August 11, 2020

The Reading List — Revisiting Casino Royale


Image ©2020 by B H Triber
Revisiting Fleming’s Casino Royale

GENERAL SPOILERS FOLLOW.

The subject of this essay is 68 years old. You’ve likely read it by now, but in case you haven’t, be warned.

I originally picked up Fleming’s Casino Royale in high school. Our public library had copies of all the books, and, after growing up with Connery, Lazenby and Moore, I mistakenly believed I was familiar with the source material. I worked my way sequentially through all the Bond books that summer before senior year, and Casino Royale was the first.

That was nigh on 30 years ago for me. (Allow me to moisten my throat on warm tea and polish my glasses as we reminisce…) Back then, of course, the only Casino Royale visually available was the 1967 drug-induced head trip of a comedy by the titular name, with a handful of directors headed by Val Guest and John Huston, and Bond being played by David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and countless others popping up like whack-a-mole 007s. The black and white feature for television was only a distant memory to aficionados, since VHS and BetaMax were slugging it out at the time, the Laser Disk had just bit the commercial dust, and HBO was still relying on Fraggles and Not Necessarily the News to expand their customer base.

So, I picked up the book, and was transported away into the fictional spy antics of Bond. Now, by way of comparison, the original Casino Royale film only had one or two scenes at the most with any scrap of attachment to the source material. The 2006 Martin Campbell offering, with Daniel Craig, by comparison, is much more faithful to the source, duplicating most of the scenes from the book, while adding supporting scenes to round out the story structure of a film. I am a firm fan of both films, for different reasons. The most recent, because it was the film that got the literary Bond right (runner up to Living Daylights, also mostly faithful to the short story with additional supporting material), and the 1967 version because, well, Woody Allen, David Niven, Orson Wells, Peter Sellars and Ursula Andress.

Now, for the book itself — it is difficult to discuss any work of classic fiction (which, first published in 1953, there is no doubt of the book’s impact on pop culture or its global universality) without also discussing the context of settings. Casino Royale was published during what is now recognized as the early years of the Cold War — a time during which spying technologies and techniques experienced a renaissance behind the veil of classifications, and the tensions of upmanship of necessity. Everybody was afraid of dying in a nuclear holocaust, the US (and by extension, the UK and other members of NATO) and the USSR were vying for nuclear, air, naval, and space superiority. All to make sure the other guys were so afraid to kill us that they wouldn’t risk death themselves. And, so, the Cold War of secret deaths was fought on the global battlefield.

Fleming, meanwhile, having worked British Intelligence during World War II, retired to “Goldeneye”, his home in Jamaica, to pen his own experiences into his ideal of the British spy. There are a few points which one notices going through Fleming’s works as a collection, and many of those points can be difficult to confront without recognizing that Fleming was a man of his time. He lived in a sexist, racist, homophobic, biphobic and transphobic world. All of that reflects in his writing, and then some. But there is also a purpose, for the most part.

During the Cold War, most nations engaged in spycraft to collect information on their enemies, including any factor that might be used to blackmail an individual or their country. (For comparison, until and after DADT, people were still being ousted from the US military with the justification that their sexuality could be used to blackmail or coerce a member of the armed forces.)

This attitude is reflected in the way race, gender and sexuality are treated in his novels — they are facts to be collected, tools in a long war of propaganda. And this attitude is also reflected in Bond’s actions in the stories. He is the conquering Englishman come to win the women in his path, and harshly judgmental of them upon inevitable rejection.

Usually the bigotry stops with the character, only occasionally seeping into the narrative point of view. The real question for me is, how much is too much? Well, Casino Royale never really devolves into a woman-hating scree. Despite Bond’s passing rape fantasies and, as in the film, his report back to M that “the bitch is dead,” the language never passes that point of insult into obscenity, in the 1950’s censorship usage of the phrase. I think it’s a matter of reader maturity to parse the prose as a product of its day.

The story, about bankrupting Le Chifre during a baccarat tournament, is quick-paced. The voice in Bond’s head is cinematic in some scenes — right in the middle of the book he enumerates all the players’ qualities and develops strategies to deal with them on the fly. One can see Bond walking across the casino floor while slipping wads of cash into his dinner jacket.

The alluring Vesper Lynd has been assigned to watch Bond by the home office. She’s the pursestrings on the project, and he has to convince her his methods are sound before she’ll loosen her strings. On the way, the sexual tension between them leads to a harsh lesson for 007 about romance during spying, but not before Bond convinces himself he will marry her.

