Someone Else’s Writing

Man, sometimes I think about how much things have changed just in my lifetime and it’s astounding. Like the fact that the term Man is no longer the catchy slang of hip youth, or that we once wore our socks all the way up to our knees while also wearing shorts and thought nothing of it.

Also, the Internet. I was there, kids, when the Internet was literally turned on, and it was … kind of boring. I remember my roommate Ken had a 386 PC with a 14.4 modem in it, and we used that to connect to a pretty bare-bones, text-only network, mainly to access newsgroups. Newsgroups were sort of like Reddit, organized around specific interests. People would post and respond, sharing knowledge and having a very long text-based conversation.

Going back to the early 1990s, my discovery of newsgroups coincided with a broadcast of the old 1960s TV show The Prisoner. Being an impressionable youth, I became obsessed with the show — if you’ve never seen it, you simply must, because it is delightfully weird. A British secret agent played with admirable paranoia and twitch by Patrick McGoohan tries to retire, is abducted by mysterious forces, and wakes up in The Village, a place apparently designed to discover whether his retirement was sincere or if he’d defected to the other side. Or possibly it is the other side, trying to get him to reveal secrets. The agent’s name is never given — in fact, no one’s name is used. Everyone in The Village has a number (the agent is Number Six). The mysterious nature of the place, along with its trippy psychedelic 1960s vibe, is definitely part of the charm. Heck, Iron Maiden wrote a song about the show:

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To say my friends and I fell into a rabbit hole on this show is an understatement. It’s almost genetically designed to be the sort of show you obsess over. It’s filled with strange details and odd references, it’s got strange inconsistencies and a very specific design sense. We spent hours and hours coming up with theories and arguing over the true meaning of everything. Then I discovered a graphic novel, Shattered Visage, that was a direct sequel to the series (though not written by the original team).

That’s when I got inspired to write pretty much the only fan fiction I’ve ever written: The Return of The King: A Story of ‘The Prisoner’.

Live Wire Act

Which is a long-winded intro into the point of this essay: I wrote my fan fiction, all 18,000 words of it, live, direct into the newsgroup alt.tv.prisoner. Meaning, I would fire up the old computer, connect to the newsgroup, and literally type a chapter into a post. No saving. No editing. No cutting and pasting. Just a burst of creativity, hitting POST, and walking away. 17 Chapters were written this way, off the top of my head, by the seat of my pants.

If you’re curious, you can read the thing (PDF | EPUB | MOBI). Be warned: It is not great, even if you’re a Prisoner Super Fan. The story I’ve posted here has been cleaned up a little — typing directly into the Internet doesn’t bode well for typos and spelling mistakes — but it hasn’t been edited or revised in any way. So, no, it’s not good. But you know what it is? It’s finished.

The lesson I took from the experience of writing directly to publication in front of a (small, but real) audience was simple: When writing a first draft, getting it done is more important than getting it right.

To this day I follow this approach. I write my first drafts (or perhaps more accurately my zero drafts) as if I’m typing them directly to the Internet like The Return of The King. I don’t go back and fix things. I don’t re-write. I don’t worry about continuity when I have an inspiration that breaks something I’d written earlier. I just keep going until I hit THE END.

Then I go back. Then I fix things. But in the mean time, I have a finished story. A finished story can be fixed-up. It can be revised, massaged, tweaked, edited, and perfected. A story you haven’t finished because you keep starting chapter 3 over and over again can’t be any of those things.

NOW, here we are thirty goddamn years later and I’m posting this piece of fan fiction for you to mock. Which leads to the real point of this essay: Am I drunk again? Dammit, I can’t tell any more.

In which I watched Terminator: Dark Fate so you don’t have to.

1984’s The Terminator is a delightfully deranged, violent sci-fi story that somehow combines Linda Hamilton’s 1980s feathered hair and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inexplicable Austrian accent and improbable body into a near-perfect story. Sure, it’s trash, but it’s very good trash, at least for some of us.

A sequel should have been a disaster. It shouldn’t have worked. But somehow James Cameron avoided simply remaking his first film with a bigger budget and managed to surprise viewers with a story that cleverly flipped the hero/villain dynamic. Making Arnold’s Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Series 800 Terminator the good guy, then having it stumblingly learn why human life is important, was a (slightly stupid) very cool plot twist, especially when coupled with Robert Patrick’s slender-but-relentless Series 1000.

Alas, like Daffy Duck’s gasoline and dynamite schtick, it’s a trick that only works once. Watching the horrifyingly terrible Terminator: Dark Fate the other day, I was struck by the fact that the diminishing returns on the T-800 Terminator learning how to be human have slipped down into negative numbers. This is an idea that has to stop.

