I read another book about writing as part of my DIY MFA. It’s Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon. He’s one of the authors I enjoy reading. I’ve only read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay so far. His writing was the third adult book I’ve ever read.
Maps and Legends in an anthology of roughly two dozen essays by Chabon. It’s about his thoughts and how he wrote his works. Throughout a few thesis ideas emerge. I’ll do my best to summarize those points. There’s a lot packed in 274 pages.
Successful writers bring new ideas that fit together well. Examples were the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the series His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the first to write about the detective with a series to characters giving their takes on event. All in the direction of unraveling the central mystery. Those nested story didn’t explore, distract, or rephrase that said before; they added information. That’s basically the difference between literary and the beginning of genre fiction.
In His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman a few key ideas combine to make a great story. Those plot elements, rules of the world, character traits all have to combine to enhance the story. Just serving as a wall the character faces and changes to overcome isn’t enough. That’s what happens so much in fiction. The cowardly face the obstacles that most challenges them. Feats of courage. Like how Froto has to leave the only home he has ever known. How Sam wants to be a good person so he goes. Every character is designed to be a foil to the things they face. Like Ethan’s struggle in Pines, Book 1 of Wayward Pines by Blake Crouch. His time in the military makes the resistance he faces in the small town that much worse. Or how Harry feels alone until he finds a community in the Wizarding World. I always thought my plots were good enough, but I’m missing a huge part. The resonance achieved by plot elements, character traits, and the rules of the world must play each off the other. I’ve been missing that key consideration so far.
The idea that ghost stories are the beginning of short stories. I would argue that a little bit. Sure they were around in the beginning. But previous stories aren’t always a direct blueprint for what comes after. Hauntings from sight unseen seems an obscure place for short stories to begin with. But isn’t something hanging in your thoughts like that in a literary story? Things lurk in your head from defining moments. Until you deal with them, they hang around haunting you. I agree that ghost stories could be the precursor to literary short stories. That connection could help when I get stuck. Maybe I’ll use it.
Fiction is the bridge between things imagined and things real. Fiction has fictitious parts. It’s in the name after all. But some things connect it with reality. That’s always something. How real the characters feel in fantasy. How some science still works how we think in science fiction. How the sky and the environment is normal in thrillers. But characters are the big things that make something real. Those bits of real are required for the reader to believe that somewhere out in the multi-verse the story is actually possible. In other words, fiction must always be relatable.
Something you’re exposed to serves as inspiration. It doesn’t have to be the most obvious things. If you look hard enough, ruminate hard enough inspiration strikes. Some things work better than others. It’s the writer’s purview to decide what stories to go after. Choosing could very well determine success or failure.
Maps and Legends fills me with hope for the future in writing. There’s a long way to go before I can’t progress further in writing. Writing and reading will never end up on the dust heaps of history. There’s more. Humble roots and inexperience don’t matter. Get your head down and write.
Everyone interacts with the media they consume in a different way. This is my interpretation of what this album means to me. A few places I’ll reference specific verses from AZ Lyrics as needed. I’m trying to make this a lyrical analysis in the vein of literary analysis.
Seems good for a starting track, but that’s obvious. I think this track says that we are made for each other. In every situation they complement each other.
“But if he’s a ghost then I can be a phantom”
“Knew I was a robber/…/But if I’m a thief then/He can join the heist”
This song combines rapping and singing. A lot of songs these days have that combination. It packs more details into the particular song. Basically, every song on this album has quick sung or spoken statements like this. It’s of note here because the first time I ever heard this enter pop was in a Dido album for 2015, then Bad Blood (Feat. Kendrick Lamar), and then on Ed Sheeran’s albums from + onward. And that’s a trend all over Pop and everything I listen to. I’m a fan of a lot of alternative pop, Halsey, Lana Del Rey, and others.
The song says I want to be someone you can always rely on.
“I wanna be your end game/I wanna be your first string/I wanna be your A-Team/I wanna be your end game”
By the way, Ed Sheeran has a song titled A-Team.
End Game is about two guys courting Taylor. Taylor wants to forget about everything except being in love.
First FUTURE says:
“You so dope, don’t overdose/I’m so stoked, I need a toast”
“You love it, I love it, too, ’cause you my type”
Taylor says:
“I just wanna be/Drinking on a beach with you all over me”
Ed Sheeran says:
“Now well, when I was young, we connected/When we were little bit older, both sprung”
“After the storm, something was born on the 4th of July/I’ve passed days without fun, this end game is the one/With four words on the tip of my tongue, I’ll never say it”
The argument is history vs. new and flashy. Both are appealing in different ways, but love is still there no matter how it ends.
Every friendship is different. Sometimes everything clicks and sometimes you don’t know what’s going on, because everything is so restrained. And depending upon how much both sides want it to work it works or doesn’t. That’s not the same as love. Endgame makes me think of friendship though.
Message:
It doesn’t matter what everyone thinks, but the person there with you at the end matters.
This song sounds like a whispered confession to me.
The verses are about two relationships that she knew wouldn’t last. But still it worked at first and failed later on. I’ll ignore the news postulating the truth behind the lyrics. Digging too deep into the real lives of famous people disappoints me too frequently for it to be very worthwhile. I’ve read the news a little about the Famous scandal, Tom Hiddleston, Joe Alwyn, and Nicki Minaj. But that’s about it.
“I can feel the flames on my skin/Crimson red paint on my lips/If a man talks shit, then I owe him nothing/I don’t regret it one bit, ’cause he had it coming”
And having a relationship with a playboy is doomed to fail.
“I never trust a playboy, but they love me”
“You gotta leave before you get left’”
A playboy goes through relationships like clothes. Each partner is used and put away for greener pastures with another partner. And the cycle continues. Then throwing names sometimes help.
“But if he drops my name, then I owe him nothin’”
There’s a reference to witch trials.
“They’re burning all the witches”
I was watching a video about the witch trials on OZY. Apparently a majority of woman prosecuted were widows that inherited property. And that seems what this is alluding to. Wealth makes you a target.
The chorus is a few repeating lines:
“They say I did something bad/Then why’s it feel so good?”
That line really puzzled me. According to this avowed Pentecost I talk to, bad things feel good because humans are corrupted all the way through. I dismissed that off-hand. Then maybe the outside appearance of doing bad and everyone outside the situation isn’t entitled to an opinion. That’s my interpretation of what this means.
Message:
People can twist things around to make you the bad guy, but that alone can’t make you a bad person.
This song sounds different than everything else on the album.
It’s a few layers of Taylor’s voice through the chorus. I heard something like this in an older Halsey song, Empty Gold and another from Badlands: New Americana.
It sounds like a gospel you would hear from a church choir.
Love is equated to a drug, madness, and a lifetime addiction.
“Don’t blame me, love made me crazy/If it doesn’t, you ain’t doing it right/Lord, save me, my drug is my baby/I’ll be using for the rest of my life”
I agree with those associations, and they aren’t new. Love feels good. And the connection makes people seek out love. And loving someone isn’t sane, omitting the wide acceptability of love. Fear of giving another person so much power to hurt you has a widely recognized name “fear of commitment”. And people look for love all their days, if a few things haven’t gone wrong.
This song is about the search for love. And that’s basically life. That’s why so much media out there is about finding love, holding on to love, and finding peace after love is gone.
One line was interesting.
“I once was poison ivy, but now I’m your daisy”
I think that’s about how before everything looked horrible, and now she’s happy and in love.
Message:
Love is something we will always need, and pursuing it isn’t a crime.
This song uses a whispery voice to differentiate thoughts from what’s going on outside.
It starts with wondering if everything is alright.
