Notes on Writing

Why I Hate George Lucas

Over this past weekend, for some reason, Spike TV was on constantly in my apartment. They were airing the entire Star Wars saga over and over again in a continuous loop. I’d head out for errands and come back to watch Luke get de-handed. After a late dinner I watched some Jar Jar. On Sunday I watched the finale of the original while texting with a friend.

It was during this text conversation that we realized that all of the movies would be trotted out, once again, starting this spring…only now in 3-D!

My friend had one thing to say: “I hate George Lucas.”

I agreed.

But over the past few days I’ve come to realize what a strong phrase that is, “I hate George Lucas,” and I began to wonder why a guy obsessed with puppets and magic could bring such strong emotion out of me. Oh, I know there are plenty of reason to hate the prequels (ChefElf covers those far better than I ever could). I have long since downgraded all of them to “Crap.”

But it wasn’t the prequels my friend and I were watching when our issuance of hatred arose. It was the originals. The new originals. The ones packed full of just utterly absurd changes that serve no purpose. In A New Hope we get to see Jabba! Hooray! And he’s presented in a way that makes absolutely no sense and as if fucking up his physical appearance wasn’t enough, we now get a scene where Han Solo steps on the tail of the most feared crime leader in the system and nobody cares. It’s played for laughs in fact. Ha. Ha.

In Empire, R2 gets eaten by a swamp monster and spat back out. Luke, in the original, wipes mud off of R2 and says: “You’re lucky you don’t taste very good.” Now, through the magic of editing, he says: “You were lucky to get out of there.” Awesome!

And this goes on. And on. And on. It’s like a madman is at the wheel of my childhood, and instead of passing by all my favorite memories he’s randomly making right-hand turns to see things no one cares about and tell fart jokes.

And yet still, I’m not sure that’s where my hate comes from, though mucking about in my childhood memories is not a good thing, to be sure.

No. I think I hate George Lucas because the prequels manage to make THE ENTIRE FIRST THREE MOVIES MAKE NO SENSE. Obie-Wan ages forty years in the time it takes Luke to grow into a teenager. Chewbacca, who fought at Yoda’s side during the Clone Wars (apparently), never once pipes up with the slightest bit of information. Vader doesn’t bother to look for his children or old master in his hometown. Oh, and also, nobody remembers or cares or believes in the Jedi, who less than twenty years ago were a major part of the Imperial whatever the hell it was called.

And I know, these things are somehow explained in the books. I get told that a lot.

But I don’t care about the books. People are constantly plugging up plot holes using a jury-rigged explanation from material that doesn’t exist in the movies. I get angry when fans defend the existence of cities that make zero sense by conjuring up some bizarre native cultural belief that is not addressed in the films. Or how I get assured that scenes of complete nonsense are actually perfectly explainable if I know the back-stories of the characters that got made up to explain the nonsensical scenes in question. In short, I get angry when anything outside of the movies needs to be brought in to explain the movies.

Because that is crap.

Pure and utter crap. You don’t get to have legions of fans and gh0st writers scramble to cover up the mistakes you were too lazy or too blind to see, Mister Lucas. You are not a writer, if you do so. You are not a creator. You are not giving anything to your art and you are not respecting your craft.

And that is why I hate you.

Look. Here. These are some notes I wrote trying to piece together one set of scenes for Persistent Illusions (warning: there might be spoilers in here assuming you can read my handwriting):

That’s a sequence of maybe four scenes. I wanted to make sure that my time-lines made sense. I wanted to make sure, since my characters are all over the world, that I had sunrises and sunsets occurring at the right time in the right places. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t accidentally skip too far ahead or give a character knowledge they couldn’t possibly have. I wanted to make sure that emotional responses had time to build, that fights had back stories, that breakdowns had build-ups.

I wanted to put together the best possible product I could for my readers.

I’m sure I made mistakes. And I know I fudged some things. Artists do that. But I thought long and hard about everything I fudged, everything I did that pushed the unspoken agreement between me and my readers that I’m going to be a good guide for them. And I tried as hard as I could to dim those down and I tried my damnedest to eliminate all my mistakes.

I’m not sure when George Lucas stopped caring, or if he ever did. Maybe he just got lucky in the originals. But I know that the minute you stop caring, the second you shrug and give no thought to putting your name on something you haven’t sweat for, that’s when you stop being an artist.

