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014: The Quiet Bomb

"MGM? Yeah, this is Pierce Brosnan. I've just read the script for Die Another Day and I'd like to execute the clause in my contract where I phone in my performance. What? Everyone else is doing the same thing?" I can image everyone involved in the film having a number of conversations like this one. The actors, director, and crew all lining up for their paychecks, trying not to feel like complete whores as they took the money. Meanwhile the marketing machine rolls on, touting Die Another Day as the second coming of the action genre, the 20th outing of the world's most respected franchise wherein the producers point and exclaim, "Look! There's still life in this body!"

Which is the same statement Dr. Frankenstein made after running several million volts through an assembly of reconstructed tissue.

The pitch for Die Another Day went something like this: "Like License to Kill, only with DEADLY SCORPIONS and ENDLESS WATER TORTURE as motivation." "Like Dr. No, only in SLOW-MO WITH MORE TIT SHOTS." "Like Goldfinger, but WITH MORE LASERS." "She'll kick ass like Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies except with AN OSCAR IN HER HANDBAG." "We'll throw them out of a cargo plane just like The Living Daylights but in a FREE-FALLING HELICOPTER."

Opening weekend numbers were $47.1 million in the US alone, a number the producers will claim as a mandate to pump out more of the same recycled material for the next twenty years. Audiences will line up because we've shown a predisposition to be happy with the same thing over and over again. Hollywood is beginning to understand the maxim by which McDonald's and Starbucks have taken over the world: the audience doesn't want variety, they want the simplicity of perpetual regularity. But SUPER-SIZE it, make it a VENTE, because damnit! we want it LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER.

Einstein is laughing at us. Sooner or later we're going to bump up against a theory of his and even the insatiable human thirst for consumption isn't strong enough to overcome his theory of relativity. We'll try anyway and that may very well be the ultimate alien invader which breaks us. "Brought down by physics." That'll look good on our collective tombstone.

I was in the theater this weekend. Yes, I was voting for more of this crap with my dollar and if it makes you feel any better, you can blame me for the state of movies coming out of Hollywood in the next year. I was sitting in the theater, watching the pyrotechnics, the product placements, and the actors as they tried to squeeze some dignity out of their dialogue, and I was bored. I was thinking, "Did I leave the gas on? Are my socks all lined up in vertical rows in my drawer? Why does my cat lick his ass so constantly?"

I was also thinking: "Is the corpse worth saving?" Populist wisdom says there are only seven unique plots available to the writer and, with the action genre, that number is probably reduced to one or two. Even the most ardent fan is going to eventually realize that the spoon being shoved in their mouth has just come directly from their ass. Bond is being strangled by his own mythology. He teeters on the edge of self-parody, unable to escape the Saville Row mannequin into which he has been sewn. He poses, he preens, he blows things up: this is the extent of his character description. The characters in the film recognize their own stereotypical nature and comment on that nature as if the self-evaluation can be passed off on the audience as sharp psychological insight.

The inherent problem facing the Bond franchise is the same issue which Marvel and DC are trying to distract you from: boredom. James N. Frey in How to Write a Damn Good Novel talks about the concept of "maximum capacity." Characters must act at their maximum capacity in order for an audience to sustain a belief in them. They don't have to be paragons of their niche, but they have to operate at the peak of THEIR ability. Bond, like other superheroes, faces the problem that they are unmatched in their maximum capacity. Effective operation at that level would reduce film time to about ten minutes, leaving you with eighty minutes of commercials and naval gazing. The moment a character goes stupid on the audience is the instant where their attention wanders.

Quick! EXPLOSIONS. NAKED PEOPLE. RABID DOGS FEASTING ON INNOCENT CHILDREN. MORE EXPLOSIONS. SEX. SEX. SEX!

We're simple, really. It doesn't take much to distract us.

Writers need to do two things as well: operate at their own maximum capacity and know when to get off the stage. You don't have to outdo Shakespeare, but you've got to be able to look your audience in the eye and say, "Yeah, those are my words." And you need to know when to take the residual checks for foreign editions and call it a day. Take up gardening. Kill your genre character and start over, if that is what it takes.

"LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER" is intended to beat the audience into submission. One day we'll wake up from this S & M fantasy and the loudest, faster, hardest film will be playing to an empty theater. We'll have realized what is missing from the rollercoaster in which we have strapped ourselves: the sense of wonder.

It is an epiphany, the sensation of the sacred intruding itself into our mundane world. Cyclical religious structures (and aren't they all?) hold at their center the recreation of this primal moment when we first touched magic. The craze for nostalgia -- the continuing acceptance and queuing up for "more of the same" -- is just our attempt to circle back and find that initial moment again. Except we've built up so much scar tissue that we believe we need the recreation to happen -- you know it -- LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER.

We'll be saved by the quiet bomb. We need the mushroom cloud to be hand-held and personalized.