Villain Decay

Since the glorious days of 1992, there have been four major films in the Terminator franchise: Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys, and 2019’s Dark Fate. Rise was a second sequel, and was relatively successful despite being a pretty boring retread of the previous films’ tropes. But at least it still had a relatively young Arnold Schwarzenegger (he was 55 during filming) who could at least look like a deathless killing machine.

After that, the franchise fell into a pattern: For three films, they’ve been trying to reboot the series, failing miserably, and then trying again.

2005’s Salvation tried something different. Set in the post-apocalyptic future, it tried to leave Schwarzenegger behind; Arnold only appears as a brief, CGI version of his 1984 self, the original T-800 model in a tiny cameo. If only Salvation had been a brilliant film and a huge hit, because the last two movies have been stuck with Grandpa Terminator, and it is terrible.

Everyone likes Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there’s no sin in growing old. But after the failure of Salvation, the film studios took a look around and obviously concluded the film failed because of a distinct lack of Arnold-style Terminators. And the only solution they can think of is to keep bringing Arnold back as an increasingly ludicrous killer robot.

WHY DO YOU CRY

The explanation for why a soulless killing machine would age and grow old is just barely acceptable, and then only if you’ve already suspended your disbelief to the sky-high levels these movies require: The T-800 is covered in real human flesh, complete with blood vessels, in order to fool the future scanners of the resistance. That flesh ages, even as the robotic chassis beneath it remains immortal or as close to it as technology can make it.

Sure, that makes no sense, and doesn’t explain why Old Man Terminator walks like a stiff, 73-year old man in pretty good shape, but fuck it: It’s Terminator Town. I’ll allow it.

The real problem is in Dark Fate‘s extension of the learning-to-be-human trope established in Judgment Day, where John Connor gives the T-800 simple lessons in how to be human, culminating in a line of dialogue that still makes me want to kill someone every time I hear it:

Terminator 2 Quote: I know now why you cry. But it’s something I can never do [HQ]

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Yeah: That’s terrible.

The whole “robot learns value of human emotions” isn’t exactly a new trope, and the decision to double down on it with Grandpa Terminator in Dark Fate is a terrible storytelling decision in a film filled with them. The T-800 in Dark Fate isn’t the same one from either of the two original films. There were several Terminators sent back in time, and after the end of Judgment Day one of those other ones found John Connor and, er, terminated him. Then it walked away, its mission accomplished, and instead of self-destructing or something else a real, programmed machine would have done, it goes off, starts a drapery business, and hooks up with a single mother.

This is real. This happened.

So we have Grandpa Terminator pretending to be the asexual stepfather of dreams, because apparently all Terminators have secret subroutines or unlockable achievements concerned with being a father figure. Which is a remarkable thing for an evil AI to introduce into the design, if you ask me. This leads to Grandpa Terminator doing all sorts of goofy old man schtick, like a lengthy monologue about talking a customer out of some really bad drapery decisions, and the sight of Grandpa Terminator sitting in a lawn chair that miraculously supports his 400 pound weight, passing out beers to everyone.

There’s a broad strokes argument for this sort of nutty twist, but it falls apart in practice. This is just terrible character work, necessitated solely by the desire to have Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film as the T-800 without just going ahead and animating him.

So: Mistakes were made. Someone made this movie, for example. And I watched it, as another example. Take some lessons from my shame: Playing around with making your villains into anti-heroes is fun, but it comes at a price, and that price is usually the ruination of the character. It’s a trick that works once, and you should be aware of it before you go Grandpa Terminator in your own story.

LIKE everyone else in this trash fire of a year, I’ve been bingeing a lot of streaming content to distract myself from our descent into what is almost certainly a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. One of the shows I’ve re-watched is Love, produced by Judd Apatow and starring Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust.

If you’ve never watched it, it’s essentially the story of two incredibly fucked-up people as they meet and eventually fall in love. Neither one is a very nice person, really, and a lot of the show falls under the category of ‘cringe comedy’ as you watch two lo-fi awful people grow and evolve into a more or less mature relationship. It’s kind of a dramedy, not exactly a laugh riot. I recognize myself in the two lead characters, in the sense that they are both monsters slowly realizing how monstrous they are and making fumbling attempts to own their bullshit, and that likely brought the series home for me.

I’m no connoisseur of Apatow’s work; I’ve seen a few things and enjoyed a few things, but I haven’t exactly made a study of his comedic empire. But I’ve noticed that in this series there’s some nice visual storytelling. Writing isn’t just about words; the visuals you use or show are just as important. One mistake a lot of writers fall into is making their visual storytelling very obvious. Love manages to keep it all very, very low key, and it works pretty beautifully.

