Category: Creativity

I do not worship at the altar of logic. I refuse to bring it frankincense and goats. I’ve employed deductive reasoning in my work for years, and I’ve read its instruction manual. So when I tell people that logic isn’t always the best way to know the world around us, they look at me as if I’ve been replaced by a dancing pixie from the Land of Dreams and Candy Corn.

A friend taught me a crackerjack quote from our buddy, Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Don’t misunderstand me—I love logic in its proper place. In the world of things that can be measured, logic rules with a mighty fist. Will my car not start? Logic is my ally. Do I want to build a helicopter? Logic stands ready as my sword and shield. Do I want to tie a Windsor knot? Logic throws me a party in Monte Carlo with dancing girls and baccarat.

But if my wife asks me how much I love her, logic is a tiger shark eating my damned leg off. If I fire up my spreadsheet to answer her question, I will be dragged below the surface and never seen again. To illustrate my point, try to assess these statements logically:

  1. When your 16 year old son wants to borrow the Jaguar and you deny him, he will calmly understand this if you provide him a matrix showing the probability of him slaughtering half the city, including the dogs and cats.
  2. When two groups of people massacre each other because their common ancestors moved to different neighborhoods 2,000 years ago, giving them a Venn diagram that shows they’re one big family will solve the problem right away.

Please hand in your answers at the end of class, and be sure to show your work.

Years ago my job included helping people jointly make decisions when they hated each other. I had a nifty, logical tool for the job. Everybody loved it. It involved giving ratings and assessments to various factors. It used actual math, and the option that got the highest score at the end was the logical one to choose. Not once—ever—did a group select the option with the highest score. Yet they always agreed unanimously on a different choice. They all walked away happy. They all stuck by their decision, although otherwise they remained bile-spitting enemies.

When people aren’t building pyramids and fixing faucets, they are not logical. They live by intuition, and applying logic to people problems leads to misery and death. Or at least, to unpleasantness and failure.

But people should be logical, right? Isn’t that the problem? I agree that it is. People should be logical in the same way that tanning should be a fat burning activity and trees should be covered in lollipops. People just are not logical when it comes to people-related stuff. If you spend time trying to make people logical, you should also spend time trying to make a toaster cry when it hears La Traviata.

So what is the answer? We can’t abandon logic. It’s too darn useful, like that TV remote that does nothing except activate slow motion, but you keep it because none of your 7 other remotes does that. I suggest that we just embrace intuition when we’re dealing with the illogical dominant species on our planet. And when our wives ask how much we love them, we’ll all know that the correct answer is, “I cleaned the litter box before you got home.”

When I decided to become a writer, I received a license to whine. More correctly, I gave myself a license to aggravate everyone I know with my whining. They can’t shut me up, unless they want to beat me to death with my laptop and toss my body in a ditch. I think they don’t do that because I threw a great New Year’s party one time, and they’re hoping I’ll throw another one.

I whine about having no ideas, having bad ideas, not enough time to write, how much time writing takes, writing myself into a corner, hating the characters I created, having to kill characters I love, not knowing how to end a story, finishing a story and being depressed about leaving it, and reading books that make me realize everything I’ve ever written sucked. But my most profound whining comes when friends and family fail to show a slavering interest in my work and my writing process.

Perhaps a friend never gives me feedback on the 200,000 word monster I forced on her. Maybe a friend took three months to review my story, when I know that during that time he read someone else’s novel in two days. I may know that a friend read my book until four pages from the end and then let it sit on the desk for a week. Some friend may finish and point out a dozen typos, and when I press for details all she says is, “I really liked it.”

At these times I become dejected, and I whine. The fact that other friends provide me fantastic help doesn’t seem to lift my gloom.

But today I realized something. Writing isn’t an ego-boosting activity. Writing isn’t a holy calling worthy of everyone’s attention. Writing is a job. How many people have jobs about which they expect their friends to get all enthused? Sure, all of my friends read, so I expect them to be interested in my writing. But say I was a plumber. All of my friends use the toilet, but I wouldn’t expect them to get excited about how I replaced a P-trap at work today.

So I’m resolving to whine less and work more. Perhaps my friends will stop pretending they’ve snorted salsa up their nose when I approach them at parties. That would be nice. I just have to keep in mind that when I’m writing, it’s no more than the social equivalent of fixing a toilet.

I’m watching an hour-long television program about chrome. The guide says that it will visit a factory in which chrome is added to a truck. It will also visit a parking lot in which chrome is scratched off a truck. I believe that all of the television has now been produced. They must have made every other program the human mind can grasp before they resorted to making this program, therefore the entire body of television work has now been completed. If anybody is looking for me, I’ll be in the study pretending to read Chaucer while I play Angry Birds.

