Chained To The Keyboard

I hope everyone had a Merry Whatever. I know I did. I’m still eating ham and pudding.

Because it’s traditional, here are my resolutions for the new year of 2006. I banned myself from including any wishy-washy “I want to be a better person”-style resolutions; they’re all hard and fast goals.

In the New Year, I will:

1. Make a daily writing schedule and stick to it.

2. Update this blog at least three times a week.

3. Finish my current screenplay, and at least one other.

That’s it. I don’t think those are unreasonable goals.

I do, however, have two bonus resolutions. They are unreasonable, but I include them as a kind of extra feature, a Director’s Cut if you will:

1. Sell a screenplay.

2. Get an agent.

Happy New Year’s everyone. And if you live on the Gold Coast and you’re going to the party at my house, you better not wander into my room and throw up on my books.

Because I will find you.

Writers from all corners of the scribosphere have been responding to Red Right Hand’s thrown gauntlet. The challenge? Post a single page from one of your screenplays.

I’m here to announce that I have finally caved to peer pressure. For your reading pleasure, here is the first page from the Invader Zim spec I wrote a few months ago, entitled ‘Even Scarier Monkey‘. Given that it got me my current job, I’m quite proud of it.

(It also forms a nice simian theme in combination with the previous post. Because we all know monkeys are cool. Although not as cool as pirates. Also, I apologise for the awful formatting. I couldn’t get John August’s style sheets to work in Blogsome.)

INT. ZIM’S LAB - NIGHT

We’re in ZIM’S underground lab below his house. Zim has a welding helmet on - he’s using a blowtorch to weld something inside GIR’S head.

He’s done. He turns the torch off, flips the helmet faceplate back and closes the lid of Gir’s head.

ZIM
Finally, the installation is complete! Do you know what this means, Gir?

GIR
Ummmm… No.

ZIM
With your new Mezmero-Chip, you will be able to mesmerise my enemies! My filthy enemies… And once they are mesmerised, I shall be able to -

GIR
You mean like this?

Gir’s eyes light up and become twin spirals - the classic ‘hypno’ effect.

Zim stares into Gir’s eyes, transfixed. He stands rigid in place, drooling a little. Gir’s eyes turn back to normal. He stares at Zim, then loses interest and wanders off.

CUT TO:

INT. ZIM’S LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

Gir walks into the living room. He’s holding a little chocolate popsicle. He plops down on the couch and flicks on the TV.
It’s the Scary Monkey Show - the whole show consists of a scary-looking monkey glaring at the camera. Gir licks at his popsicle and eagerly watches the screen.

On-screen, someone offers the SCARY MONKEY a banana. The monkey growls at the hand, knocks it away.

MONKEY HANDLER (O.S.)
Come on, now. Who wants a nice banana?

SCARY MONKEY
Raaargh! No banana! Me want freedom!

The Scary Monkey roars and leaps towards the camera. Someone screams.

The image goes to static, then a little hand-drawn error card pops up on screen. It says ‘THE SCARY MONKEY HAS ESCAPED. PLEASE STAND BY.’ It has a little smiley face and a picture of a camera crew running away from a snarling monkey.

Gir grins.

GIR
I love this show.

Wasn’t that fun?

Holy lack of updates, Batman!

I’ve been a very busy little writer this week, and consequently the blog has fallen by the wayside a little bit. On the plus side, you’ve all had a good solid week to follow my advice and go find yourselves a rare 1856 edition of the Arabian Nights. It shouldn’t have cost you more than a few thousand dollars. That’s good, we’ll all be on the same page now.

On a completely different tack, King Kong is absolutely brilliant. This review by Walter Chaw - my favourite film critic - completely sums up my feelings on the film. I had in fact seen and loved the first film, but I feel Jackson’s singular vision actually surpassed it. If ever a beloved film needed a remake, this was it. It’s that enduring, iconic image of the ape atop the Empire State building, clutching the blonde heroine while being buzzed by fighters. That image is etched in my mental encyclopedia next to the entry for ‘Cinema’. So it’s good to know that the Kong story will live on with a new generation of cinema-goers. Make no mistake: This is a remake of love.

With The Lord of the Rings and now Kong, it’s become clear that Jackson has the amazing ability to micromanage every fine detail of a film while simultaneously staying focussed on the core story. And it obviously helps that he seems to have an amazing team of writers, production crew and visual effects people all working together as one. He’s got a team going, and he’s not afraid to use them. I say: Long may WETA reign.

In fact, I’d even be prepared to commit Nerd Seppuku by claiming the unclaimable: Kong is better than LotR. It’s tighter, cleaner and stronger in almost every way. Definite Film of the Year material.

Speaking of which: As the year end approaches and I look over my top films list for the year, I notice that at least four of the very highest-rated (Serenity, King Kong, Sin City, Batman Begins) are genre films, and all are adaptations. Funny that.

