most cases, it shouldn’t) reaches the reader, your work will come through in how the character behaves. In their consistency. In the subtle maneuvers they make, like meeting another person’s eyes or hovering at the edge of a room.

We don’t know a lot about Ben Bradlee from the two movies he’s been in, but he’s still a fully-realized character. We understand why he takes the actions he does, and they fall in line with his character. There’s a great scene in The Post, towards the beginning, where Bradlee asks an intern to help figure out whether the New York Times is getting a scoop. He doesn’t ask the intern to commit a crime, and he’s not advocating the intern bribe or steal things. It establishes immediately that Bradlee is both competitive and, to some degree, honorable.

Now, it’s one thing to say this about a living, breathing person who literally has a history to track and a character defined by what they actually did. Watch the HBO documentary on Ben Bradlee and you’ll get a better picture of what made the editor such a force in the newsroom. Still, taking a few minutes to establish a baseline for your side characters can lend them real authenticity. You’ll keep their actions consistent, and their goals will match (hopefully) with their own reality. That way, you won’t wind up with people randomly changing their minds, pursuing objectives that don’t align with their ultimate desires, or (worst) that seem to do nothing and are there only as foils to help the heroes/villains develop.

Every character, even Deidre and her knitting needles, deserves to be, even just a little bit, real.

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisen

For Christmas, for my father, I purchased the Broken Earth trilogy, by N.K. Jemison. It’s a fantasy, but with a fair bit of steampunky-sci-fi stuff in there too. Floating obelisks and post-apocalyptic societies and whatnot. The blend of settings works, though, and if you can make two disparate concepts mesh together, well, I’ll pay attention.

The title of the trilogy aptly describes the setting – a continent constantly broken apart by aggressively shifting earth beneath. People who can touch that rock manipulate it to further their own ends, and everyone else hates them for it.

I didn’t know much about the trilogy before I bought the books, wrapped them up and put them under the tree. Partly, I do things like this as an excuse to get books that I know my father, or others, will read that I can then borrow. And my father did exactly as I hoped. In the five days that we were there, he tore through the first two books, allowing me to snag them on the ride home. I’ll be back for the finale shortly.

Jemison does something neat with these books, something that always stands out to me when I see it, and then I haven’t yet tried myself. She uses present tense, and it makes you feel as though you are in the events as they occur. Rather a narrator looking back to the past and reciting what happened. Her writing has immediacy. A character talking about their movement as it occurs brings you into the scene, though it can sometimes feel little as though you’re reading stage direction.

And yet, skillfully done, as it is here, present tense possesses a verve that past tense can’t quite capture. You know when you read it. Since you’re moving around with the characters in live action. Makes it easy to get in the scene, to hear the thoughts as they happen. It doesn’t hurt that Jemison does a wonderful job of blending description and back story with the perspectives of the characters, including one written entirely in second person which is a feat in and of itself. Second person present tense? How often have you seen that one?

I’m not yetthrough the first book, though I’m making fast progress and hope to finish it soon. In the meantime, I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s a great, mysterious story thus far and, if nothing else, it will expose you to a form of writing seldom seen.

Pottersville: Finally the Furries get some Respect

There’s a Netflix movie, at least I recently saw it on Netflix though I don’t know that it’s actually their own, called Pottersville. It concerns, among other things, furries.

Attacking weird concepts is a great strength of comedy. If you inserted, say, characters who like to dress up as costumed animals into a serious drama, you would feel compelled to make being a furry something of relevance. Something of, perhaps, metaphorical importance. A drastic personality trait with layers upon layers of meaning. A furrie cake, if you will.

Instead, in Pottersville, it’s simply something people like to do. Just as you might enjoy a morning jog, or I might enjoy going to the play at the theater. These people go to the middle of the woods, light a few fires, and dance around while dressed like bunnies and wolves and foxes. It’s all good.

Pottersville does a great job of giving this the same treatment as any other odd hobby. In general, the film does a great job presenting the quirks of a small town without judgment. Characters within the movie have personalities, goals and dreams that seem just as real and relevant as those in steamy New York romances, and gritty crime dramas. They’re just as desperate to find the lives they want. Just the stuff is desperate to find a story to be a part of. And that’s cool. It is, in fact, funny and engaging.

