Get Down With OPP (Other People's Poetry)

"Oh no, another post about writing poetry! Run!" I can actually prophesize that cry going out from all those readers who enjoy this blog but refuse to do poetry. That's okay - this is not another attempt to convert the heathens into poets. This is, however, a reminder of how poetry can provide us with another tool in our writing toolbox, and we can gain this sometimes by merely exploring what other people have already created.

I mentioned in a past post that I was currently on a dystopia kick, in part thanks to the recent release of Cyberpunk 2077. (No, this post isn't about dystopia or Cyberpunk either.) Well, of all the places, it turns out that some poetry was offered within the Cyberpunk universe, and it struck up my own curiosity enough to go and read the original works. At first I was just curious to find out if there was some hidden meaning behind bringing up that particular poem at that particular cyber-moment, but I read them and something clicked. Why? Honestly, I do not know, but I found out it did by reading it first. 

Maybe it's just me, but one particular verse stood out - and it was not the verse cited in Cyberpunk 2077, though the rhythm is basically the same. I read it, and something in my inner writer moved:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
- Excerpt, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot

Now, maybe you got nothing out of this. Maybe you see a particular line and think how I might relate to a middle-aged character with thinning hair. Maybe that sort of music of the meter sounded like singing in your mind. Or maybe something in the back of your head says, "I don't know what it is, but I kinda like it." No matter - all those responses and any other are valid. The point is, by consuming this poetry, our writing mind starts to think in different ways and appreciate different ways of communicating.

This is not to say that you even have to appreciate a work just because it's done by someone famous or respected. Cyberpunk 2077 also made reference to William Butler Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, which is considered a profound reflection on the subject of aging (most people would know it for the line, "That is no country for old men.") In fairness, it went over my head. It just didn't do it for me. And yet, I think I was better off for having read it, even if just as a writer.

So, this was not a post about writing poetry. However, if you are inspired to read a few verses of other people's work, go ahead. And if that makes you scribble down a few lines of your own, well, Eliot and Yeats would be pleased.

Why We Did Book Reports

Remember way back in grade school when we first did book reports? It was probably our first foray into essay-style writing, all based on what we had just read. Our first ones were probably not masterworks by and sense. "This book is about a lady. She has a horse. She loves the horse. They ride around the country..." Yadda, yadda yadda. We basically take a work, process it through the mind of a ten-year-old, and retell it in about one-hundred words. Nice work. Trust me - it's important that we take this step.

Later on, our book reports become more elaborate affairs. As our mind becomes more complex, we pick up on themes, styles - even writing techniques. We talk about the story, but we start expanding on ideas underpinning the story. In junior high I did a report on Lord of the Flies that actually did more than rehash kids surviving on an island but explored the devolution into tribalism - it was a big step forward. (I think it got an A. Maybe.)

As adults, we probably read more book reports than we write, but our reflections on them become explorations of what ideas the book explores. How it discusses them is not as important as what it discusses. Just like a good movie review, it should tell a lot about themes and concepts but be very thin on actual blow-by-blow details. The actual story is for the reader to consume. The review tells that reader whether it will be anything more than just a superficial romp in the park.

Do you see where this is going yet?

When we sit down to write some masterwork, we should already be able to write our book reports on it. Not just the simple ten-year-old version, but we should have our junior-high version and our adult book review versions as well. This may sound odd, but it's true - each of these has a place in our writing, and if we can't write them before we write the book, we probably aren't ready to write the book.

In business, these three concepts are usually discussed as: The Elevator Pitch, The Proposal Pitch, and The Presentation. They are the same as the ten-year-old, the junior-high-school and the adult reviews - the first one says what happens, the second one expands to ideas, then finally themes. But in business or in writing (and always in the business of writing), they are all necessary for the person to know before anything is done. 

If you are working on a major project and find yourself hung up on some part, put these ideas to work. First, write your quick run of the story - one-hundred words to tell the adventure. If you can't package that briefly and succinctly, you are having problems. Second, go to junior high and write about what the idea of the story should be; what will engage the reader besides basic actions, character and dialogue. No more than 250 words should do it. Then write your book review, exploring in about one-thousand words the major interactions, concepts and conflicts, and what should drive someone to pick that book over all others. 

