Writer's Journal

So, this is prompted mostly by Shell’s comments on Cicatriz 3×05.

In short, I need to let you all know that Cicatriz goes up with barely any revision or editing.  As soon as I complete the chapter (which usually happens early Friday) I put it up here.  This is hardly ideal, though the story’s coherence is assured by the outline, which I follow scrupulously.  Nonetheless, there are obvious flaws.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is my other project, Behemoth, which is sot of like Cicatriz’s sociopathic older brother, which I built off of a simple outline, and which I’ve been editing off and on for a while (I’m on the last revision/editation, though.  It’ll be ready soon.)   This difference could easily have been flipped, I could have made it Cicatriz and Behemoth instead of Behemoth and Cicatriz.  I chose to do it this way.

Now, obviously, if you’re writing something and you don’t care too much about deadlines, then editing should be a major concern.  As should revision.  Especially if you intend to pursue publication.  Revise and Edit.

Between these two processes and outlining, very little of the actual process of “writing” as people think of it, occurs.  It’s much less creating on the page or screen, and more about laying groundwork for it, then shaping the final product after you get the Everything out there.

A good analogy would be constructing a building.  First, you’ve got to dig a giant hole and lay a foundation–Outlining.  Once you’ve got the foundation, you put up the structure, the electrical work and plumbing and whatnot–Writing.  Then, once you’ve got that all done, you’ve got to make sure everything’s in its right place and that everything works–Revising.  Finally, you make sure that the damn thing looks good, which would be putting up the facade, installing floors, putting up the walls–Editing.

Now, this is obviously a quick and dirty analogy, because oftentimes, you can edit while you write and revise.  But, if you’re just starting out, it sometimes helps to consider them each as a distinct stage.

So, it’s been a week since Episode 2×04 went up, and I can barely remember anything about writing it, other than the fact that I did it all in one quick burn while riding the Amtrak up to Kansas City, so that I could go on to St. Louis for a few days.  Other than an hour in the hotel lobby at the Sigma Tau Delta convention, I haven’t had wireless, and had to physically carry my writing to the one computer in the house that could handle the task of uploading things onto the web.

What a week.  Real Life intervened, and it struck with a vengeance.  Many of my friends are struggling to figure out what to do with their lives, they get out of college, and maybe, just maybe, get into a profession similar to their desired one, only to find that it’s not what it’s cut out for, or the market isn’t good, or they’ve got to compete with others who have been at it for much longer, or maybe, they’re just not happy.

I’ve got an idea of what I’m doing, but it’s not easy.  Yesterday morning, we put my dog to sleep.  Not ashamed to admit that I cried like a child up until it was done, at which point the hollowness of true mourning sets in.  But the sun was shining, as it would the next day and the next, we knew the day would come, and I accepted that we had unwittingly hastened its arrival.  I had work to do, though.

This is what Cicatriz is about.  It’s all possibilities.  Pick up stakes, go on a goddamn adventure.  Go live on a mountain for a couple of years; figure out what you want to do, and go become the best you possibly can.  Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is an epistle addressed to you.  Take The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road as your Old and New Testament.  It’s dangerous, and it’s frightening, and the life you’re living is boring as hell–the worst part, though, is that you know it’s boring, yet you choose it anyway.

When’s the last time you put yourself in harm’s way on a hunch, or got out of your comfort zone, or even just did something because it was fun?

Allow me to soapbox for a moment–as if that isn’t what I’ve been doing the whole time–and give you an idea:  Every so often, we die.  Not Capital-D Die, with the pinebox and the weeping women in black, but the little everyday deaths, where you get poisoned by the toxic bullshit of your job, starved by the lack of real connection in your relationship, shattered by the pressures that you get put under.  So, that’s that:  you die. But this is a very special kind of death, this lowercase-d death.  It’s the medicine for what ails you, because when you die, you are reborn.  This isn’t just the rantings of a crazy man; this is a metaphor.  If you go through something difficult, a trying time, and don’t change, you’ve wasted all that hardship and pain, and just made the broken self that you had previously, just re-became that poor bastard that got you killed last time.