Posted by Teppo at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) November 25, 2002

013: The Daily Regime

I spent part of my lunch hour staring out the window at the leaden water of Lake Union, thinking about writing. Also thinking about the lack of exercise in my life and the two threads started to run together. Sure, it's an old adage of the trade that you have to put words on the page to get anywhere. Raymond Chandler once said that you've got a million shit words that are dying to get out and there's no point in trying to avoid them. I'm thinking about writing and exercising and realize I've never taken the metaphor seriously.

Here I sit, a guy who is spending all of his time working his biceps, and I'm completely neglecting the rest of my body. It's one thing to pour all my energy into putting words on the page, but I'm going to end up looking like a Venice Beach librarian--bulging at the top with no back or lower body support and no endurance. The other parts of the body -- or, in this case, the mind -- need their workout time too.

Let's call reading "cardio" and revising/editing the "lower body workout." You're supposed to alternate days, aren't you? Lower body on even days, upper body the odd days, with a little cardio every day is how I think the regimes are intended. I don't want to tear anything or to fry my synapses too harshly.

It's been awhile since I made regular trips to the gym, but I can remember that first week. I couldn't lift my hands to the top of my scalp to get the shampoo worked into my hair. I couldn't walk up and down stairs without feeling like I was hauling a sack of anvils. Riding the bike for a half hour just plain sucked.

But it got better. I even started to look forward to the workouts, relishing the fading sensation of the upper body burn when I moved the weights around for the lower body workout, feeling my legs loosen as I fell into the rhythmic motion of the bike. It was a month or so before I started to notice the changes. They weren't immediate, but they were there.

Reading. Writing. Revising. Full workouts only. No skimping.

---
Final week of NaNoWriMo. I'm not even sure where my word count is, but I am sure that it is woefully short of 50K. Not that it matters, 50K isn't anywhere near the end of the book. After about a quarter of the way, I can usually nail the final word count pretty accurately, but I'm afraid I have no idea right now. Feels like 120K, but I know there is a whole lot I haven't done yet.

I've left the outline as well. I just started Chapter 15 and, let's see, what is supposed to be happening there? Oh, "Sex." Huh. You can stick it anywhere I suppose and it works.

This is where the process gets interesting. The NaNo safety net disappears in a week and the only impetus to finish will be my own. I've got a number of unfinished books in the file drawers which speak ever so highly of my success rate. The distractions of the holiday season are endless. There are any number of reasons to put off working on the next chapter.

And one reason to keep working. You only need one.

Posted by Teppo at 09:06 PM | Comments (0) November 21, 2002

012: Déjà vu

I’ve written the beginning of chapter 11 before. It is a strange sensation to have my fingers moving on the keyboard without any mental effort on my part -- automatic writing thrown up by the lizard part of my brain. Déjà vu is an experience which never fails to feel like cold goose feet on the base of my spine. Especially when I write.

Everything we see and do is grist for the mental mill. Every conversation during the day can be mined for gold; everything overheard while riding public transportation or sitting in a coffee shop is fair game. We are wallflowers with binaural mics and digital lenses and terrabytes of storage for all the audio and visual that surrounds us. We breathe it in, synthesize it, and breathe back out again.

Remembering the difference between the imaginary and the concrete can be complicated. The distinction becomes ever more distorted when your dreams are continuations of the work which is consuming your waking hours. I’m dreaming again -- which always happens when my brain is actively churning through a project -- and the dawn turns the nocturnal firestorms to stinking pits of hoary ash in the morning. But the fires which have burned during the night have left marks on the dome of my skull, streaks of soot which are inverted still frames from the mental journeys, phantom negatives which are indelibly captured in my head.

Déjà vu. Am I recycling reality or remembering a dream? The act of creation is beginning to get away from me; this creature is starting to breathe without aid from me, starting to flex its own muscles, rattling the bars of its prison.

I’m starting to wake up. I’ve remembered the secret: reality is fiction too.

Posted by Teppo at 10:33 PM | Comments (0) November 18, 2002

011: Cake

I'm watching my wife fall asleep. It only takes her a few minutes and then her breathing becomes regular and her hand falls away from mine. I give her another minute to fall off the ledge and into deep water before I slip out of bed and creep downstairs to my office.

I can steal three hours a day. Two during the train ride commute and one after everyone goes asleep. This hour at night is the one where I get to have all the reference books and the Internet at my disposal. This the hour when I can focus a bit more on getting out of the prose tar pit. Of course, this sixty minute window happens at 11pm when I've been up for nearly twenty hours and most of my synaptic connections are firing with the accuracy of a 30 cent water pistol at ten feet. But it is an hour that is all mine and I take it.