In this story, Le Chiffre is a bit heavier than portrayed by Miles Mikkelsen, and a bit more of a bottom dweller. When he strips bond to torture him, we’re unsure at first if this will involve more. But, Le Chiffre still has that characteristic Fleming character flaw that every enjoyable Bond villain has, like Scaramanga’s third nipple, or Bloefeld’s attached ear lobes — in this case he cries blood.

It turns out Bond is rescued by SMERSH, and not SPECTRE, as in the films — that was an invention to round out the storytelling for the quadrilogy with Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Sprectrerounding out the story cycle. SMERSH, as a truly devoted Bond fan can tell you, is short for the Russian Smiert Spoinam – “death to spies” – a KGB agency that sends operatives out to assassinate foreign spies. Smersh could not exist in a modern Russia after the Cold War, and so was necessarily changed for the film franchise. It is central to the context of the novel, however. Bond is not Smersh’s target. Le Chiffre was, so they leave him alive. He is then hospitalized and visited variously by Mathis and Vesper, until…

Well, the rest of the book is waiting to be discovered if you want to read it. Be warned, however, that sexism is the lifeblood of Bond’s character, right up until On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when he really does marry the girl of his dreams.

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August 6, 2020

The Reading List – Clay’s Ark a Zombie-Lover’s Vintage SF

Filed under: Book Discussion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Brian Triber @ 4:52 pm


Image from the Hatchette Book Group website.

Clay’s Ark, by Octavia Butler

Published by Hatchette Book Group.

Heard of Octavia Butler? If not, you should. She was a Hugo and Nebula award winner for breaking the gender and racial barriers in storytelling in science fiction. And Clay’s Ark is no exception to her catalog, with its strong black female characters, from the infected to the victims (yes, strong victims who fight back!).

Butler’s story, first published in 1980 and set in 2021, is a page-turner. It’s Mad Max meets Andromeda Strain with a dose of batsh!t crazy polygamous rape and offscreen attempted Elektra Complex to boot, set in the California desert and told in two parts. And the dual narrative paints far more complex characters than a single narrative would.

The protagonist in the very first scene, a black astronaut named Eli, crash-lands in the desert and tries to hide for as long as possible before seeking help. (He knows he was infected on the ship.) But the alien microbial intelligence within him won’t let him off so easily. He’s disoriented and has somehow survived the infection. Now he also has heightened senses, agility, speed and strength.

Controlled by the microbes, Eli walks a thin line between surviving and spreading the alien consciousness, as he infects a family of desert farmers in the wild lands of California. He infects Meda first, who has taken a liking to him, but is no pushover. The family manages to survive through farming and very limited shopping trips into town for supplies. They also keep the microbes at bay from world invasion by, once in a while, kidnapping new members for their commune. The alien microbe seems to keep their animal senses heightened, as well as their libidos. Then the newborn children arrive, Meda and Eli’s child Jacob first, and they’re human — mostly.

Despite the horrible-acting adults in the room, the microbes seem to keep everyone placated and loyal to their kind, sort of like cats recognizing each other as a pride by their shared scents. So, regardless of how unnervingly alien the kids are, they are still endearing, because they tend to be the most decent-acting in the story.

In the second plot line, told in alternating chapters, the protagonist flips to become the antagonist when Eli kidnaps Blake, a white widower doctor, and his two black daughters Keira and Rane, on the road home to their walled city from the struggling community medical facility where Blake works. Rane has leukemia, and is on life-saving drugs. But once all three are infected with the alien microbes, there’s no return to home. Things spin into gear when Blake decides to escape, with the full knowledge that Eli and his family will hunt him down rather than see the world infected.

I won’t give away the rest, except that the story-telling is break-neck. The characters are fully realized, each human throughout, even while infected by the alien microbes, which in effect intensify their humanity through crisis and draw it into focus through comparison with the microbes’ alienness and mystery. This is perhaps not the best of books to read during a pandemic, as it can elicit paranoia and fear of microbes. But its theme also helps orient the reader in the reality of a pandemic through the same kind of comparison to its own alienness.

The predictions from 40 years ago are not that far off from reality. We now have on the market such tank-like SUVs that homesteaders actually own. The space station is in orbit, and the divisions in society of country folk versus city folk has certainly become noticeable in politics worldwide (as it has been to a lesser degree since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but I digress…). Butler’s work stands as solid 40 years on as when it was published, and certainly ranks her as a top futurist, in addition to her being a Nebula, Hugo and Locus award-winning author. Pick up a copy, but read with caution. It’s for the strong-constitutioned zombie-loving sci-fi fan.