I like experiencing things more than I like hearing about them, with the exception of earthquakes and family dinners. I imagine you do too. Most people prefer to smell and taste a homemade brownie or two rather than hear someone read the list of ingredients on a package of brownie mix. I learned this rule by violating it hundreds of times over years of acting and performing improv. As my audience’s eyes rolled back and they began to strangle on their own spit, I would ask myself, “Don’t they like hearing about the gag gifts at Cousin Skeeter’s birthday party?”

Mark Twain finally convinced me that my audiences hated the birthday party, hated Cousin Skeeter, and hated me. Mr. Twain wrote, “Don’t talk about the old lady screaming. Bring her on and let her scream.” Upon reading that, I decided to do stuff onstage, rather than just talk about stuff. I resolved to take action. This began a period in which I flailed around the stage like a beached halibut as I tried to find things to do. I swept floors, I carried boxes around the stage, and I waved my arms a lot. My audiences found this as fascinating as the re-oxygenation of my blood. They hated my action.

A subsequent thousand years of humiliating failures showed me why my action sucked. My action needed a clear target and a reason to go after it. Action is doing something, true. But it’s also doing something to someone or something for a reason. For example, when the old lady screams, that’s doing something. And when she screams into her sister’s face from a distance of one inch, that’s doing something to someone. But when she’s screaming to communicate outrage because her sister just snatched away her hash pipe, that’s when action is born.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of good dialogue. The words and how they’re said are critical. But come on—old ladies screaming and grabbing drug paraphernalia is entertainment we can all appreciate.

These days I’m working to apply this principle to my writing. I’m astounded by the scope of action I can include in a story. I can incorporate literally cataclysmic events. The closest I ever came to that onstage was me dancing in Oklahoma! But I try to remind myself that the rules of action apply when I’m writing: do something to someone or something for a reason. So when my characters just walk somewhere, that’s not action. Even if they have a reason to walk, the walking itself isn’t being done to someone. If my terrorist releases a plague, but I never show what it does to anyone, that’s not action. Sure, I can say that the plague got released, but my readers don’t get the payoff of “seeing” what was done to the victims. If my hero sharpens his sword just because it’s sword-sharpening time, that’s not action. Any of these things may be fine additions to my story, but I shouldn’t fool myself into thinking that action has just happened. I’m better off fooling myself into thinking that a third brownie is no big deal.

I find action challenging to write, just like I find action challenging to perform onstage. I could say that I struggle with action out of laziness—and that would be true. But I also struggle with it out of fear. Onstage if I talk about someone being a bastard, I can take it back later. I can distance myself. If I slap him because he’s a bastard, that’s harder to take back. I’ve got to commit and be willing to back it up in the rest of the scene.

Trying to write action hits me the same way. When my villain burns down an orphanage, I feel a little more comfortable just describing how my characters heard about the tragedy, and then letting them get on with walking someplace. Then I don’t have to commit to the reality of the action. I don’t have to write about teddy bears on fire, or the villain kicking the escaping orphans back through the flaming doorway into the conflagration.

So, those are my struggles with action, and it kicks my butt pretty often. One would think I’m the dramatic and literary equivalent of a Galapagos Tortoise. But I’ll keep working at it. It should help that I’m building up good artistic karma by never dancing in Oklahoma! again.

An example of action. You should have seen what happened to him 10 seconds later.

 

 

I accomplished a lot this weekend, if you count hair growth and peristalsis as accomplishments. If you don’t, then I didn’t make much happen in my part of the world. I’m sure my inert existence even prevented things from happening, as if I were a flabby, slack-jawed black hole reducing the net balance of energy in the universe. In my house we have something called The Whirling Vortex of Lethargy, and for 48 hours I lay at its core, as occasional infrared signals from the TV remote conveyed the only signs that I still lived.

On Friday I read a fantastic book about writing. It’s one of those books that’s so powerful and insightful that it plunges you into a profound depression about the inadequacy of everything you’ve ever written. This is like finding out that despite all your love and nurturing, your children have grown up to be carnival geeks. My weekend writing and editing goals evaporated. Cold air washed unchecked into the front yard beneath my un-weather stripped door. Weeds flourished, dirty laundry lay fallow, and my mom remained uncalled.

Saturday morning I crumple onto my green couch, which is twice as old as any of my friends’ children, and I click on my TV, which is shaped like footlocker and weighs as much as my refrigerator. I flip to a crime drama with 248 episodes available for instant viewing. If Netflix had a graven image, I would happily sacrifice goats to it. By Saturday afternoon I catch my wife, seated on the other end of the couch, giving me sidelong looks of concern usually reserved for the terminally ill. I either pretend I don’t notice, or I smile at her in what might be a reassuring manner, although I wouldn’t bet on it.

