The Most Humbling Experience Of Being A Writer Is When You Spend Hours Writing And Think You Wrote 10k

For some reason the versions of this where he gives two salutes is being deleted and replaced with a version with a quick cut to a cheering crowd so I’ll just share it here 🙃

J. R. R. Tolkien: no, my books aren't about the war I experienced. It's just a story

J. R. R. Tolkien's works: you cannot go home, war ends entire bloodlines, you are mourning the death of your brother alone, you dug into the earth and permanently scored the land, you cannot explain what you have been through, you cannot go home, "that wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life", leaving the women behind does not save them, the young die first, you cannot go home, the parent will bury their child, you have lost the wives and you will never connect with them again, "how shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?", you are not the same, you cannot go home, you can never go home, your father will only side with those he sees as worthy bloodlines and you cannot change his mind, it is more meaningful Not to kill, sometimes your sacrifice accomplishes nothing, you cannot go home

Putting books on hold at the library has the same thrill of ordering books online, but with the added benefit of not losing any money over titles I might not enjoy.

10/10 would recommend.

I have the best friends lol. Look at this lovely cross stitch piece a friend made me!

Everytime I read Frankenstein, the same line makes me put the book down and stare at the wall. It’s my favorite line in the book; it has its own highlighter color in my annotations. The first time I read it, I literally detoured after my last class just to tell my lit teacher how much I liked the line because I couldn’t wait until second period the next day. Here’s the line:

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

This is said by the creature. He wanted to live. He wanted to live life so badly even though he had had such a difficult one. He still loved the song of the birds and the smell of the flowers and the joy in the world even if he never got to truly experience that joy. I just. AHHHH.

He wanted to fight for a life he never got to live.

Cinderella rewrite where Cinderella’s father is an unusually successful fisherman due to his secret friendships with the shy and mysterious mermaids, successful enough to attract a moderately wealthy and ambitious bride with two daughters. Once he dies, her stepmother, determined to make sure her daughters inherit the fishing business as dowries by marrying before Cinderella, forbids her from going out on the fishing boats or into town and makes sure she spends as much of her time as possible doing drudgework, hauling offal and cleaning fish. When the Prince’s ball comes around, an important occasion for young women to make good connections, the stepmother forbids her from going, telling her that she needs to get the latest salmon catch gutted and ready for sale instead.

Cinderella’s mermaid godmother calls upon her people to clean the fish and gifts her a dress and shoes of shimmering fish scales that wreathe her in rainbows under the moonlight. She makes an impression on the Prince at the ball so strong that he immediately falls in love with her, and when she’s forced to flee before her stepmother notices her (no masquerade mask or dancing rainbows will disguise her from her own family at close range), the Prince is left with only a delicate fish leather slipper left on the front steps to try to find her again.

He goes around the houses, seeking the owner of the slipper, but Cinderella is once again working in the fish sheds. He stepmother, desperate and determined and having found Cinderella’s other shoe that very morning, realises what has happened and takes a knife to the feet of her prettiest daughter, telling the prince that she suffered an injury that very morning but those are definitely her shoes, see, here’s the other one, and they still fit.

The daughter is pretty and witty and charming, and while the Prince doesn’t feel the same spark and instant sense of connection that he did at the party, he reasons that she’s overwhelmed and in pain and once she’s healed, all will be well. There are no birds to whisper of blood in the shoe – the Prince has seen the bandaged feet already – and the daughter slips on the shoes (the only shoes she has that will fit her, now,) and accompanies him to the palace.

But the stepmother is no doctor, and by the time the Prince gets her to the palace doctors, it’s too late – his beloved has contracted an infection in her feet from the shoe leather, made unclean in its travels. She will survive – it is an infection of a common filth of fish and birds, one that the doctors have potions for for the occasions where dangerously cooked food causes outbreaks – but in her raving, she confesses the whole scheme to the Prince who, furious, returns to the village to find the girl he truly fell in love with, the girl hidden from him.