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February 13, 2020

The Reading List — Looking Back at Looking Forward


Image ©2020 by B H Triber
Review of editor Milton Lesser’s Atomic Age Anthology, Looking Forward

I found an old collection of early 1950s SF short stories at a hole in the wall shop in Salem, Massachusetts a month back. The title of the collection is “Looking Forward; an Anthology of Science Fiction” edited by Milton Lesser. (Known best for his Chester Drum mysteries under the pen name of Stephen Marlowe, Lesser also worked under a number of other pen names.) Now, the names on the cover certainly promise a good read: Anderson, Asimov, Bradbury, Lester Del Rey… And the table of contents reads like a Who’s Who of golden age sci-fi writers. Twenty shorts by greats like Jack Williamson (Grandmaster of SF), Lewis Padgett (also known as the writing duo of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), Walter M. Miller Jr. (“A Canticle for Leibowitz”, 1959), Robert Lowndes (editor of golden age SF magazines Science Fiction, and Future Science Fiction), Murray Leinster (who had just introduced science fiction to the universal translator in his 1945 novella “First Contact”), Jack Vance (multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award winner), and Gordon R. Dickson (who would later win Hugo and Nebula awards as well). Stranger still, this copy had once belonged to the MIT Science Fiction Library. Somehow, this book and I have crossed paths throughout eastern Massachusetts for the last 50 years without connecting until now, despite my having worked in the MIT community for 20 years. It will join a couple other volumes from the same collection I’ve obtained since they were liquidated from MIT.

Looking Forward, with its deceptively bland title, contains a variety of creative fiction that would never be found together today in a single anthology. Mostly written between 1949 and 1952, they all have a very unique generational lens: World War II was fresh on everyone’s minds, they were stuck in the adolescence of the Cold War, with Korea actively claiming American lives. Atom bomb drills were routine, and mandatory blackouts with wailing air raid sirens were still common practice when staring at the looming threat of a Soviet Union that could drop the H-Bomb undetected by high-altitude aircraft, long before a counter-strike deterrent had been deployed. It was the Wild West of atomic diplomacy, and these stories are filled with that existential angst, newly discovered by the inheritors of Oppenheimer’s legacy. (By the time I was born, we were entwined in an unflinching web of foreign policy that ensured the world would be destroyed should anyone blink.)

Being a product of its unique moment in time, the stories are varied in ways that today’s sci fi anthologies are not. Of course there are aliens and time travelers, game shows and highways to nowhere, and a fourth-wall breaking writers’ group. And, in the middle of it all, an argument for sending humans to the moon, and an argument for not sending humans to the moon. But there is also a breathable atmosphere on Mars (an idea that held for anther decade), and a dystopic alien-ruled 1950’s Earth that’s a cross between 1984 and Children of the Corn.

It’s a good read, if somewhat dated by callbacks to long-retired technologies — rotary phones and crystal sets come to mind. Perhaps in today’s age, these shorts can be looked at as period pieces, or perhaps the quaint seed of a future tube-punk movement. The style of the stories are dated, some almost sterile of emotion. Sometimes the story is so birthed of its time, it loses significance, like Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “The Little Creeps”, set in post-WW II Japan with a booby-trapped Russian-Chinese river valley as its fulcrum. Sometimes the story transcends time, like Lewis Padgett’s “We Kill People”, which could be adapted as a modern cyberpunk with few changes.

Even if you can’t find a copy of “Looking Forward”, I strongly encourage you to look up the authors mentioned here. The science fiction of their era influences what follows in the 1960’s and 1970’s, which is ultimately the seed of today’s sci-fi.

Happy reading!

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January 15, 2018

1/15/2018 Log: Tracking Character Emotional Arcs

Filed under: Log,Writing Tools — Brian Triber @ 1:46 pm

Much of the past week was spent in maintenance mode – updating software because the new OS was updated last month, adding functionality to my personal writing tools, &c. But just because I didn’t physically write does not mean it’s not time spent writing. To some writers this might seem like justification for not producing pages – there’s nothing as inner-critic-calming as pretending that trip to the coffee shop staring at a blank screen with block for 4 hours was worth the 20 dollars on latte and the trips to the bathroom at 3 in the morning.

I’ve been at this for a while, and know now that there’s never a justification for $20 worth of lattes. Not even with inflation. It’s only coffee with milk, and poorly roasted bilge water at that. But I digress.

