The staged reading I wrote a post about several weeks ago that was cancelled a few weeks after that is on again. This time for sure. I’ve rescheduled it for Saturday, June 13. Other than a couple of minor changes: the date and the benefactor, it’s the same event. Read all about it HERE.
Please consider coming out and supporting me and the MS Society. It’s entertainment with a purpose. Win win. You can’t do better than that.
Memory plays more tricks on us than Penn & Teller combined. After the passage of enough time, it becomes as unreliable as a Ford Pinto. And sometimes, just as dangerous. The following is a true story to the best of my addled recollection. The fact that it occurred many decades ago only increases its allure of mystery even as it decreases its credibility.
For reasons that elude me to this day, every few years my parents wedged us all into the family station wagon and made the long drive to Florida to visit my aunt. I can’t even begin to imagine how my mother and father survived those trips. Why would anyone, of their own free will, drive more than 1,000 miles over two interminable days with three sons who probably hastened the need for the ADHD diagnosis? We bounced around that vehicle’s back and way-back like electrons on amphetamines.
Our road trips came before the days of portable entertainment devices and we were too restless for passive activities such as books or radio. Our primary means of passing the time was incessantly attacking one another then appealing to Mom or Dad for justice that was as futile as the discipline they tried to impose. Another diversion was reading the countless “South of the Border” signs (“Pedro’s Weather Report: Chili Today, Hot Tamale”), which seemed to us to stretch from Connecticut to the resort’s South Carolina location.
We usually split the trip into two supposedly more manageable segments by spending a night in the cheapest, i.e. sleaziest, motel in North Carolina. (If you think sleazy, motel, and North Carolina is a redundancy, you’re not far off the mark. One of those joints could justify a story in itself. More than likely, it will.) By the time we staggered into my aunt’s house, we were in need of sleep and therapy.
This was called a “vacation”.
My aunt was widowed before I was conscious of such fundamental matters as death. To my prepubescent mind, she was just an old woman to whom I was somehow related. My innate ignorance of anything outside my proper skin excluded any need or desire to understand that she was my father’s sister. It didn’t occur to my self-absorbed state that my father had parents, never mind brothers or sisters.
The old girl had been alone for as long as I could remember. She dealt with her solitude by engaging in a series of polygamous – but purely platonic – canine and feline relationships. We had never encountered an adult who was anything like her. She was as uninhibited as she was eccentric. None of the descriptors for “grown up” applied to her. More appropriate labels were boisterous, spontaneous, and extravagantly loving. And, of course, we adored her for it all.
A stay at my aunt’s was a treat for us boys. Besides goofing around with her, it also meant long days at the beach, exploring the most unappetizing dining establishments on the east coast of Florida, staying up late, playing with the pets du jour, and lots of yelling. The reason for the increased volume is that, in addition to her many other virtues, she was almost completely stone deaf. We had to use our “outdoor voices” to have any hope of being heard.
Thus we spent many fun and carefree days. Nights, on the other hand, were less pleasant. The good news is that we slept through them. Most of them.
This is the story of The Night I Woke Up.
To be continued…
Inspired by a discussion with a fellow writer earlier today, I’m trying to figure out how to do it all.
I’m told that great writers read a lot. Writers also have to write a lot. Whether this is true is, of course, a matter of conjecture.
What isn’t conjecture is that there are only so many hours in a day – 24, by most reckoning – as well as days in a lifetime. In other words, there are boundaries. If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that you can’t do everything. Believe me, I’ve tried. Now you don’t have to because I’ve told you and I wouldn’t lie.
Plus, I’m writing this blog.
On top of all that reading and writing (thankfully no ‘rithmetic), there’s life. Life takes up all my time. Even weekends. As one of my heroes wrote, we all have dots we’re committed to connect: pay bills, keep in touch with friends and family, exercise, go to the bathroom, feed ourselves, return calls, clean the house, buy Stuff, fix Stuff, store Stuff, throw away Stuff, pay taxes, fill the gas tank, balance the checkbook. You get it. Somewhere in there we need to pull back and recharge, too.