One of the beautiful things about being creative is that you can take your story, your vision and make it whatever you want. My laptop, right now, has as its background girl writing a flying sea turtle over some sort of urban coast. This eternal has wings instead of fins. Does it make any sense? Of course not. But then, to whom ever created, and must’ve presented itself. A vision to be made something more.

That’s a Pottersville is. Someone came up with the story, wrote it down in a number of other folks banded together to film and. It’s pretty neat that they can take something so small and weird and turn it into something, well, slightly larger and still weird.

Sidenote: It’s often funny to me to look up a movie after I’ve seen it (particularly one I didn’t know existed till it showed up on Netflix and we chose it at random) and find out that critics generally thought Pottersville was boring and unoriginal. In this case, I’m glad I saw the film before reading the reviews, or I’m sure we wouldn’t have watched it. Differing opinions are par for the course in a subjective medium, I suppose.

Thoughts from Holiday Travel

There are so many costs to travel: Long plane flights and shifting time zones kill sleep. The lack of one’s usual spaces in which to do things like, you know, spin wild stories about adventures through time and space and magical worlds. Turns out those are easier to come by when staring out your own window rather than scribbling in a cramped airplane seat with a large man next to you snoring his day away.

There are benefits too: All the (friendly) people. The laughter. New places, foods, sights and sounds. Fodder that twines its way into the next story without you really realizing it.

And there are, of course, the things beneath the surface. I think travel represents an opportunity to get back in touch with yourself. You’re removed from your routine, so it’s easier to look back what you were doing and address inconsistencies, flaws and the parts that you’ve proceeded to ignore. To come to epiphanies. To form hypotheses that, far away from your home where you can test them, flourish and morph and refine themselves into something that you’re actually excited to implement upon your return.

Of course, that does mean you can set yourself up to fail. You can come up with some sort of grand idea on the road that, when actually executed, proves far beyond what one can normally handle. What you want to handle.

So I suggest this, based off of my own myriad experiences stopping and starting any of a 1000 different lifestyles:

Go forth with malleability.

Leave things flexible.

Allow your goals to bend, if not break.

This isn’t to say give yourself excuses, but rather to allow those things you have no control over, those moments that demand your time even if it’s unscheduled, to occur and not feel bad about them. Spend one night in an airport due to an airline’s mishaps, and you’ll see the value of this kind of zen attitude.

Life is going to change. All the time, whether you want it to or not. Accepting that gives you the greatest chance of moving towards where you want to go.

A Letter to Our Cats

Dear Anna and Elsa (our cats):

You are the best winter day blankets we have ever had. Your presence on our laps makes for warmth better than the thickest blanket, and your constant, deep purring brings about some sort of contentment we didn’t know existed prior to your furry place in our lives.

Somehow, despite all of our holiday travels, you two haven’t destroyed everything in the house. We can forgive the nutcracker you massacred and whose body, separated from its head, you scattered across the floor. The ornaments you have taken off the tree and, in some ritual we don’t understand, proceeded to shatter one by one in the precise spots we’re most likely to step on them.

If, though, we could make one recommendation: when commencing your cuddles, your head-smashes and chin-nips… perhaps choose an hour later than 2 A.M.? Like Six? Seven?

Sincerely,

Your warm, exhausted cat parents.

A brief, late word on Star Wars: The Last Jedi

There’s not really much to say that hasn’t been said about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The film has been talked about to death by just about every media outlet, twitter feed, and squawking parrot out there.

And you know what? That’s good. It’s supposed to happen to a cultural phenomenon. It’s something that, I think, any creator would love to have happened to their project.

Anyway.

I looked at it, as I look at all of the new Star Wars films as they come out, as some sort of culmination of a childhood spent wishing I could fly among the stars. It’s a condition from which I can’t be cured. Dashing between the planets with Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the rest held a prime place in the pantheon of childhood dreams.

George Lucas’ vision represented an escape that my life, relatively easy as it was, certainly didn’t merit, but that I pined after anyway. Action, adventure, galactic consequences with, seemingly, a perfect ending (for the original trilogy, anyway).