“Dive bar on the east side, where you at?”
Then later everything is going fine.
“Long night, with your hands up in my hair/…/Stay here, honey, I don’t wanna share”
The chorus is the most telling.
“Is it cool that I said all that?/Is it chill that you’re in my head?/’Cause I know that it’s delicate (delicate)/…/Is it too soon to do this yet?”
That asks if it’s too soon for me talk about this. Do I feel closer to you than you feel to me?
That’s frequently my experience with friendship. I’m an oversharer. And sometimes that tanks a friendship before it’s actually a friendship. Blogging is the perfect way to overshare, hence this blogging journey I’m on. I’m tangled up in anxiety deciding what to share. Is this too much too soon? And when’s the right time? How will I know?
Message:
Relationships will always be complicated, but that’s one of the things that make a relationship work, that back and forth.
This song paints a clear picture in my head of a Whodunit stage play. The victim is the lyrics of Famous. And possible perpetrators standing around, Kim, Kanye, and Taylor.
“Don’t like your tilted stage/The role you made me play”
“You said the gun was mine”
Then it goes on a little about betrayal and reversals of fortune.
“I’ll be the actress starring in your bad dreams”
That line implies that Taylor isn’t the party at fault. Everyone is casting her as an actress playing the villain.
“The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama/But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma”
The rhyming of drama and karma really impressed me at first but a few other words rhyme with drama. Pharma, parma, Dharma, and diorama.
The chorus is odd if you watch the music video.
“Look what you made me do”
That’s basically the justification people use when the do something they question inside. But the music video is about her rebirth as a new character for the media. That doesn’t really feel evil. It feels weak. The events didn’t cause the transformation but coincided. It feels like a woman balancing between being weak and being bitchy. That bugs me, but still I fall to that position as a gut reaction. I think most people feel that gut reaction, but it’s more important what we do after.
Message:
Sometimes things are meant to be a certain way, and nothing can change destiny.
I’m trying to forget our troubles, but that’s just not possible.
This is something that happens to me. Everything has two emotional routes in your reaction. Positive and negative. Love and fear of rejection. Jealousy and happiness. Anger and sadness. Boredom and self-loathing. Laughter and embarrassment. Everything has that duality. That’s why stories like Mr. Hyde/Dr. Jekyll, Dorian Grey, and superheroes work so well.
Message:
Life happens, and the outcomes can’t be changed too much.
This song didn’t make sense for a long time before I read the dedication in the Taylor Swift Target Exclusive Magazine Volume 1. It’s written for a baby. That explains a few things. And the writer’s want to make it possible that the song is about an adult I think. That’s a really far stretch though.
“That I got drunk and made fun of the way you talk.”
Because isn’t that what we do when we imitate baby talk.
“You should think about the consequence/Of your magnetic field being a little too strong.”
Aren’t we all drawn to the cuteness of babies?
“And I got a boyfriend, he’s older than us”
But isn’t that something you could hypothetically say to a baby when talking about an older person.
“You’re so cool, it makes me hate you so much”
This sounds a lot like that phrase “something makes my face as smooth as a baby’s bottom”. Those anti-aging commercials make me feel like they speak to the jealousy and slight anger that the young are young. And that’s a far stretch too.
“You’ve ruined my life, by not being mine”
That reminds me of the joke some people used to make about children: You’re so adorable, I wouldn’t mind taking you home with me.
”’Cause look at your face”
That really doesn’t mean a thing unless that face is a universal symbol of cuteness, or being gorgeous. Because people can be pretty in different ways.
“That I’m talking to everyone here but you”
That seems like something you would say to a baby, right?
“If you got a girlfriend, I’m jealous of her/But if you’re single that’s honestly worse”
Isn’t that another joke people make? A baby having the responsibilities of an adult. Like a job. Maybe a girlfriend. That’s basically the premise of Boss Baby.
“Ocean blue eyes looking in mine/I feel like I might sink and drown and die”
I have sometimes experienced this jealousy for a baby with it’s whole life ahead and all the open possibilities. And sometimes a wish that things could’ve been different when I was younger. Basically that’s the question “would you like a do-over? Would you do the same things again?”
I think it’s about cheating to get away from a relationship.
“I wanted to leave him/I needed a reason”
“Think about the place where you first met me/We’re ridin’ in a getaway car”
Meeting someone in a getaway car is impossible, so that must be a metaphor for something else right? A getaway car takes you away from a bad situation or something that doesn’t work.
“X marks the spot, where we fell apart/He poisoned the well, I was lyin’ to myself”
That old relationship would never work, but I convinced myself it would.
“There were sirens in the beat of your heart”
Being with this new guy makes me feel guilty.
“We were jet-set, Bonnie and Clyde/Until I switched to the other side”
Defection back to the lover that she was getting away from. She confessed and ended both relationships.
Sometimes I need a break from my life. I find that in the pages of a book I’m reading, a story I’ve written, or mediation.
Message:
Things aren’t neat and tidy as we would like, but in the end everything works out fine.
“And you move to me like I’m a Motown beat/And we rule the kingdom inside my room”
We are perfect together when we’re alone. And what everyone else thinks doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter that the guy isn’t rich, but they are great together.
“‘Cause all the boys and their expensive cars/…/Never took me quite where you do”
“Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep”
Again everything is great in private, but sharing will ruin things a little bit.
“Change my priorities/The taste of your lips is my idea of luxury”
Love is so important that it changes priorities.
“Is this the end of all the endings?/My broken bones are mending/With all these nights we’re spending”
Are you the one? Being with you feels good enough to heal me from everything that happened before with love.
For me, finding love has been dream that may never be realized, and that fact makes me a little sad. But that’s I choice I’ve made long ago, not to try given my status quo.
Love between her and someone else that remained her secret.
“I, I loved you in secret”
“My, my love had been frozen/Deep blue, but you painted me golden”
She’d wilted from love, and his love made her capable of love again.
“I could’ve spent forever with your hands in my pockets/Picture of your face in an invisible locket”
The way she loved him meant she was okay with loving him and keeping it her personal secret.
“You said there was nothing in the world that could stop it/I had a bad feeling”
He’s in love with her, but she didn’t think it would work out.
“And darling, you had turned my bed into a sacred oasis/People started talking, putting us through our paces/I knew there was no one in the world who could take it”
They were together, then people started to find out. That pulled them apart.
“But we were dancing/Dancing with our hands tied”
They can still spend time together, but not together like we were.
“I, I loved you in spite of/Deep fears that the world would divide us/So, baby, can we dance/Oh, through an avalanche?”
She still loves him. Can they be together again? At least they’ll have this. She would do anything to have this.
”And say, say that we got it/I’m a mess, but I’m the mess that you wanted/Oh, ’cause it’s gravity Oh, keeping you with me”
Everyone still sees the love between them even though they aren’t “together”. They are perfect for each other. It was inevitable they would be together.
“I’d kiss you as the lights went out/Swaying as the room burned down/I’d hold you as the water rushes in/If I could dance with you again”
If they end up in the same room again, she wouldn’t be afraid. She wouldn’t allow anything to between them.
The part about loving in secret used to be me, except it was a secret kept from me too, for years. I have experienced romantic one-way love and could never act on it. I’ve had to be satisfied with hiding it away like this song starts. Sometimes I feel like I’m living with my hands tied because of Duchesne muscular dystrophy. If I could be normal, I could do so much more.
Message:
Nothing should stop love. Until you realize that’s the point of life.
This song is obvious in meaning but a few things stood out to me.
