Archive for September, 2007
Being LDS
Posted by smokingpen in On Writing on September 28, 2007
I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
What does that mean?
Well, quickly, it means that I ascribe to the tenets the church puts forward. I believe the Book of Mormon is revelation from God. And I believe we are led by a Prophet who receives revelation from God.
But, being a member of this faith, and when I live in Utah, does this mean that being LDS answers who I am. Does my faith define who I am and what I do?
There are reasons I bring this up is not that I don’t think these are important questions; but rather, do these questions have a need to find answers when I sit down and write one of many different things: fiction, personal essays, poetry, television, movies.
Those are examples, but I think the examples are pertinent to the questions I am asking. If I, as a member of the LDS church, decide to write fiction within that environment, is it necessary to explore what it means to be LDS. Let me give an example:
Dean Hughes is an LDS author. He is also a professor on campus. He wrote a series of books, that I have read, titled The Children of the Promise where we follow a family who sends their sons and daughters off to serve, in various capacities, during World War II. Throughout the series, Hughes writes his characters dealing with a) their religion, and b) the consequences of the world at war and the choices made before the World War II. All of this deals with each individuals faith in God and willingness to be faithful in the LDS church.
I understand the desire to find meaning in things. There is meaning in the trials and joys we have in life, in general. There is meaning in getting married. There is meaning in having families. There is meaning in finding religion, or losing it. There is meaning in so many things that, if we are set upon doing it, we can get lost in looking for what that meaning is.
What all of this comes down to, for me, is that we, as members of the LDS church, spend way too much time talking about what it means to be members of the LDS church. We are concerned with defining a culture and then, once defined, exploiting that culture for entertainment purposes. One of the problems with LDS cinema is not that we are producing movies, but that we are producing movies that go over the same definition of who we are again and again and again. The exceptions, mostly the ones by Richard Dutcher don’t really choose to explore something else, or delve in to realms where being LDS is a part of the character rather than a reason for what is happening.
I realize that suggesting we change the way we approach our cultural entertainment, and the answers to prevailing questions: like: Who am I? or What am I? For many people, this is a part of the fiction we create, this is how we explore the cultural phenomenon that is Mormonism or being members of the LDS faith. And yet, I think that by creating this question, and it is artificial, we eliminate many opportunities that we have to explore other themes that might come up.
What is it like to be white in South Africa?
What is it like to be sober and clean in East L.A?
What is it like to find a new life and new opportunities?
Granted, this is not even close to what can be accomplished in writing or in entertainment within our culture. And yes, I believe that being LDS is being a part of a culture, living in Utah around other members of the church is being a part of a much larger culture. Yet, we don’t have to explore that culture to tell good stories. We can explore other cultures, other genres, and then allow our culture to show up as we write; to allow us to explore themes like racism or ageism or cultural shock or growth or failure in so many different ways.
We, as members of the church, as creative members of the church, have the opportunity to allow morality to be the guide in creating fiction and we don’t do that. We are stuck with what it means to be LDS that we forget that there is no single, uniform, universal answer to that question. What it means to me is not the same thing as other people. I approach my religion and my faith very differently. Even though I approach is differently, though, I find that I discover similar outcomes as the people around me.
Writing about what makes me different doesn’t make me a better writer; rather, it has me explore the same question everyone else (seems to be) is writing, and that is what I would love to see the culture and the environment and the community move away from.
You can’t answer the question; you won’t come up with a satisfactory answer; explore a different topic – but write in a way that moral fiction is produced that may use members of the church.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
Real Heroes Fly
The Lost and the Found
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on September 27, 2007
A few days ago I stuck my hand in my pocket only to discover that I did have my pen and I did have my keys but I did not have my little stone bear in there. Last year my parents purchased for me a little bear fetish which has taken on the name of Courage, and which accompanies me, pretty much, everywhere. When I went to look for him, he was gone. This was sad.
I started looking around, somewhat passively, for the little bear and couldn’t find him. It was sad. But I figured that I’d left him sitting around the house, in my car, or had lost him somehow. None of these scenarios, in my head, was good or agreeable, but, at the same time, I wasn’t worried because I was thinking, “How many people carry around a little bear fetish?”