So part of me expects, when I see those big bold yellow letters splash across the screen, is the infinite possibilities of childhood. Which is why I’ve enjoyed The Last Jedi more every time I’ve seen it. As if my adult self is gradually filtering those impossible childhood dreams and letting me enjoy the movie for what it is.

The takeaway, I think, is that we will always see pieces of our past in new movies, books, and TV. When those new works inevitably fail to measure up to the rose-colored history, stop.

Take a breath.

Then watch it again. Preferably with popcorn. Or a loved one/friend that doesn’t have the same baggage you do.

Now here’s the real trick – after it’s over, argue for it. Be a fan. See the film in a positive way (this can be difficult if the thing is actually terrible, but maybe that makes it more fun?).

And you might find it’s better the second time. You might find that, in fact, it’s not your childhood at all but is, instead, its own story and you’ve just made new memories.

And yet…

I’m sure I’ll forget all this when the next one comes out.

Cool facts can ruin stories

It’s the truth, darn it, and there’s no way getting around it.

Readers should be treated like people without security clearance – information on a need to know basis, only.

I’m working on this story that involves Aztecs and Mayans and all sorts of awesomeness about, well, Aztecs and Mayans. Unfortunately, for all the pages of random knowledge I’ve assembled in my quest to become acquainted enough with these civilizations to write a character living in them, I’ve yet to find facts that aren’t awesome. This sucks, because now I want to work all of the things into the story.

But that would make the story suck.

This is because, not being the writers of the story, most people won’t care that much about what the Mayans ate for breakfast, or how many prisoners an Aztec had to take captive to move up in rank. With tidbits like these, I’ve essentially got two choices, which apply to just about any “fact” that you want to drop into a story (and this includes world-building things, like spaceships and magic systems):

1. Massage the fact into the narrative

This is the most effective, but also the most difficult way of dealing with information that you want the readers to know but that isn’t plot or character-essential. To use the above example about breakfast, rather than dropping a line in a paragraph that the Mayans ate fruit for breakfast, you could instead include a scene set at breakfast. If you’ve already got a scene in mind that doesn’t have a set time, then make it happen in the morning. That way, your characters can discuss all the juicy conflicts while having their juicy, fact-based meal. Your readers will enjoy the authenticity without wondering why you’ve bothered to include these food descriptions.

Another way of doing this, depending on the fact in question, is to slot the fact in as a bridge for a particular plot element. Say, for example, that your hero needs to sneak inside the Mayan palace. Having the character come up with various breakfast foods and use the delivery of same as an excuse to get into the palace can work. Again, you’re imparting facts and color to the readers without throwing it out there for them.

2. Burn it

Is this a choice? Why yes, it is. If you can’t find a way to fit information into the narrative in a way that’s relevant… then perhaps it’s not relevant. If a given tidbit doesn’t help the reader learn about the characters or understand a particular scene, then you’re probably better off not touching on it. Readers aren’t generally reading fiction for facts (though working facts into the narrative is often fun for this reason – readers don’t always expect it). Don’t lambast them with pages and pages about how your world works, what various societies are like, or what the current toy fad is unless those things are critical to an understanding of the story.

But here’s something I also keep in mind, and that might help you too – when writing a draft, if you’ve got a cool fact that you want your characters to drop, put it in there. Move on. Don’t debate.

Then, when the editing pass comes around, you’ll spot that passage again. Or you won’t. If it seems out of place to you, if you’re asking “what does that have to do with anything?” or “I’m really bored right here”, then that’s a sign your story hasn’t earned or doesn’t need that particular nonfiction nugget.

By the way, did you know many Aztecs wore capes? How cool is that?

Why Wind pants are Great

You might have seen the title of this post and wondered, rightly, if I’d lost my mind.

In truth, probably.

But that’s not what this is about. These words about wind pants, a glorious invention that deserves a place in your ward robe, especially if you work from home.

A disclaimer: This is not a post about wind pants fashion, if there is such a thing. I don’t know any particular wind pants brands, nor do I know about upcoming trends or features in the wind pants world. I’m simply a wind pants user, who happens to enjoy his wind pants for what they are.

So why? Why wind pants?

