When Drew Chial was very young, he found an attic hidden in his bedroom closet. He discovered it investigating an indentation in the ceiling, nudging it with a broom, until it fell inward. There was no stepladder for him to climb, so he scaled the shelves. Shining his flashlight, he found a long triangular hall, twice the length of his bedroom. Every surface was coated in pink insulation that made his skin itch. Creeping into the basement, Drew stole a sleeping bag that he unrolled on the attic floor. He set a tiny aluminum lock box on top of it. This is where he hid the things he wrote. Now Drew hides them in plain sight.
Photo by Keane Amdahl follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
Writer’s block doesn’t always come from the lack of inspiration. Sometimes it comes from the abundance of inspiration, from having too many ideas to choose from. It’s hard to know which ones will leave you with a sense of accomplishment, and which ones will leave you feeling spent. Why invest the time, if the time is going to payoff?
Writer’s block is a fear of failure. If you never try you’ll never fail. The trick is to get yourself to try without realizing that’s what you’re doing. To grift one of those stories out of you and onto the page.
This 13 minute audio blog runs through all the cons I use to get the job done.
The instrumental version of Grift the Words Out of You is the perfect background music to write to. There are layers of ascending melodies stacked over ambient synths, with a rugged a trip-hop beat. The blog entry itself mentions The Cure’s Pictures of You. That song rubbed off on the soundtrack. Depeche Mode and M83, rubbed off on it too for good measure.
Photo by Keane Amdahl, follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
What follows is an ode to self-defeatism. To those of us who over-share when someone asks, “How’s it going?” To those of us who proclaim our circular reasoning until we sound like broken records. It’s about when we need emotional reinforcement, but lack the language to ask for it. Unable to get into the specifics, we say whatever comes to mind. Too bad our minds are scrambled. Our conditions create a language gap, an abstraction, an anomaly in the exchange of ideas.
Like broken computers, we don’t communicate. We spout off an error code. We kernel panic. We blue screen of death. We say we need our space. Then we forbid our guests from leaving. We ask for brutal honesty. Then we accuse them of ganging up on us.
This is an ode to those ironic cries for help. The attempts to lure people in only to push them away. When we walk out of our job, because we want a raise. When we duck out of the party, because we want people to talk to us. When we give the Batman goodbye, because we want people to notice us. We’re quiet, because we want to be heard. We hide, because we want to be found. We run, because we want to be chased.
We want to get under your skin. We want to get into your head. We leave messages on bathroom mirrors, in magnetic poetry, stashed in paperbacks to be discovered later. We soak our boots, step over welcome mats, and leave footprints down hallways. We key cars, impale pillows, and shatter portraits. We burn letters in the sink. We leave messes. We leave evidence.
Here’s to those of us who vague-book in the middle of the night. Who say something serious we can always accuse our commenters of reading into. Here’s to the divas, the drama queens, and the boys who cry wolf. To those of us who keep it real, in the hopes that someone will call us out on it. To those of us who get sloppy in the hopes that we get caught. To those of us who wear our injuries like merit badges, only to rediscover our shame.
This is about the fixes we discover when left to our own devices. It’s about the moment we spot the evidence of our own self-sabotage. When we face palm at the revelation that we’re the ones who are hitting ourselves. No one can fix our heads, until we realize that we’ve encrypted our thoughts. We’re the ones with the most at stake. We’re the ones who have to break the code.
We have to identify this pattern: stress from without creates stress from within that creates stress from without. Continue reading Party of One→
Photo by Keane Amdahl, follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
Ridicule has over-saturated the marketplace of ideas. It’s frightened off potential investors: authors, poets, and screenwriters. They bury their spark in their portfolios, when the market could be nurturing it. Investors see an abundance of taunts, and a scarcity of discourse. They horde their assets, because they know what happens to the people that share them.
Inspiration is taken apart by market analysts. They are not creators themselves. They lack the language for artistic analysis, but they fake it all the same.
Every one of them has a harsh word on the tip of their tongues, and a scathing review on the tips of their fingers. Every one of them is entitled to their opinion, and they treat their opinions like facts.
The problem is: when everyone is a critic, criticism loses its value. With the bar set this low, there is no more room for growth.
The demand for ridicule has been inflated, by a handful of traders with nothing but put-downs in their portfolio. Their sole product is their ability to defame. To ride the uptick of an artist’s epiphany, just to crash it on the way down. To pump it and dump it. To treat inspiration like a toxic asset. Continue reading Ridicule is a Bad Investment→
They say that lizards can feel
Where their tails used to be
They say the same thing
Of amputees
You took my heart with you
When you parted with me
But I still feel the space
Where our love used to be
My phantom parts
Call me from afar
Like secret agents
They tell me where you are
You took an arm and a leg
Now I’m out on my last limb
Left with the chore
Of filling the empty spaces in
Clipped and severed
Left with only the stem
There’s a phantom image
Where a flower would have been
You left your aura
Your essence behind you
Open my eyes to
A residual shade of blue
You made me feel
Like another person entirely
Now that you’re gone
That person’s here to haunt me
The ghost of moments past
Squealing like a banshee
Scaring me shitless
Making dissonance of my harmony
Did you hear a thump in the night?
Did you feel a chill?
When you think of what we had
Do your arm hairs stand still?