Then I notice that a lot of my low points are also genre adaptations/remakes: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, War of the Worlds, Star Wars Episode 3.

Coincidence, cosmic alignment, or evidence of Hollywood’s growing lack of originality? You decide!

NOTE: If you like comics, you might be interested to know that I’ve started occasionally contributing to this blog. It’s a fan blog, open to many contributors, with the noble mission of talking about comics without utilising snark, sarcasm, hate, vitriol or bile. A difficult task, indeed.

This blog is supposed to be about the craft of writing. Ostensibly, my role is the distribution of pearls of writerly wisdom, but in practice I usually end up raving about videogames, superheroes, the state of the Australian film industry, Grant Morrison’s brain and the weather.

My friends tell me this is a good thing. A consistently on-topic, methodically-updated blog is no fun at all, they say. But every blog must occasionally obey its Prime Directive. Therefore, today’s post will actually contain genuine advice for writers. And here it is:

Read a book. Specifically, the Burton translation of The Arabian Nights (aka Alf Layla Wa Layla, aka The Book Of 1001 Nights, aka One Thousand Nights And A Night). It’s probably the best lesson in storytelling you’ll ever get.

You’ve probably all heard of The Arabian Nights. It’s almost solely responsible for every Western idea about Arab culture and mythology. The roc, Sindbad, Ali Baba, Aladdin, genies, flying carpets and evil viziers all come from this one monumental work. If you buy books, chances are good that you own a stripped-down ‘collection’ of stories from the Nights. But most people know very little about the real thing.

In their original form, the Nights were a collection of roughly one thousand myths and folktales from early medieval Persia. They were later transposed and translated into Arabic after the rise of Islam, becoming the primary story of that culture (just as the Iliad was to ancient Greece). The first manuscripts must have been both incredibly long and incredibly varied in content, containing as they did around a thousand wildly-different stories; from comedies, animal tales and bawdy tales; to epics, tragedies and tales of war.

It was many centuries later (the 1700s) that the Nights finally made their way to the West, courtesy of a French scholar named Antoine Galland. Interestingly, Galland also inserted many of the tales we most commonly associate with the Nights: Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were added at this stage. The Nights became popular, but there was not yet a defining version, a translation that kept the style and tone of the original. The problem was, none of the English translators were particularly well-versed in Arab culture.

Enter Sir Richard Burton. This guy was the Indiana Jones of the scholarly Victorian world. Burton was a soldier, explorer, translator, author and Orientalist par excellence. He spoke 29 different languages, including perfect Persian, Arabic and Hindustani. He discovered Lake Tanganyika and the source of the Nile. He was the first Westerner to visit the capital of Somalia, and the first to enter the Holy City of Mecca without being executed (For this last feat he spent months crafting the perfect Arab disguise, even going so far as to circumcise himself). He wrote over 20 books, including a translation of the Karma Sutra, and was knighted by the Queen. In his free time, he was one of the best swordsmen in all of Europe.

Our man Burton did not think much of the English Nights translations available at the time. Never one to mince words, he called them ‘hideous, hag-like and naked’ and ‘disfigured by childish mistakes’; and despaired that they reduced a work ‘of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a nice present for little boys’. So he damn well did something about it. Burton released his weighty translation (16 volumes) in 1856, and it is still the best English translation available. He preserves the violence, the politics, the religion and, most importantly, the sex. At the time of the book’s release, Burton’s anthropological footnotes were basically considered pornography. I’m pretty sure they’d still raise a few eyebrows today.

For the writer, The Arabian Nights is a firsthand lesson in what it means to be a storyteller. It’s all here: surprising twists, subtle character development, cliff-hangers, complex allegories, flashbacks, role reversals and stories nested within other stories (And as an interesting aside, I’m beginning to see that the Nights was a major influence on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman). This book is the perfect toolkit for anyone who aspires to hold their audience’s attention and tell meaningful tales. Aleister Crowley once said: ‘If you want to learn magic, begin by reading The Arabian Nights‘. He could very well have been talking about writing.

And besides, you have to love a book in which characters frequently begin their stories with the line: ‘God forgive me for the lies I am about to tell!’

The writer’s battlecry, if ever there was one. So get thee hence to a second-hand bookstore!

It’s that hideous time of year.

Even with all the airconditioners at full capacity, I feel as though I may as well be sitting on the surface of the goddamn sun. The worst part is that I can practically feel myself getting slower and dumber in the heat.

Antonio Vivaldi hated summer. He had chronic asthma as a child, and so couldn’t go outside and play in the heat for very long without almost asphyxiating. Consequently, his ‘Summer’ movement from The Four Seasons isn’t exactly a happy, playing-on-the-beach, ideal Australian summer. It’s more of a wilting, withering, muggy, dangerous, nighttime thunderstorm kind of summer.