And to do that with your biggest project? To do that and manage to ruin your previous projects in the same motion?

No.

Just no.

I’ll never join you, Lucas.

Never.

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Writing Someone Else’s Story

I am once again attempting to put a short story together for one of Chuck Wendig’s weekly flash fiction contests. This week’s contest is about guns and crime. Which is a nice fit for me. I can certainly get up to some fun with guns, murder, crime and a nice macguffin. And the 1,000 word limit adds a nice spin on things. It’s like creating an amuse-bouche with words (props to me for fitting the words “macguffin” and “amuse-bouche” into one paragraph).

There’s also a certain thrill that comes with writing someone else’s story. It’s strange, coming up with my own fiction is such a difficult process to track that it’s hard for me to say where most of my ideas come from. And at times is seems like what I really do is come up with one or two strong ideas, scenes, lines, characters, just whiffs of them mind you, and then flesh out everything else that’s attached in order to find the story surrounding them.

In these flash fiction challenges, though, one or two of the ideas are already there. They don’t arrive in my brain spontaneously like normal, they are sitting right there on Chuck Wendig’s page for me to approach from afar and study. It’s like playing with someone else’s set of LEGO’s. I mean, I know I have tons of those blue blocks and rubber wheels and jungle material, but I poke around in someone else’s collection and there’s all these new pieces to try and figure out. Where does that airplane wing fit? What are these tiny white one’s for?

Not that guns and crime don’t exist in my personal LEGO set of fiction, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, I should probably get back to my shotgun and bank robbery.

It needs to be done by Friday after all.

 

 

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Probability Angels: Part 10

Probability Angels

Part 10: One Final Push

By

Joseph Devon

Eyeball and Printer Friendly Version

(Please note: This story is the final part of a series of stories beginning with, “Probability Angels: Part 1,” and while it is designed to stand alone it does draw heavily on the foundation of characters and events that were created in “Probability Angels: Part 1,” and continued through Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. Basically, I have to highly recommend that you start at “Probability Angels: Part 1” and continue on in order.

Or you can go here and buy the book or go here and view the book in its entirety.)

Mary opened her eyes. She reached a hand up and felt her forehead and touched something sticky. When she drew it away there was a matte layer of red blood on her fingertips.

She sat up and looked around, ungrounded fears sprouting up inside of her like weeds, and even though she saw the friendly surroundings of the Himalayan Mountains the fear inside of her kept growing and dividing and worming its way through her body.

Then her fear found a home and she began to remember the last few minutes before she was knocked unconscious, the screams in the night and the sound of things feasting in the dark prairie grass.

“Well good morning,” a voice next to her said, and she turned to see a tester looking at her with worry. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” Mary said, but her words came out weak. “That was stupid,” she said, cursing herself as she started remembering again. “That was so stupid…how many others followed me out to the train?”

“Five,” the tester next to her said. “And then Kyo went after you too of course.” Continue reading “Probability Angels: Part 10” »

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And that, apparently, is how you write a book

First draft for this last section is done.

I’m very tired.

I’m not at all confident in my ability to clean up a rather clunky ending.  And the pacing in the last half needs some serious work.  Plus there’s a scene I couldn’t be bothered to actually write, so I just put some filler in there and then changed scenes again.

Which is going to be tons of fun come tomorrow when I have to sort all this out.

Not to mention the typos.  So many typos.

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My bid to alienate everyone

So, as I mentioned yesterday, endings are tough.  They’re really tough for me because I don’t really believe in them.  In my mind, life goes on; I never really get it into my head that a character’s story is over (unless I’ve killed them off, of course).  The result of this mentality is that for my larger works there’s always a lingering hint of things left undone in my endings.

I shouldn’t say “always” I guess because I don’t have a ton of larger works, but just the same I don’t see myself ever wrapping up one of my stories with a bunch of ewoks playing instruments and everybody dancing and smiling implying that now everything will be perfect for always.

Or maybe I’m being too analytical of myself.  After all, even the most tied up of endings gives some notion of life continuing.  I’ve yet to see the story that ends with, “Then everything stopped forever.”

No, maybe my point here is that the Matthew and Epp stories are, by nature, going to end with the notion of things continuing on past the final word.  These characters live preposterously long lives; I’m not going to be able to sum them up in the year I’ve spent with them.

But that’s not it either.

