sandbox

Time to dip back into the vault of vignettes of my earliest memories. This one I called "Sandbox":

Mara and I are sitting in the sandbox in the front yard. She's sitting in one corner and I’m sitting in another corner. Mara's face is white and serious. An animal runs into the sandbox between us and stops. We stop digging to look at it. I don't know the word rat but that's what this is. The rat is dark-colored with a long bare tail. It looks at me with one eye and Mara with the other.

We watch as the rat runs out the other side of the sandbox. It's quick and quiet. It runs across the grass and up the stairs toward the kitchen door. It stops on the stairs for a moment, then runs in the open door.

Mara and I watch the house. We hear Mom yell. It's a loud, low sound without words. Then we hear her say, "Get out!" There's a quiet thump. "Get out!" Thump again.

The rat runs back out the door. It runs straight down the stairs, quick and quiet, and across the grass through the fence. Mom comes out the door holding her broom. She watches the rat go. She's breathing hard. Mara and I still watch. Why did Mom yell at the rat?

clouds

Yesterday was the Remembrance Day holiday here in Canada. Kimmie and I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon walking in East Vancouver, marveling at the windblown trees in the low light of the sun. Storms knocked out power for many thousands of people, but we saw our lights flicker only a couple of times.

Today I thought I would offer up another one of my lifewriting vignettes of my earliest memories. This one I called "Clouds":

I'm standing beside Grandma in the living-room. Grandma wears sweaters and pants, and scarves on her head. She has big eyes and she blinks hard. She stands with her arms crossed in front of her. She doesn't talk like Mom and Dad. Sometimes words are hard for her. We're looking out the window over the table. There are white clouds in the blue sky.

"Look!" I say. "The cloud's moving!"

When I turn I face the side of her pants.

"Yes," says Grandma. She is calm. She is not surprised.

"Why do they move?" I say.

"The wind...blows them," she says.

"Where do they go?"

Grandma unfolds her arms to move one of them in the air.

"Around the world," she says.

I feel something deep and big and mysterious. I turn to look up at Grandma. I am in awe.

"Grandma, do you know everything?"

"Oh no," she says. "No!"

Now she's surprised. I'm surprised at how surprised she is. I don't understand how she doesn't know everything. She knows where the clouds go.

my clip show: bite

Still in vacation mode, I'm finding it hard to get to my blog-posting in my usual way. Late rising, changed routine--no post. Yesterday I became involved with research and didn't want to tear myself away.

In the production of TV series there's a phenomenon called the "clip show". These happen when the show has overspent or otherwise run out of money, and still needs to come up with an episode. So a meager, one-location script is written (characters trapped together in an elevator or something), and they reminisce about things that have happened to them. The reminiscences are then shown in the form of clips from previous episodes, now perhaps with a new context or voice-over commentary by the character. Result: a low-budget but hopefully watchable episode of the series.

As a viewer, I was always aware of the cheesiness and unsatisfactoriness of these episodes, and I used to wonder why they bothered dishing up stale rehashes of previous episodes. Well, in TV it can be hard to raise the production funding in the first place, then it can be hard to keep a tight control on it, no matter how tough or how experienced you are. I'm pleased to say that in season 1 of The Odyssey, we never had to resort to a clip show. Thanks partly to the cheapness of the creative talent (notably the writer-creators), we were able to have all-original episodes.

I thought of clip shows because I'd like to use a preexisting piece of writing to fill out my blog-post: another vignette from my early life, written years ago as part of my lifewriting project. It's not a true clip show, of course, since this material has never been published before. It's still all-original.

This "clip" I titled "Bite":

Naptime is over. Mrs. Dunsmuir turns the lights back on. We have to pick up our blankets from the floor. I don't know the word church but kindergarten is in a little white church a long walk from home. Mrs. Dunsmuir has a long sweater that buttons up and a long skirt. Mom walks me there and sometimes Grandma walks me there and once when it was raining really hard and it was almost like night Dorothy drove us there in her black car. I walk home by myself. It's a little way up then a long way down.

Mrs. Dunsmuir is playing music. We have to walk in a circle, two by two. We're holding hands. We hold our hands high, then we hold them low.