The answer is that they’re all things to home office fashion. Wind pants are the Swiss Army Knife of clothing. They’re warm enough to withstand jaunts to the yard in the winter for such necessary activities as taking out the trash, dumping something in the compost, or doing a quick shovel so the driveway can be useable after a snowstorm. And yet, in the summer, they’re cool enough for mowing on a chill day or for a walk to the coffee shop.

You can work out in the things, either by going for a run or lifting weights. The wind pants don’t care – they’re multipurpose.

They’re cat resistant – meaning that, unlike denim or sewn fabrics, the claws have a harder time getting hold on the wind pants. They’re like kitty armor.

Because they’re perfectly fine for lounging, a fresh pair of wind pants makes for a great transition after the morning pajama routine. Then you’re all set for your eventual workout, after which you can change into the more appropriate evening tuxedo that we all wear to our home-cooked Hamburger Helper dinners.

So yeah. Those are my arguments. Wind pants are great. They’re not expensive. Nobody cares about wind pants fashion, so you won’t have to buy new pairs until you wear out your old ones.

They’re the best.

The Sleep Imperative

You’ve doubtless seen, read, or had shouted at you dozens of articles, studies, and artistic renditions on the necessity of sleep. Going into that dream-filled or dream-less state is, the many “they” say, required for life. At least, for a life well-lived. And for a long time I’ve maintained a loose relationship with that idea.

Namely, from night to night the amount of sleep I’d manage would swing wildly. Sometimes 7 hours, sometimes 5. This, especially, came about in the traveling days when a delayed flight and an early presentation could mean arriving at the hotel at 1 AM and getting into the conference room, dressed and ready to present, at 7.

Guess what? With a couple of espresso shots, it wasn’t all that terrible. The eyes drooped, perhaps, and I certainly wasn’t going out that night, but I could swing the presentation and make a successful day out of it. Caffeine became a crutch, but a useful one that didn’t bother to judge how many trips I made to the coffee shop.

With writing, it doesn’t work the same way. I can’t, after four or five hours, even six, come up with words in quite the same way. It’s like the mind is stuck in mud – I can see where I want to go, but have to work so much harder to cover the same distance that, the day before, I could speed along. It’s simply more difficult (for me) to write creatively than it was to present, answer emails, or partake in meetings all day.

In the time I’ve been doing this, though, I’ve come up with a few tricks for getting through a day when I’m tired – and I should note that I’m not a napper unless I’m sick or so dead tired that nothing’s going to happen except lethargy.

1. Dictation

I’ve talked about dictation before, but it really shines on those days when I’m struggling to get the finger music going. If I’m zonking out, I’ll actually take the glasses off, lean back in the chair, and hold the mic close and just talk. The result is messier than normal typing, sure, but I find editing to be a faster process than writing from scratch anyway. As a result, my tired eyes don’t stare at a screen and I can get, if nothing else, the core of some scenes down. Then I’ll go back and butter them up on the next day. Just getting away from a blank page sometimes acts as that first step, and then I’m off and running, even if I’m still waking up.

Another way to do this is to walk around and talk into a recording device, like your phone, and transcribe. Moving around helps keep you awake, and I’ve found that I can come up with good ideas while on the move that I don’t while sitting down – I read once that there’s a theory around walking being healthy for the mind because, way back in the day, humans used to wander around most of the time, so our minds are used to working while on the go. I dunno. It works.

2. Change Tasks More Frequently

I’m not saying “multitask”, but rather attempt to swap what you’re working on every 20-30 minutes (like the Pomodoro method, for example). Unless you’re really into a scene or whatever it is you’re doing, I’ve found that swapping up activities is like blowing a bit of fresh air into the smoldering fire of your brain on low sleep. It can ignite some sparks, get you jazzed a bit. So what I’ll do is write a scene, then do something like wash the dishes, clean a room, or chase the cats around the house like an insane person as a way of giving the tired brain a break. Note there that I don’t say “switch from writing to another computer task” because I’m trying, here, to give my eyes a rest from the screen too. Ultimately, what tasks you want to switch between is your call, but give it a try.