FileMaker Pro is both a bane and a blessing. I’ve been modifying my writing tool in the software – a tool I’ve carried across the creation of 3 novel-length pieces now. At some point in the fall I purchased a new word processing software by the moniker of Scrivener, which promised to combine all the functions of my database with those of MS Word (which I’ve been using since 3.0, when they should have stopped adding features). Sadly, after trying to pull together all my research and notes, and working on adapting my process to the new software, I’ve rediscovered the basic “there are no rules” rule – to each their own.

Now this may seem strange, but those experienced in creation of any art can tell you the reason for learning the rules is not so that you can break them – any fool with a high concept can do that poorly – but so that you can break the rules without making yourself look a fool. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, if you manage to make it through our school system with your sense of individuality intact (or somehow figure out how to recover it), you’ve been started down the path of rigorous criticism. That’s fine if you want to be a critic. But creators need to step outside the box to recognize when the box requires it be enlarged. After all, without the expressionists, we’d still be painting realistic works, and without the modernists, everything would still be portraiture, still life, and allegory.

To step into the realm of art (which is really for others to determine, because a creator always thinks what they’re doing is art) requires both a look from outside to determine how impactful your work will be, and time to develop perspective to recognize the work’s shortcomings. There’s no time to reflect on any of that in the middle of the process, however. The situation is a bit like Schrödinger’s Uncertainty Principle – that old physics chestnut that holds that a particle cannot be simultaneously observed for both location and speed because the very act of observance affects the outcome, more famously known for his hypothetical cat being caught somewhere in scientific purgatory. Similarly, if you’re watching yourself write, you’re not actually writing. You’re staring at your training wheels while riding into a tree. And there’s no surer way to create block than to disassemble your writing process.

Instead, I spent some time creating a table in my database for tracking the characters’ emotional plot arcs. The source material I used was a book called “The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expression”, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. (This is one of several reference works put together on the web site Writers Helping Writers. It’s a terrific place to start – the writers have put a lot of work into understanding relationships between emotions, and providing cues, signals, and motional responses to use in situ in a manuscript.) I was primarily focused on the relationship between emotions. I’ve been mapping the relationships as a visual aid, but I need something more electronic and quickly referencable. So the emotions ended up in a contextual menu that allows me to quickly see where the emotional arc leads. It’s another tool for analysis after the fact, much like Campbell’s Hero’s Journey model — not to be used for plotting, but for troubleshooting.

All the bells and whistles are in place, and it only stole a week of writing time. But, on the positive side, I’ve already begun rethinking some of my WIP’s scenes for comedic effect, so the effort wasn’t wasted. (These kind of efforts are rarely wasted. Even if it’s not adding directly to a WIP, it’s still adding tools to the writer’s toolbox.) Now my characters will have proper motivation to get themselves from one scene to the next, under their own volition. And that’s a really nice change of pace.

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January 7, 2017

1/7/2018 Log

Filed under: Uncategorized — Brian Triber @ 9:34 pm

Well, time here on the East Coast is 9:24 in the dwindling hours of a Sunday. And, as all New Years go, brocken promises, bottles of whiskey, and several bad country songs later…

No. That was the life of one of my characters. My life has been… well… scattered. There have been tragedies this year – plural, and one is too many. But there has also been some forward movement. Marriage, a completed first draft, a plot outlined, many ideas collected in journals, some expanded on, many many balls being juggled.

And part of that is my web site and blog. Changes are coming. Many changes. So, as with all long-term projects, this is not a re-launching, but a revising. I’ll ramble a bit, and maybe you’ll like what you read. If so, drop me a comment and many thanks. If not, let me know anyway. Constructive criticism is always welcome. I won’t bite unless poked at.

Now that I’ve finished channeling Will Rogers, Jr….

Here’s what to expect from here. At some point in the future, the format and look of the site will change. I’m working on a couple of ideas for interactive storytelling, and may be using part of the site for beta. This has still to be worked out.

I’ll be posting polls. I’m entering a research phase now, so I’ll likely be posting a bit of this and a dash of that — wherever my research brings me. (Of course I’m going to be selective. Spoilers!)

As this revision occurs, the site will morph – things will shift and disappear. It’s okay – net reality sometimes needs time to cascade out of its previous configuration. (And, believe it or not, that’s human time, not machine time. No matter how fast or recursive or quantumly connected and refracted, machines still only exist to follow their programming. Can they be intentionally misprogrammed?? That’s the subject for a different post. 🙂 )

This is not the place for politics. Feel free to comment, but leave the campaign buttons and conspiracy theories with the lobby attendant. This blog is about entertainment, with a healthy dose of wonder; it is inclusionary. Visitors are welcome.