Last night, looking for the little bear kind of took on a new life. I was sad because I didn’t have it in my pocket and decided to start eliminating different aspects of my life where it could have landed for various reasons: like my backpack. I started to pull out all sorts of things from the computer sleeve I use for my macbook to all of the books, gadgets and items and didn’t find the little guy. Up until this point, the search was merely an exercise, I wasn’t, exactly, worried or convinced that I wouldn’t be seeing the fetish again.
Enter Erin.
I shared with her that I couldn’t find the little bear and she started looking for it. In the closet (where my pants land most nights). In the room. Under the bed. Behind the dressers. On the dressers. In the clothes. You name, it sounds like she went a-looking for it. Nothing.
At that point, I was sad. Couldn’t tell you why I was sad. Sure, I wanted the fetish. And yes, I wanted it to keep in my pocket. I don’t look at it as the Native Americans might’ve approached a fetish; but more as something that I liked having on me and holding on occasion. Most people shouldn’t even know it exists. And yet, there it was, last night I had to come to the realization that the little bear might be gone from my life forever.
As it occurred to me that I was more connected to the thing than I’d thought, I realized, for whatever reason, that I needed to be prepared to live without it. I needed to stop worrying, be sad for whatever length of time, and just prepare not to find it. I shared as much with Erin and that I was a little sad. She was too.
At the end of the night, as I was driving home, I checked the obvious places in my car with the intent of, this morning, really checking my car. Then I got home and decided to check around the dressers and on my desk one last time. As I was checking this, I felt like I should just scan under our bed to see if I could see anything. I knelt next to the bed and stuck my head under there.
There was this little black spot. I reached in, praying it wasn’t a spider, and pulled out the black thing. It was the bear fetish. I was happy.
This has proven kind of interesting to me. I don’t need something, and yet I want it around. I don’t recognize the power in something that is made for a religion that I don’t follow or believe in, or for the consumer. However, I am happy to have Courage back in my pocket.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
Real Heroes Fly
Theme
Posted by smokingpen in On Writing, Plot on September 26, 2007
What is the theme of the piece you are writing?
I ask this not for you to say, “I want to talk about the struggle between individual forces that you can see with this character in this scene.” But rather, to open a discussion about the common use of plot.
Plot, when looked at, is a series of points that guide you through a story. We often look at plot as, it is alleged Shakespeare did, and say there are only a finite number of plots available to the writer. And yet, I would like to suggest that what people are talking about is really the theme of the piece, and what Shakespeare meant to say was that there was a limited number of themes that exist.
I had some friends, years ago, that, upon a discussion of a novel I was writing, said, “All stories are love stories.” They then proceeded to do what we all have a tendency to do in our lives, and they pointed out movies. One of them said, “Pick a movie and I will prove it to you.”
One element of theme is the love story.
You can create a love story between all sorts of characters and it is true, in most movies, and most stories, that there are universal elements that allow for a love story. Boy meets girl. They date. They fall in love. They marry. The end. These elements are plot elements. How does the boy and girl meet? What kinds of dating experiences do they have? What causes them to decide they want to marry? How does it end?Not the marriage, the story.
The story, though, is more than the elements you are writing that carry it form point A to point B to point C and on to through the end.Rather, the theme of the story is a love story.
Watch Payback, with Mel Gibson, and the theme of the story is revenge.
Watch another Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ, and the theme can be translated into a story of faith.
Read War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, the theme is love, not war; the backdrop, the setting for the families to come together, is war, but the theme is two individuals finding love and choosing to spend the rest of their lives together. It’s a soap opera.
The theme of a story is, essentially, what we refer to as plot. They are interchangeable, but, when dealing with the theme there are many we can pull from, but for most people, there are only a handful they will ever use to accomplish the sharing of the story.
One of my favorite movies is called The Naked Spur starring James Stewart (if James Steward doesn’t ring a bell, maybe Jimmy Steward will). The movie could be a love story. It’s not. James Stewart plays a cowboy who went away to war in the Civil War. When he returned to Texas, after the war, his wife had run off with a neighbor and they’d sold his cattle and property. He was left desolate.
The result was that he had a vendetta against the man his wife ran off with. That man had committed a crime. And Stewart’s character was determined to capture the man, take him back to Texas, and get the reward. Mix in a girl and, like War and Peace, the theme of the story can be obfuscated by the movement of the story from plot point to plot point to plot point.
