The Immortal Movement of Art

So, this morning I was thumbing through The Music of the Ninetieth Century, and its Culture by Adolph Bernhard Marx, and I came across a very interesting quote.

“Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.”

The immortal movement of its time. A brilliant and romantic concept with more than a little truth to it, this quote encapsulates the mantra of hundreds of Creative Writing majors, Music Theory instructors, Art History enthusiasts, and amateur photographers.

While it is true that art is immortal, Marx is a little more vague when raising a definition of what it is to be “art.” Though Marx was a composer, I am going to apply this concept to the writing of literature, because I know far more about that than I do composition music.

There are going to be nearly 300,000 new books published in the U.S. by the end of 2014.Every single one of those 300,000 books cannot be a masterpiece. In fact, you will probably only ever hear the titles of a handful. So, does that mean that the unsung books do not qualify as “art?” Furthermore, by Marx’s estimation, does that mean that 299,995 of those books are destined to die to the annals of history?

Now, for the sake of physical immortality, no. Most of those books will remain on a shelf somewhere. A few here, a few there; they will last (baring a house fire or a nuclear apocalypse). Even ebooks will remain  in the form of data on some storage device.

But, if the art is not experienced, does it meet any definition of “art?”

This brings us back to the old philosophical quandary; if a tree falls in a forest, but no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If the book sits on the shelf, but no one reads it, is it a book?

This may go deeper than you’re willing to swim on a Friday morning, but it is worth considering—particularly if you are writing a book (or even just considering it).

Please note, I am not trying to dissuade anyone from writing. The world needs literature. However, when writing a book, you have to be willing to accept that your book may never be a best seller. In fact, odds are that it won’t be. Most of those 300,000 books will barely sell a dozen copies and fewer still will even make it to the public arena.

Art is immortal to someone, but it doesn’t mean that it will make it onto the pages of history. Can you accept that?

Art preserves our humanity (as I mentioned in an earlier post). But not all art can be representative of that humanity. Some writing is just plain bad (don’t act like you’ve never read a book or story that was just flat-out terrible. I know I have. Heck, I’ve written some that are just flat-out terrible).

Don’t write a book (or construct any other art piece) for the sake of it being a piece of history. You will probably fail.

Write a book because you need to write it. Then, it will have a place in history—even if it is only your history.

How to Become a Writer in 40(ish) Steps

1. Come up with an original, inspired idea (this is arguably the hardest part).
2. Outline how that idea might translate to the page.
3. Sit down and tune everything else out.
4. Develop a “thinking problem.”
5. Let this problem overtake you, preventing you from getting anything done.
6. Get up to check if the laundry is done or if there is anything new in the fridge.
7. Sit back down and actually tune everything else out.
8. Start writing.
9. Leave part of who you are on the page—and be willing to accept that it might be drivel.
10. When you run out of things to say, stop writing and go get a snowcone.
11. Get another snowcone.
12. Sit back down and second-guess what you’ve written.
13. Check the fridge again.
14. Put your writing away and take a nap.
15. Sit back down and open your work.
16. Write some more.
17. Hit a roadblock.
18. Give up and decide that you’d rather be on Facebook or watching Netflix.
19. Come back to the work six weeks later and think about how much farther you could have been had you been writing once per day, like you told yourself you were going to.
20. Re-read what you’ve already written.
21. Decide that it’s actually pretty good.
22. Write some more.
23. Get a job because you have bills to pay and your work is only half finished (if you already have a job, disregard).
24. Become stressed out by your job and procrastinate from your writing again.
25. Wait another two weeks while you “figure things out.”
26. Pick it back up and write until your fingers bleed.
27. Finish the work, in spite of yourself.
28. Make some smart friends (hopefully, you already have some).
29. Give them your work and tell them to read it and rip it to shreds (figuratively).
30. Don’t lash out at them when they do.
31. Question your self-assertion that you are a literary genius.
32. Binge-read Mark Twain quotes.
33. Put off revisions for a month.
34. Pick them back up and do them in what little spare time you have. 
35. Finish the goram revisions.
36. Have someone else read it to make sure your plucky revisions weren’t completely counterproductive.
37. Revise it again (if needed).
38. Send the work out into the world to be enjoyed by millions.
39. Wait.
40. Wait.
41. Wait.
42. Make a little money that doesn’t seem to be worth the piece of your soul you left on the page.
43. Smile at your “success.”
44. Repeat. 

