26 - Writing music #1

Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
Christmas 2008, like every Christmas, saw my brother receiving a heap-load of obscure albums and not a lot else. I have a pretty poor music taste and knowledge. His is apparently overwhelming and vastly superior. He forces albums upon me all the time and generally I never get round to listening to them, because I like sticking with what I know and I just don't like what I hear coming from his room.

Anyway, that Christmas he forced Crystal Castles by Crystal Castles onto me. Determined to give it a go, I stuck it on while I did some writing and it just worked. It fitted perfectly. It's a simply extraordinary album that somehow manages to both play along unobtrusively as I write, and yet affect me and spur me on. Particular favourite tracks are Alice Practice, Crime Wave and Black Panther.

Unlike other albums I put on when writing, this doesn't have a specific association. I'll play it when I write fiction, when I write non-fiction. I'll play it at night, during the day and especially when I'm sitting on my bed with a notepad jotting down a hundred and one bad ideas.

25 - Sam & Wikus

My two favourite films from last year were Moon and District 9. Both sci-fi, both made incredibly well and both had a fantastic, original story to tell. But more than anything, it was the central character that made each film remarkable.

Sam Bell in Moon (played incredibly by Sam Rockwell) and Wikus Van De Merwe in District 9 (played superbly by Sharlto Copley) are fantastic to watch. Each man faces a tragic, truly saddening, if far-fetched, story. Both of them are caught up in really dire events that neither of them is to blame for.

These aren't perfect men. Sam has moments of selfishness, combined with a clear deep-rooted anger problem as well as a tendency to be immature. Meanwhile Wikus is even more selfish, self-centred, a coward and as xenophobic and crooked as the rest of his co-workers. All aside, neither man deserves the tragic events that happen around and to them.

We might not be able to fully empathise with each man, but we can certainly sympathise with them. These are very human characters facing extraordinary events and we the viewers are helpless. We can only watch each man 'cope.' This more than anything, makes these films compulsive, repetitive viewing in my eyes.

Faultless, good-looking heroes are great for action films. Amoral/immoral men with sadistic streaks are great for TV* but sometimes the best stories are told with a helpless man at the centre, trying his best to cope with the tragedy of his own existence.

*See The Wire, The Shield, Dexter

24 - 4265

As much as I'm enjoying One A Day, it had near-enough replaced my fiction writing. Since starting, I'd only written one short piece and that was it. I love the fact that I'm writing something new every day, but I was using One A Day as an excuse not to get back to the slog of rewriting my novel.

Last Summer I gave myself a target. From June until September I planned to write 500 words a day and end up with 60,000 words at the end of September. I finished September with 59,451 words and a very rough, largely forced first draft of a novel. Though I hit my target, I'd often gone days without writing anything then caught up at the end of the week. One week I wrote literally nothing. Another I wrote near-enough 7,000 words.

The plan was to then read over each of the twenty-one chapters throughout October, taking notes on what needed to be improved, changed, deleted etc. That I managed easily enough in a similar fashion.

The final part of the plan was to spend November, December and January redrafting two chapters or so a week. This was a foolish idea but the plan was to have it finished by February 3rd - today. Why today? Well, it's my friend's birthday today and seeing as she wants to be the first person to read my novel, it seemed as good as any date to aim for.

The end of the year came and I'd rewritten five chapters. The end of January came and I'd rewritten one more chapter. So today I forced myself to write - a strategy that rarely works for me. Today, it did.

I redrafted all of Chapter Seven and part of Eight. A grand total of 4,265 words, which is fantastic by my standards. Now I doubt this is the start of some huge push that will see the novel rewritten by the end of March, even, but I know I can do it. I'm going to keep forcing myself. It won't always work. But if I do it enough, I should get back into the swing of it. Hopefully.

23 - Klaatu barada nikto

I started this blog with the hope in the back of my mind that it would help me achieve something. What? I don't know, but it fits in with my greatly delusional life view that everything's leading up to something big. That there's something out there. That this is by no means all there is. That I'm in some way special.

The novels I read, the films I watch and the games I play further compound this belief. They're about other worlds, or exceptional events happening, or quite often about a nobody with a destiny.

Occasionally it hits home that nothing exceptional will happen to me or anyone else. We'll never make contact with another world. I'll never mutate beyond my own colourblindness. I'm never actually going to get a novel published. And I'll probably end up becoming a teacher.