Suddenly there's a scream. I look around, confused. It was a girl's scream. We've all stopped. Two girls who were walking together are both crying. They're best friends. Mrs. Dunsmuir runs to the girl who's holding her own hand.

"What's wrong, dear?" says Mrs. Dunsmuir. "What happened to your hand?"

The girl, crying, says, "She bit me."

"Why'd you bite her?" says Mrs. Dunsmuir to the girl's friend. Mrs. Dunsmuir isn't mad. She is mystified.

The girl's friend is crying more loudly than the girl she just bit. She is scared and shocked. She is sobbing so hard that she can't talk. Mrs. Dunsmuir bends closer to listen. The girl chokes out her words between sobs.

"Because I love her."

Mrs. Dunsmuir doesn't seem to understand. But I understand right away. I know exactly what she means.

Jesus

In yesterday's post I offered one of my lifewriting vignettes of my earliest formative memories. The memory of climbing the cliff is no doubt part of my conscious memories now because of its enduring power in telling me who I am and what my life is about--it's part of my personal mythology.

Today I'll offer another one. Again, I would have been about five years old. This one I labeled "Jesus":

I'm playing with some kids who live down the road. They live just above the bend where the dock is. Their house is white with green edges. We're playing in the garage which is inside the house (our garage is by itself). The older sister is a little older than me. She seems to know a lot. She's telling me about a man who's in a book she's holding. His name is Jesus.

"They killed him," she says.

"Who did?" I say, worried.

"They hammered nails right through his hands," she says, narrowing her eyes.

I feel my face start to crumple with horror. I can see long steel nails.

"They hammered nails through his feet."

I cringe in the torment of pain. How could someone hammer a nail right into someone else?

"They stuck thorns in his head."

"In his head?"

"Yes."

I'm baffled and horrified by the cruelty. I had no idea.

"Right in his head?"

"Yes."

I feel a swoon of pity and shock. I have to go home.

There you have it: my introduction to religion.

cliff

I would like to report progress in my great work--I really would. But the very concept of progress has become hazy even to me, the one supposedly "progressing" with it.

I have arrived again at what feels like a characteristic spot for me: stuck on a cliff-face. Metaphorically, that is--although in my personal mythology, the guiding image is from a real event. When I was attempting my lifewriting project about seven years ago, one of my efforts was to write a number of vignettes of my earliest memories. These form an archipelago that has no sequential order in my mind; they remain self-contained yet interconnected, not unlike the Greek myths.

Here is the vignette that I labeled, simply, "Cliff":

Let's climb up here. Yeah. Okay. It's the cliff behind the Schmidts' house. It doesn't seem like a cliff because trees grow around it and up it and on top of it, but the dirt runs out and you have to go up the speckled rock. Greg Schmidt is first. he's twenty-four days older than I am. He's five. I'm next. Doug Schmidt is last. He's four.

Greg is fast, he finds places to grab and places to put his feet. I try some of his places and some of my own when his look too hard. At some point I stop. All the places look too hard here. I look down. Doug climbs slowly below, bristly blond head against a yellow sweater. I can't see the last place I put my foot. I look up again. There's a crack in the rock running up at an angle. The top of the cliff is rounded. Greg is just standing up to turn and look down.

A wave of fear passes through me. It is intense fear that I have never felt before.

"C'mon!" says Greg. "It's easy!"

There's a squeal of excitement in his voice. He makes a big come-up gesture with his arm, lifting one gum-boot from the rock with the energy of his movement.

I cling to the rock. I look up. I look down. The fear becomes strongest as I realize that I must either go up, go down, or fall. There is no other choice. There is no one who can help me. I must do something. I must do it by myself.

"C'mon!" says Greg. "Grab over there!"

I must choose.

"C'mon!"

But Greg is already turning to explore the trees at the top, losing interest in us.

I don't know the word panic, but I know I mustn't or I will fall. The top is closer, but I don't know how to get there. The bottom is farther but I'll have to get past Doug. I'd be chickening out. I could still fall.

I decide to go up. I reach for the crack where Greg went and cling to the rock as I make my way. I hate being forced to do this. I hate being stuck so I have no choice. I hate being terrified. But I have to. I put my feet in places and grab places with my hands. The slope gets less and I walk leaning forward over the curve at the top. I make it.