“Our secret moments/In your crowded room/They’ve got no idea/About me and you/…/Made your mark on me/A golden tattoo”
No one see what’s between us, but it’s deep. We love each other.
This reminds me of the way social gathering feel like to me. I’m really good at one-on-one conversations and suck a talking in groups.
“All of this silence and patience, pining and anticipation”
This is longing for something.
I long for a lot of things but mainly getting cured.
“I don’t want you like a best friend”
I’ve always thought that was the ideal way for love to develop. Best friends falling in love.
“And if I get burned, at least we were electrified”
It doesn’t matter if this relationship implodes, at least we had these moments.
Basically my philosophy for life is “it’s better to have loved and lost than not having loved at all.” Or “it’s always better to know any experience even just once”. And not repeating it might as well hurt like hell, but it was worth it. My life has a lot of lasts. Last time I walked. Last time I breathed for myself. Last time I talked.
“Everyone thinks that they know us/But they know nothing about”
People know what we allow them to know. And they can never know/understand everything even if we tell them.
“Even in my worst times, you could see the best of me”
I can never do wrong in his eyes. He loves everything about me.
Message:
How we are together matters. And what everyone thinks doesn’t matter.
This song seems to match really well with the Great Gatsby.
The first image is right on.
“It was so nice throwing big parties/Jump into the pool from the balcony/Everyone swimming in a champagne sea/…/Feeling so Gatsby for that whole year”
“Did you think I wouldn’t hear all the things you said about me?”
Gatsby knew what everyone was saying and just didn’t care.
“But you stabbed me in the back while shaking my hand”
That is ultimately what happens in the Great Gatsby. The protagonist finds that hanging with Gatsby isn’t that great for your mental health.
Never had that experience of excluding people, but being the one excluded. That explains my interpretation of this song. The desired meaning is way off probably.
It started as a song about wrongdoers or mean people getting cut off for revenge after trying everything else first.
“My castle crumbled overnight/…/They took the crown but it’s alright “
“Nobody’s heard from me for months/I’m doing better than I ever was”
I don’t need anybody except him.
“Cause…/My baby’s fit like a daydream/…/So call it what you want, yeah”
That is because I love a great person. And I don’t care what everyone thinks.
“My baby’s fly like a jet stream/High above the whole scene/Loves me like I’m brand new”
He’s above it all. He just cares about loving me.
“Windows boarded up after the storm/He built a fire just to keep me warm”
I’ve hardened against everything, and still he makes me feel good.
“All the jokers dressing up as kings/They fade to nothing when I look at him”
Nothing else matters when I’m with him.
“And I know I make the same mistakes every time/Bridges burn, I never learn/At least I did one thing right/I did one thing right/I’m laughing with my lover”
Everything else is going wrong except her love for him.
“I want to wear his initial on a chain round my neck/…/Not because he owns me/But ’cause he really knows me/…/But would you run away with me?””
They are actually in love. And he’s her escape.
This is again the song that describes my dream of finding love from a different perspective.
Message:
What other people think doesn’t make people happy, but happiness is there in finding love.
It’s about a New Year’s party that’s a microcosm for how to love.
“There’s glitter on the floor after the party”
The party was fun but it’s over now. We have great times together, but after.
“Don’t read the last page/…/I want your midnights/But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day”
After the party, the good times are over. That doesn’t matter. How we are together when things aren’t so good really matters. It doesn’t matter how this will end, but right now we love each other. That’s what matters. I don’t want lose you, because we are great together.
“You squeeze my hand three times in the back of the taxi/I can tell that it’s gonna be a long road/I’ll be there if you’re the toast of the town, babe/Or if you strike out and you’re crawling home “
It started out simple but I could tell it was going to be something. I’ll be with you through good, bad, and everything.
“Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you/And I will hold on to you”
Remember what we had, because it was something important that you’ll want to remember, and I’ll never forget.
“Please don’t ever become a stranger/Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere”
I don’t want to lose you and just remember what we had.
This is the ideal love I have in mind. Finding someone that sticks with you through good or bad.
Message:
Love is about choosing to be together no matter what and mutually not wanting it to end.
Conclusion
reputation is a coming to maturity album, becoming a fully fledged adult by accepting you can’t make everyone like/understand you. That’s the difference between adulting and staying a whiny adult. Everybody won’t like you, and what you do with that informs a lot of your future.
This album is all about accepting that perception of other people. Two people can grow together. What people think can change a little (…Ready For It?). We look for the person that will be with us at the end. I doesn’t matter what people think, if it can work (Endgame). Sometimes people won’t understand and nothing can change that (I Did Something Bad). There’s nothing wrong with looking for love, because it’s something people do (Don’t Blame Me). We can’t know everything in advance, but that makes life interesting (Delicate). People get what’s coming to them (Look What You Made Me Do). Life happens and what we do can’t change much (So It Goes…). (Sometimes things happen that change us in strange ways (Gorgeous). Things happen and only those involved in the matter have a say (Getaway Car). We find love in unexpected places that might not be approved of by everyone (King of My Heart). Love between two people doesn’t have to be known by others (Dancing With Our Hands Tied and Dress). Sharing something can ruin it (This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). Everything else going on doesn’t matter except in the way we feel about it (Call It What You Want). Love is something special that can be elusive but well worth it (New Year’s Day).
New Year’s Day sounds a little like what people expect when two people in love don’t ever have plans to get married. Like how Gorgeous is a little about babies.
I recently finished reading Swann’s Way, volume one of seven in Remembrances of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time. That volume is 600-something pages. I’m reading a guide at the same time. After each volume, I’m comparing my thoughts with the verdicts delivered by the reading guide. That isn’t exactly the best way to get the most from reading this but as the preparations for reading more literary work. I have my eyes on IQ83 by Haruki Murakami.
That’s a long way away or maybe sooner than I think. Anyway this is a summery/reaction to Swann’s Way and the reading guide the group’s using, Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time: A Reader’s Guide to Remembrance of Things Past by Patrick Alexander. The book is divided into three parts. The Overture, Combray, Swann in Love, and Place-names: The Name.
The Overture is a real bore in my mind. There are a few interesting tidbits in there, but forty pages seems overkill for a waking up sequence. It’s long but effectively primes you for the writing style you’re likely to experience. Brevity is a tad more important later on. It never reaches the expectations of today’s rapid gratification.
Combray is the memories Marcel has of his childhood. It details his experiences of visiting his ailing Aunt Léonie in the summers. There’s a lot there about his childhood desires and experiences. The guide refers to Combray as one of best childhood experiences in a novel of this era. Reading through, I noticed a few things. Marcel is ailing from some mysterious condition which I suspect is just getting colds that are quite severe. That sickness reduces his activity considerably. Still, he’d much rather stick his head into books. Marcel attributes good qualities to people he likes and people he would like to be like down the line. These memories Marcel remembers were triggered by eating something he enjoyed in those summers, lime tea and madeleines.
I like to think Marcel and I would be kindred spirits if we ever met. That makes me feel good, and that’s reason enough, but there’s more. I have Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy, and that enabled me to distance myself from peers. In addition, I loved reading. That love is what got me into writing. Then, I wanted to be like those charismatic people who can entertain an entire room without breaking out in sweat and make people like them. And I remember my past history to a similar extent. I think we’re pretty similar.
Swann in Love was my favorite part of Swann’s Way. According to the guide, it’s the closest that Proust gets to traditional story structure. I agree. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. Swann meets Odette. He doesn’t commit right away. Then, he’s in love with Odette. Swann gets jealous. He asks too many questions and finds difficult answers. In lack of love, he tries with another woman. That’s the plot of Swann in Love.
