What is a blog for?

I'm going to set myself a challenge. Fear of failure is my biggest obstacle to my daily writing. So I'm going to try to fail and see what happens. My new goal is to get a piece of writing rejected five times. That's five rejection letters for one small piece of writing. As soon as I collect all five, the piece will become a blog post.

And hey, if I'm as good as I think I am, maybe I'll never get those rejection letters, and this blog will continue to suck, or at least dwindle away to even less frequent postings, because it won't have any real writing on it. Or I'll be a famous writer posting my speaking and book signing tours on this blog, or answering questions from all the other new writers.

What I learned at the library today

I learned that being a professional writer is actually two quite different jobs. One is the actual writing process, which you have to do all the time. The second job is selling your writing, which is almost as spirit-crushing as a regular day job, like how I used to sell kitchen knives.

The New Star Trek Sucks

This will be my attempt at a movie review. I've never written a decent movie review before.

It's all too easy to point out a movie's flaws, so as I am inexperienced at writing reviews, I will resort to being negative. But before I do that, I just want to say that I did enjoy the new Star Trek. It had some really good scenes, and it was really funny in parts. Unfortunately, it also had some really stupid scenes, and too many for my taste.

Let me try and pick out a few elements that stood out to me. For one, I think all the actors did a good job at reinventing the characters. All except Karl Urban, who played Dr. McCoy. Urban didn't reinvent the character so much as produce a "carbon copy" (his own words) of DeForest Kelly's version of the character. Part of it was the writing. Everything bout Urban's performance screamed "I'm trying to be DeForest Kelly". I actually thought this was really cool at first. "Hey, he sounds exactly like Dr. McCoy," I said. But then none of the other characters sounded anything like their previous versions. It was either one bright spot in a sea of poor imitations, or one try-too-hard in a film that was about forgetting the old versions. Either way, he didn't fit in the movie.

Another problem I have with the movie is the ridiculous position that Kirk is placed in. Throughout the first half of the movie, Kirk is nothing but a screw-up. He doesn't do a single heroic thing. The old James T. Kirk was the hero par excellence; not so with Chris Pine. He reminded me a lot of Hayden Christensen in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. All hype, and no substance. Perhaps this is a common symptom of seeing your heroes (or villains) in the light of growing up and making mistakes. They're really impressive once they grow up, and it is clear that they have an interesting story that got them there, but once you see that interesting story on film, you lose some respect for their awesomeness. In Kirk's case though, I also blame the way the writers took the plot of the movie.

Actually, in Star Trek, Kirk's lack of heroism is explained by the plot: according to the story, he never becomes the hero he was destined to be, because he grew up without a father. His father was never supposed to die, and a well-adjusted Kirk grows up to be captain of the Enterprise. The orphaned Kirk turns out to be a total screw-up, and there's no reason given why he just "fails upwards" into the captain's chair, when Spock and several others are clearly better qualified for the position. Abrams said that this film wasn't made for the fans, but if that's true, then why bother with Kirk at all? I can't see how anyone who isn't already a fan would give two hoots about this ridiculous character.

Now, about the "moral" about needing a father, the movie sends out mixed messages. First, we discover that fatherless Kirk is a loser, and he fails at everything he does. So I guess having a father-figure is important. But then, magically when he meets the future Spock, Kirk transforms into the starship captain that he was always meant to be, father or no father. So it turns out it was his "friends", none of whom particularly like him anyways, that allow him to succeed. I'm actually fine with either message, friends or father, we all need someone to support us if we're going to take on such an important responsibility as a starship captain; I just would have preferred a consistent message, or a message that took me from A to B.

Next on my list of quibbles is Sulu. I think Sulu is a completely useless character in the movie. (unlike in the original series, in which he was awesome.) He has two moments: first, he fails to get the ship started. So he basically looks like an idiot and an incompetent pilot. Whatever. I don't mind that so much. But then there's the scene where he whips out a folding sword from nowhere. I guess it's supposed to be a homage to the original Sulu, who was an expert swordsman. But in the context of the movie, it makes no sense.

And then there's the red-suited guy that accompanies Kirk and Sulu on the skydive down to the drilling platform. As soon as the guy shows up in a red suit, if you're a Trekkie, you know exactly what his destiny is. He's going to bite it. He's gonna die. And for one happy moment, I was hoping that the writers would throw the fans a bone, and maybe toy with him a bit. Like maybe he wouldn't die right away, but something funny would get him. But no, he pretty much jumps straight into the blast of fire, no tension at all. I suppose to be honest, that really is true to the original series, because the writing was that bad there too. But the red-suited guy dying is a homage to bad writing that I could have done without. Or at least, they could have done it in a smarter way. As in "no no, guys, I'm okay, the fire didn't burn me. Let me just ... AAAAGH!" and then something unsuspected kills him.

