Why the World Needs Superman

                I had planned on this being a post about what makes something “Iconic”, in terms of creativity. What makes one character or building or work of art, iconic while another is merely famous? But when I plan out in my head what I wanted to say on the subject, it keeps coming up Superman.   I was going to talk about how diluted and overused the term has become. How it describes the front of a Mustang and the back of a Porsche.  It covers Marilyn’s white dress and Bruce Lee’s yellow jumpsuit.  I was going to talk in some depth about how an Iconic character had to be the embodiment of a concept or belief much greater than himself, but after the events in Aurora, Colorado last week, I’ve really been thinking a lot about Superman.

                Superman is unarguably Iconic in the best sense of the word. His symbol is immediately recognizable in almost any corner of the earth. In any language or culture the character embodies the very best of qualities. Courage, Strength, Compassion, Self-sacrifice.  When we talk comics, my friends don’t really get why I like Superman so much. They say he’s too powerful, that he’s too much of a boy scout, that his stories lines have become stale.  They think he’s become irrelevant to modern readers. God I hope not.The day Superman becomes irrelevant; we are well and truly doomed.

                You see, the thing that Superman is the embodiment of, the thing that makes him “iconic” is us. Superman is us on our very best days, the way we should try to be every day.  He is Brandon Fisher from Pennsylvania who pounded through 2000 feet of rock with his Pneumatic Quad-hammer drill to rescue 33 Chilean miners.  He’s every fireman who ever ran into a burning building to bring someone out alive. He’s the pilot who put that passenger jet down on the Potomac with no lives lost. He’s Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves,  who used their bodies to protect their girlfriends from gunfire in that Colorado movie theater.  They had lives and plans and families who loved them. They had every reason to say every man for himself and scramble for the door. A lot of people did. But they had courage, compassion, and the strength to lay down their lives doing what was right. 

                I look at the world around me, and I can no longer believe as I did in my youth that it is mostly a good place. I think the bad people outnumber the good. I think the lazy and selfish and apathetic outnumber them both.  You have only to connect to the internet to see that cruelty and bigotry and snide insults have become the natural response for everything from politics to natural disasters to youtube kittens. It seems like there are so few people actually trying to do good.  They’re holding the world together with both hands, and the rest of us are just hanging on or actively making it worse. 

              I know I’ve wandered from my original mission statement of better writing . It’s just late, and the news coming out of Colorado has me a little brokenhearted.  I will say only this; As writers you have a forum. You have the opportunity to influence your readers, even if only a little bit for good or bad.  You can show them that qualities like bravery and self sacrifice and helping one another for no other reason than its right , are characteristics worth having. Or you can present that sort of thing as outdated, lame, naive, and no longer relevant to the modern reader.  I just think a good story is one that in some way makes you want to somehow be a better person. And the world needs every Superman it can get.

Writing a Story with Heart

           Any good story will illicit an emotional response, it’s the reason writers do what they do. No criticism will ever sting you as deeply as indifference.  Stories can be sad, or funny, thrilling or thought provoking, but not every story that creates an emotional response in the reader, can be said to have heart.  What is heart? Why do some movies leave you with a warm glow inside and a feeling of hope for the future, when others that try to tell a similar story whiff terribly?  I find that the stories that resonate most deeply with an audience are the ones that take us home.  Heart is a grubby little boy in patched overalls and a gap-toothed grin offering to let Charles Foster Kane ride his sled because he looks sad and no one can feel bad when they’re sledding down a big hill.

                Life has a way of breaking you down over time. You start to lose yourself a piece at a time.  There was a time you believed in true love. And then the ugly breakup happened. There was a time you were going to play for the NFL, and then your knee went out.  There was a time you planned to do something really meaningful with your life, like join the Peace Corps and build schools in Africa, and then your student loans came due and you had to take a job, and when you looked up ten years had passed.  That’s just how life goes, and after a while you get used to that piece of yourself that used to be so important being gone.  The pain, when you feel it, is the phantom ache of a lost limb. Something to feel melancholy about on a rainy afternoon.

                Now imagine someone walked into a pawn shop with a briefcase full of money.  Pawnshops, the elephant graveyards where forsaken dreams go to die.  There, on the walls and on the shelves, amongst the dvd players and the waffle irons, are the treasures that someone used to love gathering dust.  So he cleans them out.  He buys the Fender Stratocaster and the engagement ring, he buys the 21 speed Schwinn and the Japanese Cooking knives.  Then he goes looking for the original owners.  “Mrs Johnson” he says, I think you might have lost this ring somewhere.  I get the feeling you’re going to need it really soon, .  And then he’s off to the next house, and it’s “Dude! We’re getting the band back together.  “and You and me buddy, Tour de France 2013.”  This is what writing a story with heart is about. It’s finding the misplaced part of your reader’s soul where the hope, and the happiness and the self respect used to live and bringing it home to them.  It’s showing the jaded divorcee that sometimes the ugly breakup is what brings you to the place you need to be to meet the love of your life.  It’s showing the “could’ve been great” college footballer that the NFL dream didn’t happen because he was always meant to be a professional surfer.  Sometimes people do stand up for what’s right. Sometimes teachers do make a difference.  Sometimes love does last a lifetime.

