From Lileks:
It’s unnerving to see Darth Maul’s glaring face everywhere again, as if it’s 199-whatever again and our hopes are so very high, right up until the moment we read the opening crawl, and think – tax dispute? – and then see the guys who are obviously wearing crude ASIAN ALIEN masks, and then someone has to say “I have a bad feeling about this,” and so on. From the very beginning, in other words. Realizing you’ve waited all these years, and you’re getting a kiddie movie. Robot soldiers who talk and say Roger-roger. My God. If only someone had shot a time-lapse movie from the perspective of the screen, capturing the faces of the audience as they went from rapture when the Star Wars logo crashes on the screen, and stayed with the same fixed smile gradually fading away as all hope leached from their bodies.
I guess it would have bothered me more if I’d ever been a big fan. But I’m a 2001 man.
This always fascinates me:
For the entire book I’ve been mashing together two plots, making #3 a sequel of sorts to #2. (It’s not, but they’re tied together, like they’re all tied together, by the Casablanca Bar.) The two plots would not blend. There was nothing to make them mesh, at least nothing I knew. A while ago I got the idea that the main character would meet up with one of the protagonists of the late-40s noir novel, and he’d be a spry old bird who could set a few things straight. Imagine Bogart at 80, showing up in a sequel to “The Maltese Falcon.”
Well, he got to talking, and holy. Crow. He explained it all. He wove them both together, provided the motivation I’d been missing, and provided a theme and subplot for the sequel to the 40s-noir novel, “Band Box.” It’s just a bombshell. I looked at the page, walked away, came back, looked at it again, went to bed to chew it over, woke thinking: yes. That’s it.
It’s the best part of the job: you’re not writing. You’re just taking dictation.
Once in a while, someone asks me why I don’t write fiction. It’s because no one ever dictates to me. I have no idea where one would come up with character, plots or dialog. It’s a form of creativity and genius that I simply do not possess.
Characters? The world is full of them. Did you not go to an Iowahawk party or a party which he attended? Just look around you – you have the Iowahawks, Lileks, many people here including the never to be forgotten Matulas of the world…engineers that you’ve worked with; scientists that you’ve worked with; editors and media people you’ve worked with. There are no new characters; just well chosen examples placed in well chosen situations to bring out their interesting features.
Plots?
You think of dozens a day. What you do is start with something you’d like to see – for example what about an economy based upon hydrogen along with a solar system transportation system that allows ships to dip into the Jovian atmosphere and scoop up hydrogen just as fire fighting aircraft scoop up water from a lake. The fuel is then shipped throughout the solar system (where needed). What are the ramifications of that? You write predictions of a path all the time in your articles.
You like the idea of orbiting fuel depots – write a short story that looks every bit a boring story about an analogous earth-based system (garage, car, gas station, 18 wheeler tankers to fill the station tanks, fill-ups, distant destinations), and ends up actually being your orbiting depot infrastructure, in the last paragraph.
The trick…is that it has to be about people – or a person – and how the story changes them. For that you need to know about life.
Your mind has to work in a certain way in which mine does not. Some people clearly have stories trying to get out, as Lileks does. I do not, and never have. Similarly, though I’m a musician, and have a good ear, I can’t come up with a new tune to save my life. Whereas people like Mozart or Bach were clearly dictating from something within, that I simply don’t possess.
What? Who writes and directs for the Space Policy Teddy Bears?
Sadly, that’s not fiction.
I think it’s because you’re too honest, and writers have to take some pleasure in lying.
To quote:
“Writers do not lie!!! They just give the truth…..scope….!”
Story writing is an adjoint problem. You start at the end, and integrate backwards to the beginning.
Hahahah how about this ending:
“And they were all dead”
😉
So, how did they die? The salmon mousse. So, there was a dinner party. So, where was the dinner party? Who were the characters? What were they doing there? And, so on.
You have to start at the end, because possibilities expand from a point, and the end has to be the point where it all comes together.
Great! Now I get to hate Jar Jar Binks in all 3 friggin’ dimensions. Life is glorious!
Oh I see a second part to all this. I played Euphonium in High School and was usually 1st chair. Often I was called upon by the conductor to demonstrate how to play a section of music when the rest of the symphony was off in some way. I was 2nd chair all city band my sophomore year. Because I was in marching band I was always around the drummers and such because they were the cool crowd. Never actually play the instrument at all though. That is until I went over to a friends house that had a studio setup with a full drum set and I sat down and just starting playing the drums and he was like, “Damn you know how to play the drums?” I can mimic quite well but yes just coming up with things creatively on my own seems so beyond me. But I have this hunch that it really isn’t quite so hard as people make it out to be. You just have to be willing to make piles and piles of utter crap before you finally find that one diamond in the rough. Most people just can’t get themselves to trudge through all that until that moment arrives though.
I’m a 2001 man.
When I was 12, I was totally enthralled by Arthur Clarke. I, too, was a “2001” true believer when it seemed like the rest of the world thought space ships would swoosh when they flew overhead.
But 2001 has been on cable a number of times in the last few years, and it hasn’t aged well. The last half hour, which seemed so “tuned in” and relevant and symbolic in 1968, now just triggers a 21st century “WTF?” It reminds me of the comment that one of my heroes, the late, great Joe Bill Dryden, made about the film “The Right Stuff”; he said “I been supersonic lots of times and I ain’t never seen them funny colored lights….”
I was pretty WTF during the last bit of 2001 as well the first time I saw it. The light show went on too long, and the time folding didn’t seem necessary, like it was designed more to confuse than to inform. I think Kubrick said something along the lines of if you understood the ending that he had failed.
Up to that point it was remarkable.
Kubrick was master of “the pause”. It’s oddly effective. Pauses are eerie. Measured speech is eerie. In my book, the apotheosis of the method was on display in The Shining, when Delbert Grady blandly and methodically explains to Jack how he “corrected” his family.
Well, I think it was pretty clear that Kubrick was exploiting the crude special effects of the late 1960’s to evoke the sensation of a “mind-expanding” experience, which at the time meant dropping acid. I don’t recall that that was invoked in the book (but I might be mistaken). But the idea of symbolizing a mind-expanding experience with drug imagery is dated, to say the least.
But yeah, I loved the spaceships and all the gear. I liked the bit about blasting into the vacuum of the airlock and closing and filling it quickly enough to survive. And imagine a computer that could play chess! LOL. Maybe someday!
Those crude special effects weren’t surpassed until well into the 70’s, maybe the 80’s. The mattes involved in the Orion docking to the space station were astounding. The light show, not so much.
Clarke was speculating that the only reason 2001 didn’t win an award for makeup was because the academy didn’t realize they were costumes. What did win–Planet of the Apes?