The beginning of this part was the first time I loved reading this book. It makes me a little sad that the other sections won’t follow the basic plot structure. And a theme of this book is love leads to jealousy. That’s true. Love always comes with some unwelcome jealousy as a bedfellow. That’s especially true if you have abandonment and anxiety issues. Jealousy can make love sweeter by contrast. Working on your self-worth might reduce these issues. Surely possessiveness makes the jealousy worse. That’s a theme in this book that bugs me. Any number of themes bug me, so that’s basically a given with anything I read.
Place-names: The Names wraps up everything. It cross applies the lessons learned in the previous sections of Marcel’s young life in Paris. Then, it echoes the fact much more is going to change.
Each section is like a novel in its own write except the transition sections: Overture and Place-names: The Name. That’s not the way any book is organized these days except memoirs. Because In Search of Lost Time is the very first memoir as far as I know.
That method isn’t acceptable in fiction these days. I know it’s not fair to Marcel Proust, his many fans, and the English literature community to compare a book written something like 120 years ago to stories these days. That comparison is of paramount importance to current writers of fiction trying to learn from Proust. What elements of Remembrance of Things Past can be used to write fiction in the time we live in now? What elements won’t work? For example, putting two storylines in one piece of fiction. They need to smoothly merge from one to the other despite section breaks. Some things can end and be picked up later but never left hanging forever except at the end. Simultaneous story lines are permissible if they’re all pushed together.
I read an example of that recently. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer. The title is uninspiring to me, but the writing is top notch. That story artfully combines numerous storyline to create a synergy more powerful than any one alone. For an example to a story continuing through section breaks check out The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. That’s the best example I can think of off the top of my head.
I didn’t get to my conclusions matching the guide: 4/7. That seems pretty good for a start. I’ll get better by the end of this.
I’m listening to Taylor Swift on repeat since the release of her sixth album reputation a few weeks ago. I have always looked up to her as role model of success and creativity. That seems a little ridiculous when I started writing at 23, a full six years after Taylor Swift made her debut. It seems impossible I’ll ever get anything published at this point, but I’m going to try. A lot of things motivate me. So far, I’ve never been able to get those reasons all fleshed out on the page. This is my attempt at doing just that with a few references to Taylor Swift’s musical journey as seen through the eyes of a fan.
reputation has a deeper theme that becomes clear after listening to Taylor Swift’s previous albums. There’s a big difference between the version of you that’s projected out to the crowd, and the real version people close to you see. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust discusses various identities you go through as you change and grow through life.
reputation then goes a step further by saying there are multiple ways to see that duality. The difference between the best version of you and the worst version, light and dark for the sake of brevity. Then the version you put on social media and the real you. That feels like a cheap attempt to tap into the current Zeitgeist. The songs aren’t about fabricating an identity on social media. I admit showing that with music is tricky. But Taylor Swift accomplished that in You Belong With Me (from Fearless). Turning that into a whole album is very difficult.
And the lighter parts are easier to share than the darker parts. That’s because of the social unacceptability, and the fear that indulging in darkness can make you into a horrible person. Of course fearing you’ll become evil is a sign of goodness right?
The struggle is finding the courage to be yourself with people spouting their ideas of who you’re supposed to be.
I could make this into a post supporting that conclusion. The cover booklet of reputation starts with a brief note explaining the meaning of the album. That storyline feels superfluous.
This is about my experience with that transformation. Starting overly concerned with what a few people thought to not caring what other people think about me.
As a teenager and until a few years ago, I would say I don’t care what other people think. I didn’t fit in with other kids. Those themed days we had in high school. Well, I didn’t participate. I didn’t stay in the corner assigned to disabled students. I wanted to go to regular classes with non-disabled students. I was in all Honors classes. I scored academically like a normal students. For all intents, I refused to be typecast. That seems like not caring what other people think, except that was what my parents expected from me.
My parents never put pressure on me to achieve academically. I was just trying to be like my parents to feel closer to them. That’s something I always wanted to feel, love. Pursuing the same aspirations made me feel closer to them.
I always craved affection in a tangible form.
In order to feel something from the reticent displays of affection provided by my parents, my unconscious amplified my emotions. That way I could feel close to them. That’s the biggest problem I face, extreme emotions. It’s even bigger than my physical condition of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. I’m not trying to level charges against my parents. They tried the best they could and the best they knew. Without them I wouldn’t be alive today. There’s no doubt in my mind.
Those extreme emotions made me very clingy to friends and people in my life as a kid. That meant my friendships didn’t last very long. It was an intense friendship in my mind but really annoying to my friends. It was frequently like the friendship between Erika and Clementine in Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty which I happen to be reading at the time of writing this.
Then I went into the phase of just following approved behavior.
Being that strange was too painful. All my emotions became subdued and locked away. The resulting anger from suppressing everything turned inward. Wondering what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I be like everyone else? Why am I messed up?
That’s what we train men to be in this society. To suppress emotions we don’t deem acceptable for men. Anger is allowed. Slight sadness. And happiness. Everything else should be suppressed away or bad things happen. Being alone. Insults and perhaps the insinuation you’re gay. That means everything has to be converted to anger and thus become acceptable. Slowly that’s starting to change. Suppressing emotions is unhealthy. It leads to trouble expressing emotions, and difficulty explaining what’s going on inside. That leads to troubling things like suicide and loneliness.
Being socially acceptable is the goal of Taylor Swift’s eponymous first album. It’s about innocence, love, and anger that’s a little cute. That’s how this story starts. Fearless and Speak Now follow that same pattern and camouflages the rest.
A song like White Horse shows exactly what I mean. I wasn’t listening that close to the lyrics, but it didn’t sound sad to me. It sounded like it was saying I don’t want you anymore. The music video shows a sad messy breakup.
My isolation and social ineptitude continued through high school and three semesters of college. Then reality caught up to me. I have Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Around 18–24, people with my disease get into breathing issues. I got my first pneumonia. It was a few days in the hospital. I wasn’t getting enough sleep. My dreams of going to college were dashed. I tried summer classes and online classes. My health requirements were too much, 8 hours sleep and breathing treatments.
That sent me into depression.
My extreme emotions make me highly susceptible to depression. If you’re feeling too much, it’s easier to just tune everything out than deal with it. That especially happens when an onslaught of bad emotions hit me. There was nothing except clearing my lungs and airways, sleeping, stuffing my stomach, and watching C-SPAN. I was steadily losing weight from expending too much energy breathing. And I was home alone with a PCA, all day.
Three years into my depression, I got a trach. That was freaky for the first two years. I couldn’t sleep overnight because a nurse was sitting in my room. An emergency situation happened in the first two months, I couldn’t breathe. I got sick every few months after. It was deadly not to care, the way depression made me. I needed to mediate to stay calm and not go crazy from breathing through a tube that could clog at any moment. It was a new experience, having a trach and a ventilator to breathe.
There was one good thing to those first years with a trach. I got a stomach tube. Slowly I got up to weight. From 63 to 117 pounds.
My back is really messed up. It’s curved like an S because my back muscles weakened too much before my back was fused to a stable state. After surgery, my curvature was 50 degrees. That surgery happened when I was 15.
That means getting a trach tube to fit my curvaceous airway is tricky. My brilliant ENT doc found a trach that worked for me. Unfortunately, that trach tube is really tricky to change. With my curvature, any correctly fitted trach is difficult to insert.
My brilliant ENT doc had trouble changing out my trach.
There are several layers of flesh between the outside of the throat and the airway the trach tube sits in. So the doc pulled the old trach. He tried putting in the new trach. It was a ton of force on my neck. The connections between my airway and chest were hurting probably at five out of ten, but let me tell you that was nothing. The trach tube didn’t go in.
