1000 Days

This weekend I completed my stalled reviewing of the Matrix Trilogy.  The gap of time between one and two measured in weeks, if not months.  The gap between two and three only a few days.  If you’ve seen them you’ll not be surprised.

Turns out that the second and third movies improved with the gap.  Directors shoot for the best perception possible for their movies but I doubt they factor aging into that equation.  It worked for me in this case.  They still didn’t excel, but they didn’t bomb the way they did when I first saw them.

All this is a clunky lead in to what I really wanted to highlight.  In the third movie there is a tertiary storyline with Tank and Dozer’s sister—Link’s wife—and an incidental woman with a shaved head.  The second scene with them together has one asking the other if the other is scared.  Dressed in homespun garments they crouch in a mechanical access line waiting with the other newly volunteered infantry members.  These ground troops wait in line to die.

I recognized this scene as similar to how I like to start much of what I do here at 1000 Days.  If I can, I really enjoy starting just a little late in a story so the reader is already missing out on what’s gone before.  In the Shanty arc I’ve significantly written on here I have one character coming in for a landing, another about to board a gondola, and a third hitching a ride in the middle of the desert.  Elsewhere I’ve dropped in on hunters atop a perch watching prey approach.  Soldiers being shot at.  Voyageurs dragging a frozen body through marshland.  Old teachers overlooking the gathering of the tribe to safety.  I rarely start with a wideshot—an establishing shot.  I almost never start out describing scenery then follow with placing characters in that set.  I guess this is my style.

Day 279

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I ran across a bit of artwork recently that put me over the edge on understanding what it is that appeals to me about pieces like that one.  They posses so much depth and richness that even in the shadowy unseen parts of the painting you know there is detail.  In most art I don’t feel like I could dive into the landscape to discover the reverse side of the subject.  These paintings that intrigue me convince me that I could.  Could enter the painting and find more flowers among the shadows of the trees; find beetles crawling in the cool grimy shade; find the fox that just ducked behind the barn as the artist brought out her easel.

Ok. So, great.

Some paintings bring out an emotion through lack of detail.  Or through condensing that detail to iconic representation.  These paintings I have in mind go to the other end.  They amplify the detail—appropriately.  I’m not sure this is good practice in writing.  Or I’m not sure I’d be able to pull it off they way I’d like.

The trouble I see is that I’d feel like I was cataloging the landscape not incorporating it.  I do something similar to put my kids to bed sometimes.  Starting in one corner of the room I verbally tour the items in their room in monotonous sleepy detail.

But I’m reminded that I’ve seen this pulled off well by others.  I’ve got no examples because that’s not how my mind works, but I can imagine reading the description of a fantastical market.  The author plumbing the origin of each bizarre fruit or meat or trinket.  Infusing the reader with the characters’ experience.  Sure she overstuffs the reader with non-essential storyline, but she pulls it off.  We like it—I want to recreate it.

I’m thinking it’s often about timing in the story.  Knowing when you can slow the reader down.  Let them soak up the atmosphere and just coast for a bit.  But I’m also thinking that it has to do with technique.  In the faster parts of a story you need to capture the quintessential ‘thing’.  Show the reader the absolute canonical object or action.  Once you set that up you need to torque it just a little by marring the canon a bit.

Well that’s enough talking about writing for today.

Day 272

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When I was much younger, still a boy in Scouts, our Scoutmaster took us out to a local airfield to get our Flying merit badge. This kind of thing was his thing. He brought rattlesnakes to our church basement meeting room and set them free on the floor among us boys. He invited a cop to come speak about his role on the local force. He located and wrangled a cowboy that had ridden or was still riding from Canada to Mexico along the Continental Divide. For him if you do it, you’ve done it. Near as I can tell he insisted on getting us as done as possible.

It was cold and a bit grey that day. I recall waiting in a smoked out room filled with dated flying magazines and one hastily cleaned ashtray. The plaid sandbag for a bottom kind. If a set dresser for a movie about a quaint little redneck airstrip were looking for the perfect set they would need to look no further.

Kids exaggerate waiting. I recall as a young child sitting in a doctor’s office for half a day or more just to get my throat swabbed. But at the airport I was in my teens so certainly my temporal judgment increased by then? As far as I know we never taxied the runway. My memory skips from the waiting room, to walking up to the plane, to being in the back seat—passenger’s side—of the smallest plane I’d ever boarded now in flight. I wore a hooded Ocean Pacific long sleeve shirt and I could feel sweat running down my side from my armpits. It was not hot.

The Scoutmaster, two other boys and myself. My head raced to keep up with the fear and the amazing experience. Roads and trees and houses and other structures that can only be seen from above ran under us like we were a canoe passing over stones in clear swift water. The plane regularly rocked or rolled in a number of directions. The words yaw and pitch come to mind now, but as much as I might have known what they meant on the ground back then in the sky, that day, they might as well have been made-up.

He must have been instructing us in his own inscrutable way. He had to have been talking to each of us in turn because at some point I switched places with the kid in front of me. I’m certain I would not have done this without being asked. Imagine climbing over the dinner table to swap places with another diner; you can’t touch the ground or spill your drinks it’s OK if you step in your food—or your partner’s.

I now have the secondary yoke in my clutching clutches and my feet tentatively on the peddles ready to break free at the slightest whisper of an inferred command. I’m feeling the flight path he’s flying through my arms and through my feet. The seat is sturdy and soft. The floor of the plane is solid and sure. The windows are clean and safely shielding me from the wind. The engine is running and will never stop turning the prop. In the whole world I’m the only thing likely to fail. He let’s go of the instructor’s yoke.

Holy mother of shit! The North Pole just flipped to the South.

Nothing is there anymore. The plane, once a car on a road unable to go up or down without regard for the terrain or left and right without regard for the curve, goes where I send it. Directions were at my finger tips and I could call them each up at will or whim or whatever.

Writing feels this way to me. Like a book is just on the other side of the threshold there is no way to ease through. That you simply jump off the cliff, pen and paper in hand, and write yourself out of a bad ending before you hit bottom.

You might see why I sometimes avoid tarrying near the edge.

Day 253

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