Don’t get too close to mirrors
Don’t even say my name
My ghost is breathing down your neck
Just waiting to be summoned
Clipped and severed
Left with only the stem
There’s a phantom image
Where a flower would have been
You left your aura
Your essence behind you
Open my eyes to
A residual shade of blue
I took up smoking
To taste more like you used to
You put the nicotine in me
Before I started to
Our love has been ashed
Right down to the filter
But whenever I cough
I know it’s still there
Clipped and severed
Left with only the stem
There’s a phantom image
Where a flower would have been
You left your aura
Your essence behind you
Open my eyes to
A residual shade of blue
An author tries to solve a mystery from inside the pitch of his own story.
My story’s pitch starts in the parking lot. The lot is empty apart from a lone convertible, a rusty old stepladder, and a thick layer of slush from last night’s snow.
The convertible is a classic, fully restored to its original mint green. Too bad someone thought to wheel it out in this nasty weather. The fenders are caked with black slush. There’s an awful mess in the interior. The windshield does little to hide the line of cocaine on the dashboard. There’s nothing but powder from the wheel to the glovebox. It looks like last night’s blizzard happened on the upholstery. A log sits on the passenger seat, too small for a support beam, too large for kindling. It leans forward. Its bark is nose deep in the fresh fallen blow.
I pace around the vehicle and wonder why the log was staged to look like it overdosed. This is the weirdest damn crime scene that I’ve ever seen. What business does a log have with such an epic line? Then it occurs to me. This is a terrible pun. It’s a “log-line.” Every pitch has got one.
A logline is the main idea sentence of a story’s pitch. It’s the bait that get’s the audience on the hook. I must have staged this mobile drug den to remind myself to lead with my logline. Continue reading The Memory Palace Mystery→
Her eyes
Were bigger than her belly
Until she
Got her fill of me
Left a mark
With her molars
Ate all my good parts
I’m what’s left over
And it feels like I’ve been harvested
Of all the love I have to give
Of all the heart I’ve left to lose
A bit worse, for lack of use
It’s time for me to get my shit
To perform another exodus
I’m going back to the meat locker
I’ll wait it out another year
I will
Yes, I will
I will
Oh yes, I will
Built a wall of newspapers
Comicbooks, and magazines
Headphones, bottles and
Laptop computer screens
Tried so hard to lick my wounds
To imagine myself happy
Turns out that I’m the thing
That’s been eating me
And it feels like I’ve been harvested
Of all the love I have to give
Of all the heart I’ve left to lose
A bit worse, for lack of use
It’s time for me to get my shit
To perform another exodus
I’m going back to the meat locker
I’ll wait it out another year
Writers are always told to read more. I say, they ought to watch more movies. Why? Good films do not slip into the same pitfalls that so many novels do.
Good films do not tell you what a character is thinking. The audience has to make observations of their mood, and draw their own conclusions. Good films do not just launch into backstory. If there are flashbacks they appear as scenes. Good films put the events on display, they don’t just put them into a character’s mouth, and expect you to take their word for it. Good films show and don’t tell.
Writer’s could take a cue from this. Just because our medium allows for free form exposition, that doesn’t mean we should use it.
The limitations of film force it to tell a more compelling story. These are limitations I urge novelists to try to bring to their work in progress.
The above audio blog gets into the nitty gritty of the benefits of watching movies. The background music is like a scary movie score put through a trip-hop filter. I’ve heard it described as electro-goth. If you’re looking for good music to write to, you won’t go wrong with the instrumental version of the song.
This piece first appeared on Loren Kleinman’s blog on writing. Check it out at lorenkleinman.com, and follow her on Twitter @LorenKleinman. The above photo was taken by Keane Amdahl follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned.
Seduce the Words out of You
Writer’s are told to draft everything before rushing in. We’re told to have an outline to refer to when we get stuck. It’s a good check against writer’s block. It’s hard to lose the plot, when you can see every link in the chain. You know what happens next. You know your responsibilities. Your role in the relationship is defined. Continue reading Seduce the Words out of You (Audio Blog)→
Photo by Keane Amdahl, follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
Everybody needs their space. Everyone has their comfort zone, their bubble, their line that you just do not cross. We keep our guards up, because the world is constantly hitting us with its battering ram. We wall ourselves off, because we know what it’s like to feel exposed. We wall ourselves off, because we value the things we’ve already lost.
When those walls feel like they’re closing in, it’s because someone is pushing on them. When we don’t feel like ourselves, it’s because someone has gotten under our skin. When we wake up on the wrong side of the bed, it’s because the thing that haunts our dreams is lying on the other side.
This is the dark conclusion to my cyber-bully storyline. It’s the reason the entire piece is called, “The Moderator.” I write flexible outlines to allow my stories to swerve into the kind of dark territory this one lands in. The ending had me questioning if this was one of the worst, or best things I’ve ever written. The jury is still out on that, but the story had an impact on me.
I owe a debt of gratitude to @Raishimi for scanning through the story for grammatical mistakes. If you like intensely clever dark short fiction, check her blog out here.
In part 3, Jeremiah Jenkins has tracked down the cyber bully that outed him online. A man named River. Armed with his target’s whereabouts, Jeremiah has come to San Diego with a plan of his own.
The Moderator PART 3: Bridge Trolls
River walked down the sidewalk with his eyes buried in his phone. It was as big as any touchscreen tablet, except this one made calls. He was using an application that took advantage of the camera. It allowed him to type and see the ground at the same time. With an e-cigarette screwed into his lips, River was a master multitasker. He took a puff. Static crackled inside the pipe. He exhaled. The vapor trailed behind him. Continue reading The Moderator PART 3: Bridge Trolls→