Chekov was one character that I semi-enjoyed in this film. I laughed when the computer couldn't understand his Russian accent, but I would have thought by the 23rd century, computers would be able to compensate for things like accents.

Speaking of Chekov and him being a genius and everything, I sort of liked how the film gave out that each of the crew members were experts in their field. That said, I didn't like how it was presented. Rather than showing what they could do, each character was basically introduced as, for example "This is Uhura. She's really good at languages and communications stuff. She's a xenolinguist." (I actually love that word). It's all telling, and very little effort put into showing. So when an alien language issue comes up, there's no tension there either. It's just, "okay, we have an alien language problem. Do we have an expert for that? Yes? Uhura? Good. Problem solved."

And then "okay, we have a transporter problem. Do we have an expert for that? What? Chekov? But he's not in the transporter room! Have him run down the corridor really fast and then instantly solve the problem as soon as he gets in there."

I don't know how much I want to say about the aliens in the film. Except, in Star Wars, for example, the background is absolutely teeming with weird monsters and aliens. In Star Wars, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone in a rubber suit. In this film, the new Star Trek, every alien makes a statement. Every alien means something, although what that is, I can't really understand. For example, there's the beautiful green woman alien. She's green. And beautiful. And that's it. That's why she's in the movie. Because she's green.

And Kirk lands on a deserted ice planet, only to discover two alien creatures, both of which immediately try to eat him. There are two monsters on the entire planet, and Kirk manages to tick them both off.

And Scotty has a little alien sidekick that does nothing and says nothing. He just sits on things, and Scotty yells at him. And he's not inconspicuous. You always want to think, "ok, that little alien is going to come in handy somehow, I'm just waiting to find out his significance." But there is no significance. The alien sidekick is just there to be an alien.

I really don't know what I'm asking for here. I guess in a proper sci-fi movie, aliens and monsters are either part of the background, or they're somehow important to the plot. But every single alien in this Star Trek film, is somewhere in between. I think it's a case of the background intent, but the director is too proud of the aliens to let them sort of fade into the background. He wants them to stand out so that everyone can see how much money they spent on rubber suits and CGI.

Overall, maybe I was expecting too much from this film. Everybody said it was good, so I went in expecting a good story. What I got was some fun action sequences, a few chuckles, and a whole bunch of plot waving. (Eg. "we really need Sulu to do a sword-fight, so just before we have him pull out a sword, we'll have him say that he knows how to fence.") The science fiction part of the film was typical Star Trek fare, which is to say, often outright wrong scientifically speaking, especially when dealing with temporal paradoxes, but I can't complain too much about that.

On "Spoken Word" Poetry

The following post sounds worse than I mean it to. I actually really do enjoy spoken word poetry, but this is a bit of a rant. Another time I'll talk about all the good things.

Here's what so-called "spoken word" poets (including me, when I read out loud) are doing. One, reading a written work. Two, being a character (in other words, acting). Three, going for a laugh (being a comedian). Four, making weird sounds (using their voice and words as a musical instrument).

None of these are an accurate translation of what written poetry is to me. Written poetry is dense. It is infused with meaning. A single word can mean so much to a poem.

So what is a performer supposed to do with a powerful word or image? In a written work, a powerful word might appear exactly like every other word in the poem. Very rarely is a single word

emphasized.

In performance poetry, if you (I) let an important word slip by without special emphasis, you risk the audience missing it. But if you emphasize it too much, you sound like an idiot. Or worse, you sound like you think your audience consists of idiots.

Maybe it's just me, but too often when I listen to poetry out loud, the part of my brain that understands things shuts down, and in my head, it sounds like this:

"poetry, poetry, poetry, poetry
poetry poetry poetry poetry
words words words words
words words words words."

Am I the only one? I find the same thing often with music lyrics. So many songs are virtually unintelligible to me. The only way I can comprehend a song or a poem performed is to read the lyrics while I'm listening.

Note to Myself on Writing Novels

I'm just typing this out so I can organize my thoughts a little better on the subject before I go ahead with writing. Hopefully I can come back to this later in life, and maybe someday it will be useful to a random person on the internet.

Last night as I was trying to get to sleep, I had the following insight on writing. Not that it's revolutionary or new. I've heard it before, but only now does it seem to make sense.

The narrative voice is as much a character in a work of writing as any other explicit actor in the story. I have read novels in which the narrative voice changes from chapter to chapter. For one example, take _Last Orders_, by Graham Swift. There are several characters in the novel that take turns telling the story. I've read reviews, and one from my mom, that expressed annoyance at this shiftiness in the narrative.

There is a certain kind of reader, perhaps the majority of them, that prefers to be led through a story by a consistent voice. The kind of reader who doesn't mind being left to his or her own devices, probably doesn't even read novels. They're probably more a fan of poetry.

At the same time, I think the English language's two greatest storytellers, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, spoke exclusively with conjured voices. Shakespeare necessarily, as he wrote dramas in which every line had to be spoken by a performer. But Chaucer, I'm less sure about how his work was performed (was it sung?). The Canterbury Tales are stories told with specific narrative flavour, even if the narrator rarely speaks of himself or herself.