That list looks really important when it’s staring me down. Like most people, I generally submit to the Tyranny of the Urgent. Everything else – writing included – gets pushed down until it decomposes into compost, stinky and filthy but suitable for planting seeds, one would hope.
So when do I get the real Writing done?
Now.
For no discernible reason, seven of the last fourteen books I’ve read have been memoirs. This wasn’t planned. Some were chosen during a flash of inspiration, others coincidentally rose to the top of stack around the same time after many months in waiting. I’m not even necessarily a big fan of memoirs.
Four of the seven books were by people who are renowned in some area of the arts in which I take a special interest: three were writers and one was a performer.
A number of similarities arose in these books.
Regarding that last point, it amazes me that the more we have (and these folks have lots) the more we take it for granted. It’s not just the Rich and Famous. After all, by the world’s standards, I’m obscenely wealthy. From my observations in the time I’ve spent in Haiti, people there are more thankful for the little they have than we are for our abundance. And they readily acknowledge God as the source of their few blessings. Gratitude and faith are among the first victims of the pandemic of Affluenza.
I don’t criticize out of spite or envy. I’m just making observations. The four books are the works of brilliant minds, people whose work I have tremendous respect for. Perhaps these kinds of personality traits are helpful in reaching heights of fame and/or creativity.
Every one of us exhibits some or all of these tendencies at one time or another.
We just don’t publish them for the world to see.
[In the interest of fair and balanced reporting, I should note that a memoir I read last year, “As you wish – Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride” by Cary Elwes showed very little of these characteristics. It was terrific, as I reported in a previous post.]
This is a brief ode to what is, in my opinion, one of the most underappreciated films in history.
I’ve watched “Joe Versus the Volcano” perhaps twenty to thirty times. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that I enjoy it more each time I view it. Most movies can’t hold up to multiple viewings. As we lose interest in the story and characters, our attention wanders to reveal gaps in logic, bad lines, and other assorted flaws.
Not so with “Joe”.
I bribed them to sing a song that would drive us insane and make our hearts swell and burst.
Here’s a movie that somehow presents profound philosophical questions about life and death, God and meaning, yet still manages to be outrageously funny. The scenes between Joe Banks and his boss, Mr. Waturi, could be a movie on their own. (There’s something strangely familiar about that workplace. I think I worked there. In fact, I think most of us have.)
I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?
The performances, by one of the more eclectic casts you’ll ever see, are uniformly wonderful. It marks the first pairing of what could be this generation’s Tracy and Hepburn: Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Ms. Ryan gives three of her best performances. Lloyd Bridges, Dan Hedaya, Robert Stack, Abe Vigoda, Ossie Davis. Great, great, great, great, great.
My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.
The best performance of all, however, is by a guy named Barry McGovern, whose role is listed simply as “luggage salesman.” I would have given that guy an Oscar.
Very exciting… as a luggage problem!
Even the music is terrific. The Rascals, Del Vikings, and Sergio Mendes all in one movie? So great. Best of all is Eric Burdon’s passionately brilliant version of “16 Tons” that introduces the film.
Nobody knows anything, Joe. We’ll take this leap, and we’ll see. We’ll jump, and we’ll see. That’s life, right?
In closing, I’ll add that the film’s writer/director (a true auteur), John Patrick Shanley, is one of the most gifted artists of our time. As evidence, he also wrote “Moonstruck” and “Doubt” (play and film). That’s good stuff.
Dear God, whose name I do not know – thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG… thank you. Thank you for my life.
I could go on and, if you were here before me, I would. Better, I’d suggest we watch it. It won’t be the last time for me.
I have no response to that.
Patricia: I wonder where we’ll end up?
Joe: Away from the things of man, my love. Away from the things of man.