So let yourself die, and change:

“The passion of destruction is a creative joy.”

–Bakunin

This is Cicatriz:  the title refers to the scar left by surgery, the spot where you’re made whole again.  All death (lowercase-d) leads to rebirth, and each one is a step forward.
—

Trivia:  The epigraphs for Season 2 come from the poetry of Weldon Kees.  I don’t have the time to list all the titles, but I do recall that the previous one is “The Furies” (you all caught the reference in there to “The Wasteland,” I bet) and I think the one before that was “A Pastiche for Eve.”  He’s a good poet, and I’m not sure he’s that well known.  Like Ambrose Bierce (who provided the epigraphs for Season 1) he also disappeared without a trace.

Cicatriz Episode 2 can be found behind door #1.

It’s important to think about the style of what you write; many amateurs don’t, and that’s why they’ll remain amateurs (said the glorified amateur that’s climbed up on the soapbox in front of you.)

If you can’t look at a sentence you’ve written, and understand why it’s good, or why it’s bad, you’re not going to progress. Each type of work—each work—calls for a different way of writing the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter.

Look back over White Knight, if you’re interested. There is no sentence in it that doesn’t refer to one of the five senses; there is no interpretation besides. On that level, it functions much more like a screenplay than a traditional manuscript.

With Cicatriz, I’m not only including non-sense information, but I’m allowing the narrative voice to intersperse bits of interpretation. The narrator, while not foregrounded, has a bit of a presence.

Which is fitting; Cicatriz has a series of ironic notes within it. Wade and Algernon are both—to use a colloquialism—assholes; I say this because both make heavy use of irony when dealing with other people, a technique I term the “snark” (a term, I admit, derived from a number of different sources.) The narrator adding in his/her/its own interpretation provides a grounding for this.

This determines the content of the narration, but the manner in which it’s presented (the context of the events) is fairly strictly defined. By this, I mean that I follow two important rules when writing sentences:

1. Everything important tends to go on the left.

2. Adverbs tend to be dead weight.

I term both of these “tends to” the same reason that most scientists term their discoveries with the same phrase: it usually holds true, but we can easily imagine situations when it doesn’t. I’m not going to tell you where—sometimes you’ve got to put a clause between the subject and verb, sometimes you’ve got to put an adverb in to be specific—but you can see what I mean.

Nota Bene for college composition students: When a professor starts slinging around abstractions like “unity” or “coherence” or the like, this is usually what he/she means.

As for the arrangement of the chapters of Cicatriz…well, laugh if you want, but I’ve been watching a lot of Lost lately. I asked myself “why not arrange my next project like a Television show, with bite-sized chunks between convenient breaks?

Partially, this came from a friend of mine complaining that the chapters of White Knight were too long (she obviously didn’t realize that the later chapters tended to be four pages long, as opposed to the earlier ten or twelve—writers get tired too.) But also, I realized that the format I was using—a narrative presented at a particular time of the week in a particular place—more closely resembled a television show than a traditional novel.

Hence “Episode” instead of “Chapter.”

I had to fit the way I wrote it to the story I was writing, and vice-versa.

(Which, I suppose, is the hard part.)

Trivia about Cicatriz:

The epigraphs that appear in part two of each chapter come from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. This will last until episode six, i.e. the first season (shut up, it’s my terminology, and you get to live with it.)

There’s a reason, but you’re probably not going to know for a while.

The second season is going to use quotes from a poem written by a certain poet who disappeared in 1955, and who you might not be familiar with.

I’ll note who and why when we get there.

However, I just gave you all a certain bit of information that you should be able to assemble, yourselves, into a (mostly correct) theory about what I’m going for.

But will you hit on it?

–Cameron Summers!

October 2009

P.S. Next time, I promise I’ll talk about something more interesting, like world design. Just thought I’d get the formatting stuff out of the way.