During the day, my body is in this same position, staring at the computer screen. But I'm not doing the fun stuff; I'm wading through emails from people who think I exist to catch the glorious shit that is going to fall from their ass and save the company; I'm reiterating the same instructions a hundred times over to the same people who couldn't be bothered to read the how-to the first fucking time I sent it to them. I am, in short, an office drone. 8 to 5, my creativity drains down into my heel and tries to escape out the iron hatch. I am dead until 5pm.

It's 11:30pm. I've been waiting all day to kill the two men in black who have popped up in the kitchen. I've got a fun plan that involves an explosive package under the car in the driveway. I can't wait to get them out there. Just a few more lines. Give them that phone call. Come on, pick up the damn phone.

---
The blonde man listened to the phone, the muscles in his face relaxing. "Yes," he said again. His eyes drooped and he started to sway. He nodded once more and put the phone down on the counter.

"What—" the dark-haired man started to ask.

The other man's eyes snapped open and his hand darted into his coat. The hand returned with a pistol, and he pointed the weapon at Liz. She froze, staring at the small mouth of the silencer, her mouth dry. The blonde man blinked, reacting to something he had heard, and moved the muzzle away from her.

He fired twice, put the hot barrel of the weapon in his mouth, and pulled the trigger a third time. His body hit the floor at almost the same time as his partner's.

---
It's 11:45pm. I have to get up in five hours for another day being a worker bee. My characters have just elected to skip the car bomb and take themselves out in the kitchen. I have been surprised.

This is why I do this.

Posted by Teppo at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) November 15, 2002

010: Use a Knife

I wrote 700 words of shit today.

I'm not going to look at that section again. I'm just going to highlight the first fecal-stained letter, hit 'page down' twice, and make it all vanish. Actions contrary to the basic tenet of 'write till you die' month, but I can't just leave them there. These words smell bad and they aren't going to suddenly expectorate some olfactory effervescence.

This is the throes of week two: when you start second guessing every word. Actually, it is the weak moment of every day at the keyboard. Some days none of the words seem right, they all lie crooked and askew on the page as if arranged by blind amputees working with their tongues. They are your words, though. They came out of your head; they fell from your lips and fingers to the page. You gave birth to them. They are your responsibility: the hideous truth.

They will never grow up straight. Some of them will never achieve any sort of homely luminance. Some of them will never be a suitable framework on which you can hang a glittering idea, hiding their crooked limbs and tortured skeletons with the radiant majesty of your doctrine. Some of them will just be ugly.

Kill 'em quick. They'll only poison the rest of the page. Use a sharp knife and cut them out. Toss them out back and let the night animals have their fill.

Listening to King Crimson's Disciple tonight.

"Frame by frame (Suddenly)
Death by drowning (from within)
In your, in your analysis.

Step by step (Suddenly)
Doubt by numbers (from within)
In your, in your analysis."

Posted by Teppo at 12:10 PM | Comments (0) November 12, 2002

009: Soundtracks

I like building soundtracks. Music is a consistent part of my daily life; I think the only time I haven't got something playing in the background is the half hour between waking and breakfast. There is some color and rhythm around me all day. It's only natural that I think about the soundtrack to the book as I write it.

I used to pick music for each chapter as well as finding theme songs for the characters to help me delineate their attributes. I've got a CD-R somewhere which is a 70 minute summation of a book lying in a drawer. Listening to that mix reminds me a great deal of where my head was when I wrote that book.

You also have to be careful what you listen to as you write. Too much White Zombie that year definitely lent a pallor to the text which contributes to its accelerated sense of age. Too much sensitivo indie pop will result in characters that will be played by Ethan Hawke. An abundance of ambient music will result in your readers zoning out as they tumble into the mantra-chant of your letters.

I tend to listen to records that I know very well while writing. I want the noise, but want to be able to ignore the details. I want lyrics that I know well so I'm not distracted by the clever phrasing or the patter of their dialogue. I want their strength but not their influence. A number of writers I know prefer soundtracks while they are writing. Energy, but no words, keeps the distractions to a minimum.

I had my head turned by a sample once. My fingers were stuck, the events on the page having caught me fast, and I couldn't quite figure out the solution to my problem. I'm was listening to Front Line Assembly and a sample from the film Falling Down popped through the mix: "Heat seeking, shoulder firing, and fucking disposable." My fingers start moving. Two guys in a convertible with a portable rocket launcher have just driven up.

The soundtrack should present solutions; it should give you direction.

What is being poured into your ears while you type?

Posted by Teppo at 08:16 PM | Comments (0) November 08, 2002

008: First Quarter Report

Seven days into the process and I still have all my hair. I've only launched my cat across the room once so far; he gets the hint pretty quickly when I growl at him from the computer. I had hoped for a jump start by setting aside a large chunk of time at the beginning. It took two days of rather random letter arrangement on the page before the cleverness kicked in.