Speaking of uncomfortable content, which you might recall I was in my last post, what’s the deal with all the puke in movies recently? I thought it was just me. It seemed as if every movie I watched had someone barfing up their innards. Like the F-bomb issue, it was unrelated to genre or (lack of) consumer demand.
Then I saw an online discussion of the phenomenon. Others had noticed it, too. I was relieved. But only a little.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with occasionally spewing a few chunks on screen, especially if it fits. Pregnant women often throw up in early stages of pregnancy. A stomach bug is bound to bring back breakfast and a few snacks.
But every movie?? If anyone is even slightly off-center about something, here come the chunks. Confused? Dizzy? Angry? Depressed? That’s all it takes to lose lunch these days. In the aforementioned discussion, someone made the claim that every movie nominated for a Best Picture Oscar this year had a puke scene. I can’t verify that because I haven’t seen them all, but every one I saw towed the retch line.
This isn’t reality because people don’t puke that often. It isn’t commercially necessary because nobody goes to the movies saying, “Man, I hope someone hurls in this one!” It’s not edgy because it’s mainstream.
So why all the regurgitation? There can be only one reason and it’s the same reason young kids take up smoking, swearing, and stealing: Everybody’s doing it. You’d think artistes would want to rise above the morass of the mundane and stick it to the status quo.
You’d be wrong.
They’re lemmings just like the rest of us. Monkey see, monkey puke.
I can deal with this. I just ignore it, since it doesn’t add anything to the story. What worries me is what’s next. What about when it becomes cool to show people with diarrhea? That episode was in a major movie last year. And the dumper was nominated for an acting award. Could the Hershey Squirts be the next offensive trend? Unlikely because the movie was a flop, but you never know.
Nose-picking is a likely candidate. Starts innocently enough but before you know it, they’re drawing blood as they strip mine for nose gold. Great visual. Hawking loogies, fingernail (and toenail!) biting, squeezing zits. There’s a deep well of unsociable behavior to draw from.
All this talk has made me sick to my stomach. I gotta…
I thought this was a new trend. Sadly, this guy noticed it eight years ago. It must be getting that much worse.
Someone wiser than me (that’s covers pretty much everyone) once observed that no one ever left a movie theater saying, “Yeah, it was a good movie. I just wish there had been more swearing.” Plenty of audience members yearn for more violence or lurid sexual content, but swearing is not really in that great demand.
I guess the market is saturated.
This topic came to mind recently when I read an online discussion among screenwriters wondering whether the whole F-bomb thing had gotten out of hand. The discussion was initiated by someone who questioned whether movies rely too much on that popular profanity to convince viewers of the film’s edginess.
Funny thing about that. F-bombs have been defused merely by their ubiquity. They aren’t spoken only by nasty thugs in edgy movies or shady characters in bleak noir films. They’re in goofy comedies, historical epics, and science fiction. They’re in everything! We’ve been carpet F-bombed. As a result, the very effect they supposedly serve is gone. It’s just another cliché. A cliché no one questions.
Let’s think about it. If a character in a movie said any other word as often as Robert De Niro or Chris Rock use The Big One in an average movie, no one would take them seriously. The argument is that this is the way people talk. Which people? I don’t know them, and I’ve been in some pretty rough environments. In my experience, the number of times a person uses that word is inversely proportional to the IQ of the speaker.
Besides, film characters aren’t written to speak the way people really speak. The “um”s, “uh”s, and “er”s are generally banished because they’re boring, just as excessive swearing has become boring. Suppose, for example, a character said the word “like” as often as many people do today, say, like this. That dialog would be unlistenable. It would never pass development muster.
So we’re on our way to completely declawing another obscenity. We’ve seen it before. When I was growing up, there were still older people who remembered where the word “screw” came from. If we innocent children referred to something as “screwed up”, we were shushed or, if we were unlucky, went on a soap diet. We had no idea why. Today no one bats an eyelash at screw, which means essentially the same thing as… well, you know.