I don’t know.  I haven’t actually written the final words yet, but I get the idea that it’s going to be possible to read it as me leaving the door open for a sequel or something.  Which it isn’t.  I may come back to this world, I have no control over that.  But my ending isn’t an attempt to hint at that.

It’s just my ending.

Life goes on.

This one and the next.  Ha.

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Endings are tough

About four times so far today I’ve stopped writing, thrown myself into a panic, come to the conclusion that this is nothing but a horrible mess, written the words, “then everyone dies,” and walked away from my computer in disgust.

In fact, I didn’t bother to delete those three words, “then everyone dies,” the last time I wrote them. They’re still there at the end of my current Word document, hovering just past the body of the text, sitting there below the cursor, a happy little escape hatch for me to fall back on when I finally give up on tying all of this gigantic mess up. It’s sort of like my mythical trip to Tahiti that I’ve been contemplating for as long as I can remember but will never actually get around to taking.

At any point I can just stop, mid-sentence even, and hit delete until the rest of the story catches up to those three words. Then I’ll be done.

Endings are tough.

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This is not a blog

For some reason I’m rather stuck this week in the word department.  They aren’t really flowing.  For the story that’s okay because, over the course of this project anyway, the week leading up to my writing weekend has always been spent doing a lot of brainstorming and note taking and book reading and things of that nature, but no actual writing.

Except for these daily posts.  Which have no point and go nowhere and, in no way, are meant to comprise a blog.

I mean, yes, they’re sort of a blog, but periodically I feel compelled to point out that really this is more of a documentary.  I don’t dedicate tons of brainpower to coming up with fascinating and humorous blog posts.  This is partly a survival issue.  There is no way I could craft ten interesting posts and a short story over the course of two weeks, every two weeks, for fifty-two weeks.

No, the daily posts on this site were always meant to be more of a study in what goes into writing a story.  And, as it turns out, a lot of what goes into writing a story is me being stressed and bored and sleepy and sort of thick-headidly stupid as I stare off into space and listen to the noises in my head.

Sometimes something fun pops up, but otherwise I feel obligated, mostly to other writers out there, to not spice things up and try to display this process as honestly as possible.

So when I’m having a hard time stringing words together, you get a post about me having a hard time stringing words together.

Like this one.

Tada.

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This might not be my shortest story

I didn’t sleep very well last night.  I was tossing and turning a lot and then I was up at about five and couldn’t fall back asleep.  It wasn’t a bad tossing and turning.  I was stuck in thought barely enough to keep sleep away.  And what I was thinking about was this last section.

I keep mentioning that it’s a little strange to be wrapping all of this up, but the number of different ways I could wrap things up is a little strange as well.  I may have worked out some of the larger steps last night, but, really, a lot of things are up in the air, and a lot of things are going to wait until I get into the story and can see which way some of my early choices lean.  Which is a weird feeling.  Also, well I have a lot of ground to cover and I don’t want to short change anything, so this might run a bit long.  Not that the Matthew and Epp stories have ever run short.

Love the e-mails and comments thus far on that last section.  It’s so much fun when I can throw Tammy for a loop while at the same time not confuse my mother.

Good stuff.

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The title is now set in stone, unchangable for all time

Or unless I go into the “Manage” section of my dashboard and change it.

I had to put a dash in between “Part” and “10″ when I renamed the category, otherwise this current category appeared above “Part 1″ in the categories tab. Which was annoying.

Also my page went nuts earlier today.

I just saw an ad for the Adirondacks where they bragged about how many of those “other parks out west” you could fit into the Adirondacks. Five. Five famous parks from Utah and Colorado were able to fit into just one Adirondacks. I’m not sure how this is a selling point for a National Park.

Haven’t started the last story yet.

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You know those dreams everyone has where you forgot to study for your final?

I’ve got to tell you, I’ve kind of got the jim-jams here.  Firmly lodged in the front of my skull is the notion that this is the last story of this project, not to mention the final chords of Matthew and Epp.

I think I’m nervous.

On another note…I somehow have no other notes.

If you just dropped in, the story posting next week will be the last story in the project, it will also round out the Matthew and Epp stories which began with “Part 1: Second Choice.”  Go read it.  If you like it, then go read Parts 2 through 9 in preparation for Part 10, coming next Thursday. You can find them nicely labeled and in order over in the “Categories” sidebar.

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