If you can't write these, well, that's probably the problem - you don't fully understand the story. If you can write these - and actually do write all three of these - then I guarantee you will resolve what is holding you back. 

Of course, if it also inspires you to read Lord of the Flies again, well, that might help too. 

Poor Writing and the Super Bowl

For all of you non-Super Bowl fans out there, I will share with you a not-so-well-kept secret: This year's Super Bowl was not so super. It had a lot of good elements to it, and the preparation was all in place, but I think it was one of the matchups that ended with a shrug rather than a cheer. The past two weeks were a big run-up to an international spectacle that can best be described as, "meh." For all of those actual football fans, tell me I'm wrong.

Now for all of the writers (and non-football fans) out there, the game translated into an example of poor writing.

Do not be alarmed - I am not going to go into analyst mode. But if we break down the whole Super Bowl situation in terms of how a story is supposed to go, we can learn something about storytelling in the process. This will not dwell in the world of football, so if you don't know what a nickel defense is, you're safe here.

Let's look at some positive writing elements for the game:

• Clear contrast of the opposing forces. This was a matchup of the young upstart versus the crafty veteran, the next generation versus the old guard. These kind of matchups let the reader choose a side, taking one team versus the other, then letting two forces collide in an epic matchup.
• Subplots. More than just being about these two players, team sports have a lot of players, each with their own stories to follow. Aside from the main arc of the two opposing stars, there are plenty of individuals to root for on their own merits.
• An underdog. Everyone loves an underdog, especially when they are written as someone who is not guaranteed to pull it off in the end. Rocky, The Bad News Bears - classic underdogs who ultimately lost but we loved them simply for the act of never giving up.

Now the negatives (an abridged list, considering all the shortcomings of the game):

• Tunnel vision is death for a writer. When there are several stories to manage and subplots to pursue, too tight a focus on your main character makes those other characters vanish. Our Super Bowl announcers kept our eyes trained on our two heroes, and didn't let up. After a while, we got tired of hearing about them,. As readers, we would lose interest.
• No back and forth. In good writing, the tempo should change and vary throughout the entire piece. Some parts should make you cheer for your favorite character while others make you worry about their outcome. We should never go with the same pace for too long, or it gets boring - like that game did.
• The ending became apparent way too early. Any story should leave you guessing until the end, or if the big reveal comes early, there should still be obstacles on how the character will succeed in this goal. I had friends texting me about boring stuff by the third quarter. If your readers are thinking about other things three-quarters of the way through your story, you gave away too much, too early.

Maybe next year will work out better; we never know. The only thing I took away from the game (since none of my betting squares won) is that I could've written a better one. Any writer could. Any maybe I'll try that just to get some belated satisfaction from yesterday's game.  

The Tigers of Africa

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

- The Tyger, William Blake.

As animals go, tigers are right up there with lions in evocative power. The thought of tigers brings up images of the jungles and savannahs of Africa, or lions hunting from the inky shadows. Huge, menacing beasts, hearing the roar of a lion through the night air means big trouble. In the thick of the Congolese jungles, if you see a tiger's stripes through the trees, you know you are already its prey and your moments are numbered. Perhaps there are no greater threats in the animal kingdom, nor should there be. 

This makes for very gripping, very engaging writing. Sadly, none of it is very accurate.

We start at the top, and recognize that despite what William Blake told us, tigers prefer jungles. Also, despite what my words said, while tigers do hunt within jungles, there are no tigers in Africa, especially the Congolese jungles. If you see a tiger's stripes in those jungles, the poor guy is clearly lost after escaping from the Kinshasa Zoo and needs help getting back (or a bus ticket back to Asia).

What's my point? Am I here to prove my knowledge about larger felines or the flora and fauna of Africa? Is this a overdue critique of the late William Blake? Have I snapped and now have to be hypercritical about everything around me? 