When changing a trach, they always have a smaller trach if the correct size can’t be inserted. That smaller trach went in. At that point, I hadn’t breathed for about a minute.
My ventilator was hooked up. The breath didn’t come. I had intense pain in my neck.
The trach had gone between the layers of flesh in my neck. The trach wasn’t in my airway. I told them I couldn’t breathe. I was looking at this innocent ENT resident across the room from me.
The doctor pulled the trach. He called for a trach tray to re-establish my airway. Luckily, that wasn’t required. My brilliant ENT doc got the trach into my airway finally. Then, I was breathing again. I remember the events with a precision that happens when you almost stop breathing.
I also remember what was going through my head. I looked at that innocent resident. I wondered what would be the emotional fallout for him, that fellow Indian if I died in that room.
I’ll ruin you.
At least my life would have a lasting mark beyond the heartache my passing would cause. I was desperate for my life to mean something in those last moments. I no longer cared if it would be something good. Facing death strips everything away and leaves behind something you can’t guess.
Then an eerie calm took over my head.
So this is the last thing I’ll see.
My vision went yellow. It was like looking through amber at the world. Then everything started to look normal again. The resident was scared. Man was he scared.
That’s probably projected emotion. In difficult situations, you project your emotional states on other people or things, effectively removing them from your person.
I stayed the night and had to be put under to get my correct trach put in.
That made me question my life. Which is common after what I experienced. Is this what I want? Sitting around and just surviving day to day. What’s the point? Keep in mind I was depressed around that time. That’s when I thought about what I could do. I have a ton of time to think about stuff when people do medical things to me. That became meditation, at first. Then something that had been a desire from years ago resurfaced. That dream was to write science fiction.
That’s when my transformation starts.
Taylor Swift’s trajectory radically changed with Red. That album was happy at times, but it was usually sad. The end of a relationship, liking danger, sadness, and the fact of love love being elusive. Off hand, I remember just a few songs that were happy, Begin Again, State of Grace, and Everything Has Changed.
I wrote the most acceptable science fiction story possible and heavily obfuscated the darker elements. It was a crisp, clean, bright future. That doesn’t make a good story in itself. Then, I added memory and cryosleep elements to make a story. I thought I wasn’t good enough, so I wrote heavily wrought prose.
Some quirks were there because my parents have basically reversed gender roles. My father takes care of people better. My mom likes dealing with things instead. My father is more emotional than my mom. They even stand like the opposite gender. My mom stands on both feet. My dad favors one leg. That explains the strange gender roles I put in my first book.
I noticed a few other strange things. It could be argued that the supporting female character was actually the protagonist. In the length of the novel, she’s the hero. But in each individual scene, the main character, a man is the hero. Anyway, I enjoyed writing from a woman’s perspective more than I thought possible.
That’s based on me being hetero-normative. I can love women in a romantic sense. That extends to writing from a woman’s POV. I can’t have a romantic relationship with all the duties I need to complete for my survival. I even wrote a song that states my case. It will probably be really sad. I’m self-conscious putting it up here.
The Way I Remember You
Chorus:
You go your way
I’ll go mine
In the end what happens, who can say?
But I’ll never forget you,
The way I remember you.
–
Love escaped me in the dark.
Lost to the brightness of day.
–
Light wasn’t there for me then.
It never came my way without you.
–
I can never be without you
Not even for a day.
–
Everyone around us
Has only what we can dream.
–
We can only be onlookers
On what everyone else has seen.
–
Chorus:
You go your way
I’ll go mine
In the end what happens, who can say?
But I’ll never forget you
The way I remember you.
–
We never know when our time will come
It’ll not be in forever, but some day.
–
Until then, we try to experience what was lost
What we can never find again
–
The love of another we can’t be without.
The trouble we can’t live without.
–
There’s accusation in those eyes
Eyes I’ll never see again.
–
Chorus:
You go your way
I’ll go mine
In the end what happens, who can say?
But I’ll never forget you
The way I remember you.
That was fun, right?
If you love someone that’s out of your reach, than imitating them makes you feel closer to them. Like reading something, they like reading. Doing something they like doing. It’s like the fan wanting be like the star. And the closest you can get is falling in love. Which is what happened in Black Swan, this compelling psychological thriller movie that came out in 2008.
Nina wants to be a natural dancer like Lily. Nina dreams of sleeping with Lily.
In Taylor Swift’s 1989, she starts to own everything that has gone wrong. She might get hurt. People might not understand what’s going on. All that doesn’t matter, because she just wants to be herself. It doesn’t matter what that means to everybody else.
My second book, the Remember Sequel was an excursion into everything that Remember wasn’t. With Remember, I avoided sex. The characters from Remember were stumbling around in the dark while everything miraculously worked out for the best. In the sequel, they were self-aware enough to see the end and help it along.
I’d focused a ton on making Remember based in reality. That limited my science fiction. In the Sequel, I abandoned that constraint.
The first character I wrote in the Sequel was sexy in everything she did, like Tiffany in Truly Madly Guilty. And she was looking for something she couln’t have, durable love. She was a compelling character I enjoyed to write.
Taylor Swift’s reputation has more allusions to sex than her previous albums, in songs like Dress and So It Goes….
Wildest Dreams was the closest to that from 1989.
Then I started Book 2, The Trouble with Dreams. It has a deep thesis that a perfect life doesn’t exist. And involves more sex. Sex is one of those things that should be hidden away to make people comfortable, like religion, race, mental health, and sadness. I still didn’t have the guts to actually write erotica yet, but I had to read some not to accidentally write it. Labels mean a lot.
What’s in a name except meaning?
A few months ago I would have said nothing is in a name except a shared definition.
Then I finally wrote something pieces that looked professional. The first was kosher. Then second was PG-13. The fourth was erotica. It had to happen eventually, right? I have no firsthand experience, but it seems nice. And it’s a part of growing up. It’s the modern day’s rite of passage like hunting was long ago.
I can write whatever is required in service of a particular story.
The shedding of what other people think of me has been the biggest evolution of my writing in these five years I’ve been at it.
I listen to a ton of music while editing. Music is one of the few things that get me through the editing process. I’m frequently bored out of my mind editing something. Unlike writing, editing doesn’t require undivided attention. Focusing on editing makes me remember what I wanted to write instead of what’s on the page. Listening to music teaches me ways to add elements of lyric writing in story writing, specifically literary devices.
Memory has always been something I could do well under a few special circumstances. Math and science, historical stories, things I’ve read, things I’ve watched, and things I’ve heard. My strong emotions help the remembrance of those things. That explains why I could get straight A’s in high school, despite the fact my insufficient caloric intake made me basically dumb. I could still remember stuff, but the ability to make creative leaps was beyond me.
Listening to music isn’t a fruitless enterprise. Song lyrics are a mixture of prose and poetry, instrumentals and vocals. Sometimes the connecting patterns are in instruments and vocals. This article is just about prose and poetry of lyrics. Because that transfers the easiest.
Of course, using a metered verse can add beat to prose and poetry. That isn’t something I know or use well. I know how to write in iambic meter, because the first language I ever learned was entirely iambic, Tamil. The phrases and words themselves sound more musical than average English. The other metered beats like the trochee, dactyl, and anapest are something I haven’t used. The dactyl and anapest, the three syllable variations are daunting to me.
This post uses music freely available on Youtube. I’ll put up the Google Music and Spotify Web Player Links. As far as I know, Google gives a free listen and Spotify requires a free account. And the Youtube links. Relevant excerpts are below with explanations. Some have multiple literary devices at the same time.
