Filed under: art, Creative Process, Imagination, writing | Tags: Answers, dreams, magnets, Shades of Magic, sleepless, story, story-making, V E Schwab
Before bed, I was reading the third book in V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy. I had a hard time putting it down as our two heroes were in a very tight spot, battling a killer magician creature that could dissipate itself. How were they going to get out of this mess? And, maybe more to the point, how was the writer going to get them out?
It took me a while to get to sleep as I was turning over the problem but eventually I began to dream and I woke myself up multiple times in the night, trying to will myself to remember the following sentence: The Answer Is Magnets. I’d discovered that particles of this magician creature could be drawn out of things like bowls of soup, with magnets. This creature was metallic in some way, I guess. I loved the elegance of a simple scientific kind of “magic” being the solution to this giant thorny problem.
All night long, I kept returning to, “The Answer Is Magnets.” It was so important to me in my sleep, I tried to tell my partner about it multiple times but I never managed it.
Now, I am almost certain that the answer, in this book I was reading, is not magnets. I haven’t read on yet but I feel fairly confident that magnets will not be how this team escapes their situation. It’s out of line with the style of the book and would lack a crucial swashbuckle quality. But you know, I had to solve it for me first, I guess.
This sort of thing has happened to me before. I remember one night, being awake for hours trying to figure out how they were going to get someone out of jail on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I tried out so many scenarios between two and five in the morning. I don’t remember them now or any of the circumstances but I remember the fervor of wondering, “How are they going to get themselves out of THIS one?”
What I’m wondering now is why this doesn’t happen more often. I have a story-making brain so it makes some sense that I get hung up on what might happen next in a story. I can get very wrapped up in the sequences of events. But only rarely does my brain get stuck on a story point like this.
I don’t know why this might be but I suspect it happens when the stakes get very high, when a character I care about is in the tightest of spots and there is no obvious solution. I suspect my story-making brain is actually finding story solutions all the time, without my noticing it. My brain likely generates multiple story solutions, based on the many stories I have seen and read before and it is satisfied that there are ways out of these moments. I think this may be why I am so impressed by stories that I cannot predict. I’m a non-stop predicting machine.
Except when I can’t find an obvious solution. That’s when my brain starts spinning and giving me dreams. I imagine this may be something a lot of us do. I think humans like to problem solve though stories and we like having a list of solutions for getting people we like out of tight spots, even if they’re fictional. We like posing questions and creating problems to solve. We like having answers readily available. And what is the answer?
The Answer is Magnets. Of course.
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Filed under: feminism, movies, TV, writing | Tags: Do you?, movies, Perry Mason, screenwriting, supercut, The Power, TV, You Just Don't Get It
While watching the new Perry Mason show, I heard one character say to another, “You just don’t get it, do you?” and I wanted to ring a bell. Ding, ding, ding! Every screenwriter’s favorite line!
There was a bit of a stir around a movie clip video supercut a while back which featured one character after another saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” As you watch, you can start to feel crazy as one person after another says, in almost exactly the same tone (because there’s really only one line reading for this text), “You just don’t get it, do you?” with occasional text variations.
The video went viral and I would have thought eight minutes of a single line repeated would have alerted every screenwriter to flash a red light whenever this phrase slid out of their pen or keyboard. I certainly put a mental pin in it. But apparently folks are still saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” onscreen.
I feel like I read a breakdown of why this phrase was both so ubiquitous and so lame but I cannot find it now, twelve years later apparently. Maybe the folks at Perry Mason thought no one would notice their cliché because twelve years have passed since this trope got called out. I don’t remember what folks were saying about this in 2011, when this video went around, but now, it’s clear to me that it is a way for a character to explain something going on in the story, a way to squeeze in some exposition or context. It’s a funnily stylized way to include information.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say this phrase in real life – but it is relentlessly common on screen. It sounds natural because we hear it so often but it is just an exposition delivering mechanism, disguised as a tiny conflict between two characters. I was thinking about this phrase while watching The Power (I know, I know, I thought I was done but apparently not). I don’t think they actually used this line but the whole show feels like a fleshed out, “You just don’t get it, do you?” story. This is partly because of the enormous amount of exposition that the show indulges in but mostly because of the attitude. The show feels like someone is playing that line under everything, whispering it, declaiming it, shouting it – over and over again it, the series feels like one big, “You just don’t get it, do you?”