However, the theme of the story is revenge, though not the same kind of revenge Mel Gibson follows in his movie Payback.
What you should be looking at is what is the theme your plot follows? If you know, good. If you don’t, figure it out.
Tuesday – a writing where I…
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on September 25, 2007
I think I actually wrote today. Not a lot. Not going to offer word counts, even though Microsoft Office for Mac actually gives me a running total at the bottom of the screen as I write. Nope, not gonna share, but I did write. It was nice. After I went to campus to meet with one of my professors and see if a couple of other professors were available to talk to (they were not) I absolutely wrote – which felt… amazingly… good.
Actually, I opened a lot of windows on the macbook and was impressed with how well it handled everything and then let me bring different things to the front. I was a mac convert… well, more a fan… years ago, but having one and using it has made all the difference in the world. One thing that I see happening, a lot, is when I get back on a PC I find myself defaulting to mac finger positions rather than to the PC ones I’ve used most of my life. (I like keyboard shortcuts and learning the mac ones has been enjoyable and entertaining… even if some are cross platform… sort of.)
Anyway, got to sit down and look at some things that had to be changed, opened up my master character list for Alicia Grey and the ideas list, basically plot points that need to be added in to the overall framework of the story as I work through it, and just sort of played around. Sure, it took a couple of hours to get in to the mode, and I really need to clean off my desktop and work in there rather than the front room; but the outcome was refreshing and makes me think that, somewhere, somehow, I might actually make it in fiction.
What I’d intended to do, though, was to work on the Cassandra West story I am doing for class. I decided, after talking to the professor, that I needed to go back to an earlier draft of the story I am writing and make it a hybrid of the current draft before moving on. There were, according to him, too many currently familiar objects in there that it pulls the reader out of the story. The problem that you encounter, though, is not whether or not there are familiar objects, because familiar objects are conceits of writing; but rather, how you deal with those objects and move forward.
Outside of printing off the pages, I didn’t work on that story at all. Kind of sad.
I did read up, some, for a quiz I am taking tomorrow on rhetoric for my professional communications class I am taking. Downloaded a PowerPoint presentation and went through it, then started reading the chapters. Didn’t get very far in the chapters. Hope to make time tomorrow morning to review, quickly, the material so I am semi-prepared for the quiz – though, at the same time, I did get my project for the class approved by the professor and get to move, full steam ahead, forward on it.
Beyond that, Erin wasn’t feeling to well today. She went to the doctor. Being married changes how doctors treat you. Well, how doctors treat girls. The first thing he did, for, like an hour, before he’d even treat the problem was to determine whether or not Erin was pregnant. That was fun. I expected a 20 minute appointment and a phone call, she was there for nearly an hour and a half. Was tested three times. And then diagnosed with what might be the problem. After touching her head, the doctor doesn’t believe it is neurological – in case you were worried. I got her phone call as I was driving to my appointment with my professor.
As for today, that is it.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
Real Hero’s Fly
Monday where we learn all the things we don’t want to learn and start doing all the things we don’t want to be doing… or how I spend my time
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on September 24, 2007
As has been stated, I am taking a creative writing class. This class is more an introduction to creative writing than something that allows me to explore more of what I’ve been doing for a few years. The professor is aware of that. I’ve had him before. As a result, I am writing real fiction and the rest of the class is working through other things. It proves to be interesting. Especially considering MoHo chick… she always has something to say that you’d think she would realize is completely … uhm … idiotic.
That, however, is not the point of this entry.
The point of the entry is that the professor of the class asked me to talk, today, about something I know a little about: technical writing. So, last night I put together an 8 slide PowerPoint presentation which went over what I thought was important for Professional Communications as a career. I didn’t really think a lot about what I was doing other than there are a) certain characteristics that are important to be a technical writer; and b) you have to want to pursue the job in some form or fashion.
I pulled from a magazine article writing book that has become, in recent weeks, a constant companion of mine. In the introduction is a list of attributes that people need to have in order to be successful at freelance magazine writing. I felt, and still feel, that these attributes apply to the technical writer and shared them. I won’t bore you all with the sordid details. However, went through the list. Talked about experiences with them and how they’ve affected my life and why, in some cases, I am what I am when it comes to these things; and then, after 20 minutes, ended.