By Saturday night I resolve to climb out of this cesspool of pity, right after I find out who’s behind the murder of the genetically altered prostitutes, and whether he gets 25 to life. My cats continue to migrate across me one by one, as if I were an tiny island and they were seals pausing to sleep on their way to the Aleutian feeding grounds. My end of the couch is the perfect place to take a plaster cast of my butt, if someone were so perverse as to want such a thing. My wife goes to bed at an hour appropriate for sane people. I stare at the TV as if Dick Wolf were an electronic Svengali, until I slither into unconsciousness, my face mashed into a couch cushion.

On Sunday my wife has things to do with real people, and while I’m sure I’d be welcome, no one expects me to come along. I bring the TV to life once more. If Netflix had been out of service, I might have wept. Throughout  the morning I witness a panorama of felonies—murders, fraud, sexual assault, drug possession, and more. Somebody has a disturbingly fertile imagination. “Bravo,” I think. I’d never appreciated how entertaining a series with no continuing storyline can be. It’s perfect for someone who’s depressed and inattentive.

My cats no longer come near me by Sunday afternoon. They seem to find my degree of lethargy excessive and unnatural. I realize that I have accomplished something. I’ve demonstrated that I can live for two days on Tostitos, Junior Mints, and Diet Coke. By mid-afternoon the TV presents me with the seventeenth child pornography case of the weekend, and my hand seizes the remote control in a spasm of button-pushing. The TV settles on another series without much continuity between episodes, but this one is about the military. I figure the potential for child pornography investigations is low during assassination missions in Afghanistan, so my hand flops back down, the remote rolling out of it.

My den sinks into dimness on Sunday night, and the loosely organized mass of body parts on the couch is barely recognizable as me. Inside, I’m trying to corral my willpower as I prepare for work on Monday. I’m failing. Then on TV I see a brief exchange between characters:

Girl: Do you think people can change?

Big Guy: No.

[Girl exits]

Small Guy: You really don’t think people can change?

Big Guy: No. But I have seen it happen.

I laugh at this for a while. For some reason this dialogue strikes me as hilarious and great. But not impossibly great. I could see myself writing something like this if I worked hard and took my vitamins. I rewind and look for the screenwriter, and I see it’s a David Mamet script. Well, go Dave. It’s not like I’d compare myself to DM, but maybe I’ve written something in the past that is not repugnant. Later Sunday night I slide a cat out of the way and flip back the bed covers at an appropriate hour for sane people, and I find the lullaby “My stuff’s not repugnant” to be oddly comforting.

This Independence Day my wife and I patriotically supported the economy by going to the movies. She chose the movie, which was fine with me. I like movies of all kinds. I’m not prejudiced against any genre of movie. I’m prejudiced against movies that suck, regardless of genre. When I say “suck”, I mean poorly written, badly acted, unimaginatively filmed, and so trite that the corpse of a blind flat-worm could see the plot twists coming through a concrete wall.

In these days of Netflix and Hulu, traveling to an actual movie theater seems unspeakably dowdy. Yet I don’t look at it that way. Driving to the multiplex, parking a quarter-mile away, and paying $5.00 for 28 cents worth of popcorn all feel like part of a cherished ritual. The annoyance they cause is in itself oddly comforting. Perhaps it reminds me that I should be expected to put forth at least a little effort if I want to be entertained.

I dislike one part of the experience however. I do not care for previews. I know that some people like them, but to hell with them. When I buy my ticket I have some inkling of whether the movie I’m attending will suck. But watching previews is like being forced to eat a box of demonic Twinkies. Some may contain creamy filling, but some will reek of bile and the corruption of the human spirit.

Theaters think about their preview strategy, of course. They show us the previews they think we’ll like based on the movie we paid to see. For example, if a theater is playing “Descent Into Hell” then it will probably not show a preview for one of the My Little Pony films, unless it’s “My Little Pony – The Reckoning”. They try to target the trailers, but that doesn’t change the fact that lots of the previewed movies suck, and therefore the trailers will suck as well.

