Things People Say to Writers

I have heard numbers 4, 6, 7, 8, and 10. I guess that means I've been fortunate.

Stranger Things as Written By Yours Truly.

I swore I had my final word on this undeservedly popular Netflix series, but some expressed interest in how I would have taken the same concept and written it my way. Since I had such harsh words for the show, what would I have done to make it supposedly better? Well, here goes. I know many won't agree or might even find my changes equal to what was done. So be it. Art is subjective.

A few things I won't include in this piece are things I would have no control over, such as quality of acting, direction and casting. This will only be my suggested fix-its from a writing perspective. I'll begin with the most obvious one:

STORY STRUCTURE- The organizational setup of "Stranger Things" is rather lacking. For one thing, it opens in the wrong place to serve the needs of the plot. Starting with the abduction of a character the audience has not grown to care about at all is a huge misstep. One would think that given eight episodes to develop characters, the Duffer Brothers could have at least given us fifteen minutes of the kid before he disappeared. Even "It," that terrible adaptation of a brilliant novel, was able to let us get to know Georgie before he was killed. And that was within the confines of a two and a half hour movie. Whether or not it was done effectively is irrelevant. The effort was made.

Frankly, the series starts in the wrong place regardless of that little dramatic misfire. I'm no fan of "Something went wrong in the secret laboratory" stories, but the lab is undeniably where all of this starts thematically and should also be where it starts structure-wise. If the Duffers really wanted to create an homage to Eighties horror and science fiction, they should have known to start their show in that laboratory. Actually witnessing Eleven's escape would have made here a more interesting character and would have set the tone for the weirdness to come. She could have run into the character of Will, they could have had a brief interaction, then he could have disappeared. Early on both of them would have been established as people the audience should care about instead of two separate incidents with a nary an emotional investment between them.

Also, the plot should have been expanded to justify the amount of episodes. At a mere eight episode run, this show should have been so chockful of story that them Duffer Boys could barely tell it in the time allotted. Instead, what we got was a show so thinly plotted it contained not one by two episodes of filler featuring characters sitting around discussing the plot and their motivations. I don't believe this was an intentional stylistic choice either, considering the overall thinness of the plot.

One way to expand the plot would have been to expand the involvement of the lab workers. Instead of trying to mimic Spielberg's approach to the government agents and scientists in "E.T.," where they were mainly faceless entities as seen through the eyes of children, the Duffers missed a real opportunity to go from archetypes to genuine human characters. It doesn't work here because there are too many non-kid characters.

FOCUS- This rivals story structure in its wrong-headedness. Let me begin by saying I know what the Duffer Boys were trying to do. It's rather obvious, so the kids make sense when considering the influences the creators are attempting to channel. Without criticizing their acting, it's difficult to fault their presence, but here's a story-centric reason for saying they should not have been the focus of the story. If you remove Eleven's interactions with them from the story, the kids literally serve no purpose except to remind us of older, better movies in the same genre. They do nothing except hide her from the Big Bad Lab Folks until the inevitable showdown scenes. They're not particularly interesting or likable and their entire sub-plot could be removed without scarcely a minor inconvenience to the overall plot-line.

Fans of Eighties B-movies know that teens were usually the main characters. Not old enough to have total freedom but definitely old enough to figure things out and handle themselves physically, they're the perfect protagonists to face the unknown. The teens in "Stranger Things" are among the show's few strengths and they should have been, if not front and center, certainly more prominent. Instead of having the kids hide Eleven, the story would have been better served having the teens do it. There could still have been a kid or two present, but the story would have been tighter with this simple change.

No character on this show was better than Sheriff Hopper. Perhaps because he's the only character with more than two notes to his personality, he feels authentic and we want to follow him on his quest to find out just what the hell is going on. Clearly he should have been the focal point of the series (I hear his part is horribly diminished in season two) and all the rest should have grown outward from that.

The greatest misfire involves the people at the laboratory. As I mentioned above, they needed to be better developed. This would have shifted some of the focus to them and their admittedly laughable experiment. Perhaps Matthew Modine's character had a real story to tell, one that would have juxtaposed nicely with Hopper's. I don't care if it turns out we learn more about him in the second season. It's lazy writing to not develop your characters to at least the point of not making them background noise.

PLOT- Once we find out what's really going on beginning with episode three, the entire concept is revealed to be quite terrible. First, the trite idea that this evil laboratory opened a doorway into another dimension that's really just an ugly, unimaginative mirror of our own is absurd. It's also home to the dullest monster since the one in "The Relic." It's little more than a mindless, hungry animal. There's simply no way to develop something that lackluster into a compelling antagonist. Also, having it come from a place that's really just our world's reflection makes little sense within the context of the Duffers' own established rules. Why is there no equivalent here? And while some may say the scientist and his cronies served as the real bad guy, they're far too underdeveloped to mean anything except a stumbling block for the heroes to overcome and redshirts for the monster to kill and eat. Also, a less predictable ending that didn't involve Eleven killing the creature and disappearing would have been nice. How about instead, the creature and Eleven are connected or maybe Will was the creature's counterpart in our universe and a true moral quandary resulted as everyone had to decide it killing one meant killing both?