For better or worse, our culture is in the midst of the dilution of another cuss word: suck. No one said this when I was young. It was a “swear word”. Like the other no-say-ems, it referred to a sexual act. Now it means… well, it means nothing. And everyone says it with impunity, from children to parents to ministers to teachers. It’s just another word.
Crap, heck, darn, shoot, screw. The euphemism backlog is growing as the “real” swears fade into impotence. I’m not sure if all this is good news or bad. Are we lowering the standards of the language or are we gradually removing the words that hurt?
I don’t friggin’ know.
Addendum: OK, just so you know it’s not only narrow-minded bloggers like me who think this way, here’s a quote from a recent newsletter from Richard Walter, chairman of the UCLA screenwriting program:
“The downside to writers having the freedom to write whatever they want is that it allows us also to write as badly as we want. The relentless exploitation of vulgarity is supposed to foster a sense of authenticity. In fact, however, it usually achieves precisely the opposite: heavy-handedness, thudding self consciousness, and a tone that is overbearingly shrill.”
To which I say, “Amen, Professor Walter.”
This week is all trivia, all the time. Thus, my time for writing is severely constricted. To save time, I’m reposting something that first appeared on my other blog nearly five years ago.
This short story was written several more years before I first posted it. I’ll give the same disclaimer I did then: If you think it stinks, we can all pretend I’ve become a better writer since.
The story is called “Frog Pond Skater”.
A Childe Hassam sunset descended upon Boston Common, the surrounding towers outlined in a golden haze. She approached the skating rink – already overflowing with rosy-cheeked children struggling to stay erect while socially-challenged teens fell in each other’s paths – with a poise that was well studied but forced, already wearing thin even at her young age. She seemed to be chased through the gate, leaving her three dollars with the attendant and barely acknowledging the greeting that came from within the badly weathered booth.
Some of the youngest skaters saw her arrival and chirped with glee in anticipation. Not a few muffled laughs were also mixed in but if she heard them, she didn’t let on. Her fingers laced her skates with the deftness and care of a surgeon. She left her shoes at the rink’s gate. Though they would be unattended, she never gave another thought to their safety. There was no tentative step as her left skate hit the ice. Where others tiptoed to a safe starting place, her first motion was a perfect glide already in synch with the whirlpool of skaters that had begun at ten that morning and would continue unceasing but endlessly changing for several more hours.
She was as different from the rest of the skaters as she was a mystery to them. What was this statuesque beauty with the perfect form and designer outfit doing amongst the tourists and assorted riffraff of the city? Her subtly muscular body moved with the grace of light. Those who were not in awe of her were trying to suppress an envy that was without pity. In vain, women did their best to distract the attentions of their partners back to themselves.
The girl, oblivious to the stares and glares of the onlookers, made a couple of turns around the rink before, now fully warmed up, she headed for the eye of the skating storm. Many of the children stopped their revolutions as well; this was the time they had been waiting for.
The girl paused in the center for a moment as if she didn’t wish to continue. There seemed to be a struggle within her. With a deep sigh of resignation, she threw her arms out and with a single move began a slow spin that increased in speed as she pulled her arms closer to her body. A voice in her head screamed at her to go faster. She must go faster if she was to get it right and faster she went. Still, the axis of her spin never wavered and it seemed as if she was rooted to a single molecule of the ice.
The children, some of whom witnessed this sight every week, were no less impressed by it, their mouths open in naive adoration. They were at least as amazed that she didn’t simply fly away like a missile or drill straight through the thin veneer of ice and the concrete slab beneath it, so fast was her turning.
She didn’t slow down as she gracefully raised and lowered her hands in perfect time. Finally she threw her head back and extended her arms, reducing her speed to the point where her facial expression could once more be seen. She wore the same joyless countenance that had clouded her face since she had arrived. Most who observed it discounted it as nothing more than professional smugness, but if any took the time to look beneath the facade, her pain was evident.