Clothes

First of all, this show manages to create a very specific fictional universe. All TV shows and films do this, of course—they select settings and costuming that establishes something about the characters and the world they inhabit—but Love did an exemplary job of it.

Mickey’s wardrobe is a prime example. Aside from being on-brand for her character, what’s interesting about it is how limited it is. Many television shows have the characters in different clothes all the time, unless an article of clothing is iconic to their character like Fonzi’s leather jacket—this is especially true of female characters, who are often portrayed as clotheshorses for no other reason than the fact that male writers assume this is true about all women.

But Mickey actually wears outfits more than once, and individual separates appear in different configurations. You know, like a real person’s wardrobe. Mickey doesn’t have a spacious walk-in closet and endless budget for clothes. She buys thrift and is thoughtful, but like a real human being she wears things over and over again. That’s a great piece of visual storytelling.

Another is Mickey’s T-shirts. She wears a wide variety of hipster-ish T-shirts, including one she borrows from Gus when she (platonically) sleeps over at his place after telling him she doesn’t want to be in a relationship and they have an adventure. That shirt pops up again in the series finale when they (spoilers!) get married, which is both a nice callback and an indication that Mickey’s T-shirts tell a story. It’s easy to imagine that each of those shirts, from seemingly random places, are all stolen (borrowed) from people in her life. Ex-boyfriends, ex-roommates, one-night stands, friends—all these T-shirts forming this record of Mickey’s life.

Stuff

Love also treats the objects and possessions the characters possess as part of its storytelling. Gus drives an aging Prius, complete with dent in the door, which perfectly matches the character both in terms of self-image and financial straits. Mickey drives a busted old Mercedes, because she’s a broke hipsterish L.A. woman, but it’s also in immaculate shape. Mickey herself is a mess, but she cares for her things.

When Mickey, an addict, makes a first stab at sobriety early in the show, she re-arranges everything in her apartment and organizes her books by color. This is a fantastic visual—it’s a superficial improvement, just like this first attempt at sobriety, and because it’s impulsive and not well-planned, it actually causes her more trouble than it solves. A great little callback joke happens much later where Mickey, having agreed to cook an elaborate dinner, can’t find her cookbook and asks her roommate what color she thinks “The Joy of Cooking” would be.

Gus’s apartment is also a powerful symbol if you’re the sort to think too much about writing and storytelling. After breaking up with his girlfriend in the first episode, he moves into a furnished apartment, the sort of temporary place newly-divorced Dads move into, or people just starting out. On an obvious level, he does this because at the time he thinks he might get back with his old girlfriend (he explicitly says this at one point in the show). On the other, it’s a perfect indication that Gus is very performative. He hesitates to express his personal style (more on this below) and uses a generic approach to hide himself. Whereas Mickey’s apartment is crammed with knick-knacks and decorations and thoughtful style decisions, Gus is literally living in someone else’s (awful) taste. Later in the series, when he and Mickey have progressed in their relationship, she begins to influence his style and he starts to brighten up a bit.

The Rug

Finally, the detail that set off this essay, which might be something I’m reading far too much into. In the first episode of the series, just before Gus breaks up with his girlfriend, he orders a rug for their house. He wants it in gold, she insists it should be in blue. The day he breaks it off and leaves, the rug is delivered, so he takes the blue rug he didn’t want and puts it in his new apartment, a perfect symbol of Gus accepting a generic substitute for what he really wants.

When he meets Mickey, she has the same rug in her place—except it’s the gold version he originally wanted. That’s an obvious but graceful symbol that their relationship is meant to be, a nice visual connection between the characters the show obviously intends for us to notice.

In the seventh episode of season three, “Sarah from College,” Gus and Mickey go to a wedding of one of Gus’ old college friends, and meet Sarah, who Gus was once engaged to. Gus never told Mickey about this part of his life, and tension ensues. That tension gets worse when Sarah gets super drunk and Gus agrees to drive her back to her hotel over Mickey’s enraged objections. At the hotel, Sarah tells Gus how miserable she is, and he sadly tries to comfort someone who was once a big part of his life as he realizes how good he has it in the present.

On the bed is a pillow with a similar—similar, not exact—pattern as the rugs. It certainly could be a random piece of set dressing that I’m thinking way too hard about, but I prefer to see it as a subtle visual lining Gus and a woman he once wanted to marry in the same with the rugs link him to the woman he (spoilers!) will eventually marry.