Writer’s Block and the Uninspired

So, I am writing a novel right now, and for those of you who have never tried this (or any other major project of equivalent magnitude), you should know that it’s hard. I’ve been to school and have a line of degrees that say that I know how to write. But, the fact of the matter is, no amount of schooling can prepare you for the trials that come along with actually trying to put rampant imagination on the page.

I won’t go into excruciating detail about my book, because it will be released soon, and I don’t want to spoil all of the juicy goodness, but essentially, it is a paranormal story about a group of young people as they all work towards resolving struggles in their lives in the midst of some very fantastical happenings.  The issue that I’m experiencing with this novel is that, originally, it was written as a story about a single young boy. Then, I decided that a solo protagonist wouldn’t be able to explore the dimensions that I wished to visit. Then, I found the story remained narrow and needed a little spice—a little darkness. So, I added a third.

My issue came when I was trying to interweave two additional stories into the substantial portion of what I had already written. This made writing more like piecing together a puzzle than actually writing.

Long story short, it has caused me to go through numerous rewrites, brainstorming, storyboards, and character adjustments to get to the point where I am now (which is still about 20% incomplete).

And, on several occasions throughout my sojourn to write this novel, I have experienced the phenomenon of writer’s block.

I have always treasured my ability to avoid writer’s block. My imagination remains sharp in most situations, so I can plug through any roadblocks that I experience with a little creative problem solving. However, that does not mean that I am immune to writer’s block—just that I have trained myself to overcome those moments of being “uninspired.”

The formula, in my experience, to avoiding an breaking writers block (not just on writing, really, but on any creative block), is to work through it, regardless of being uninspired.

What I mean by this is, if you get to a point in a work and become stuck, write the next chapter anyways. It will probably be rubbish. It will probably not make it to the final draft. But, it will get something on the page. This is what is most important—forward motion.

Open-water sharks have to swim forward at all times to pump the appropriate amount of oxygen through their bodies to live. If they stop swimming forward, they will suffocate. The same goes for artists. If you put a project on “hold,” or succumb to a creative block, that work will suffocate. You may be able to revive it later on, but picking up an old work is exponentially more difficult than powering through a minor creative block.

Just remember the power of revision. If you don’t like four chapters in the middle of your book, then you can go back and change it. The important thing is that you keep working, in spite of the difficulties—or die.

The same can be said of any struggle in life, when you think about it.

Woah. This post was waaay more profound than I expected it to be.

I need to take a long shower and ponder.  

Voltaire and the Unsaid

This morning, I read a very interesting quote by Francois-Marie Arouet (Voltaire). He wrote, “The secret to being a bore is to tell everything.”

One can only guess on the ultimate purpose of the quote, but I think that it can be adequately applied to the writing process and what it means to create literature that is titillating and descriptive, but not full of exasperating exposition.

So, what does it mean to be a “bore” in writing fiction? Many people believe that Charles Dickens was/is a bore in his stories because he goes into excruciating detail on the smallest of aspects of the narrative. Some believe that this is because he was paid by the word while others simply thought he was a perfectionist who wanted to cover eight different issues of morality or philosophy in a single paragraph. But, being longwinded or employing the use of exposition is not necessarily preservative of this idea that Voltaire wrote on. It is important to understand the difference of saying a lot and saying a lot of words.

The difference is key. Dickens, though longwinded and very keen on detail, had a lot of content within his novels. Though he said a lot, there was a lot to be said and may ideas and concepts that he wanted to cover within the scope of his novels.

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It should also be noted that the novels by Dickens that we see today were not how they were meant to be read; Dickens released his works in serialized segments within periodicals that were released to the public in chunks. So, when you pick up a Dickens novel, picture it as being 1/10^th the size over the course of several months—this will make it far more digestible.  

But, I digress.

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Voltaire wrote about telling “everything;” or, saying much when saying little would be far more interesting. Just because writers like Dickens wrote a lot doesn’t mean that he said everything that was underlying. As a reader, it is our job to see the unseen; to look past the surface level and determine what is going on below.

So, I could tell one story in two different ways:

“It was rainy and I went to the store. I went to the fruit aisle and picked up some oranges. They seemed to be a little over priced, but my doctor said I needed more vitamin C because of my frequent colds, so I got a few of them and went to the check-out. The cashier was wearing a red vest and chewing gum loudly. She was pretty and her hair smelled a lot like lavender soap, but I was in a hurry.  She smiled at me and then gave me the receipt. I took the receipt and then I went out of the store and rushed back home.