The skater returned to the rotating mass of visitors, blending in as best she could. Some of the children followed her, hoping to glean some of her magic. They could see the muscles in her legs ripple under her tight leggings belying the ease with which she glided effortlessly over the ice. Her movements were as smooth as the ice itself had been when it was first laid down, before it had been carved so violently by the hundreds of skaters who left their marks with their blades, hands, knees, and bottoms. If it had occurred to her, she might have winced at the irony of this, if she considered how her life had once shined but was now also scarred, though much more permanently.
As if the thought itself threatened to invade her mind, she distracted herself by heading back to the rink’s center. This time she didn’t hesitate before spreading her legs, toes pointing outward, leaning into the large circle she traced in the ice. She leaned so far that the children thought that surely her defiance of the law of gravity would bring her face down onto the frozen surface. When she straightened up, leaned back, and reversed the circle, the children sighed with relief. Although they had seen her perform the maneuver many times, they watched her like they watched a much-loved movie, clinging to the suspense in spite of the fact that they knew the ending was a happy one.
The skater left the center stage as quickly and easily as she had entered it. She may have been contemplating her next move or she may not have been thinking at all, but she never saw the teenage boy who was flailing his arms trying to keep from stumbling as he cut across the steady flow of skaters in the perpetual circle.
The boy was actually moving backward when he slammed into her broadside with his full weight. Her legs came out completely from beneath her as she fell to her right. She never had a chance to put her arms out to stop the fall and the side of her face hit the wooden fence that enclosed the rink. The circle’s momentum never slowed. A few of the people saw the girl fall but an hour didn’t pass at the Frog Pond without several such spills and they paid little attention. The children were stunned. The girl herself was stunned. She hadn’t felt the cold of the ice on her skin in many years. She sat for a long time as the pain began to overcome the initial shock. She put her finger to her cheekbone and felt her warm blood as it slowly dripped down her face, mingling with the tear that was falling from her eye. She had nothing to wipe her face with and she was not inclined to do so anyway. Her body shuddered once and she lifted herself to her feet with great effort.
As she made her way to the exit, one little girl watched her slow progress and noiseless tears fell freely from the eyes that only seconds before were wide with wonder and delight. The skater unlaced her skates with far less aplomb than she had tied them. She put her shoes back on and as she walked slowly away, she never gave another thought to the safety of her skates, left unattended at the gate.
The old adage says rules are meant to be broken. There’s no shortage of “rules” for writing. Those commandments are intended to aid in the writing process. They might be helpful if only they weren’t moving targets. I’ve written before about the difficulty of writing. Trying to remain upright on the shifting sands of unstable standards doesn’t make it any easier.
Go ahead. Try to get a group of authors to agree on the tenets that are most useful to guide the writing process. You’re likely to get a protracted religious argument for your trouble.
Here are a few of the most well-known non-negotiables that are constantly being negotiated:
For every writer who subscribes to one of these statutes, there’s probably one or more who eschew it. For example, I was at a book reading by a highly regarded, best-selling author who, when asked what other authors he read, claimed not to read other authors in order to avoid being unduly influenced by them. So much for reading to become a good writer.
With all due respect to adverb-phobic Stephen King, who deserves a great deal of respect indeed, I don’t have any problem with adverbs as a reader. In fact, I kinda like them. So why avoid them? If you’re writing a book for Mr. King, I guess. But why leave any tool in the toolbox unused? They’re there for a reason.
Fundamentalism is generally condemned in other spheres, but it’s alive and well in the writing world.
And the “write what you know” dictum would be better expressed as “write what you care about.” You can always gain knowledge about a topic. It’s no easy task to develop enough passion to write well about something about which you are otherwise indifferent.
If you’ve read enough about writers writing, you’ve undoubtedly come across the ones who claim they don’t know where their characters are going to take the story. Those lifeless entities are independent actors with wills of their own. I guess that’s possible, but is it mandated somewhere? Some would have you believe that it is or that at least it’s a hallmark of a higher level of fiction. I don’t think so. No less an authority than Vladimir Nabokov says he has no use for that tactic when he says, “My characters are galley slaves.” No surprises for Mr. Nabokov, thank you.