Quite the opposite. The excerpt and my little intro paragraph are examples of how writing can evoke emotions despite the annoying contradiction of facts. As writers, we need to keep this in mind.

If you read it in its entirety, Blake's The Tyger is not really about tigers in the literal sense. To criticize the poem for not keeping true to the behavioral ecology is about the same as focusing on the Mona Lisa's lack of eyebrows - kind of missing the larger picture. Instead, we can appreciate the author's wordplay, the evocation of the more primal nature of the world, and that of man in particular. (Read the poem, and its counterpart, The Lamb.)

The point underlying all of this is that while writing should dwell within the realm of the accurate and real, we should not let it overwhelm our natural urge to express feelings and emotions. We can talk about the tigers of Africa to a certain degree - an emotional degree - and allow them to exist in that regard. Just as long as we do not make Africa the lynchpin of the story, they can exist wherever they want, facts be damned.

And look it up - there are no tigers in Africa (outside the zoo).

Creativity and Shoveling Snow

In case you didn't hear, a snowstorm rampaged through the Great Lakes region this weekend. While the foot of snow dumped on my house and others was nothing compared to what the east coast is bracing for, it was still enough for me to be quite annoyed. And, of course, by annoyed I mean having every routine in my weekend disrupted while I shoveled out the space around my car, cleared my front walk and removed plow snow from the curb every few hours. Shovel, rest, repeat. Most of my other routines - including writing - had to be put on hold, save for food and sleep. However, I still wanted to get some writing in.

The answer came naturally - I got in my writing while I slept.

No, this post is not about some odd condition that allows people to write essays while they sleep (although in college it seemed a lot of students had such an affliction). This is more about using our creative tools whenever and wherever possible, and putting them to work even when we have little or no control over them. In this case, I am referring to the creative process where we put together the bones a story before we flesh it out in writing.

I will not say that I am the most creative person. I have my moments, as do we all, but usually I just have the typical ideas that wouldn't blow anyone's mind. When I write, I think about these ideas, dig out the emotions underneath them, start finding a few words to bring them to life, then place them on the page. It's an elaborate, complex, and oftentimes boring-to-watch process, but it works. But if you notice, a lot of that process requires nothing more than brain power, and we use a lot of that when we sleep.

This is a technique I use when my mind wants to write but I am too busy, tired, achy, sore or worn out from shoveling too much snow to write. I simply put some paper or my laptop by my bed and go to sleep. When I sleep, I dream. When I dream, the creative craziness is uncontrollable, and there's no reason to tame it. I let my mind wander around wherever it wants to go, see whatever, do whatever, and run its course while my body rests.

When I wake up, I give myself a simple mission - start writing what I remember. Not just the images, but the emotions, the sensations - I apply all those steps of my process to the story still lingering in my memory. If I dreamed about a rabbit that talked like my fifth-grade teacher, I type up my conversation with the rabbit. I use adverbs and adjectives that solidify this dreamscape, and don't worry about the story's sensibility. I capture the strongest scenes in my head and churn them onto the page, all from the comfort of a warm bed.

I have often been surprised on what a creative release this can be, particularly when my mind needs that type of freedom but my schedule is simply unable to comply. In this moment, I no longer feel my aching back or sore muscles. I merely experience the freedom of writing

And it feels good. Better than shoveling snow, anyway.

Poking the Painful Places

I wish I knew who coined the phrase that is the title of this post, but unfortunately I have only hit dead ends in the search for a source. That all being said, I thought it would be worth it to briefly discuss just what this means to me as a writer, and how it has develops my process.

One of the posts I got a lot of personal feedback from (and someone in fact commented using the phrase I am now using as a title) was an early piece called, "Yes, it hurts." This post was a discussion about writing about the loss of a good friend, and how it helped me grow as a writer. Now, some people also told me that they were not in a space where they could face up to writing about their personal traumas. For those people, and for writers in general, there is a way around this.