When the previews began this afternoon I knew that several trailers would be washing over us. In fact, we saw eight trailers before the actual film. But the movie we’d come to see was a romantic comedy, so I figured the previews couldn’t get truly hideous. Then an amazing trailer appeared, for an upcoming film I shall not name. It’s the story of two guys who’ve been friends for life. One’s a stressed-out family man with no more spontaneity, privacy, or sex life. The other’s a successful, workaholic sex-maniac living a shallow existence. They’re each frustrated by their own lives and envious of the other’s. In the land of movies, there’s only one logical way to resolve this dramatic tension, and of course that’s for these two men to be magically swapped into each other’s bodies, without their knowledge or consent. Then they can have all the fun of seeing how green the grass is on the other side, and then they can get into hilarious trouble, and then they can realize that they want what they had all along, just before they’re magically swapped back and learn a valuable, heartwarming lesson. I understand that this is THE ONLY WAY for movies to handle this situation. I accept that. But it seems that every possible method of magical body-swapping has already been done:

  • lightning bolt
  • gypsy fortune teller
  • magical amulet
  • magical earrings
  • breaking a voodoo mirror
  • spell cast by statue of an Aztec god
  • steering wheel blow to the head
  • malfunctioning Starfleet transporter
  • near-drowning experience
  • drink brain-exchanging serum
  • magic doodad inherited from a giant dead snake
  • magical soul transfer at the point of death gone awry
  • get drunk and have sex
  • somebody flat out casts a magic spell on you
  • brain transplant (after being captured by mutant thugs)
  • fortune cookie
  • wish that came true for some random, inexplicable reason

All of these mechanisms, and many more besides, have been employed by film makers to realize the artistic vision of the noble “Body Swap” storyline. Therefore, I viewed this afternoon’s preview skeptically. What would keep this movie from fading into the background? What creative twist could make it unique? And then the trailer revealed that these two friends will switch bodies because they’re talking about it while they’re both peeing in a public fountain!

That’s some amazing creativity right there. I can hardly wait.

I spend a lot of time editing right now. I suck at it because I’ve been through the story in question so often I can now no longer see what’s on the page. That’s a literal statement. I can’t see a misplaced comma any better than I could see Blackbeard’s ghost.

A number of friends have stepped in to rescue me as if I was trapped in the Alps and they were particularly intelligent and generous Saint Bernards. One of my friends, Linnea, came through like a champion, providing me with feedback such as, “I don’t like any of your characters.” Now that is the kind of friend every writer needs like a tick needs blood.

Linnea also observed that several hundred insults appear in the story and that no insults are repeated. I don’t have her verbatim comment at hand, but I think the words “cool” and “disturbing” may have been involved. Early in my first draft I realized that my characters were going to insult each other a lot. Possibly that is why Linnea didn’t like them. I challenged myself to come up with a new insult every time, just to keep things fresh for the reader, and for me as well.

Over the subsequent 8 weeks of writing, I realized that I have no reliable process for creating insults. However, I did come to understand a few guidelines. When I needed an insult, those guidelines reduced my insult-generation time to about 5 minutes of staring at my screen, rather than staring at my screen forever without producing any insults.

To create an insult I first have to know what kind of insult I require. The plain old insult is just a derogatory description. It often involves phrases like, “You are…”, “You smell…”, or “Your momma is…” For example:

“Your breath smells like the inside of a wino’s shoe.”

However, sometimes I need an epithet, which is a specialized insult. An epithet descriptively names the insulted party in some way. Famous epithets include “Oscar the Grouch” and “Capitalist Running Dog.” You can see that epithets include a noun (in some cases a proper noun). For example:

“Barrel full of dumbass.”

I’ve found that the loose guidelines below make for fun insults, although you don’t need to use all of them together.

1.  Make sure the insult makes sense in some way. It should be relevant to the insulted party or the situation.

If the insulted party is an oppressive bastard, an insult like “You couldn’t tell fine wine from your mother’s piss,” would just confuse everyone. Something like “Baby-kicking chunk of butt-fungus,” seems more appropriate.

2. Employ alliteration and/or assonance.

Streamlined insults wound more deeply, or at least they sound better. Alliteration gives an insult extra zip. Hard consonants like “B”, “C”, “K”, “P”, and “T” yield especially pleasing results. Contrast this insult for a tall woman, “Telephone pole with breasts,” versus, “Tree trunk with tits.” You can see which one pierces more deeply. With regard to assonance, compare these insults for a shiftless, untrustworthy person: “Lazy, no-good cur,” versus “Ass-dragging jackal.” Assonance can transform a tedious insult into something close to poetry.

3. Build insults with rhythm in mind.

A rhythmic flow of words, as in poetry or song lyrics, makes the insult fly off your tongue. Such insults produce beauty and malevolent venom at the same time. As an example, for a mean-spirited, petty woman consider these insults: “Cruel, fearful vat of goat drool,” vs. “Vindictive, cowardly yak’s twat.” The first one is fine, and it does the job. But the second has a rhythmic flow that makes it a little sweeter on the ears, in my opinion.