He wrote a little sonnet to go with it:

Beneath the blazing sun’s relentless heat
men and flocks are sweltering,
pines are scorched.
We hear the cuckoo’s voice; then sweet songs of the turtle dove and finch are heard.
Soft breezes stir the air… but threatening north wind sweeps them suddenly aside.
The shepherd trembles, fearful of violent storm and what may lie ahead.
His limbs are now awakened from their repose by fear of lightning’s flash and thunder’s roar, as gnats and flies buzz furiously around.
Alas, his worst fears were justified, as the heavens roar and great hailstones beat down upon the proudly standing corn.

I’m with you, Tony. The next Ice Age cannot come quick enough.

Well, the first 10 pages of the comic script have been completed and sent to my Talented Artist, to do with as she wishes. To be honest, it was a major adjustment to go from the hidebound structure of the screenplay to the ‘anything goes’ format of the comic script, for which individual issues may follow different formatting schemes. Nonetheless, it’ll be exciting to see the art as it starts to take shape.

Speaking of which, an eery thing happened to me the other day. I was browsing away with multiple windows open, happily multi-tasking, reading two separate interviews which I’d happened upon for different reasons. One was Alan Moore; the other, Grant Morrison. Both interviews were conducted in 2003.

So it was pretty startling when both writers began simultaneously saying the exact same thing.

Morrison:

“‘Emergence’ is the science of spontaneous order, which means quite simply that ‘intelligence’ can be regarded as a by-product of complexity.

One bee is not particularly smart but group a number of bees together and at a critical threshold something interesting happens - a ‘hive’ emerges. That is to say, from the aggregation of a number of not very intelligent units, a mass intelligence emerges. The same thing happens everywhere in nature; a single sponge cell is a fairly aimless, hopeless animal but gather enough of them together and a colony intelligence is seen to develop which drives each individual along as part of a group endeavor.

So, now that we have the idea in our heads that ‘intelligence’ appears when systems become increasingly complex, we can approach my notion of ‘living comics.’

Think of a STORY. My contention is that a story can be made sufficiently complex that it achieves some measure of self-awareness - in fact I believe this is what’s happening when authors talk about characters ‘taking control’ or when they say ‘the story just took a turn I wasn’t planning…’. When I was doing The Invisibles, I was definitely aware of the book as a living entity which was interacting with me in many of the ways a human being might but at the time I was thinking of this ‘aliveness’ as a kind of mystical quality not as an emergent property that could reproduced without recourse to the spirit world. I’d like to see if I can deliberately ‘wake up’ a story and let it make its own decisions.”

Moore:

“But it might be an idea - and this is just a mad, hippie, did-too-much-acid-in-the-’60s kind of theory but - if you could get an idea that was complex enough, self-referential enough, could it become aware? They say that awareness is an emergent property of complexity. Could that be true on a purely immaterial level, about ideas? If you had a complex enough idea form, could it become aware? Could you have things that were ideas but were alive? I mean, I’ve certainly encountered things that seem to be ideas but act as if they’re alive. I’m not saying that they are, I’m not saying that they’re not just some projection of me, that’s also quite possible, I wouldn’t want to rule that out but they pretend not to be. [Laughs] They appear to be something else. That is the way that my magic tends to go. When I first beame initiated into magic, which was by an event, a spontaneous event, rather than in any organization, that was the way that my thoughts seemed to be going on the subject: that actually, awareness is a space, mind can be looked at as a space and that space may be inhabited. There might be entities that are indigenous to that space. Flora and fauna of the mental realm, which I think is more than enough to explain all the demons, angels and chimera and UFO grey aliens and elves, leprechauns, pixies of all of our human culture.”

Pretty freaky, huh? What do you reckon: Coincidence or synchronicity? Whatever the case, it’s certainly an interesting theory.

I imagine the more skeptical among you are wondering if they’re pulling your collective legs with this ‘living ideas’ stuff. Perhaps what they’re really doing is allegorically referring to the convergence of ideas that takes place in a writer’s subconscious? I’d be inclined to disagree, if only because both men are practising magicians, a philosophy that usually emphasises the human will; and one which certainly accepts the idea of microscopic changes (thought-forms) effecting macroscopic results.

In other words, I think they’re serious. Definitely something for writers to think about. And if nothing else, ‘living ideas’ is itself a very cool, very Morrisonian idea.

IN OTHER NEWS: Famed CRPG designer Bioware is running a competition for writers, the winners of which may be hired to work for the company. For a dual-classed Video Game Nerd/Aspiring Writer like myself, this is akin to an early, more exciting Christmas. I’m off to EB to find a bargain-priced copy of Neverwinter Nights.