We read your stories, and for a while, we remember who we were meant to be.  We realize that maybe that person didn’t die. Maybe they just got lost for a while. And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, we do something about it.
                                                                 

It's not as bad as you think.

Just a short post today to share this gem I stumbled across on Youtube.

There are a few lessons to be learned here.  One, whatever weaknesses there may be in your writing, you're probably better than these guys, so don't despair, you're at least part of the way to where you want to be. Two, do your homework. As Billy Crystal says, it's probably a good idea to know what they call the thing the captain talks into on a submarine. If you're going to use it in a story, know how it works. Three. Loyalty is a wonderful thing, but when it comes to reviews, honesty is what helps your friends become better writers. Constructive honesty. Calling someone an idiot doesn't help anything. And remember, a Writer writes, always.

The Probem of Diversity in Writing

This is going to be kind of a long post, and one that takes a position some may consider controversial, but I hope the reader will bare with me.  I’ll try to be as clear and concise as I can be.   Today I am going to talk about the problems inherent in the belief that  a story must have a diverse cast of characters drawn from  various races, genders, religions, sexual preferences and economic strata, or be considered bigoted.  I’ve seen good writers called racist because they didn’t have the whole set of humankind, all presented in a positive manner.  This is not a notion I hold to.

                The idea of true diversity in a written work is a lot harder than it might initially seem.  If the idea is to make everyone feel represented in your story, race is only the beginning.  Let’s take just the African American segment of our ambitiously inclusive story for the moment.  We need both a clean cut good looking educated professional type, and a tough, street savvy type.  In a tv show they might be played by Blair Underwood and Ice-T respectively.   We also need a least one black woman, preferably more than one so we can have a professional type, and a hard working single mother. At least one of the characters should be religious. At least one needs to be gay.  In this case we can probably get away without having a republican, but we really should have at least one. Some poor and some well off, some athletically gifted, some not, some young, some old.  We’re looking at somewhere around five or six African American characters all portrayed positively, and some pulling double duty as both athletic and gay, or professional and religious, ect .  Now we have to do this again for the Hispanic, Asian and Middle Eastern characters with the added complication of cultural origin and religious sect. You can’t represent a Peruvian with a Columbian. There’s bad blood there.  You can’t represent a Shiite with a Sunni or an Indian with a Pakistani. 

               You can see how if we tried to write this story, we’re already dealing with a cast of 30 or 40 characters, all of which require development and attention and screen time.  It’s not really a viable scenario. The most you can hope for in terms of diversity is to pick your battles.  What kind of story are you telling? Is it better served by having a gay character or an Asian? Or even a Caucasian.  Maybe you’re Tyler Perry.

                So let’s say you’ve decided to write a story, and you’ve cut back all your diverse groups as deeply as you can without getting pestered by those Berkeley critics.  You’re writing a story about a commercial flight that goes down in the Himalayas where this small group of survivors must work together to make their way to civilization.  We’ll say we have a 35 year old white engineering consultant on his way to a project in Asia somewhere, a black marine lieutenant retuning from leave where he met his new daughter.  A Hispanic lady doctor on her way to a clinic in India, a 47 year old Japanese salaryman with Sony, and a 21 year old Egyptian Muslim woman who works as a photographer for a Newspaper in Cairo.  This is a suspiciously diverse group with no repeats, but let’s role with it.  Given what you know about these people, how well can you write them? Does each of them have their own unique voice and presence? Do their thoughts and actions and dialogue match their cultures and backgrounds, or are they really just white people whose physical descriptions are Asian, Hispanic or Black?

                About 12 years ago give or take I stumbled onto a fanfiction writer named Chris Dee. Note the name. She writes the Cat-Tales series which is based on the DC comics Universe and centers on the relationship between Batman and Catwoman.  We eventually became friends and even collaborated on some graphics projects, but when I first spoke to her after reading a few of her stories I paid her the immense compliment of not knowing she was a She.  You see, in those first few stories I read, I perceived an insight into the way I thought as a man that I had not formerly encountered in fanfiction written by women.  I think that if you are going to be a good writer, you owe that level of insight to all of your characters.  That can be a problem, because I don’t know very many writers who can write a young Muslim woman from Cairo working in a man’s profession so well that young Egyptian women will be surprised that you are not one of them.   I think your story is better served, and your readers in turn, by writing characters that feel natural to you. When a character comes to you organically from the needs of the story, everything comes more smoothly; the actions and dialogue often write themselves. Shoehorning characters that aren’t right for the story for the sake of diversity will disrupt the flow of your creativity.  Imagine poker night with your buddies. Imagine the cigars, and the beer, and the nachos, the boasting and the dirty jokes. Now imagine your wife made you let your mother-in-law play.