A final note on Gus and his performative nature: The most telling detail in the show is that when he proposed to Sarah, it was a tragically huge production involving flying both sets of parents out to Los Angeles and having a violinist appear out of nowhere. Gus is performing, overdoing it. But when Mickey and Gus get married, it’s an elopement on the spur of the moment—which is then called off when they have a moment to think, only for them to sneak away from their friends and get hitched anyway all by themselves, with zero production at all. It’s a nice, subtle sign of character development.

That’s it for this episode of Jeff Takes Shit Far Too Seriously. When you write stories for a living it’s hard to turn off that machine in your head, which is, of course, why I drink.

Plotting a story can be complicated stuff, as any writer will tell you. Sometimes plots come to you in linear form, with an idea for a beginning that then leads you to characters who then lead you to the ending. Sometimes it’s the other way around — sometimes you think of an ending, or a plot twist in the middle, and you find yourself working backwards from there.

Which is fine, as long as you put in the work to make your plot point or ending seem organic by the time you get there. Because if you don’t, you wind up with a twist or an event that won’t feel even slightly real to your readers.

The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises, the third and concluding film in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster superhero trilogy, is generally regarded as the weakest of the three films (for good reason). While it’s seen an uptick in critical assessment in the ten years or so since it was originally released, there’s one plot point that prevents it from ever being considered a, you know, actually good movie: The police in the sewers.

Police Commissioner Gordon, ostensibly a smart, experienced law enforcement professional, decides to send the entire police force including himself into the sewers to thwart villain Bane’s plans. This is … insane? Incompetent? Yes! But mainly, it is required by the plot. Nolan needed to get the police out of the way or the rest of the movie made even less sense, and so that plot point became inevitable: The police wind up trapped in the sewers because the police had to be trapped in the sewers. It makes just that much sense.

Westworld Season 3

More recently, we have Westworld, season 3 on HBO. Every season of Westworld follows the same pattern:

1. Intriguing beginning, with smart world-building.
2. A slow slide into stupidity.
3. An unearned finale.

This most recent season was no different. The first few episodes were pretty solid world-building of a near-future world outside the Delos Park. It felt like a world that might inspire a park populated by human-like androids you can rape and kill with impunity. It had interesting ideas. And then it slowly narrowed down to a point where civilization collapsed … because an AI predicting your eventual fate based on collected data about your life has predetermined your fate.

Now, that’s not a bad idea, on paper. There’s a story where this moment, the moment when the world is clued in to how they’ve been manipulated and decides to go insane in response, is earned. It is not this story, though, because they’ve done exactly zero work to earn it. You can tell without any doubt that the writers decided where the story needed to go first, and then tried to build a story backwards. And that’s why the story feels awkward, and forced.

When you have a predetermined ending to your story, you have to work very hard to make it feel natural. If you’re not careful, it can feel very stiff, because it’s dead space. It’s already been written, it’s already there, as opposed to being a blank, writhing space that the writer is striving towards.

When you’ve got a predetermined point you’re writing towards, there’s a tendency to rush, to leave out all the organic little bits that make your story feel alive and rooted in the gravity of the real. You just keep rushing towards that end point, certain that once you get there everything will be forgiven. But that’s rarely the case.

I’ve been watching Westworld on HBO these past few years, and generally enjoying it. While the first two seasons were fascinating explorations of the nature of sentience, the loops and chains that bind us in our lives, and the innate brutality of mankind, they were also a bit small-scale and interior. The fact that almost all of the action took place in the titular park didn’t help this suffocating sense of insularity, although it did make the glimpses we got of the futuristic world outside that much more tantalizing.

Season 3 has finally moved outside of the park, said park being in bloody tatters after the (SPOILER ALERT) android uprising and jailbreak. And I have to say, they’re doing a bang-up job of world-building, exemplified by a wonderful show-don’t-tell moment in Episode 3, ‘Absence of Field.’

An App for That

As far as I can tell, the future of Westworld is a sort of Late Stage Capitalism nightmare where an advanced AI is keeping things stable by predicting all possible outcomes and then tightly controlling society at every level. This results in things like Caleb, played by Aaron Paul with typical weary charm, being denied any possible employment that might improve his life because the AI has predicted an early death by suicide for him — and thus concludes he’s not worth any additional resources, or the criminal underground of society using an App called RICO where they sign up for crimes and advance in a gamified fashion as they make ill-gotten gains. This is, I imagine, some sort of control or release valve the AI is using to let the oppressed and unhappy vent a little, feel like they’re sticking it to The Man when in fact The Man has hired them a’la 1984‘s revolution.