“Oh, yeah, the fish cleaner,” the villagers shrug. “We don’t see her around very much, she’s probably in the sheds. Her family calls her Salmonella.”

yup, it's all a joke to me...

among the most enduring lessons i have ever received in screenwriting stands this one from glenn gordon caron…

(glenn created and ran the wildly successful, long-running “medium” - on which i worked for two seasons as co-executive producer - as well as one or two other things that have… you know… shaped the very face of popular culture as we know it)

…a legendarily tough grader who likes to do his master-level work without a lot of noisy fuss and bluster (and probably dislikes being singled out for public praise like this) glenn would set the table for every one of our story pitches to him with a single, and deceptively simple, request:

“tell it to me like it’s a joke.”

now, “medium” was several things - among them, one of tv’s best portrayals of a messy but functional marriage, as well as a crime procedural dotted with representations of unspeakable violence, usually perpetrated by serial killers in the psychic visions of its lead character - but “barrel of laughs” is most likely not in the top ten descriptors for that series…

…so how did “tell it to me like it’s a joke” fit into the equation?

a joke - for my money - is to storytelling what haiku is to poetry: the shortest possible distillation of formal intent. a set-up, brief development, and a punch line…

…short, sweet — and, if successfully told, climaxing in an explosive, involuntary emotional response.

for a story to work in any genre, every successful element from the macro to the micro - from the sweep of the story, to the shape of individual scenes, the arcs of the characters, and the very structure of individual lines of dialogue - should be reducible to the specific outlines of a joke.

set up, development, punch line.

as you have guessed by now, the punch line doesn’t have to be funny - it can be horrific (as it often was on “medium”) or tear-inducing, or a twist that sends the story into an unexpected direction - but it is the nexus toward which the set up and development need to work in absolute concert - there’s no room for fat on a joke, only specificity of purpose.

to this day, the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” principle guides me through story and scene development like a trusty compass: if you can tell your story in the most concise way possible and still deliver your emotional punchline, then all the adornments will fall into line as needed.

“tell it to me like it’s a joke” is neither a formula nor a cure all - it’s a test: if your concept survives on the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” touchstone, then at least you know that the gross anatomy is in place… there are still a thousand ways to mess it up, to be sure, but the airframe will fly - so long as you outfit it with all the necessary equipment.

you wanna know my favorite joke?

an aimless young artist is recruited by an organization that fights monsters… while at first she dislikes her employer and considers him a stuffed shirt, she ultimately finds in him the father she never had.

I'm so fascinated by languages with different levels of formality built in because it immediately introduces such complex social dynamics. The social distance between people is palpable when it's built right into the language, in a way it's not really palpable in English.

So for example. I speak Spanish, and i was taught to address everyone formally unless specifically invited otherwise. People explained to me that "usted" was formal, for use with strangers, bosses, and other people you respect or are distant from, while "tú" is used most often between family and good friends.

That's pretty straightforward, but it gets interesting when you see people using "tú" as a form of address for flirting with strangers, or for picking a fight or intimidating someone. In other languages I've sometimes heard people switch to formal address with partners, friends or family to show when they are upset. That's just so interesting! You're indicating social and emotional space and hierarchy just in the words you choose to address the other person as "you"!!

Not to mention the "what form of address should I use for you...?" conversation which, idk how other people feel about it, but to me it always felt awkward as heck, like a DTR but with someone you're only just becoming comfortable with. "You can use tú with me" always felt... Weirdly intimate? Like, i am comfortable around you, i consider you a friend. Like what a vulnerable thing to say to a person. (That's probably also just a function of how i was strictly told to use formal address when i was learning. Maybe others don't feel so weird about it?)

And if you aren't going to have a conversation about it and you're just going to switch, how do you know when? If you switch too soon it might feel overly familiar and pushy but if you don't switch soon enough you might seem cold??? It's so interesting.

Anyway. As an English-speaking American (even if i can speak a bit of Spanish), i feel like i just don't have a sense for social distance and hierarchy, really, simply because there isn't really language for it in my mother tongue. The fact that others can be keenly aware of that all the time just because they have words to describe it blows my mind!