This confusion first confronted me when I was trying to master screenwriting. The rules to screenwriting are many, absolute, and quite specific. The only problem is, accomplished screenwriters break them as a matter of course. One decree beyond discussion is: Don’t describe what can’t be shown on the screen. For example, a script can’t say in its descriptive text, “Joe was nervous about the interview.” Fine. At a lecture at the Austin Film Festival (the screenwriter’s Mecca), a man who is arguably the most successful screenwriter of this generation, told all of us rapt listeners that he does it all the time.
AFF produced a nice little book of excerpts from various talks given at the festival over the years. “On Story” has lots of advice for writing the next great movie. Unfortunately, much of the advice is conflicting.
This is one of the reasons I question a prime directive of screenwriting education: Read scripts. A problem with that advice is that screenwriters don’t follow “the rules” we’re supposed to learn, so we’re likely to learn the wrong way. Also, most scripts we have access to are “shooting scripts” filled with camera angles and other technical directions that don’t belong in submitted scripts.
What’s a struggling writer to do? Obey the rules (“Do as I say, don’t do as I do.”) until you break in. Then you can do anything you want. Another way of saying it is, “Write something great and you have permission to write whatever you want.” I think of it as learning a secret handshake. Based on what I’ve seen and read, once you’re in the club, the rules no longer apply.
Fair enough. If I want to play their game, I’ll do my best to play by their rules.
Hello, my name is Rick C and I’m a bookaholic.
It’s true. There is always at least one book I’m making my way through, sometimes a few at a time. My backlog of to-be-read books is out of control. I’ll read pretty much any genre, but there’s one I miss terribly. Children’s picture books are among my favorite reading matter.
Arnold Lobel, Don and Audrey Wood, Rosemary Wells, Peter Spier, James Stevenson, as well as old reliables like Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. They’re my Tolstoy, Hemingway, and Faulkner. I miss having little children around to read to and it runs contrary to the societal norm for a man to read “Frog and Toad Are Friends” in public. Not that I haven’t done it anyway.
No list of children’s author/illustrators would be complete without the remarkable Chris van Allsburg, best known for his “The Polar Express”, as well as other great books that were made into mediocre movies. One of his books was an enigmatic masterpiece called, “The Mysteries of Harris Burdick”. Each page of the book consists of a magical (and sometimes downright creepy) illustration. On each facing page was written a single line from the book from which the picture was supposedly drawn (pun intended).
According to the book’s introduction, the collection of drawings and accompanying texts were dropped off at a publisher by a mysterious author named Harris Burdick, who never returned to pick them up.
All that verbiage was simply to lead up to an idea I’ve come up with for some blog posts. Since the extent of my backlog of writing ideas outstrips even that of my reading list, what better model to follow than Mr. Burdick’s? I can’t draw to save my life – hope to God I never have to – so I’ll write short snippets from stories that don’t exist, that I have ideas for but have no hope of ever pursuing. Consider them writing prompts on steroids. Maybe they are.
Confused as much as distressed, he watched the ship disappear beneath the waves, foam and oil bubbling to the surface, marking its interment. No one could possibly have survived the explosion that ended the vessel’s journey long before it reached its destination.
He still clung to the life preserver he’d carried with him when he leapt into the water just moments before the blast. The old man he’d dived in to save had certainly looked like he might drown out here, miles from any known shore. The prospect of playing the hero in front of the crowd of onlookers standing on the deck, some of whom were attractive young women, had triggered a shot of adrenaline that made him perform an act that was as uncharacteristic of him as the peaceful, beckoning look was on the face of the old man.
Now the ship was gone, the sea slowly settling from turbulent to placid. What had happened to that man?
Scribbling in the Sand 