3. Get some exercise

Yeah, working out when you’re tired might seem like the opposite of a plan. It might, in fact, seem like I’m just spouting nonsense (and I’m neither a doctor, nor a personal trainer, but a writer, so it’s likely that this is all pointless meandering). Still, a workout often does wonders for my attitude on a down day. Doesn’t mean I’m talking about loading up the bench press and shooting for a personal best, or doing a marathon just ’cause you didn’t get your full eight hours, but maybe you do some push-ups and situps for 30 minutes, or take a jog around the neighborhood. Get the blood flowing and all that. I’ll often make a point to walk to the nearby coffee shop, getting the ol’ 2-for-1 benefit of exercise and caffeine.

Lastly, of course, is making sure you get the amount of sleep you need the next night. One of the things Nicole have done, though we don’t always succeed at it, is understand the amount of time it takes us to get ready for bed, and adjust our “bed time” such that we’re generally falling asleep at the same time most nights. This did mean sacrificing some time that we’d normally spend watching a movie or playing a game, but the result is that we’re getting the sleep we need to be productive more days than not, which is the real benefit.

Also, sleep is quite nifty. If you haven’t tried it, you should!

Going Mad in the Mountains

There are certain lines drawn between what might be called “casual” games and “serious” games – the latter being the type of thing you come to after having had some caffeine and with a readiness to bust your brain plotting out the most effective way to move little pieces around to accumulate points, and the former being, well, charades.

Mountains of Madness attempts to bridge this divide with a wonderful setting and, more or less, succeeds in doing so. You and your pals, up to 5, are a troop of people who’ve chosen the right place to dig for alien relics – a mountain full of mysterious auras that will slowly drive everyone insane. In most games, the insanity would act as some sort of points mechanic, or an obstacle that affects your pieces in some way. Not here, no. The madness truly infects you, the player, pushing you to do things like spin around or keep your cards at a distance or even leave the room at certain points. As the game requires intense communication, much of the madness that afflicts you interferes with your ability to tell everyone else what supplies you happen to have. This, of course, leads to frantic guesses and held breath as the donated supplies are revealed to see if your group survived, or better yet, if you’ve found something.

And Finding Something is, indeed, the goal of the game. Namely, you have to find a certain number of things before you all go insane or succumb to nasty injuries. In the games I’ve played, it’s usually the injuries that win out in the end after we’ve spent too long driving ourselves nutty on the mountain slopes. But because the outcome, due to randomized tile placements and a vicious die, is never certain, it’s not like other cooperative games where you know you’ve lost well before the last piece falls. You’re all in it to the very end, and escaping the mountain alive, even if you failed to get enough relics, counts as something of an achievement.

The game also contains a number of clever mechanisms to make sure everyone gets their moment to shine, like a rotating “leader” marker that forces a different player to make key decisions every round. This keeps the affair from being “quarterbacked” by one spirited soul who believes they know exactly where to go. There’s also a good chance that you’ll be useless on a given challenge, and being forced to rely on your insane friends to see the group through is all kinds of fun. Lastly, because the whole group moves as one, there’s no real downtime. Phones don’t come out, people don’t wander off to check the game on the TV or hunt for snacks. Once you start climbing the mountain, you’re invested till the end (which isn’t all that long).

So is there anything that doesn’t work?

I’d say two things:

There are some madness cards that aren’t all that fun, and because these specifically don’t hamper your communication abilities, they feel more like an annoyance than something goofy. Ideally, everyone should be laughing as they try to overcome every challenge. From what I’ve seen, these “dull” madness cards aren’t game breakers and, as there are many, many madness cards, could even be removed as you find them and the game would carry on just fine.

The tile layout of the mountain changes every time you play. This is mostly a good thing, though it does mean that it’s very easy to happen upon challenges at inopportune times, where rewards actually get you nothing and you’re just trying to succeed in order to, well, not fail. It’s not all that fun to throw a bunch of cards down and see that you’ve gained an award that does nothing just because certain cards didn’t happen to shuffle their way to the top. Once in a game might be fine, but when it happens three or more times, that’s a lot of meh moments to suffer through.

Still! You won’t be suffering long because the game moves fast, and you’ll quickly be on to the next challenge, wondering if your eyes haven’t started deceiving you and glancing askance at your colleague who’s just started talking nonsense. For these mountains are mad, and they’re fun, no matter if you’re hardcore board gamers or no.