                I am not saying that diversity should not be a part of your writing. I’m saying write the characters that work best for the story, no matter what they are. There wasn’t a white guy in sight in Slumdog Millionaire and I could care less. I loved that movie. It’s a deeply human story, and I’m a human being. That’s enough for me.  That is the golden rule of writing for me. Tell a human story, and the rest will take care of itself.  

                Diversity in and of itself is a good thing. It brings fresh perspectives, new ideas and a greater understanding of the people we live with. It makes us more fully human.  There is something ugly however in the way it is being pushed into the arts though.  It is the expectation that your reader can not rise above his prejudices and should not be expected to.  It’s like segregation for empathy.  “Don’t worry about those characters sir, well find you someone who looks like you to care about. “ That’s one of the things that drives me crazy about the scholarly journals that discuss the shows of Joss Whedon .   There’s always someone who says “Joss covers a lot of themes of female empowerment, and has positive feminist role models, but his lack of characters of color means he fails on Race.” To this I say if you can watch an episode like “The Body” and not empathize with Buffy because she’s white, then Joss Whedon is not the racist in the room. Also you should call your mother.  Believe your reader can be better than that.   Believe that if you write a human story, the innate humanity within your readers will find it’s reflection within your characters no matter what they look like. People will surprise you sometimes if you just give them the chance.

Usually I like to include some kind of picture or video to help illustrate the theme of the article, so here’s a video of people from every corner of the earth just being human.

                                                                               

Timing Attacks and You

                                

                It sometimes surprises me, when I’m trying to think of a good way to explain something , how often Starcraft  comes to mind.  Starcraft for those of you that aren’t familiar with it is a strategy game that pits three different races each with its own strengths and weaknesses against each other in a Scifi setting.  It’s been described as a game that requires the mental focus of a chess master and the manual dexterity of a concert pianist. The very best players are capable of performing between five and six distinct, premeditated actions per second, sometimes keeping that pace up for over an hour.  This impressive feat is made possible by an intimate familiarity with every unit in the game, every structure, every map and a running mental clock that is keeping track of when it is mathematically possible for something to happen.  One common strategy that these expert players will employ is called a “timing attack”. I would describe it as seizing a window of opportunity, based on your race and the buildings and upgrades you have researched, where the advantage in battle has swung in your favor.  These players have it down to a science, having their army arrive at the front of the opponent’s base precisely as their advantage comes into play, thus maximizing the time of advantage before the enemy can counter it. In other words, their units are what they need to be, where they need to be, when they need to be it. In this way Starcraft is like a well written character arc.

                There are a lot of tools you are going to want to develop as a writer, but a well honed sense of timing is going to be crucial to take your writing to the next level.  For instance, there is the timing built into dialogue for effect.

 Sally:  “Yes! Oh! OH god! Yes! Yes! YES!!!” 

 (pause one beat for effect)

 Older lady at next table to waiter:  “I’ll have what she’s having.”

                Another type of timing is built into scenes to create drama or comedy, such as an interruption that occurs just as the hero of the romantic comedy is just about to tell the heroine how he really feels about her, then the moment is lost and she stays with the jerk boyfriend till the third act, or the Scene in American Pie when Jim’s dad walks in just as Jim is finding out if third base is really like warm apple pie.

                The most important timing for a well constructed story though will require you to keep track of the big picture the same way a Starcraft professional is keeping track of how much money he has, how many bases his enemy has,   what types of units the enemy can be building at 10:45 into the game and how long he has left on the cloaking upgrade, all while moving his tanks two spaces to the left so they can cover a bottleneck better.  When writing your story, you have to know where each of your important characters is going. How long it will take them to get there and what needs to happen before they do.  Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader in Star Wars just dies. He’s not ready. Luke fighting Darth Vader in Empire has to run for his life. Still not ready. It’s only after he’s been tempered by everything that happened throughout all three movies, the training, and the battles that he can meet Vader on equal terms at the end of Return of the Jedi. Imagine if Lucas had gotten so  caught up in the Han Solo/Leia storyline that he forgot Luke until about 40 minutes before the end of Return of the Jedi? Now he has to cram in a scene before Endor where Luke somehow massively powers up. he has to obviously and clumsily alter the flow of the story so that we can believe Luke can hold his own against Vader.

 Keeping a sense of where your character is in the big picture will allow you to make adjustments to his development without disrupting his character arc and costing you momentum.   Without this awareness, you often find your characters out of position and with little time or space to get him back on track the change is jarring and obvious.  You should strive to make your direction changes fluid and seamless like a flawlessly executed aikido throw, not like a freshman in drivers  ed attempting a three point turn. In this way your character arrives at the climax of the story in the best position possible.