That's it. I'm done with this show now. I've exhausted my fingers on discussing it enough. I won't get into dialogue because I'd need specific examples beyond that ridiculous Stephen King reference. I also won't go into how three teenagers can inflict major VanDamage on the monster but highly trained paramilitary guys are swatted down like flies. Some of these things are just a given in a B  movie after all. But the Duffers had the opportunity to elevate the medium to something much better than its perceived limitations. Instead, they went lower.

Feel free to eviscerate me now!

What to to with this Blog.

With my recent decision/announcement to stop writing for publication, this blog has become a big question mark. What do I do with it? Do I keep it up for for others to read if they happen across it? Do I delete it? Do I continue to update it with my random and oh-so-witty and incisive observations about life and the storytelling arts?

More to the point, does anybody really care? I know people look at these posts. The one about me not writing much anymore ironically received the most views I'd had in a while. But views don't necessarily equate to reading, do theory?

More to the point, do people even care? I know my posts are viewed quite a bit. Perhaps ironically, the one announcing my decision to all but quit writing was viewed more than most have been. But views don't necessarily equate to actually reading, do they? They can, of course, but there's no way to know. I'm okay with that. If even a small percentage of those viewing these posts actually read them, I feel as if I've accomplished something.

So, maybe I should leave it up to the assumed readers.

What should I do with this blog? And please don't answer, "Whatever you want to do!"

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR 2018: It's Been...Something...

All roads end, especially when they lead to nowhere. That realization has woken me up to a great many things lately, and sadly it includes writing. Not that many people care, but I've reached a point where it no longer feels worth it or even fulfilling. This isn't me being dramatic; take a look at the last time I had something published and it should be obvious I've been wrestling with this decision for a while.

As I've been told on several occasions, I attained my dream many times over. I'm not sure what that means but it's what I was told. Writers dream of writing and having people read what they write and of dying at their keyboards or notepads, still writing. At least, that's the stereotypical image of the writer. It probably applied to me at one time, too, but here's what my real dream was:

I was hoping to find those fans of the various genres I enjoy and give them what they were really hoping to see. Anyone who bothered to read my dark literary magazine The Darkness Internal and, more specifically, this editorial should know what that was. And while the magazine did all right for the few issues it ran, I doubt I reached anyone with what I was trying to do on any significant level. That's fine. Literary history is replete with glorious failures and near-misses. Sometimes all one can hope for is to leave a footprint on the surface for those who come next and accomplish a whole lot more.

Unfortunately, the Information Age has turned out to be a big fat turd. Where once I was optimistic that interests and ideas long suppressed and ignored would finally have a platform, now I am convinced that the human race is naught but a herd of grazing livestock desperately searching for someone to herd them off the nearest cliff. Okay, maybe I always suspected as much, but I allowed myself to hope and that was my mistake and no one else's. Perhaps my greatest mistake lies in expecting fandom to be anything except the dying beehive it's been revealed as thanks to social networking and content "writers."

In short, fandom is a cesspool of epic proportions, a pathetic pile of feces populated with self-righteous, provincial imbeciles who have no interest in seeing or reading anything that disrupts their comfort zones. Not everybody is like that, of course, but so many are that it no longer makes a difference. The latest "Star Wars" movie was a revelation because, by daring to invert expectations and drain sacred cows of their life-giving fluid, it exposed so many idiots at once it made the truth undeniable. What is that truth?

Simple: I am wasting my fucking time.

I thought fans of science fiction and fantasy and horror would want to be challenged intellectually, to embrace the various sources of their favorite mythologies rather than simply wallowing in the familiar retold ad infinitum. This is a time when genre is bigger and more popular than ever and, in many ways, it's worse than ever as well. In the mad rush to create the next pop culture water cooler phenomenon, absolute garbage and mediocre silliness is being passed off as quality. Meanwhile, those of us toiling to come up with something unique and genuinely different are deemed un-marketable.

I get it. Nobody wants to read my stuff anymore. I had my brief moment a few years ago but TV and movies, those monolithic crap-creators, have spoken and I am no longer welcome even in the margins. And if that's the case, I'm no longer interested in trying to find a way in. I thought I'd already done that.

So, am I "retiring" completely from writing? It remains to be seen. There are a few unfinished works I should complete before I walk completely away. However, for all intents and purposes, I no longer consider myself a writer. It's been a ride but all rides end, especially when they stop being fun.

Thanks to those of you who read what I put out over the years and to those who published it.

An Opinion Piece About Opinions (How meta!)

I have been told, a lot recently, that my expectations and standards for entertainment are “too high.” Sometimes this comes in the form of a criticism, sometimes it comes as a genuinely baffled reaction to my views on a given film or book, and often it comes as a misguided attempt to get me to relax and just accept what I’m given and not demand anything more. After all, it’s “just a movie.” As long as there’s something entertaining in it, who cares if it doesn’t meet my fiction-writing standards?