My approach to literary devices is just reading and remembering quirks of writing I’ve read. Then I simply use those techniques. For the sake of this post, I researched the names for the quirks listed below. They’re actual literary devices and the references are all from LitCharts.com.
That’s anaphora. It’s the repeating of the first few words for successive clauses. Two instances above. Ending anaphora with and different clause beginning, with some connection to the previous clauses. In this case that’s rhyming.
First parallelism, the same sentence structure repeated. Then that’s epizeuxis. It’s repeating a series of words with no intervening words. More rhyming.
Try finding truth, finding wisdom, and you’ll soon discover finding isn’t an easy thing. Everything that needs finding isn’t that far away, everything that needs finding is right inside.
This was somewhat useful I think. These devices of repetition are useful to build power in writing. That’s great for the purposes of conclusion. And as an accent to draw attention. But there are many ways to do that. A concise conclusion makes a difference, it surely does. Those examples verify that I need practice in their application in the construction of prose. There, that was the least bit successful. Maybe this helps, maybe it doesn’t. But understand it I will.
I’ve been thinking about how to write a piece of flash fiction. How to fit the components of a story in 1,200 words? I accidentally write 250-500 word stories. I have no intention of writing a particular scene as a complete story. Those short story paragraphs are in the middle of a longer piece. That actually works really well. If each scene has all the parts of a story, then multiple scenes build a longer piece.
Learning about this length of a story, 1,200 words should help my story writing a ton. It’ll help me find the essential parts of a story. What can be left out, and what can’t. It’ll teach me more ways a story can go. And writing that word count should take me a day to type out. That’s how I learn best. I closely study things related to my primary goal. Flash fiction is so close to novel writing, we’re splitting hairs. Most writers practice with short stories before getting into longer things. I also want to get published somewhere. This new skill will help.
I was researching literary magazines for somewhere to send my future short stories. That means, for me opening tabs in my browser of potential magazines. I screen through for criteria the precludes a few things that aren’t feasible for me. I’m not happy ordering a print copy because that’s difficult for me to access. I’m not sure about ordering digital versions from providers with worrisome persistence. If a digital service shuts down, it’s possible you lose access to everything on there. That means publications with a few free examples. At first, I was going through the list at Writer’s & Poet’s. Then I found a list for new writer’s. All those tabs are open in my browser.
I add each to this spreadsheet I keep. That includes the description of what they want and submission guidelines. I read through two pieces and a lot more if they’re shorter. I started researching The Zodiac Review. It’s just flash fiction. I’ve come across a lot of magazines that accept flash fiction. Given the fact that the majority of the short stories featured on Radical GK are less than 1,000 words, it should be pretty easy, right?
Well, it’s not. Those stories aren’t exactly complete. Those were designed with emotional impact in mind. They weren’t supposed to be stories in themselves. And they bear that out. The writing is lyrical but too difficult to understand. Look at The Sum of an Empty Life. About 13% in, C decides to wait for Brian Whalen. That’s the first plot point which is supposed to happen 20-25% in. The second plot point is C walking away with Brian’s briefcase. That happens 44% through the story. That’s nearly right. The part where C figures out the combo is the third plot point. That’s 79% in. The fact I wrote that story two years into my writing journey is amazing to me. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The story structure is nearly spot on.
I didn’t come prepared to write this post. That simply means I’ll discover something in the process. The last paragraph planted an idea. Maybe I should just forget about everything I learned in Story Engineering by Larry Brooks and return to the way I used to do things. Just maybe.
Anyway in my research, I found a few ways to tell a story in 1,200 words. There’s this much longer piece (The Watchers). It feels like that method could be brought over to this. You list the scenes with a break between each scene. That could work, right?
Some story lines are better for that method. If the story is done so much that the reader knows the sequence of scenes. If it isn’t scene after scene in rapid succession. Some time can pass between each scene. For example the development of PTSD in soldiers. It usually isn’t one event (scene), but a long series of stressful events. If the sequence of scenes isn’t all that important, or the sequence of scenes doesn’t matter. For example the story of going from place to place, a travel story. Establishing the connections between scenes is tricky. And the reader is always searching for how much time passed between each scene.
There’s this other story (The Game) that uses another technique to tell flash fiction. I call it the slow reveal. It combines story with exposition. That works well when one event exemplifies a continuing pattern. I’ll provide an example of my own below. As the indicative event takes place, exposition adds the missing plot points on their time cues. The plot points can come from the exemplifying event or the flashbacks to the continuing pattern. In the piece I linked to, the first plot point is the generalization of what usually happens (20% in). The second plot point is how they act towards each other, the protagonist and his competition who is also his friend (53% in) Then the argument about who won (77% in). That matches the established structure nearly to a tee. That’s the structure from Story Engineering. I have another shorter example from this blog I follow.
The last technique is the obvious one, writing it like a regular story except having the transformation happen in one scene. Like when a battle turns into a win. What happens is the enemy heavily bombards you. A new enemy weakness is discovered, and you defeat them. That isn’t too difficult.
1,200 word stories need a plot that works with the length. Too complicated, hard to explain plots are much harder to get across in the limited space. More nuance can be achieved with the second technique, the slow reveal. That’s using one event to establish a pattern of behavior. That kind of feels like cheating to me.
A story needs to do a number of jobs in sequence as Story Engineering taught me in definable terms. Here’s the list from memory. Gain sympathy for the character from something bad happening. Establish the character or stakes. Basically the before state. Then the character decides to take the quest which is the first plot point. The character responds to what the choice brings. The character finds something internally or externally that allows them to face the conflict, second plot point. They fight against the conflicting force and lose. The character finds the missing piece to success and the will to do anything to prevail, third plot point. The events play out, enemy defeat or character dying in the process. That story I divided into plot points above shows there are many ways to fill those requirements. Accept the challenge, get permission to engage, and proof they will do anything to remain friends. You can combine those requirements anyway that works into different scenes as long as the sequence doesn’t change. That means anywhere from one scene on up.
This is an example plot. Abuse story: woman is abused, entering relationship flashback, hiding bruises at work, buying a gun flashback, trying to talk about it with support person, returning home hoping he isn’t there, pushed to the ground changes her mind to kill him, murder then admitting to self-defense. You could easily replace any of those scenes with anything the fills the same purpose.
Hiding from abuser, has to return for belongings, friend doesn’t show up so leave, buying gun/pepper spray, return to get stuff and defend, stalking causes restraining order, face him with gun, run away/disappear.
Fear with partner, abuse cause visible symptoms, run away, abuser follows and finds, ran away after facing enemy, finds new partner, kill abuser together, live free from suspicion.
All of those work. A different method perhaps, but it’s doable. Those are my explorations of 1,200 word stories. The plot has to specifically engineered to fit the constriants of the length. With novels, any story can fit. A focused story is required for shorter formats. That’s everything I have to say. Feel free to add more in the comments below.
That’s one of the most used writing phrases out there. It’s become a cliché. But what does that mean? Banalities frequently stick in my head. There’s a bigger lesson to be learned from simple phrases such as that one.
Writing that reflects first-hand experience feels more real than pure fiction. What’s the cause of that feeling? I ask myself that question a ton. Why do I feel, guilty for example? That’s what meditation is currently for me. Why am I feeling this way? The feeling that something is real or pops off the page. What determines the difference? I need to know to write well.