(For those interested, I’m reposting the episode right…here:   Cicatriz Episode 1)

I have to admit, part of why I’m doing these essays is to keep my productivity superficially up while doing a bit less work. But there’s still some interesting things to say about the writing process I’m using to produce Cicatriz. Either that, or I’m trying to put up some Warren Ellis/Matt Fraction sort of backmatter front (of course, if so, I’d be writing this at 4AM, Friday, September 18, wouldn’t I?) But that’s what this is.

Backmatter for Cicatriz #1.

To tell you the truth, everything I’ve written has, in some way, mirrored my psychological state. Behemoth (which I hope to have out by the end of the year) is about alienation and dealing with absurdity; Archon Sutras (which I hope to have out by the end of next year, somewhat unlikely) is about a desire for transcendence; White Knight is about not knowing where to go.

Cicatriz is about…well, I’m still figuring it out. It’s a chimeric little thing, isn’t it? Not alternate history (not just,) not secondary world (not quite,) not really anything…yet.

There are numerous themes, but the way I’m planning it out, Cicatriz is less centered than my previous works. Wade is a main character, but I came up with Algernon, first, and Mari has her own character arc plotted out further than either of them. You haven’t even met the fourth central character. She’s showing up in the next episode.

(That’s right, I’m thinking of them as episodes, not chapters. Other than the lines of text marching across your screen, it has more to do with a television show than a book. I’m particularly proud of the cold open. [before you say anything, I happen to like parentheticals.])

But that’s enough rambling.

This is an essay about having ideas, and beginning to turn them into stories. It’s not a formula, not a recipe, but it’s an abstract for an unwritable article. Not so short, not so sweet, and certainly not to the point.

Neil Gaiman says that we all have ideas, all the time. The only difference between a storyteller and a supposed, hypothetical non-storyteller is that the former understands what’s happening, while the latter doesn’t.

The next time you’re daydreaming, get out a pen or pencil and write down what you’re thinking about on a napkin. Next time you think “I wonder what would happen if…” or “why is it that…” write it down.

That’s the stuff of stories, right there, and it’s the hard part—one of many hard parts, as there’s no easy point in the process—but how is a question a story?

How is a raven like a writing desk?

The former makes more sense.

All stories begin as questions, even if we don’t see it. To every story, there is a question that the storyteller asked.

“How did the Trojan War happen?”

“What if a lord killed his king?”

“Why would a man sell his soul to the devil?”

“What if a man turned into a giant bug?”

“Where are the snowdens of yesteryear?”

“What if the postal service were a conspiracy? What if a housewife discovered it?”

“What if a man found an ear in the middle of a lawn?”

The story is the answer you find to that question. Sometimes, as is usually the case with speculative fiction, you’ve got to construct a framework for the question, an idea of how you go about answering it.

You just take that answer and you stretch it out as far as it will go before it becomes a pointless exercise, then you write it out as best you can.

Which is the hard part.

Trivia about Cicatriz:

The title was something that I had trouble coming up with. Sometimes titles are easy–Behemoth and White Knight were easy to come up with; both relate to the main character–but the title for Cicatriz eluded me.

I played around with several alternatives: “The 72” (72 is going to be something of an arc number, for reasons that will be seen later on) “Asclepius” (Asclepius is a motif, taken from a line that’s stuck with me for a while: “Asclepius, why are you weeping?”) and “Scar Tissue.”

None seemed to fit, and up until I finished episode 1, I had no title.

I first encountered the word Cicatriz on the Mars Volta’s “De-Loused in the Comatorium” and I originally thought it was one of their notorious word-salad lyrics. But I later found out that it was the Spanish equivalent of “Cicatrice,” from the Latin “Cicatrix.”

It means “Scar,” but (from what I understand) it refers specifically to the scar that forms after a surgical procedure.

I found it appropriate as a title, but I’m not going to tell you why.

–Cameron Summers,

September, 2009

(apparently, this is a week of previews.  The muse is really giving me way too much work.  Don’t worry, though.  Everything’s still on track.  Those among you who know a thing or two about the subject of cinema, mind giving me a bit of feedback?)