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October 30, 2013

Derailing the Draft

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — admin @ 2:00 pm

November has always seemed an odd month to hold NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). We’re just coming off Halloween, preparing the house for the winter months, interrupted by Thanksgiving (which usually can derail even the best habits, eating, writing and otherwise), and the last week is the first official week of holiday shopping. So, it’s no surprise that I’ve never completed a first draft of a novel during November.

Heaven knows I’ve tried – 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 – Some nice ideas came from those sessions, and some not very well thought-out ideas. And that’s my biggest problem with NaNoWriMo. The assumption is that the writer will somehow magically begin on November 1, writing from page 1, creating 1660 words a day, and keep that pace up until November 30, when a first draft sits awaiting NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month).

In reality, however, only about a third gets written because, regardless of whatever technique you’re using, you will hit writer’s block. There are tools to get over this, such as writing partners, NaNoWriMo meet ups at local cafés and bookstores, and a variety of random character and plot twist generators.

None of these have worked for me. The meet-up is fine if you’re not a very social creature to begin with – otherwise you’re continually fighting the urge to engage in conversation and other niceties, and that in itself can be distracting and counter-productive. Plus, all that extra spending on coffees and snacks on a writer’s budget, and all the extra whipped cream and sprinkles on the holiday drinks and snacks – well, it’s a recipe for diabetic disaster.

The “rules” of NaNoWriMo, as loose as they are, are also non-conducive to completion of a first draft. Somehow, an entire month’s worth of writing has to be squeezed from the grey matter, regardless of how often you can (or can’t) fit in visits to museums, concerts, etc., to refill the creativity well, which, psychologically, is a recipe for disaster, since it reinforces the brain pathways that house the bad habits most writers haven’t eliminated from their routine. (Psychological studies suggest that habits, bad and good, are formed and eliminated through repetition over the course of around 21 days. If you haven’t figured out how to maximize your writing productivity by the time NaNoWriMo starts, you likely will not figure it out during November, and the bad habits will have had 4 weeks to establish themselves.)

In addition, according to NaNoWriMo, you’re not allowed to have plotted out the story in advance. This is, it seems to me, a recipe for disaster. If you don’t know the road you’re following, you need a map to get to the destination. Without a map, you may as well wander into the woods at dusk without a flashlight. Yes, I suppose you can just make things up as you go along, but doing so greatly reduces the possibility of achieving a successful first draft. And that kind of negative reinforcement, in itself, can create an enormous amount of writers block.

NaNoWriMo simply does not work for me. Instead, what I have noticed about my personal writing habits is that whenever I hit a block, it’s an indication that something more needs to be explored about my material – a character hasn’t been fully developed, a setting isn’t clear in my mind, something about the plot is tripping over itself. It requires a certain amount of distance and examination (sometimes self-examination) to diagnose and fix the block, but it’s always worth it. On a 30-day schedule, however, there’s no room for delay. Further, the earlier a block develops during the drafting process, the more fundamental the issue is, and therefore needs to be addressed immediately, before other things go drastically off track as well.

Of all the thousands of NaNoWriMo participants, I’ve only read of a handful since the program’s inception who have successfully published the end result after drastic rewriting. It’s not a great success rate, and it indicates that NaNoWriMo may simply be another creativity tool – something to spurn on discovery. But there are other creativity tools that can provide a clear focus for the story without spending 30 days foundering against self-inflicted block. Placed in this perspective, it’s a great beginners’ tool for writing, but once you’re done, what then?

I have yet to reuse anything that came out of NaNoWriMo in a serious project – most of the material is so specific to the project that it can’t be redeployed. I also have yet to successfully complete a NaNoWriMo – life (and Thanksgiving) inevitably derails it.

Having said this, I am using November to belt out a first draft, or the remainder of a first draft which I began work on in August. The plotting is completed (or at least as complete as any plot can be at this point), and the drafting has begun. But, I’m not putting some arbitrary deadline on the work. I know the best pace for my work, and there’s no way I can shoehorn it into 30 days. Quantity does not equal quality. And my personal goal is to write something that others will read – not something that ends up in a personal slush pile because I don’t know what to do with it.