My experiences seem far removed from the everyday life of most people, hence the moniker, Radical Thinker. That comes from a few personality quirks. I don’t listen to other people unless some avenue of proof is available. Of course, that precludes generally accepted theories like science and any reasonable thought process. Still, external confirmation. That process invites deep thought and learning stuff through observation. Add that to the differences in my emotional landscape discussed here. Adding that to my medical condition gives me different experiences than the average functioning adult. I bridge that gap by observing and using my imagination for the rest. Like going to work. Like dating. Like being in a relationship. Like playing a cello. Like having bipolar depression. Like basically anything within the bounds of reality.
It can’t ever be the real thing. There’s something missing. The most impactful details are remembered. The rest is forgotten. Doing that in a fictional construct is really difficult. Those imaginings aren’t real. They fade away like a dream after you wake up.
I have two examples for you guys. First the song lyrics from Taylor Swift’s autobiographical song Out of the Woods.
That has the quality I was talking about. There’s just enough detail to seem real. It supposedly is. Two details. The camera and where they were. Giving just enough detail is nearly impossible without first-hand experience. The compilation of what should be remembered and what shouldn’t is one way to get the feeling of reality.
I have another example of feeling real. It taps into another method, the relatability of something. It’s from Ella Dawson’s blog, Post Grad Warriors. I’m a fan of her writing, read this for more.
That’s basically what happens to everyone after college. Sometimes you drift away from your college friends. And sometimes you’re bound for life.Sometimes you connect with people that were there in the background. Still, there’s connection. Still, there’s shared experience.
First, there was the music, strobe lights, sweaty people, and the way they danced. That’s more than three senses, but this is an overwhelming place, a nightclub. So three senses make you feel you’re there. More depending on how intense the situation is. Fewer than three if it’s boring like a long sink to the seafloor. Sight first. Sound next if it matters, or smell. Something along those lines.
That’s a change for me, this checklist of senses.
Something else showed up when I wrote a couple of short stories. I actually have relatable personal experiences. They’re all personal emotional experiences. That’s where my extreme emotions come into play. Exploring their root causes is an added tool given to me by mediation.
That started as figuring out how to write creative non-fiction. Read this one, that one, and that other one for more. I used those new skills to write this post for Medium and this other one for BayArt. Writing non-fiction helped this change come about. I’m all about cross-application of knowledge and lessons learned.
That carried over to fiction writing where it could. I’ll write up a short paragraph on the feeling of guilt I felt this morning. Here it is:
Guilt
Guilt is that nagging feeling, the perpetual elephant stalking you from room to room, everywhere you go. It starts small, like the way big things always start. It seems insignificant at first. Then it grows and grows until it’s an elephant on your chest. It doesn’t have to be an elephant. Most guilt isn’t that severe. It’s a rock in your shoe that doesn’t go away until it’s dealt with. It’s an annoyance that hurts the more it’s in there. There are ways to scrub away the annoyance, the weight hanging around you. All it takes is an apology, but it’s not as easy as saying sorry. You get caught in the doldrums of your anxiety. Is an apology required in this situation? It’s not just you against your guilt. There’s another person involved, the one you wronged.
Are they hurt? Did the mistake bother you more than it should? Does the aggrieved see the wrong as you would, as you do? If not, there’s the pickle. Should you apologize and risk highlighting your mistake, your error. Well if you did, the elephant disappears, the rock vanishes. Then you get to pick up the cards dropped where they may fall. You have to move on and forget the turn in your fortune. What was once peaceful friendship became your torture for a while, but you mustn’t forget it. Those that forget are soon to repeat mistakes anew. Those that conjure the elephant, those that create the stone are always there. Never repeat the mistake, never call guilt forth. Mistakes are human, and we are human after all. But humans can change, and so can we.
There. My example of writing what I know. Guilt as the case is.
Boss as overseer and employee as peon are all in this together, mutual benefit for shared work. Whether one does the work and the other does none, the cycle continues in perpetuity. Hamsters peddle away at infinity wheels, like all of us. The one reprieve remains time away discussing the futility of work for naught. Work grows to a necessary evil for all dreaming to the goddess of the American dream. I and my would-be lover in better times, now puerile crush talked over plans. The joke of a thought to me Nick, but in truth my secret love’s, lost desire come true. Some connections gift everything we need to dismantle our corporate overlords. With the plan devised, Irena became mine to take. Together we do this and forever be as one. Irena in truth drags me where I daren’t go, and I become the destroyer.
I swiftly move around my floor of the Stephens Institute, using the ability to see through the darkness all around. Cam footage verifies my comprehension of the situation as a black cloudy streak, nothing else indicating my presence through space. After roaming without a set goal, I dart towards the heart of the building and the way down or up. The door opens in anticipation of my entrance, responding to my thoughts and B3 awaits, my destination on this little undercover jaunt.
I wait complacently for my arrival within this cloak of darkness, enshrouding the entire space housed within this vertical moving chamber. Once there, I duck into a nearby room to complete the mission. My black suit bristling with explosives prepped for commencing the destruction I initiated by my very acts. Unloading my arsenal upon the walls of this hollow predicates a hasty retreat to the research department — pursuant of escape unscathed and suspicion free.
The elevator meets my needs as before, facilitating an unremarkable trip to the sixth floor. Moving with purpose through the hallways, the central space of the research division, delivers the induction lab, my final refuge prior to retreat with flames. I run into the open doorway, jump into a roll, and land comfortably in the patient’s empty bed. The room (indoctrinated by shadow cloak) is the place I wait, twiddling my thumbs to pass the seconds/minutes.
A white tendril of light enters the sanctity of my lair, harboring a sleeve-collared hand inside the ever-expanding white light. I grab it with satisfaction and relief as we take off running to the escape route, our ally, soon to be betrayed. The moving room fills with a mixture of white and black form our respective dust suits celebrating the final, end all trip for this building. I look at her, and she looks back with trigger in hand ready for this. We nod together, signaling accomplishment of parts in a two-pronged attack scheme, albeit from clandestine. The carefree, jubilant race through the lobby ends haltingly at the getaway car. Pounding arteries, epinephrine filled, arc with electricity through reluctant parting hands with no other recourse to board the getaway.
The agreement to trigger our preparations unleashes brilliant fireballs from the lobby and roof. The fiery plumes stark in the diminishing light of late evening, punctuate our time together at work.
The two of us move out of the city to the northern mountainous region, the furrowed terrain surpassed with no hesitation. We near the end of our journey, the upper outcrop of canyon overlooking a lake at sunset. We are jubilant with our victory and ourselves, planning our next move, the future, and all that. The dust suits presenting a plague in these conditions, necessitates removal of our masks. It is me and Irena, in her black, asymmetric hairstyle, the last guardians of data destroyed in flames. We embrace each other in warm affection, our dust clouds swirling together.
I just watched Black Swan. It’s a movie that came out way back in 2010. I wasn’t ready to watch it at that time. But anyway, I liked watching it. The story is about a ballerina named Nina learning how to be the lead in Swan Lake, White Swam/Black Swan.
I didn’t know the story of Swan Lake before hearing it in the movie. It’s about a girl that’s turned into a swan, the White Swan. Finding love to escape the curse. She finds a Prince to love. Before he can turn her back, he is seduced by her evil doppelganger, the Black Swan. The White Swan is heartbroken. Instead of living as a swan without her love, she commits suicide.
According to the movie, the White Sawn requires perfect ballet. Nina is very good at precision and the perfect ballet required for that role. The Black Swan requires a more natural style. Nina can’t allow ballet to happen. She can’t let herself go and simply respond to the music. She can’t be out of control. That’s the part she can’t do.
The movie is about learning to let go and batting her self-injuring tendencies. Nina unconsciously harms herself and imagines perfecting herself by throwing away unacceptable parts of herself. I think that stems from her desire to be loved by her mother. If Nina isn’t perfect, she doesn’t get affection, just a strong hand controlling her. Anyway, Nina’s symptoms get worse with the pressure on her.