The set and costume design is pretty great. The cars are all driverless and look like slightly wonkier versions of the Tesla Cybertruck (if that’s possible), the flying machines are sleek and futuristic, and the personal technology is the sort of Apple-fied techno porn that reads as totally possible. At the same time, the fashions aren’t too far out there. Someone could time travel from Outer Westworld into our own dimension and they might seem a little bit weird, but they’d pass. Which I think is smart; the big mistake a lot of sci-fi makes is either having people dress in crazy, bizarre ways that feel artificial or exactly as we do today, which feels lazy. Westworld‘s elevated and slightly amplified fashions feel resfreshingly possible.

But let’s get to what I really liked about this episode: The ambulance. The main protagonist, slightly crazy and vengeful android host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is badly injured, and Caleb calls an ambulance as a Good Samaritan. The EMTs in the ambulance hook her up to the diagnostics, and are then baffled because, of course, Dolores isn’t human.

But here’s the thing: As Dolores appears to sink towards death, former soldier Caleb calls upon his training and begins telling the EMTs what they ought to be doing, and their response is that they can’t do anything until the App in the ambulance gives them a diagnosis and treatment plan.

In other words, the implication is that the EMTs know nothing. They know how to interact with an App, and that’s it.

A Better-Looking Idiocracy

The show hasn’t come out and stated that most jobs are performed by robots or Apps with minimal expertise required of the humans around them, but it’s easy to see the clues. The world seems to have further divided between the super-rich who flit about from board meetings to cocktail parties and the super-not-rich who scrape by in minimally-viable jobs that anyone can do because the Apps are doing all the work. Even the crimes are being committed by people who can’t actually plan crimes.

This fits in perfectly with the series’ other themes concerning AI and sentience and consciousness. Who is really alive in a world where meat sacks can’t do anything unless the AIs embedded in their systems tell them how? But what I really like is the unshowy way they’re exploring this future. No one is As You Knowing the Apps or the lack of education/experience/skills. They’re just showing you examples of it throughout and letting you piece it together.

This being Westworld, of course, there’s going to be at least one enormous orgy sequence featuring robot sex, and frankly I can’t wait to see the Apps for that.

Life if short, don’t I know it, and that terrible knowledge can lead to some pretty awful decisions, usually centered around various Happy Hours and the seductive realization that someday there will be no more Happy Hours, at least for me personally, and so I’d better enjoy the ones I have to the fullest extent of my liver’s capabilities.

Knowing that life is short can also have a strange effect on your reading decisions, or so I’ve noticed, in the form of a fear of wasting your time on a book that is ultimately disappointing. This is usually in conjunction with a ‘serious’ or ‘difficult’ novel, because the idea of investing some days or weeks or months in reading a thick book that requires you to keep notes and do ancillary research, only for it to be something less than perfect or genius, is kind of horrifying.

For example, I recently read Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year. It’s a stream-of-consciousness narrative often compared to Ulysses in terms of complexity and wordplay, and usually (if kind of inaccurately) described as one single run-on sentence.

I’ve noticed that when I mention the book to some folks, their reaction is suspicion — mainly the the odds are pretty good they’ll find the whole thing pretentious and the ‘gimmick’ unsatisfying. And so they just refuse to read it in the first place, as if you can’t stop reading a book 100 pages in and throw it across the room.

Here’s the thing: You absolutely should read a book even if you think there’s a high chance it will frustrate you.

Beautiful Failure

It’s easy to be cynical. As a writer, I find it sadly easy to be cynical about every other writer who isn’t me, actually, and to assume they’re all hacks who are stealing my advance monies. And as a consumer of entertainments I find it easy to assume that any book that is ambitious is doomed to failure.

But here’s the thing: So what?

This idea that a work of literature (or a song, or a movie, or what have you) must be perfect or else it’s a waste of your time is kind of nuts. So is, by the way, not writing a book or what have you because you’re not sure you can pull off the trick or gimmick or genius reinvention of narrative tropes you have in mind.

So read the weird, complicated books and worry about whether they worked or not later, whether you like them or not later. Not everything you read has to be enjoyable for you, or even successful. And not everything you write will be successful. If you insist on waiting until you have an idea that is guaranteed to be a success you’ll be waiting a long time. Sometimes you just have to take the chance.

And a novel you didn’t enjoy is not a waste of time, because you’ll probably take something from it, if only a better sense of what you enjoy — or maybe a trick you can use in your own writing; I’ve had a few stories stem from observing a literary trick that I thought I could do better (I usually can’t, but not for lack of trying). And a novel you wrote that doesn’t work out isn’t a waste, either, because you probably learned something from that as well.

Ducks, Newburyport is fascinating, btw. And kind of surprisingly enjoyable!