Zombies: a series – Countdown

By on August 27, 2010 ·

In 2 months, 4 days and 12 hours, the dead will walk… onto your TV screen!

Premiering on Halloween night, AMC TV’s presentation of “The Walking Dead“, which long-time readers may remember is my favorite zombie book, has all of the makings of becoming my favorite visual zombie experience as well.  Veteran (and venerable) screenwriter and director Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) is at the helm and the writer for the graphic novels, Robert Kirkman, is heavily involved.

A trailer was premiered last month that the San Diego Comic-Con and the official AMC website has some other great behind the scenes video clips, including a time-lapse of a three and a half hour makeup and prosthetic appliance session shown at sixty times normal speed.  Darabont is well-known for his attention to detail, so I have no doubt that he has gathered a crack team of special effects wizards to bring this story of the limits of human survival to life.

I look forward to re-reading the books, while I wait for this highly anticipated event and I hope the kids that come to the door looking for treats on Halloween night appreciate my homage.

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Gender Bias

By on August 25, 2010 ·

Recently, I was reminded of the scene from the film As Good As It Gets where the novelist Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson’s character) is talking to a receptionist. She asks Udall, “How do you write women so well?” and he replies, “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.”

Is there a distinctly masculine or feminine voice in writing? Is it possible for a man to write a convincing first person narrative from a woman’s point of view—or vice versa? Or will an author’s gender bleed into a story no matter how hard he or she tries?

Let me explain what prompted these questions. I entered a writing contest last spring, and when the winners were posted, I noticed something: There were no male names on the list of finalists—none, zero, zip. I thought this was rather interesting, considering that the lone judge of the writing contest was male.

First of all, it’s important to understand that I’m a rather sore loser. Nevertheless, I also like to give credit where it is due, and if someone outdoes me in something, I believe I have enough good sense and character to acknowledge a job well done. Maybe these women outdid all the males who submitted material to the contest. If so, bravo! Yet I have to wonder what it was about these ladies’ writings that this particular judge found so appealing? Doe he simply have a penchant for feminine voices? Were there gender differences in the writings themselves—either in terms of subject matter or style—to which he unconsciously gravitated?

What about me? Does an author’s gender matter? Both male and female writers are certainly represented on my bookshelves at home, and I like to believe that I judge an author’s writing based on its own merits and not its creator’s sex. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that the male writers do outnumber the females in my library nearly three to one. Am I biased? Because I read Edward Abbey and not Danielle Steel, does this make me an insensitive, misogynistic brute? I’m not sure. You’d probably have to ask my ex-wife.

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The New Archetypes: Part 3

By on August 16, 2010 ·
When Lego Ninja Attack...
Image by Neil Crosby via Flickr

Last time I talked about the Nobody.  Everybody has felt like a Nobody at some point which makes the Nobody a sort of everyman.  If you can’t root for him at least you can identify with him.  Before that was the Rogue Cop.  This guy (it’s almost always a guy) plays by his own rules but we know he’s the good guy.  But what if our good guy doesn’t do good things?  What if he’s a bad guy?  How can he still be the hero?  Why do we root for the modern Archetype of The Assassin?

Murder is by and large a bad thing, even in the violent make believe world of movies.  We the audience can’t seem to get enough killing though and the storytellers are always happy to oblige.  But that whole morality thing keeps popping up.  Even if it’s fiction some of us might feel guilty for cheering on killers.  Some of us might feel guilty enough to digitally alter (and not very well, I might add) a decades old iconic scene to make a cantina shooting look like self-defense.  So how do we make it okay for the hero to murder people in cold blood?  Simple.  We pay him lots and lots of money.  For some reason we love movies about assassins.  The Professional,  Assassins, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Grosse Pointe Blank, Wanted, La Femme Nikita/Point of No Return…that’s just off the top of my head but the list is pretty long.  So what is it about the Assassin?

Well for starters he’s cool.  I don’t know anything about the real world of assassins.  I don’t know if they’re cool or not but in the movies they’re cool.  They wear cool clothes and use cool weapons.  They have cool training sequences perhaps in a cool facility or in some secret ninja stronghold in the mountains.  They have cool moves for every situation; getting into and out of buildings, finding their targets and evading detection.  They remain cool under all kinds of pressure whether they’re being shot at or laying in wait for their targets.  Just laying in wait has to be cool.  You can’t just sit on a lawn chair with a deer rifle; you have to hang on to the chassis of a car or climb headfirst down a rope or…whatever.  Call it the Batman factor:  if you look cool enough it doesn’t matter how insane your actions are.