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June 13, 2012

Producing the Play

Filed under: Theater — Brian Triber @ 1:46 pm

I’ve blogged about and edited a couple of works on theater in the past (see Freytag’s Technique of the Drama and Aristotle’s Poetics), and the theory in those works are useful to the playwright, and to the dramaturge. But for the director, the actor, and the production crew, they provide a means for analysis of the script, to understand character motivations and employ the dramatic structure in bringing the play to life from the page. For the audience member, the concepts laid out are a bit more etheric, and seem not to have any connection to the finished product. This is often because the director, production crew, and actors have done such a fine job of interpreting the script, and taken the burden of understanding the play on their own shoulders so that the audience can understand only as much or as little as they want to take in.

With this blog entry, I hope to begin a series to discuss how to produce a play. I hope it will act as a place to discuss best techniques, secrets learned, what to avoid, and generally how to mount the production of a play in a professional-like manner. By raising the awareness of how much work actually goes into the preparation of a show, who needs to be involved, and what duties are required of each individual, I believe that the viewer will come away with more appreciation of the art of live theatrical performance.

I begin this series in the midst of an actual production. We (myself as director, and Oak Grove Improvement Association as producer) are currently in production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the parks of Malden for performance in July of 2012. Since we are in mid-production, these entries will be a bit out of chronological order. We are currently well into the rehearsal process, and we have just passed the off-book date (the date on which all actors should have their lines memorized so that blocking and other stage business can be worked on). I’ll be discussing the challenges of production on Midsummer, covering topics as varied as costuming, sound design, blocking, scansion, set construction, and others. I’ll also be introducing my readers to cast members, and talk a bit about the parks of Malden, and how to plan a program book. It will be a little of everything — a veritable buffet of theatrical slang, a little heavy on the sauciness, but no ham at this banquet.

I may not be able to cover every detail of production, so I invite you, my readers, to submit questions. If I’m not clear on a point (which happens occasionally) please ask for clarification. I don’t bite, and I’ll answer every topical question, even if you think it’s silly. (Usually the silly questions lead to the oct enlightening answers, so I especially welcome them.)

So, with all this said, it’s time to raise the curtain on the production process for Malden Shakespeare Project’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream…

Lori Sinatra as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Oberon’s Vest

Some costume pieces for the show are designed by Lori, including (and especially) the hand-painted denim vests.
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March 19, 2012

Leaping Over Writer’s Block

Filed under: Uncategorized,Writer's Block,Writing — Brian Triber @ 2:58 pm

Yep, every writer has a different technique to deal with writer’s block. Some swear by doing dishes, going for a walk, or some other physical activity. Others like to brainstorm their way out of the block. Still others meditate, or write down what they want to accomplish the next day before going to bed, or put out prayers and offerings to the universe, or carry a charm like Dumbo grasping that feather as he falls from the top of the burning building. But to actually produce a work, you can’t rely on those clowns to catch you in their net.

Writers block is not a disease. It’s not a writer’s malfunction. It’s a process problem. It’s a signal that as a writer you’re doing something out of order or from the wrong approach. And it’s always caused by exactly the same thing: Editing instead of Creating. (Conversely, Creating instead of Editing can cause delay, and an extended writing process.)

I got to thinking about this again yesterday after speaking with a fairly bright poet who was working as a carver at a restaurant buffet. He pined about how he had worked on dozens of poems, and was working on a novel, of which he had written 100 pages, and then found himself stymied. Full on block.

Most books on writer’s block focus on how to overcome it, through exercises, visualizations, distractions, and other tricks. But very few (only a couple come to mind) actually deal with the psychology of the block.

It’s akin to method acting — those actors who only use method acting as a tool in their arsenal to deconstruct a role and perform it usually have to follow the method precisely without interruption, or they can’t produce a complete performance. But have you ever tried to engage them in a conversation backstage? They get irate because you interrupted them while they were trying to “get into character,” even if it’s to let them know that a set piece has been moved for safety reasons, or that the understudy will be playing opposite them. Then they proceed to be thrown off when the set piece isn’t where they expect it to be, or the understudy delivers the line slightly differently and their response feels emotionally inappropriate to the understudy’s delivery of her lines. The actor who survives this kind of real-world pathos usually does so because “method” acting is neither the primary or only technique in their toolbox.

The key to successful performance for the actor is adaptability. No one approach is appropriate for all roles in every play in every production for any actor. It requires a thoughtful adaptation of the actor’s abilities, applying techniques and tricks, filtered through their experience and rehearsal, and listening and reacting to the audience and fellow actors. And even then, no two performances will ever be the same.

This idea also holds true for writer’s block – no personal technique will work every time, no trick learned from Writer’s Digest will be equally applicable in every circumstance, and sometimes the characters you’re writing just outright refuse to cooperate, whether you’re using your favorite pen on paper, blind typing, or dictating to your iPad 3. Eventually you will hit a point when the ink stops flowing, and the character crosses her arms and squints at you petulantly.