What I found was really cool, and this is an aside, was that my macbook immediately recognized the projector and set it up as a second monitor AND with the second monitor running PowerPoint popped up a timer that let me see how long the presentation had been going. This was very cool. Great for presentations. When I unplugged the projector cable, the macbook screen flashed, momentarily, and then I had a single screen going again. It was so cool.
I’d handed that professor the first part of the first Cassandra West story and he read it over the weekend. Granted, not very long; and definitely not what I’d written over the summer when Cassandra, in my head, was still going by Cassidy; but he seemed pleasantly supportive of what I was doing and pointed some things out to me that I was totally unaware of as elements to the story, but also encouraged me to follow this muse after we’d discussed how it came to be and what I was planning on doing with the short stories. The conversation proved to be interesting.
I also learned, after a weekend of intending to read about professional communications that we have a weekly quiz that is directly related to the readings we were meant to do, and things learned in class, and as a result, unless you (read me) are insanely genius at nearly everything (and contrary to personal attitudes and some beliefs) and I am not, passing said quizzes can prove to be very difficult.
I don’t know how a weekly reading quiz got past me.
On a slightly different note, I have been looking, for some time, for a study done by a group of what I believe were … I don’t know, could’ve been psychologists, sociologists, someone who deals with interpersonal relationships. I recalled reading about it through some news outlet between 12 and 18 months ago. I recall that it dealt specifically with trends in dating. More specifically, that the average human being will date between 8 and 12 people before they will get married. The reason for this is that it takes that many committed (read semi-serious) relationships before you (as the human being – and yes, I don’t care that I am changing tenses) find the person you are most compatible with and can marry. At the point you’ve dated between 8 and 12 individuals, you begin to date the same person over and over again; which, in turn, means that the type of person you date is not likely to change.
Because it is a little frustrating to me, I decided to open a question at answers.yahoo.com to see if the universal meme that is the internet would be able to help me locate this study or, barring that, the article I got the information from.
This proved to be a mistake.
Instead of ACTUALLY getting someone to assist in this search I got idiots, and I mean idiots with capitals spelled a lot like: IDIOTS who chose to share with me their opinion (don’t care about your opinion) about how many people someone should date before they get married. More importantly, they decided to tell me that my question, which was specifically asking for assistance on finding source material, was stupid and that there was no real way to determine an answer.
I was and am not interested in the opinions. If I want an opinion I will say something to the effect of, “John, what do you think about dating and relationships?” and then proceed to write my own opinion. My opinion, or those of the people on the interwebbythingamajig don’t amount to a whole lot of anything. Rather, it places me where I already am. Nowhere.
Exciting, I am sure.
Anyway, still looking. May approach this from a slightly different angle as I need the research for something else I am working on and I really have to cite my sources.
I did learn, today, that some of the notes I gave directly to a professor I was taking last year about this time did a lot of good. She altered her class to reflect more of what was interesting to the students as well as what she needed to be doing in her discipline. Actually, the lore involved in my notes is as applicable as going out and interviewing people which proved to be rather nice to hear. We are comparing notes on books that relate to the new subject matter. It’s nice to hear that I had (what appears to be) a positive impact on how something is taught. She told me, this morning, that she has students who seriously did not know that The Little Mermaid was a story shared long before Disney ever got its hands on it.
As an aside, I told her I was getting an oral history of fairy tales that I ordered sometime next month, which should prove to be even more interesting than the collections I have sitting in various places in the house (mostly the office).
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
Real Hero’s Fly
What if???
Posted by smokingpen in On Writing, Writer's Block on September 22, 2007
When I have a willing accomplice, and it really does require a willing accomplice, I like to play a little game I call, “What if???”
The basic premise to the game is you take a situation and you propose a “what if” to it. Take the fat dude on the street. What if that man was really a woman? What would happen? What would be different about the situation? Describe in detail.
The last time I really got someone to play this game with me was my friend Tina. Tina was in law school. We were out doing something. And I suggested we play it. The problem, though, was that I enjoy the game and Tina was placating me. Though an interesting individual, she lacked, sometimes, in the areas of creativity and, as such, the game didn’t last very long. I used to think the playing of this game was essential to marriage. Apparently not as I got married without ever playing that game with my wife.