22 - Remember Sammy Jankis

Memento is one of those films that sticks with you. A film that gets inside your head and fiddles around violently. It's one of those rich tapestries that reveals further detail and depth every time you watch it.

For those who haven't seen it (and therefore haven't lived) it tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a man with short-term memory loss trying to hunt down the man who killed his wife and gave him brain damage. The genius part is that the story is told backwards. We start at the end, then skip to a few minutes before that and so on and so on. These parts are divided by black and white sections told forward in which Leonard tells us all about his condition.

By playing the main story in reverse sequence we get brilliant moments of perspective shift. One such scene starts with Leonard staring at a bottle of liquor in his hand. He remarks that he doesn't feel drunk and so hops in the shower and a moment later a stranger enters the apartment and a fight ensues. The story then skips back and we see that Leonard has broken into this man's apartment, waiting to ambush him. He grabs a bottle as a weapon, then his memory fades...

In terms of playing with the chronology of the story, it's done perfectly. I'm always a little wary of stories that mess around with time, but Memento wouldn't work if it didn't. Pulp Fiction is another story told out of sequence that works better for it.

Then again there's a shit heap of films that try it and fail. The list of films that begin at the end then work back up to that point is countless. Sometimes it works, often it adds very little.

I've never played around with chronology myself. I believe there has to be a reason for it like in Memento. That and I'm not competent enough to cope with it.

21 - Dreamscapes

Recurring dreams aren't unusual, not for me at least. Last night I had one of my classics. It's a pretty rubbish dream. All that happens is one of my teeth falls out. It's always the same one. It's wobbly, then I fiddle with it, then it falls out. Then when I wake up I'm massively relieved that it hasn't fallen out.

Last night was slightly different though. During the dream, just after the tooth fell out I said to myself, 'Well at least it's only a dream.' I then had a subsequent dream where I told all my friends how I'd had this dream in which I pointed out to myself it was only a dream.

So it got me thinking back to this piece of writing I mentioned in post 12. There's this series of dreams I have that I tried to explore in a piece of writing but never got very far with it. They're not recurring dreams as much as they are recurring places.

There are three places that I visit in my dreams every so often and have done for the past 5 years or so. They're not real places, but exaggerations of normal locations. Generally each time I go to each of them something different happens.

The Tower
I think it's 200 floors tall. It's made of blue glass and two lifts run from the ground floor to about 10 floors from the top. The remaining floors are accessed by one central bigger lift. The top floor has a glass floor. The lifts always feature prominently in the dreams but what I'm doing in there varies. I've robbed a jewellery store in there with my dad. I've been chased around there by a man with a gun. I've escaped falling lifts in there. I've played hide and seek with a friend.

The Theme Park
This place is huge but sparse. I don't think I've ever really got much past the entrance as just inside is a rollercoaster. There's a clown hanging over the entrance. The rollercoaster itself is sunk slightly into the ground and full of huge elongated loops. What always happens is we'll go on it, do the loop, fall out and then generally, but not always, land in the carriage again as it zooms underneath.

The Cinema
This is a huge multiplex cinema in a dome shape. It must be miles in diameter. In the middle is the massive circular reception desk. The carpet is faded red and littered with popcorn. The only screen I've been into is pretty small. It has white concrete steps running down to the screen and the seats are more like benches. It's quite cold and empty in there. I've seen various films from Avatar to Kill Bill there.


So yeah, I keep thinking I might explore these dreams in writing some more but I doubt I'll get any further than this. I can't help but shake the hope that they mean something. Like I'm Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters, continually molding Devil's Tower. More likely the dream part of my brain is pretty unimaginative and keeps recycling the same ideas.

20 - Ideal job

I love writing almost as much as I hate writing.

The process of writing is brilliant. Getting the motivation to write is a pain.

Spending hours obsessing over every single word to make the best piece of writing possible is fantastic. Coming back to it later and realising it's crap is infuriating.

That's why I like blogging. I let my thoughts flow, read it back and tidy it up and I'm done. It's not great writing, and generally messy and convoluted but it's liberating.

Anyway, as much as I'd love to be a professional writer of some description, I can think of better jobs. Plotting stories and crafting ideas never gets old so I think my ideal job would be just that. Selling ideas. Maybe being hired by TV and movie studios to sort out the problems with their plots. Rip out the clichés and the poor ideas. Not necessarily replace them with anything. Just point out what's wrong.

So yeah, that's not really a job is it? But nevermind.