Nina is jealous of the new ballerina in the company, Lily. I liked Lily’s character much more than the troubled Nina. Lily is a natural. She let’s herself go in the movement of the dance. I enjoyed the unself-conscious way she moves through the world. I hoped a little of Lily would rub off on Nina.
I wanted a different storyline than what was presented to us. I wished Nina and Lily built a relationship, so Nina would learn what she needed to. That sadly didn’t happen. Events evolved in a different way that I didn’t like much.
Black Swan was a great movie. It made me think, and I love movies like that. Isn’t it startling how deeply our parents can influence our future self’s. It even more fascinating that we can’t remember the formative time before the age of two and a half years. Those few years greatly determine our personalities.
Memoir is really very similar to fiction in how it’s written. They both follow the same structure. Events are organized in the framework of a story. The flow isn’t interrupted to preserve the totality of events. Things that pertain to the story being told are included. Everything else is left out. Fiction is an additive method. Memoir is subtractive. You take a subset of everything you remember and from that into a cohesive story. Events are picked from a multitude of things that actually happened.
This selection of events is apparent in movies based on true events or a dramatization of the truth. Take for example, Steve Jobs. I’ve watched three versions of Jobs’ life. First, the biopic starring Ashton Kutcher, Jobs. Then the factual documentary Man in the Machine. Finally, Steve Jobs directed by Arron Sorkin and starring Michael Fassbender.
Each movie had a different angle. Jobs was about Jobs getting ideas and using them to be the best. Man in the Machine is trying to be as unbiased as possible. It was the most balanced but tried to talk about the relatively unknown things about Jobs. Steve Jobs was controversial in its directorial and writing direction. It omitted his accomplishments for the most part and focused on his relationship with his daughter, Lisa.
All in all, the based on true story movies tried to make Jobs relatable. And the perception of Jobs was he wasn’t approachable. He was a strict, straight to business type of guy. He had stringent expectations and expected them to be met. He was thought to be the driving force behind Apple’s success. Each movie took a different approach to humanize and create a connection with the audience. Sorkin focused on Jobs’ personal life and matched it to Apple’s performance/Jobs’ fortunes. Jobs started us with Jobs as a student that couldn’t really connect with anyone except when he started Apple. Man in the Machine used his relationship with the mother of his daughter.
Memoir and fiction follow the same pattern. First, we see the character before anything starts. Then, something happens they have to react to. Then, they try fixing the problem different ways and fail successive times. Then, something starts working. Finally, the character succeeds, finds something that changes their life forever, and the story ends. This matches the character arc of a fictional story. Fiction adds an external conflict. When the character arc is the main conflict, it’s a literary story.
Some recent stories have a strong character arc and conflict arc that are nearly equivalent in importance. Take The Girl on the Train as an example. The character arc of Rachel’s drinking and the central conflict of finding Megan’s killer. Or Gone Girl. The internal conflict is how Amy feels about Nick and the external conflict is Amy’s murder. Adding a strong character arc to a compelling plot brings a story up by an arm and a leg.
I recently read Naked, Drunk, and Writing by Adair Lara. She is a prolific writer of memoirs and personal essays. She pointed out some key points. You have to be a hero, not a victim. It’s easy in this society and time to feel like a victim. You need a time in your life where you take action. A bad thing comes your way, and you fix it. Getting your car stolen is bad luck. Bad stuff happens. But if you track down the thieves, steal your car back, and you learn how to overcome a debilitating fear of confrontation. Then, it becomes a story that works in a memoir.
You need to be done with the problem. If you haven’t found a way out, there’s nothing really there. Struggling and still struggling with the issue you want to write about, it is too soon. The writer needs perspective to make a memoir. You need to know the lesson and be detached enough to know what really happened. People read a memoir to gain a new understanding of the human condition. Something that can help figure out life, a little better.
A few things are in the way of me writing personal essays. When I write about myself, the writing comes out snobbish and stand-offish. I have allows been a little showoff. For years, I never knew why I wanted to prove my intelligence. Recently, I found the reason behind it. I have always felt less than everyone else because of my physical limitations. I always felt a little trapped by my condition. My way out and to feel better about being “less”, I try to feel equal by proving my intelligence more than balances out my physical weakness. That realization changed a lot, but I still worry about falling back into old habits.
When I have in-depth conversations about my intense emotional states and the inner workings of my mind, the person on the other end doesn’t understand me. That’s because I’ve never tried telling people even a percentage of that stuff. I have trouble relating to other people. I’ve been anti-social for that long. I’m slowly improving there.
This is an example of a recent conversation where I try to get better at explaining something.
Recently saw Collateral Beauty. It’s about a father that recently lost his 6-year-old daughter to cancer. He writes letters to Death, Time, and Love and they reply. Towards the end, there was a really emotional scene where he admits his daughter is dead. I actually had tears forming a well in my eyes but didn’t allow any out. I pulled away emotionally.
Why didn’t you let your tears come? Don’t you think you’re cutting out emotion unnecessarily?
Whenever I describe something in too much detail, it doesn’t make sense. I need to fix that before writing a memoir. I’ll try my usual description first.
Emotional history: Started as a person with normal reactions to my emotions. Feeling them and becoming numb when some emotion became too much. Everyone does that except it isn’t going to happen frequently for most people. For example losing a close loved one. That might happen a few times. Simple sadness was enough to make me numb after a little while.
Then I started to decrease the threshold before I became numb. It worked for a time, and I reached my goal to fit as a male in American society. At one point, I was unable to feel anything.
Then, I slowly reduced the threshold when numbness happened. Through that still ongoing process, I thought I was rediscovering something I lost. That moment, watching that movie, I was in a struggle to stay there and feel. Becoming numb would have been slightly easier. There was a standstill and anything could tip the balance. Something did.
A better image. Everyone has three parts to their psyche. We’ll ignore the superego. There are various names that work for superego like conscience, mother’s voice, God, and hindsight. We’ll ignore that.
There’s a childish side or you at your weakest, id, baby, or the person you would be without an external influence. Then the protector, ego, or what the world made you into. The protector usually acts in small ways. Like covering your face, when you cry. Hiding you away, when you’re boiling mad. Putting on a brave face, when you’re really scared. It basically reacts to what the baby wants and finds a socially acceptable way to meet those needs.
What happens with normal emotions? The protector does those little things. When something too much happens, like the death of a close loved one, the protector says, “Baby, you need some time in your quite room. I’ll be with you the whole time. Too much is going on out here.” You become numb while the baby has some time away from life.
For someone like me, the baby cries bloody murder when something sad happens. Everything is exaggerated beyond the average. A baby like that spends too much time in the quite room. That baby never gets to experience a lot, because a lot of things are too much.
I increased the sensitivity of my protector to the baby by showing the protector more emotional states. Like an abused child, the protector grew more attuned to the tormentor, the whiny baby. Then the baby spends less time out and then none at all.
Right now, I’m dismantling the safe room. If an external threat appears, the deconstruction stops or reverses temporarily. Very similar to the process of growing up.
That’s still a little confusing.
The other part is sharing too much. The vulnerability of it. We’re all scared to sharing too much. That allows the possibility of getting hurt. The more you share, the greater the rejection. I feel like I should share my life’s lessons. I’ve been through a lot. Moving to a different country at five and never going back. My medical experiences that vastly over date my time to 28 years of age. Then the lessons meditation taught me. Finally finding meaning in my life. There is a lot I could share. There might be a memoir in my future. We’ll see.
Girish Karthikeyan 