The graffiti was written in scratchy chalkstrokes. Beyond the edge of the rooftop was an empty street, haunted by the chimeric slow-drifting shadows of clouds.

The photographer loaded film into the camera, winding up the aging mechanism and raising it to look at the graffiti and the street below.

Came down from my

ivory tower

And found no world

read the chalk letters, scratched into the edge of the building by some anonymous fan of Jack Kerouac. The photographer imagined some overly romantic college student in flannel climbing to the roof with a handful of promethean chalk and a clandestine idea rattling around his brain.

“It’s fine weather, isn’t it?”

The photographer turned and glanced at the speaker, noting only the rumpled suit and the smoldering cigarette.

“What?”

“I said, ‘it’s fine weather, isn’t it?’”

The photographer turned back to his composition, grunting

“Whatever.”

He snapped the photograph, uncomfortably aware of the other man’s presence on the roof. Looking up from his camera, he sighed, looking at the view before him.

A cigarette butt

dropped down

To the street below

Grimacing, he turned to look behind him, but the man was gone. His protest that the cigarette might fall and hit a passer-by evaporated into the air and he blinked.

From behind the corner of the stairwell, he could see a foot.

Creeping over to look at what lay there, his eyes widened.

A woman lay sprawled, half-hidden behind the stairwell. While she was fully dressed, her clothes were in disarray. There was an angry red band around her throat.

The photographer raised his camera, and snapped a photograph.

Reaching into his pocket

for his phone

To call the police

He discovered that he no longer had the device; it was still in his car. Cursing, he looked at the body again, wondering who that man was, and where the body had come from.

Returning to the door of the stairwell, he swallowed, and opened it.

(You can consider this a preview for the as-yet unnamed story I’m working on, that will follow White Knight.  I got the idea from one of the books I’m reading for class, Battle Songs by Paul Zolbrod.)

Sing.

Sing of the Forgotten City, and Sing of the 72.

Tell us of the lost fool and the forsaken seeker; tell us the tale of their revelation, of the secrets they uncovered and the questions they left unanswered.

Let us know what the hashishin know, as those lost palestino boys drink and smoke and fight in the night, of the scorpion-music and scorpion-smoke that wakens them to violence and bloodletting.

Sing of the Forgotten City, and Sing of the 72.

Tell us of the Burning Prison, of the blood blue and gray spilled on those ancient stones, of the soldiers guilty of desertion buried alive there.  What was hidden in those walls?

Let us know what the Carvers knew, what they learned when they stole the Magician’s promethean fire and unlocked his arcane secrets, what they raised, and what they could not put down.

Sing of the Forgotten City, and Sing of the 72.

Tell us of the woman cursed by her own blood, of the wounds with which she was born and all the years of scars and tears that are her inheritence.

Let us know what that last, vicious scion knows, as he wakens the engines of desire, deception and destruction; as he sets in motion his machinations, as he opens the gates of Ishtar, and brings Asclepius to tears.

Sing of the Forgotten City, and Sing of the 72.

Tell us of the creeping, hidden thing, tell us of the warped aborted hybrid of science and sorcery that lurks in the dark, its whole existence a hell of pain and never-should-have-beens.

Let us know of those hidden forces which govern the world, of the threads that weave the tapestry of our lives, of the wires that carry the forces that control chance and choice alike; let us know of those men and women who have pried off the casing of this silent machinery and reshape and rework the mechanisms of fate for their own ends, for their own purposes, in their own image.

Sing of the Forgotten City, and Sing of the 72.

Sing.

(What’s that?  You think I forgot to come up with an idea for flash fiction today?  Yeah, whatever, I have class observation to do.  Also, when my new work is titled, I will recategorize this post.)

Hey, folks.  Normally, on thursdays, I post an amusing video.  Not this week; I’ve been doing a lot of essay writing and news-watching (mostly to do with the stuff going on over in Iran.)  It might seem odd to put a news story in a writers’ journal–even an open one like this–but a great many stories are inspired by the news, and the weird things that happen in our strange, strange world.