So, how does one get past the writer’s block? Purchase dozens of books on writing? Go for a walk? What if you’re on a deadline to get that last draft in? There’s no time to go through all of the tricks in the bag. So what to do? The key is in understanding what creates block to begin with, then disengage from it.

To understand writer’s block, one first has to understand a psychological model of creativity. Not too closely, of course, because as all creative types have noticed at one time or another, if you examine the mechanism too closely it eventually stops working. The idea is to understand just enough to diagnose how to step beyond the block. So, in one sentence, here’s the model I use to break through the block: The brain essentially has two functions when it comes to writing – Creativity, and Criticality.

The Creative mind kicks in whenever you brainstorm, or daydream, or when the words are flowing onto the paper. It’s the Muse of the subconscious communicating with the outside world through image, idea, smells, colors, essentially anything experiential. It’s the difference between a cloudless sky, and an effulgent sky bleeding its cerulean through the pikestaffs of the distant army of trees. Creativity works best when it is observed only peripherally. Look it in the eye and the Muse runs and hides. But play by yourself and she sneaks up on you, insisting on joining in the fun.

The Critical mind, on the other hand, is a bit of a brute and a bully, but one that is all too necessary to complete a piece. It likes to pick things apart to its finest detail. Left to its own devices, the Critical mind would disassemble a glass of water into a pile of oxygen atom and a pile of hydrogen atoms, and not content to let things go, continue to disassemble the glass into its constituent parts too.

So how do you get the Creator and the Critic to play nice with each other, to help you as a writer get to a completed product? If they were children, you’d be forced to separate them. They just don’t get along. Having the two of them living in the same brain — your brain — can be a struggle. So you have to set some ground rules to make it easier on the Creator, the Critic, and yourself.

First, never try to let both loose on the same work at the same time. This is by far the most common cause of writer’s block, and the easiest to fix if you can diagnose it. It requires completing the first draft before you ever sit down to edit. It also requires separate distinct passes at the manuscript: one to identify problems (the Critic’s job) and one to fix the problems (the Creator’s job).

This seems counterintuitive to many writers. We’ve all experienced drafting a piece and realizing halfway through the first paragraph that our focus was wrong, that we’ve introduced the same character with multiple names, that the physical setting is wrong for the emotional setting of the scene, that Toni was wearing sandals at the beginning of the scene and now has Chuck Taylors.

This usually leads to our questioning whether the story is valid, if we’ve got a good handle on the subject matter, if we’re even ready to begin writing the piece. And we’re suddenly in block, because we’re criticizing the work before it’s even been created.

There are many techniques to get around block, but the best is to prevent it from ever showing up. Here are a few tricks to prevent writer’s block from rearing its ugly head, and a few ideas on how to quickly remove it.

  • Keep a second notebook nearby. What sometimes happens while you’re writing is an idea occurs to you that is tangential to the story — a plot hook, a new character to act as a dramatic foil — or you realize that something you’ve written may be inaccurate and requires some research, or there’s something you think might be contrary to something else you’ve written in the work. Don’t stop writing to do the research or verify the continuity or figure out how to work the new bit in. Jot it into a notebook to examine later, when you’re in Critical mode.
  • Use MS Word’s Comments feature. Similar to using a notebook, you can embed comments in Word documents that can later be resolved after you’re done writing the first draft. Take caution, however, not to go back to resolve any of these issues until you’ve completed the entire first draft. Changing something as simple as a character name throughout your manuscript before you complete it can be sufficient for your Creative subconscious to not recognize the character that it’s been working with, and drastically change the story.
  • Don’t fix the manuscript while you’re critiquing it. This does the opposite of undermining your creativity. It undermines the critic, and can introduce errors in the flow of the story or its internal consistency. Mark up your physical manuscript with green or purple pens for errors and observations. (Red tends to set us off subconsciously, because we all remember those teachers’ comments on tests and papers that made us feel like we didn’t really know our subject matter. Looking at red markups of our manuscripts can create or reinforce block.)
  • Step away from the desk. When you’ve finished either Creating or Critiquing, before stepping into the next phase, do something to change your workspace. We have a tendency to associate our physical surroundings with the activities we pursue in them. Psychologists recommend removing your television from your bedroom to get a better night’s sleep for this reason — when you watch TV, you’re mentally engaged, so your body will try to fight off sleep to remain engaged. Try printing out your manuscript and sitting in a different position or place when you edit it. I use a corner chair with a window, lamp, and a table for a drink next to it. If I haven’t completed editing, the manuscript remains on the seat of the chair to prevent me from sitting down to write there.
  • Work on two stories at once. If you work on multiple pieces at the same time, consider limiting your work to 2 manuscripts. Allow your Creative mind to run free on one, while your Critical mind is engaged with the other. This can be a little tricky since both the Creative and Critical minds, once engaged, like to take on new projects, and may even see the other work as a refreshing challenge. But, once you’ve gotten proficient at acknowledging and quieting the unwanted voice, it allows you to be more productive and duck away front eh block entirely.
  • Take a field trip. If you find yourself really deep in block, or are having difficulty in reigning in the Critic or the Creator, try amusing the offended party — go to a museum to distract the Critical mind, to allow it another outlet for its nitpicking (the artists are dead and won’t mind); or try listening to classical music while you edit  to misdirect your inner Creator for a bit so that your Critic can work. A walk in the woods or along a beach can also do wonders for both.