I’ll be headed back to my blind and mostly ineffective editing now. I hope that these insights have enabled you to be just a little bit meaner to your characters—or maybe to your friends.

Today I’m struggling with a title. I’ve read that Hemingway went through hundreds of possible titles for each book. I’ve only been through 100 or so, but every one of them reeks of inadequacy. I need a title that compels people to read my story–they must be incapable of resisting once my title has seized them. The title must evoke a sense of the story, but it mustn’t be too obvious. Hopefully the title’s meaning and relevance will be gracefully revealed to the reader and then completely realized as he finishes the story. Ideally, the title’s beauty will cause people to weep.

To give you a sense of how close I am to the ideal title, my best candidate so far is, “Santa Claus is My Bitch”.

All right, back to work.

I’d like to round up every manager in every business in America, chain each of them to a clammy, stone wall somewhere, and teach them improv until their eyes bleed. Not only would it be fun for me, but they would thank me once their mind-shattering rage had passed. All of their employees and their bosses would thank me too. I’ll bet I would get presents.

I don’t want them to be funny. No one wants that. People would be less happy with funny managers, if that’s conceivable. But improv isn’t necessarily about being funny. Come see me on stage sometime and I’ll prove that. Improv’s about learning to employ a certain set of skills such as agreeing with your partner when she says you have a cow’s tongue in your pocket. But the most critical, least respected improv skill is… Listening. That’s the one I’d love to help our business leaders get comfy with.

Paul Williams said that some people listen, and other people only wait to talk. Working in business has taught me that some people don’t even wait to talk. In fact, some people don’t just fail to listen, they actively employ defective listening. If you say “cat,” they will hear “catastrophe.” If you say, “European debt,” they will hear, “It’s my fault we’re losing money, sir, and I’m an under-achieving dweeb. Let me pack up my autographed Firefly model and my Dilbert mouse pad before you escort me out.”

You know these managers I’m talking about.

So I propose that a good, healthy round of brutal improv training should take care of this. Some of these managers will cry. Maybe a lot of them. That’s okay, it’s a normal part of the process and will give them empathy when they hand out insane deadlines and take away benefits. Almost all of them will learn to listen and become better managers, when the alternative is dangling by rusty iron manacles until they starve. A few will find they have a talent and love for improv, and they’ll carry away happy, misplaced dreams of glory. And a few idiots will think they’re so good that they hop the next bus to Los Angeles, removing them from the management pool forever.

Everyone wins.

I wrote the end of the middle of a book last night. This is the part where I drink some schnapps and celebrate, because writing the middle of a long story beats me down. When I write the beginning, I crackle with fun and excitement, because it’s all new and anything can happen. When I write the end, I glide in with relief and regret because I see how it all will wrap up, and I know I won’t get to write this story anymore. But when I write the middle, I feel like I’m dragging the African Queen through a leech-filled swamp—which happened in the middle of that story as I recall.

I struggle with the middle because it squats before me in a willfully ill-defined manner. Sometimes I’m tempted to write, “People do stuff here,” repeatedly for 200 pages. This problem plagues even the best writers of books, plays, and films, as the following examples show us:

Hamlet
Beginning – You learn about the characters and Hamlet swears revenge.
Middle – Hamlet does stuff to some people.
End – You have a bunch of dead guys.

Lonesome Dove
Beginning – You learn about the characters and they decide to go to Montana.
Middle – People do stuff while they ride a long way with a lot of cows.
End – You have a bunch of dead guys.

Star Wars (the original episodes)
Beginning – You learn about the characters and Luke learns the ways of the Force.
Middle – People fly through space and do stuff.
End – You have a bunch of dead guys and dancing ewoks.

The middle is an easy place for me to go wrong. I may kill a character that I’ll need later on. The boy and girl may get together too soon, or they may hate each other too much. I may make such a crazy thing happen that my readers become disgusted for the rest of the book. I may write a bunch of meaningless crap because I feel that I have to fill pages.

I may just get outright bored with the whole thing. The temptation to quit the difficult middle of one project and switch to the exciting beginning of something else is like being hooked on literary heroin.

One reason I wrestle so hard with the middle of stories is that I can see the end of the middle of my life, right up there ahead of me. The beginning of your life contains a lot of possibilities. Just like in a story, the middle of your life sees possibilities taken away. That’s just the way a story is—people do stuff in the middle, and that makes it impossible for other stuff to be done. As in my stories, I’d like the rest of the middle of my life not to be a series of “People do stuff here” pages. And I would definitely like to set myself up for an end that includes dancing ewoks.