How often do we see this in modern literature? How many writers today can turn themselves into ten writers, or as many as are needed? Today's writers are often told to develop their own voice. This is reasonable advice, I think, because the temptation for writers starting out is to try to be universal. They are doomed to fail at that particular goal, because their conception of the universal is limited to the works they've read. So their "voice" is an imitation of those they've read.

I think the best path for a writer is to develop multiple voices. Start with one, your strongest voice. I suppose this might be the voice of argumentation. It's the voice you might use to convince someone of a political point, a robust, sharp, powerful voice. Maybe with a hint of irony, sarcasm, and satire. But move on from there and develop a range, and hone it to the point where entire novels can be written as if you were another person.

And here I am talking as if I know anything. Hopefully I'll read this again in 10 years, after I've published 10 novels and countless poetry. Will I see this as baby steps? The most obvious thing in the world? Or will I have become so engrossed with my own voice that I forget this tactic entirely. I think this is the problem that many authors have, which is not so much a problem if you have an audience who loves your developed voice, but it doesn't work for the majority of writers who are limited as to how far they can grow.

New Poetry Method "One Word at a Time"

So I was reading "The Best Poems of the English Language" edited and selected by Harold Bloom, and I came on a new strategy to writing poetry. Here it is:

"one word at a time"

You'd think it was kind of simple. I'll use this blog post to try and explain. See, prose is written in thoughts, or sentences at a time. You think your thought, and then you write it down. At least, that's how I tend to write prose. Prose is a record of what has been thought. It can be edited, of course, to become essentially a script for what the writer wants the reader to think. Either way, it's a record of thought.

Poetry, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily contain the tracks of thought. Poetry has a similar function to prose, but not every thought is written down. What I mean by "one word at a time", is that after each individual word is written, the poet pauses, considers the word he or she just wrote, sees whether it fits into the poem, and whether an alternative would do the job better. Only when satisfied with that particular word, often having crossed out several alternatives, or at least rejected alternatives in her head, does she continue on to the next word.

Under this method, every word counts. Every word must be full of meaning, except maybe connecting words (like "of" and "to" and "the"), but even then, the connecting words must be analyzed, and it must be determined if they can be cut out. The only essential elements of a thought are one noun and one verb.

Now, different critics will come up with their own ideas for what makes great poetry, but Harold Bloom seems to believe that great poetry should be rich in ideas. It should be dense with thought. Every word should be suffused with meaning.

In addition, Bloom asks that poets always bring something new to a word when it is used. The English language has books full of overused words. After all, there isn't much difference between a cliche and an expression or idiom. Words are gradually worn out by so much use. And you don't have to have a huge literary background to know that a word is overused. It is simply enough that you know the expression you're using, to know that it is an existing part of the language. Any word used in exactly the way that you were given it, is probably a worn-out piece of language.

Remember, this is just one way to look at poetry, and other approaches will embrace the standard meanings of words. But in order to make every word count, you have to give it a slightly different meaning.

Unfortunately, what sometimes happens to words used novelly, is that they get broken. I really don't know the limit of how far you can stretch the meaning of a word before it snaps and becomes syntactically useless, that is, incapable of conveying any information beyond random syllables to increase the foot-count of a line of poetry.

So as you're considering each word, ask if you're using it exactly the way it has been handed down to you, or if you've managed to put a slight new twist on its meaning. And if you find that the word means exactly what convention dictates that it should mean, perhaps there is another word slightly less obvious that could take its place.

I have a theory regarding rhyme and rhythm, too. See, poets occasionally write with rhyme and rhythm in mind, and this can sometimes make them make strange choices in the words they use. The words often wouldn't be a prose-writer's first choice to convey the intended meaning, but instead are chosen more for their sound. The result is indeed a word used in a slightly new way, and the genesis was the rhymed poem. This might actually explain, partly, the popularity of rhymed poetry through the ages, as poets have found rhyme to be a useful way to find new meanings for old words.

Over My Head in Math

Among other books, I got in the mail yesterday, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", by Benoit B. Mandelbrot. So far I've only been able to flip through it, but it has become quite clear that the mathematical language is over my head, and it might as well be written in German (ie. I have minimal experience with it, and it bears a passing resemblance to English, but not enough to make things intelligible to me.)

However, the book does contain lots of pretty pictures, and I am able to comprehend enough to be amazed that all of the pictures in the book are generated not by an artist [arguable], but by a computer program, or more precisely stated, by a mathematical algorithm that looks nothing like the final result.

The other amazing thing about fractal math is that people have been using it for the past thirty years in computer applications, and we simply wouldn't have as many of the modern technologies that we take for granted if it weren't for fractals. It may be over my head, but enough people in the world do understand it that it can be put to all kinds of practical uses.