There has to be more to it though and I think there is.  It’s not just cool moves that are attractive but the power and freedom.  The Assassin strikes at will and without hesitation.  He has the power of life and death.  He’s free from moral judgement, at least from himself, because he’s only doing his job.  A plumber doesn’t feel guilty about snaking a drain.  Despite the fact these people are ending lives most of us wish we could operate so surely and powerfully.  We live by countless rules every waking moment and being free of those rules is a strong fantasy.  Of course there’s a price to pay and that’s humanity.

Humanity is the other side of the coin for the Assassin.  Most of these characters have either been stripped of their humanity through training or lost their connection to humanity from years of killing.  It’s the lack of morality and humanity that give the Assassin storytelling legs.  The assassin story is usually a redemption story.  Perhaps the Assassin never wanted the life he was in and has to find a way out (Point of No Return).  Perhaps there is an unexpected connection that makes the Assassin want to be human again (The Professional).  Sometimes the Assassin sees the effect he has on the rest of humanity and wants to make things right (The Killer).  Whatever the case the Assassin is usually trying to regain his lost humanity and we root for him to make it.  If a paid killer can find redemption than so can the rest of us.   

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“Our doubts are traitors…” Measure for Measure (I.iv.77)

By on August 11, 2010 ·
First edition cover
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In his collection of journals entitled Confessions of a Barbarian, the twenty-five-year-old Edward Abbey ponders the progress he is making on his first novel:

“The novel, my terrible novel, will drive me to ruin…A frightful labor!

“And the worth of it, the quality—the problem worries me night and day. At times I’m afraid to read what I’ve written, almost superstitiously afraid—and then at other times I do work up enough courage to hastily read snatches chosen at random. The effects are mixed—parts of the book seem hilariously funny, beautifully written, packed and quivering with life. And then I’ll read the same passage again, or another, and it will seem dead as junkyard iron, pretentious and false, weak, thin, spineless, empty and hideous.

“Who is right? The critic or the author? I swing constantly, if erratically, between power and confidence, and antipodal despair; between surges of triumph when I look at myself grinning at me in the mirror and can say, “Abbey, oh Abbey, you monstrously clever fellow,” and dank gloom of dark defeat, convinced of failure, crushed by doubt…”

I think all writers can empathize with these sentiments, regardless of their inherent abilities or levels of success. Writing is a lonely business, and when we are “in the zone” and experiencing the sweet rush of creativity, nothing seems impossible. But of course, those rushes don’t last forever, and at some point we go back and reread what we’ve written and wonder if what we’ve crafted is really any good at all. “I’m a hack!” we say. “A fraud! Why would anybody want to read this?”

On the one hand, it’s comforting to know that a gifted and respected wordsmith like Ed Abbey experienced the same ups and downs the rest of us do. For most of us, it is a natural part of the creative process. Yet this knowledge does little to shake off our self-doubts.

Speaking personally, I’ve found that being part of a writing group does wonders to keep my creative fires burning. Part of this is the accountability it affords, but more importantly, the honest and encouraging feedback my group provides is enormously helpful in pushing me through the “desert moments” of the creative process.

What about you? How do you combat the struggles and doubts that come with writing?

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The Truth About Workshops

By on August 9, 2010 ·
Using a screenshot from Wonder Boys to illustr...

Taking a manuscript into a critique workshop is an expedient and sometimes necessary step to understand how readers view and respond to any given piece you’ve written. At their best, a workshop is a coming together of equally skilled and similarly committed writers under the guidance of a master of the trade, both as writer and pedagogue.

I’ve never been in one of these.

My experience has been in workshops where there was a broad sampling of participants, in both writing ability and commitment to the process. Some felt more like a beauty pageant, or worse, poker game, than a learning experience. It’s almost unavoidable, the collective, nuanced accounting of who’s the most skilled, the most inventive and the most likely to be published, tainted with the underlying fear that you may be the runt of the bunch. Oh sure, there will be the “what I love about your work” comments, and a few helpful suggestions, but unspoken is the competitive racking and stacking that goes on inside everyone’s head. Is his novel more likely to be published before mine? Did the group respond better to her story or mine?

Add in instructor bias and group dynamics being what they are, a workshop can very quickly devolve into an exercise in group- think based on the instructor’s preferences and prejudices. If minimalism is the favored style, then luxuriously layered descriptions, or a steady stream of consciousness loaded with emotional nuance are going to get less than enthusiastic reviews. Reading the instructor’s work beforehand can help to identify those biases. But, the knowledge can be a double-edged sword. If you don’t particularly enjoy their style or genre, that can prevent you from fully appreciating their comments and suggestions, and thus undermining what might well be good advice.

If you venture into the arena of a workshop, measure your sense of accomplishment not by how popular your manuscript was, but how much you learned about it. And, be sure to remind yourself that Kafka’s work would have been skewed, roasted and trashed with great enthusiasm in the beauty pageant of most workshops.

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