The key to keeping the Creative and Critical minds happy is to acknowledge that what they are trying to add at the moment has value, and to pay attention to it, but don’t cater to it. If the Critical mind demands attention while you’re creating, record what it has to say and make a promise to yourself (that you’ll keep!) to address it in a timely manner after you’ve finished creating. And do the same for the Creative mind while you’re Critiquing. Think of them like siblings – you can’t treat one as a favorite and neglect the other — that leads to acting out, and stubborn resistance. Instead, acknowledge them when they pipe in, reward them with praise, but put your foot down and send them for a time out if they start fighting with each other.

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January 29, 2012

The Reading List – The Immortalization Commission, by John Gray

Filed under: Book Discussion — Tags: , — Brian Triber @ 4:01 pm


Image from the MacMillan website.

The Immortalization Commission, by John Gray

Published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, a division of Macmillian publishing.

Gray discusses the connections between Darwin, the Spiritualism movement of the late 19th to early 20th century, scientific inquiry into death, and how the scientific method has helped reclaim spirituality from science.

This is an interesting read, touching upon the key figures and movements in science, philosophy, psychology, and religion of the times that led to the co-development of the Soviet and Western studies of the human soul. It’s a slow read, containing rich language and many interconnected facts, and written almost like a doctoral thesis rife with cross-disciplinary research. Yet the text helps bring to life some of the personalities of the era to explain the scientific, spiritual, and religious drives that led to prevalent 20th Century thought on science and religion. It’s a good read, and worth the effort to reconnect with our current understanding of mortality.

UPDATE – I finally slogged my way through the end of the book, and while I still stand by my previous comments on the work, I have one additional observation. The author tends to put the veracity and validity of science on the same footing with that of religion. This feels a bit to me like apologism in an effort to appear not to be attacking religion. I contend that science, while not a complete philosophy of the universe, is still adaptive enough to allow it to survive the ravages of time, while religion transforms either into mythology, or is subsumed into another religious philosophy. These possibilities weren’t covered in the text, likely because they would have been besides the point. Still, the evolution of philosophy can be dissected in much the same philosophical way as the evolution of man. In some ways, a science or philosophy cannot be said to be valid unless it also accounts for its own creation, existence, and demise.

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October 26, 2011

Short, Sweet, and a Bit Late

Filed under: Uncategorized — Brian Triber @ 12:26 pm

Sometimes life catches up with you, and everything else goes awry. And sometimes you just lose track of time. I guess there’s no better time for lazing than the summer. That’s the reason I’m giving for not having posted anything on the blog since mid-August. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Yeah. It has nothing to do with the fact that my writing projects have been put on hold pending completion of the new office. It has nothing to do with volunteering with a local community group and helping design a 3-D model of a park layout for the fall festival (which went off well despite impending threats of inclement weather), or working on assistant stage managing that same festival, through an hour and a half delay and yet still getting all of the performers in before the stage had to be packed up. It also had nothing to do with reviewing a fellow writer’s first two and a third novels, and writing blurbs for the jacket copy. Or helping a friend get started in designing a web page for a local nonprofit dedicated to improving literacy in our community.

No. It was none of that at all. It was just my being lazy over the summer, soaking in the sunsets and petting the neighbor’s cat, enjoying slow dinners with my partner … and yelling at the politicians on the television because they’re too obtuse to realize politics has real world implications. And working my way up to level 14 in Farmville within a week after liking it on Facebook.

Goodbye to the summer of 2011, and God speed. Back to work.

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