I cares, that’s who.

It isn’t just about quality for me. That doesn’t mean quality isn’t a factor in my opinions, but it’s also a highly subjective term that doesn’t carry much weight in the world of analysis. In fact, it’s a crutch for online shit-stirrers whose only goal is negativity for its own sake. Contrary to what some may believe, I don’t want to have negative opinions of movies and books I’ve been looking forward to seeing and reading. I actually want to like them. Unfortunately, my criteria for enjoyment is more involved than simply gaining gratification from spectacle. I have been trained to recognize story structure and characterization and plot progression. I even know the actual meaning of “plot hole.”

That’s not bragging, it’s a fact. Casual observers have no idea what goes into the act of creation and execution. They only know the finished product and, since they aren’t in a similar capacity, the represent the mainstream audience in a way I find difficult although not always impossible. Of course, this hasn't stopped hordes of know-it-all fanatics from acting as if they know how it all works, but that's a topic for a different post.

Frankly, the absolutely stupidest point anyone can make about a movie or book is that it made a lot of money and therefore that means it was good and people liked it. The implication here is that if you don't, you are the one who has a problem and should lower your lofty standards. The resounding idiocy of this reasoning lies in the fact that the person making the point is using a flawed capitalism=quality model. Remember when I mentioned the fact that quality is a subjective concept? So is the idea that the accumulation of vast sums of money automatically indicate quality. Many products or services of low quality have earned billions of dollars. One needs look no further than any fast food restaurant chain to see a real-life example. But there's another component to this silliness, and that is the human tendency to use the peer group as a weapon against differing opinions.

I've seen this line of reasoning used when someone has tried to prove a point about an entire race of people. They find one self-loathing member of that race and then use their words as justification for bigotry. It happens when people use former members of religious groups, too. Somewhere much farther down the scale, a similar rationale is employed when using the dual arguments of  "It made a whole lot of money so it must be good" and "Since it made all that money, people liked it and it was popular." Wrong. Large grosses of money are not automatic indicators of popularity. In fact, there are so many factors involved in how audiences and readers are pre-programmed to consume a finished product whether they liked it or not, it's almost obscene. I've sat in movie theaters where people acted out this programming like good little clapping seals and marveled at the power of suggestion through advertising and fabricated buzz. 

I won't bore anyone with a list of movies that made gobs of money that nobody liked. You'll either have to trust me or do your own research.

I'll let you in on a little secret: The reason I upset people with my opinions isn't because they necessarily disagree with them. There are actually three reasons they react with such knee-jerkiness:

1. I make them think about what they watched or read in ways they either never have or never wanted to.
2. I make them feel less intelligent because they don't watch or read things with a critical enough eye. (This is an entirely subjective point I'm making more from their perspectives than my own)
3. People that stray from the Group-think make them uncomfortable and threaten their perception of reality and security.

So, I rarely harbor any ill will towards people when they challenge my opinions. There's no point to it. Nor do I apologize for having a well-developed criteria for my entertainment. To expect anything less would be beneath my expectations for myself. And that's what it really boils down to, I guess.

I expect no less than the same level of  effort I demand of myself. No matter what I'm writing, I push myself to make it as good as I can. I don't always succeed but I at least make the effort. When I can sense someone else isn't doing that or, even worse, doesn't even believe it's necessary, it disgusts me and results in a hostile reactions as I feel my time has been wasted and my intelligence insulted. Without getting into specifics (I swore I wouldn't do that in this post...challenge met) my visceral reaction to a movie I recently watched was because of these reasons. I wasn't expressing some version of fanboy angst about not adhering to the source material or my favorite scene from the bookbeing absent. My objection was to inconsistent tone, flat characterizations, poor directing, laughable dramatic moments and an overall laziness in the production. I've had similar reactions to the fiction I've read.

I may not have notoriety as an author, but I still expect more of myself than many of these individuals do. So you better fucking well believe I expect the same of people with so many  resources at their disposal. 

Like the man said, "Did I bug ya? Sorry. Didn't mean to bug ya."

The Best Review of an Anthology I'm in yet.

Previously I posted what I considered the best review of anything ever written. And while I stand by that admittedly dubious claim, below is the best review of a short story anthology I've appeared in.

The book in question, "Beyond Science Fiction Complete Anthology," is the, "complete compilation of short stories, reviews, artwork and other content published in the Beyond Science Fiction magazine in 2014 and 2015." It is 1023 pages long and what does the one review say about it?

"Didn't find anything of interest."

If I used emoticons on this site, it would be a giant laughing face. Since I don't, here's for you:

 

RIP MICHAEL CRICHTON

I was by no means a fan of his writing. I found it stilted and flat. His stories were often meandering apologist tripe seemingly accusing science for all of man's ills. His characters were usually over-developed and uninteresting, something I hadn't thought possible until I struggled through one of his novels. On top of it all, he was a gimmicky writer and a traitor to his science fiction roots.

But, dammit! He got people to read. And for that and that alone, he earned my respect.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Crichton. You've earned your place in history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/books/06crichton.html?em