I look down and see Doug slowly climbing his way up. He doesn't seem scared. I feel some triumph but mainly relief and maybe anger that I had to be scared so badly to get up here. But I made it.

Want to know what it's like to be most of the way through writing The Mission? See above.

let excitment be your guide

"Write what you know" is a well-known and basic tip for writers. And it's a good one. After all, what else are you going to write?

For the fiction-writer, it's not a completely straightforward question. Because fiction is "made-up stuff", you can put as much of it in your work as you want. You "know" the stuff you make up, and then you write it down. There--you've written what you know!

That's a specious self-deception that I myself have bought into plenty during my life, and no doubt still do. To me, "writing what you know" always suggested writing about one's own family life and so on--subjects that never really excited me as a writer. But, driven by the commandment to write what you know, I would ever and again return to my own life and look for ways to fictionalize it. After all, was that not what James Joyce did with his magnificent Portrait of the Artist, and what Malcolm Lowry did with his brilliant Under the Volcano?

Starting at about age 18, I have spent, cumulatively, a great deal of time trying to find a way to mine my own life story for fictional material. All such efforts have so far gone bust. In about 2000, when my mother put me on to a very good book by Tristine Rainer called Your Life as Story, I became excited again by the idea of "lifewriting"--simply turning one's own life episodes into story. Once again, as in the past, I beavered away at finding the "story structure" of my own life. Now I felt I might be better able to accomplish it, since, like Tristine Rainer, I was now a scriptwriter and had studied story structure.

As with so many projects, I generated a lot of pages, but was not happy with where I got to. It gradually dawned on me that I would need a definite theme in order to provide a criterion for selection. What exact story would I be telling? But to know that, you need to have an idea of what your life is about. What is the purpose of my life?

In fact, Ms. Rainer provides strong counsel in how to search for exactly this, and I went through the exercise carefully, and was delighted with the result--for awhile. I came to feel that my life is many stories, has many themes. I thought, "Fine, pick one." I picked one--but it became obvious that it interlocks with all the others. How to disentangle them? How to simplify my life into a coherent story?

Ach--I just went and checked the folder called Lifewriting, and saw that yes, it does indeed contain many documents, some of considerable length. I never was able to solve my structural problems, and eventually gave up in despair.

Now what? You have to do what excites you. Excitement is the psychic energy that drives you forward--is perhaps the "intoxication" that Nietzsche said must precede the creation of any work of art. You need to be excited. I remember visiting the Pacific National Exhibition here in Vancouver with my friend Brad back when we were in school. At age 12, we loved James Bond-type action-adventure, and would talk enthusiastically about turning the various aspects of the busy exhibition-ground into sets for action-movie scenes. For us, a ride on the chairlift-style people-mover that traversed the site was like a movie-location survey. That creative excitement got us involved in story-writing, filmmaking, and animation. I remember staying up all night at his house making animated films with his 8mm movie camera. We were powered by excitement: how will this turn out? What will it look like?

I do seem to be naturally inclined toward the adventure genre (I note that The Odyssey, which I created and wrote with Warren Easton, was an adventure-fantasy show). The adventure genre, with its exploratory, revelatory, and questing elements, speaks to me--gets me excited. It's the genre of questing in uncharted territory, and that somehow connects with my heart.

But you need to know enough. In writing about your alien world, you need to know it, and that means research. You need to know enough about the world of your story to make your characters seem at home in it, and therefore to let your audience feel at home there as well.

Kimmie and I are currently watching the HBO series Rome. I watch with special interest because it is set in my period and place, and so I have researched that world myself--although not in as much depth, for one thing because I'm only a single person, and each department of the series--writing, art, wardrobe, props, hair, makeup--will have done its own research. But the show is striving for authenticity, and so it has authority, and the ability to involve me. (Some things I'm less happy with--such as the Forrest Gump-like appearance of its two commoner heroes at all the critical junctures of the period's history.) I'm very interested and excited by the prospect of creating authentic exotic worlds. The Odyssey was an example.

So, as much as possible, I try now to let spontaneous excitement be my guide--and follow that up with the discipline of research.