So, today, instead of moving pictures, I present you with a handful of static ones:

Twitter to Flickr

This is a collection of photographs taken in Iran that have been collected into a flickr account and put out there for use by News Organizations.  I thought you folks might like to see these photos and take a look at them yourselves, without the interpretation that always comes with them being used in the media.

This sort of thing is what Twitter, Flickr, etc. were meant to be for (not really, but it’s the best use for it.)  Citizen journalism at the speed of the wire:  right now, there’s a cyberwar going on in Iran, as the government tries to restrict the free flow of information.

I was going to post a link to the paranoid linux project (based on Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother) but it seems the project’s died on the vine.  Too bad, really.  There’s a wealth of relevant information on this sort of thing out there already:

• Instructables by W1n5t0n
• News story about Pirate Party & Anonymous assisting Iranian Protestors
  

But why do I find this interesting, you wonder?  There are a variety of reasons, and I’m not going into them all.  However, as a writer, I find this interesting because of the interplay of fiction and reality.  Go and look at the Little Brother link up higher on the page, realize that we’re coming into a cyberpunk future:  even if the government isn’t getting involved, people all over the world are.

Fascinating, no?

Alright, this is just some stuff swept up off the workshop floor and assembled together into a decipherable form.

To make sure we’re on the same page, are you familiar with the concept of a “smart mob”?  For those who aren’t, the nutshell definition:  A smart mob is a distributed group that organizes through technological means–peer-to-peer sharing, irc, skype, twitter, text message, and good old phone calls.  They’re a great deal like the critical mass phenomenon, in that they’re largely self-organizing (though there may be “Dispatchers” who moderate and mediate communication.)  For an example in fiction, look to Global Frequency by Warren Ellis.

Earlier today, while I was at work (slow day) I had an idea:  why not use a smart mob system to generate art?  Set up a distributed, city-wide group made up of writers, grafitti artists, editors, actors, etc. and use it to create art in a guerilla capacity, little more than an hour or a day from conception to completion.   Each endeavor could be spearheaded by the individual that came up with it, and could span a variety of media.

The idea could be especially useful for culture jamming, as well as for the generation of novel ways of approaching various media (for example, using grafitti to create sets for guerilla theatre or films.)  Of course, you’re free to take it or leave it.

Something new.

A while back, I was at Writers’ Group with some friends, and the play “Endgame” came up.  None of us recalled who had written it, even though several of us had read it for classes in college.  One of our members (Mr. McCoy, who will be managing a site containing KC-based literary podcasts soon) produced his phone and searched for the information.  He got the answer “Samuel Beckett” which was correct.

This anecdote illustrates something interesting:  In the era of orality and literacy, “knowledge” contained facts, heuristics, and several other, similar things.  This is not so, anymore.  In an era of ubiquitous computing and wireless communication, we have had a drastic reordering of priorities.

Thus, I would posit that “knowledge” is no longer fact-centric, but heuristic-centric.  For those of you unfamiliar, “heuristics” refers to problem-solving strategies, including the old standby of the trial-and-error as well as other, more complex methods.

I say this, because it is possible to look through the internet, drawing out facts and figures, from just about anywhere.  Thus, the intimate knowledge of these facts and figures is no longer essential: we will recall them, but even if we didn’t, we could repeat the search and access the same (or more accurate) data.  Therefore, I say that modern knowledge is heuristic-centric because it is now more necessary to know how to acquire the information, than the information itself.

Though some might object to this way of looking at things, saying that the abandonment of fact for strategy would be a step backward, I would point out that Plato put a similar argument into the mouth of Socrates concerning the written word:

“At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

This is an old allegory, but it illustrates that people area always resistant to these revolutionary things that Marshal McLuhan might have called “extensions of human knowledge.”  The advent of ubiquitous computing, while perhaps not absolutely revolutionary (certainly the same strategies and arguments were applicable with the invention of the printing press, though possibly not with the same urgency) was something of a Black Swan, an unforseen but game-changing event.