For those who say they're not ready to write about the tragedies in their life, that's okay. The experience can be exhausting, and dig up a lot of unexpected things. I was glad that I wrote that piece about my friend in a secluded place, because I cried nonstop as I processed the feelings through my words. What I did learn after that experience is that sometimes, projecting those feelings through an alter-ego can take some of the sting out of the feelings.

On that note, let me introduce you to Tom.

Tom - aka Tomas Jurick - is the character who represents my alter ego. Not surprisingly, he is about my size, has the same issues with his weight and his hair, and goes through the highs and lows and life with the usual amount of errors and missteps. The biggest difference is that the major tragedies in his life are presented with full frontal detail, not obscured by that waxy patina we tend to put on memories. When an event in his life occurs, it is viewed from the moment it happened, and not through the hazy, emotionally sterilized fog from a man in his early fifties.

Now, as a writer, I feel sorry for Tom because when I write a story to process a difficult time in my life, I know poor Tom will take the beating. It's Tom who buried his friends, lost his parents, had relationship after relationship blow up in his face, and so on. He's also make one stupid mistake after another, has a long scroll of bad decisions in his life, and plenty of stories about things that seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out to be embarrassing fails. However, I also know Tom is willing to take it because he's just an alter ego, and he will gladly take the beatings that somehow I am not willing to face myself.

As a technique, maintaining an alter ego is a good tool when we use our writing to process grief and trauma. The only caveat I would offer is that sometimes we develop a dependency on the alter ego as a way of avoiding making an experience very personal and therefore intimate. However, I believe it serves a great purpose in developing our skills, and is always worth a try.

And if anyone knows who coined the title of this piece, I would really love to know. So would Tom.

Owning Your Dialogue

"Preem chrome, choom!"

I am sure that line makes little sense to you, and that's fine. A little grammatical forensics might tell you that by its position and the punctuation, "choom" is probably some kind of nickname, but otherwise, you are probably in the dark about the rest of it. That's okay for now - the writer should know this going in, and quuickly own it. What the reader should get out of such a line is that the world they are stepping into is significantly different than what they are used to, and that they should open themselves up to a new world. As a writer, it is your responsibility to give them that world. 

This sci-fi world courtesy of CyberPunk 2077

The line is some jargon from CyberPunk 2077, and translates as complimenting a friend's cybernetic equipment. In the sci-fi literature surrounding this world, words like preem, choom, scop, corpo and klep are commonplace, though initially make no sense to the reader. They do, however, serve as excellent tools into creating the technological dystopia of the future. The real secret is understanding how to incorporate such words into a story where the reader is very much in the year 2021. 

The first part is context. Remember back in school when we were taught a word and given a sentence that offered a good framework to understand it? Example: Excoriate: "He stood in front of the corporation's headquarters, loudly excoriating the evils of their economic tyranny." This tells us first and foremost that excoriate is what you do to regarding evil things. Furthermore, you do it verbally. We might not know its exact definition, but we know enough to relate it to what we do know, like denounce or trash-talk. Close enough to get the meaning of the sentence.

My opening line in this piece means very little on its own, so it is important to weave meaning and context all around it. This makes the grammatical forensics a little easier - particularly if this is early in the writing and the reader isn't quite sold yet. This is not always easy to do, and it is often best done gradually. If there is a lot of world to take in, a traditional route is to throw a jargon-heavy line out to set the stage for the reader, offer some context, then gradually drip-feed more dialogue throughout the work. Let's look at our first line and see how context might flesh it out for the reader.

"Preem chrome, choom!" I said excitedly to my best friend, examining the silver sheen on his brand-new, top-of-the-line cybernetic arm. "Really preem!"

Now we have a better understanding about the words - preem is a complimentary modifier, chrome is about something metallic like a cybernetic arm, and choom is likely a friend. A lot to take in, but when the context is tied to it, it becomes part of the reader's vocabulary as well.

I have referred to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess as an excellent example of creating a world through dialogue. If you read the last chapter first, before understanding the different terms, it is all but illegible. If you walk in with an open mind and prepare for an adventure, well, you are treated to a full, rich, alternate world.

It's worth trying, choom.