I write because I can’t do normal work like other people.
Orhan Pamuk (via confusionis)
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Tag Archives: writing
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Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
Don DeLillo
Pity the Villain
In a writing class, you’ll hear something like this: the villain is the hero of a different story. The point being that no character thinks of himself as evil.
As a psychiatrist, the clinical version of this is to realize that we each go through life doing the best we can while fighting a brain that won’t behave the way we wish it would, and an environment that rarely offers up what we want most. Stuck in the middle, we all annoy our neighbors, ruin friendships, and make stupid decisions in love. That is our fate.
Shows like CSI or L&O:SVU love to dramatize serial killers. How do they create “believable” psychological constructs? They take a genius, add in a twisted fetish and a well-earned grudge. Voila! A compelling serial killer is born. Or so we’re told.
Mostly, these characters are just foxes to be hunted. Occasionally, we come to empathize with them because they carry out an extreme morality that we secretly envy. Hannibal Lecter hates rudeness. Jason hates sex-addled child minders. Jigsaw pushes people to carpe diem, or something.
So then, what are these characters doing their best at that murder is the answer? For that matter, what are extreme psychopaths trying their best to resolve, that murder (or rape or routine, cold-blooded harm) is the compromise?
I’ve had the opportunity to meet the real-life versions of these characters: the sexual sadist, the serial killer, the psychotic murderer, and the garden-variety psychopath. (Each had been caught and was being detained for their behavior, so I didn’t have to worry about safety or retribution. I’m no Clarice Starling knocking on doors.) I evaluated them, and tried to characterize what made them so dangerous.
Here’s what I’ve found repeatedly: they don’t get it.
And here’s what else: they never will.
Get what? Humanity. Connection. Love. Words that sound like a Hallmark card, until you find someone staring blankly at you. Or giggling. If they aren’t psychotic, then this is a chronic state of detachment honed over decades, with bases in genetics, delivery, childhood infection, development, trauma, and probably a dozen other areas we’ll discover in a few decades.
Shockingly, that’s where I have found pity.
It’s not uncommon for someone after a hemispheric stroke to not recognize their body as theirs. You hold up their hand and they say it belongs to someone else. They’re so convinced that there is no explanation, no rationalization that will suffice. When you’re in the presence of a severe psychopath my reaction (and please note, it’s mine, I’m not necessarily proud of it, just honest) is to feel deeply sad. Try as I might, I hold up their own humanity in front of them and they just keep batting it away as something extraneous.
But their behavior is so cruel. They are so angry, so despicable, you might say. Yes. But if you’ve ever met someone living their life from outside human connection, it is a dark, dark place. And there’s no escape.
It’s about standing outside on Christmas morning, peering in someone else’s window. It’s not just not having presents, it’s never being invited in. Ever. Here there be rage.
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One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from going mad. Maybe it’s an apotropaic gesture, maybe one writes to ward off death.
Harold Bloom (via quellequaintrelle)
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Apex Magazine has made my story available gratis, so if you’re interested, check it out!
The story was introduced this way: Jeremy R. Butler channels the adventure and dangers of deep space mining with his “Recipe Collecting in the Asteroid Belt.”
Insatiable reader Lois Tilton reviewed it over at Locus Online, describing the theme as “be careful what you wish for” and the content as “depressing humor.” I tend agree with both comments.
This story grew from an idea of an astronaut in deep space, so deprived of sensory experience that he decompressed just to feel the wind. I’m pleased by the outcome, and even happier that Cat, Jason and the Apex slush readers liked it too. Enjoy!
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Since I don’t tell anybody what I’m doing, it occurs to me now that I lived in my own world for nearly a decade.
Umberto Eco
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Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do.
J.K. Rowling (via thechocolatebrigade)
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Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. To a psychoanalyst it is not so important whether you tell the truth or a lie because lies are as interesting, eloquent, and revealing as any claimed truth…I prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the most bold-faced liars. My goal in writing ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’, a novel entirely based on fantasy, was to find in this way a truth that I would have not been able to find otherwise.
Italo Calvino
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I’m pleased (ecstatic really) to announce that one of my stories is being published in this month’s edition of Apex Magazine. The story is entitled Recipe Collecting in the Asteroid Belt, and I’m extremely proud to have it published in such a premier publication.
Please enjoy! It’s available for Kindle/Nook/pdf.
The Unusual Thing
Recently, I’ve been trying my hand at long-form improv twith guidance from the experts at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade (NYC division).
As a student in script analysis, I remember learning that a good opening scene would encapsulate the entire story. The conflict, the stakes, the tone—it was all there from the curtain, if you only had the skills to decode it.
Of course, that was script analysis, not script synthesis. As a writer, independent of medium, it is a daunting task to compose an opener that condenses the conflict into a moment and make it dramatically interesting.
When I signed up for improv classes, I never suspected they’d be such a valuable tool to address that process.
In improv, the unusual thing, that initial moment when the status quo is disrupted, becomes the story. Okay, so it’s hella difficult, but in the moment that comes from a misunderstood line, an unexpected reaction, an intriguing idea, lightning strikes—what the hell is happening? The game is afoot, and if you’re smart enough, the scene is scene is practically written for you.
Example: You dive out on stage and shout “They’re shelling us!” In your head it’s a WWI trench scene. Except your partner dives next to you and says, “Why do they keep throwing turtles at us?!” Now you’re off and running. Your opener is over. It’s a war story, which is not the unusual thing (as it could be in a WWI coming of age story), but that animals are being used as weaponry is unexpected by everyone.
As a writer, I’m rarely struck with an opening. More often it’s an idea, or a climax. The beginning is composed outside of the lightning and thus it bears the pressure of being composed to accomplish something.
In improv, it’s the opposite. Stepping out, there is no middle, no progression, no end. The first moment that there’s a laugh or shock, a nidus is created for all that follows—a battle against a zoo, a pet store rivalry, the Planet of the Turtles movie that should have been. It could be any of those, but the choices would be guided by the level of stakes already chosen. People in an Armageddon behave differently than those in a small business rivalry. The beauty is largely this: by the time the unusual thing has happened, often so many choices have already been made that the decisions are in the past, not the future.
I would have expected that the simplicity of this process would make a scene less compelling, however in capable hands that is rarely the case. In fact, it is the opposite. It’s us amateurs, trying too hard to write a clever scene that we’re simultaneously acting out to pay attention to the seed crystal of spontaneous creation.
Of course, it might be quite difficult (and wholly unsatisfying to everyone involved) to write a novel live…