--or—

“On a dreary afternoon, I came across one of the most beautiful women I had ever set eyes on. She smiled at me slightly as we crossed paths, imprinting within me a haunting image of her picturesque smile and lavender-scented hair. “

The first story is basic exposition. It tells you the play-by-play; even going so far as to tell you what you don’t need to or want to know. The second story condenses this and speaks more about the emotions of the situation as well as the meaning of the story—not just to the reader, but to the speaker as well.

To create a good story, the writer doesn’t have to explain every detail to the reader. 21^st century readers are smart—they can make up the blanks on their own. Creating a good story means making the reader feel something. Ironically, readers feel more from omission than they do from all-inclusion. They want to use their imaginations. If they didn’t, they would go to a movie or watch a television show. They come to books to think.

So, what Voltaire means is, “In order to be interesting, keep some things unsaid.” 

The Tropes of “Guardians of the Galaxy”

So, I saw the film Guardians of the Galaxy recently and noticed at once that it was a hotbed of tropes. I mentioned tropes in my last two blog posts, if you have not read them yet, I highly recommend them (because I will get more views on my blog). I wanted to investigate these tropes in more detail to fully understand how the equation works.

I am, of course, not going to go into the dozens of sub-tropes and minor tropes that are baked into the film’s composition, but I thought I might take a stab at crafting a series of equations explaining the overall and basic structure of the film.

Let’s start with the characters.

In the film, you have the following:

[The Leader (Star Lord) + The Opposite (Drax) + The Brains  (Rocket) + The Brawn (Groot) + The Chick (Gamora) = 5-man Band]

(I’m willing to concede if you want to switch Groot and Drax. They fulfill a very similar role.)

There, you have your protagonist cast. The 5-man Band is a classical trope defining a rag-tag group of individuals who work off each other’s strengths and weaknesses to form a dynamic team. Guardians provides a classical example of this. You’ve got your sarcastic, but beloved hero; your “lancer,” or opposite of the hero; your brains that provides a certain level of snarky commentary; your muscle that provides the necessary blunt force; and your chick, who provides the romantic entanglement for one or more of the main cast—albeit reluctantly or confusingly.

Bingo.

Now, you have to put the 5-man Band in a situation—provide them with adversity and a quest.

So, you take the Unlikely Companions trope and add it into the 5-man Band trope. Then, you consider their individual motives (money and revenge), and you have:

(5-man Band + Unlikely companions) + Anti-Hero quest = “Hook” plot.

The hook plot, (a term I use loosely), is the initial reason for the characters to become intertwined in each others stories. Star Lord, Rocket and (to a lesser extent) Groot and Gamora are seeking money and Drax and (to a lesser extent) Gamora is seeking revenge. Though they are initially at odds (“Old enemies become reluctant allies” trope), they decide to work together to achieve all of their individual goals simultaneously.

This is born in the “Alcatraz” scene where they pull the old “Prison riot + Elaborate plan = Prison break trope combo”

This allows them to escape without a hitch and begin their mismatched alliance.

But then, we learn that they are carting around an “Item of Wonderfully Disastrous Power;” that being that troublesome little orb. This is your One Ring, or your Sword of Destiny; basically, anything that has massive appeal, but massive destructive capabilities, and features a connection to the Dark Lord character in some fashion. This item compels the “Dark Lord” (in this case a combo of the Sub-Villain Ronin and the Ultra-Villain Thanos) to pursue and otherwise oppose the protagonists in search of this item.  

Now, you have the 5-man Band + Item of Wonderfully Disastrous Power – Villain’s Plot = X

Where “X” represents the unknown outcome of the various potential scenarios. Here, we experience the “what ifs.” What if Ronin destroys everything with the power of the orb? What if Thanos gets his hands on it? What if Star Lord is defeated?

Of course, that “X” becomes resolved at the end of the film, but ultimately, it just opens many more variables for potential sequels because… you know, that’s what Marvel does.

Essentially, the entire film boils down to this rough equation:

Unlikely Heroes + Item of Wonderfully Disastrous Power – Villain’s ostentatious and purely evil plot = Guardians of the Galaxy.

When broken down into these component parts, this film resembles that Lord of the Rings’s, the Star Wars’s and the Avengers’s of the last 40 years of film and storytelling.

Of course, they are not the same film, but the tropes that they use are very much the same.

The point here is that tropes, at their core, are just story-telling devices. They can be mixed and matched, revised, distorted, augmented, and otherwise moved around to make an infinite number of stories, characters, plots, concepts, and settings.

There are no new stories, only new ways to tell old ones.