What if is something that I may have discovered as a teenager reading my monthly issue of Writer’s Digest. I seem to recall an article about a writer who was called in to jury duty and the illustration, my memory is more of the illustration than anything else, was of a courtroom where elements changed frequently. I thought, “What if I could do that to the situations I see around me?”
Whether or not this started a world of imagining things or not, I’ve found it interesting to change things about some details in my head. One outcome of this is that the actual details have to be solidly in my mind and I have to be able to distinguish between truth and fiction; otherwise the activity is moot.
One example of “What if???” is an exercise I used to play with people: Describe your fist kiss and imagine it [insert location here]! For a while I would change genders of the characters. I would change locations. I would change circumstances. Interestingly enough, because of the nature of that action, the outcome was always, emotionally, the same though elements of the event changed. Setting became the old west. Setting became a mountain trail. Setting became a lot of things.
What if??? can be used, rather than a game, as a means of beating down a case of writer’s block or other fictional maladies. It can be used to move the individual away from the snag they’ve found themselves in and on to a different path that might help the protagonist or the POV (point of view) character move on to the next stage or setting in the story. The point of the exercise, though, is to put the reality you are writing aside and create something completely new, different, and nonsensical. Then move forward.
Next time you’re stuck, write a, “What if???“
Updated In Order to Write
Posted by smokingpen in On Writing on September 21, 2007
For those that keep track, or care, I’ve been updating In Order to Write. Today’s update is on What Ifs???.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
Subjective Objectivity
Posted by smokingpen in Odds-n-Ends on September 21, 2007
I just learned that an essay is a “to put to a test” or to test an idea. To write an essay is to test something. I find this interesting. In part because I have a tendency to create long entries that I’ve called blog essays.
This is interesting to me, and helps define a standard I’ve been developing since those first weeks in New Hampshire. I want to explore my ideas and, to an extent, I want other people to connect with.
However, the essay is, literally, putting an idea to the test. I have an idea and I am testing it against my own beliefs and testing it against other people’s reactions when I present the word-spew on my blog. The same thing is done at In Order to Write – except, there, I am more likely to write a shorter entry and on something specific to writing fiction. I’ve even decided to turn In In Order to Write in to a class project.
The exploration of thoughts is something that happens regardless of whether or not I do it on my blog. I think about a lot of things a lot of the time.
The point of the blog is actually to connect with family members, first; and then to share my thoughts on what is happening in the world, what I am working on, other projects, and as a clearinghouse to other websites that I have or other people, pretty closely connected to me, are also working on. The most, personally, prominent one of these is In Order to Write; academically, I also have Cassandra West; Alicia Grey; The Clockwork Princess; and (possibly sticking its head up again, soon) Mary and Kierk.
I am sure all of this oh so very important, but, the start was about essays and why I write them as well as how learning what an essay is meant to be an exploration of an idea. So, I explore ideas. I try to be very objective about it, try to remove my opinions about a lot of things; but the truth of the matter is that I am very opinionated about a lot of things. Take Al Sharpton. I started writing an entry on him the other day and then didn’t, not because I didn’t want to rant about the man and his crusades, but more because I didn’t feel like talking about it once I started.
A lot of blog entries die by way of me starting to write about them and then stopping because I get tired of the topic or realize that my feelings, emotions, whatever, that prompted me to start writing about it died away. And, truth told, I don’t feel the need (one I hit that point) to force myself to continue writing about it.
Sharpton was one of those topics that I thought I cared and then realized that I didn’t, really. And didn’t want to mentally or emotionally deal with his antics and so spent time writing about it until I realized I didn’t care and then I stopped. It was nice. The stopping.
However I get to different points in writing, I do get there. Starting an entry about the essay that turns in to an essay is something that I do. I am exploring how I feel and whether or not it will change how I act or react to the topics I follow.
I mean, well… maybe I don’t know what I mean. In theory, when I start an entry for this webpage or some other page, I go through the process of writing it out and posting it and sometimes that process seems to fail on me. I am okay enough with that to walk away from something that, right now, isn’t work for me… so… you know… it’s all good. Not everything I do needs to be done, and not everything I write needs to be written. I admit that readily.
What I do write, though, at least here, for the most part, I want to be an exploration – of sorts.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West