To hit the magic number, I should be doing 1667 words a day. A little math tells me that after seven days I should have 11669 words. Word count a few minutes ago gave me 10925. It's not a terrible number, but it certainly isn't the barn-burner I had been hoping for. I'm happy the gap isn't larger. I'll be giddy if I'm only off by this margin come November 28th.

I'd be ecstatic if I actually thought this book was going to be finished in 50,000 words.

I can't see the end yet. I know the last two chapters, but how I'm going to get there is still murky. The one thing that NaNoWriMo doesn't allow for is the luxury of figuring things out. You've got to get your groove on early and keep it there. Having the plot actually hang together is a bonus. The point of this mad dash isn't necessary to get the most exquisite words on the page, but rather to get something down. You can edit and fix later. You can argue about the curtains and the furniture once you've got the house built.

Of course, the house has to be built on a solid foundation. I'm trying not to fixate on that detail.

In the meantime, I've got holes to fill. Gaps in my research continue to haunt me. I want to spend a few days in the woods up past Snoqualmie Falls and actually wander around where I've placed the town of Fall Creek. My map of Washington state says the Tolt Reservoir is closed to public access, which has done little to assuage my desire to climb that dam and stand on the top where Georges Maratre meets Mr. X again. I know nothing about radio and my lack of knowledge is putting cramps in my fingers. I need a crime scene report from an auto accident to get the terminology down. I need to know how to operate a police scanner as well as the bigger radios they keep in their stations. I don't know enough about hypnotic suggestion.

I need to know a lot of things. But there isn't time for all that; I've got to keep writing.

A draft of the book's opening has been posted in the Library over at markteppo.com. First four chapters and the prologue. A half hour of entertainment if you are so inclined.

---
The commenting function of the site has been engaged if the urge to type moves through you. The "talk to me" link following each entry is active. Leave your thoughts, errant waterfowl, and spare change.

Posted by Teppo at 09:02 AM | Comments (0) November 04, 2002

007: Seeing Patterns

I just saw the premier episode of "24." I was supposed to have been planning the novel, but needed a little distraction. As I'm watching the show, I realize that they are walking through the process of introducing the main character -- they're setting up the mythology.

Joseph Campbell wrote a book a while back called Hero With a Thousand Faces. I'm not going to go all Syd Field on you and say that Campbell's breakdown of the Hero's Epic Quest is the end-all be-all of creative structures, but he certainly managed to distill the story arc of the hero's journey into a series of five essential steps.

The POPULACE faces a CRISIS. For whatever reason, they are unable to resolve this crisis on their own and they turn to the HERO who is either RELUCTANT or an OUTSIDER. Once convinced of the necessity of undertaking the QUEST to resolve the crisis, the hero begins his journey. On the way, he usually acquires some sort of MENTOR who guides him on the more esoteric aspects of his quest. The hero must leave whatever space he is in and enter some other space. In mythology, it is usually a transference from PROFANE space to SACRED space (to crib a few terms from Mircea Eliade) and, while in that altered space, the hero must perform a DEED in order to gain the knowledge that is required to save the population. Hero returns, crisis is averted, life goes on.

But here's the kicker: Hero must then leave. Why? Because he has been to SACRED space and he is no longer completely part of the PROFANE world. He has been changed by his journey and may no longer participate in the realm of innocence. If he wasn't an Outsider prior to the journey, he certainly is afterward. The price of knowledge, after all.

This percolates through my head as I'm watching "24." Jack Bauer, cast out of CTU after last season's debacle, wanders the streets of LA. He's bearded, driving a van, wearing flannel: those symbols which our media culture uses to symbolize "outsider." A crisis emerges. The people need help. They turn to the man who helped them before. The call goes out to bring Jack back in. Reluctantly, grudgingly, Jack accepts his mission and undertakes the quest.

Two scenes at the end made me smile. Jack takes charge and delivers the line which is on everyone's lips this last week and says to his former boss, "You want results, but you are afraid of getting your hands dirty." Jack is the creature who is no longer part of the social group -- his outcast status isn't just an emotional state, but it is a mental state as well -- he is willing to act. He has gone to a realm of ACTION and has easy access to such states again. This is, partially, why the townsfolk call upon him. And finally, Jack stands in front of a mirror, having cut his hair and beard. The final shot is of the hero transformed in preparation for his entry into the mystical realm of the quest. He has assumed a different skin; he has put on his armor in order to be ready for battle.

The importance of knowing Campbell is not to adhere to the structure which he outlines, but to be aware of it. If you can see the patterns, you can know how to avoid falling into the complacency of their structure.

My main character in the novel is named "Jack" as well. [And there's entirely different discussion about how the name "Jack" is synonymous with "agent of the people."] Is he reluctant? Is he an outsider? What space will he have to enter in order to finish his journey? Who will he rescue? What knowledge is he going to bring back? I have to go find out now.

Posted by Teppo at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)