And the problem is, I DO get it. I DO understand why the women in this show are angry and why there is enormous appeal in the evolution of a power that shifts the angle of the playing field. It feels somehow condescending to have these things explicitly stated or illustrated or demonstrated. And I imagine that that patronizing feeling is much worse for men watching the show and very possibly more alienating in the ways it tries to include them and “educate” them. A show that keeps reiterating that you, the audience, just don’t get it, do you, is a show that is fairly likely to push away its viewers. We all like to think we get it. Even men without a stitch of exposure to the feminist movement don’t like to be told they don’t get it, even if they don’t.
We all have things we don’t get. I’m sure there are a lot of things about being a man that I don’t get and it’s clear that there are a lot of things that many men don’t get about being a woman. And, of course, there are tons of things cis people don’t get about being trans and so on.
Part of the reason we’ve had movements like #MeToo and #YesAllWomen is that it became very clear how much was not understood. It can feel like we live in different worlds sometimes. Here’s a conversation I had with a man recently: He said “I like to keep the shades open so I can look out and remember I live in a city.” And I said, “And I like to keep them closed so I don’t get stalked and raped and murdered.” And then there was silence. I could have said, “You just don’t get it, do you?” But there’s no need when we put beauty and fear of violence on the scale. I think he got it.
I guess I feel like, if someone doesn’t get it, finding a way to demonstrate it or feel it or even just explain it, is a more useful way forward than leaning into cliches would be. I mean, you get it, right?
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Filed under: feminism, space, theatre | Tags: knees, manspreading, patriarchy chicken, theater, theatre, violence
TRIGGER WARNING: This piece will devolve into (imaginary) violence and (imaginary) men will be the victims. Also, some strong language.
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A few times in the last few months, I’ve gone to the theatre and found I was seated next to a young man. How young, I’m not sure – maybe 20s or 30s? But every time, I find myself contending with their young man knees pressing into mine. It drives me absolutely bananas but I refuse to be knee pressed out of the space to which I am entitled. I’ve sometimes just stuck my coat over my knee and let the young buck press into that. I’ve tried to suddenly pull away. I’ve tried some quick shifting. Those boys don’t even seem to notice. The one next to me at Into the Woods was audibly crying during the Father/Son song “No More” but that didn’t stop him from manspreading into my space. “Hooray,” I thought, “This generation has learned how to cry and experience emotions!” but “Boo! They have actually gotten worse at manspreading than previous generations.”
The boy next to me at Tao of Glass seemed very comfortable with his knee in my space and got very animated about various pieces of music in the show. I could feel it in his knee! I mentioned this irritating situation to my partner at the intermission and he offered to switch seats with me so I took him up on that offer and, lo and behold, somehow Mr. My-Balls-Are-Too-Big-to-Be-Able-to-Keep-My-Knees-in-My-Own-Space could suddenly keep his knees in his own space. He didn’t stray even once. Funny that.
These young fellas very clearly know how to keep their knees in when they are next to other men but as soon as they are seated next to women – bloop! Knees are OUT! Still! In 2023!
I don’t remember this being a problem when I was a young woman. Either men of my generation were better at maintaining their own personal space or as a young woman, I was so used to pulling my knees together (like a lady!) that I didn’t notice. I honestly don’t know which of those it might be. My feeling then was if a man was pressing his knee into my knee, he was definitely flirting with me. Or a creep.
In my youth, I did an awful lot of giving way. I made space for young men everywhere I encountered them. I yielded to their presence. I did make myself small for them. At 49, I don’t do that anymore. I sometimes end up in games of Patriarchy Chicken because I just don’t automatically make way for men. (Thanks, Charlotte Riley, for the concept of Patriarchy Chicken!) I won’t yield on the street if I don’t want to and when I go to the theatre, I claim the space of my seat!
I was thinking about it the other day – especially about how Mr Knees (at the Glass show) refrained from doing what he’d done with his knees when he was next to a man. Why don’t men press each other’s knees like this?
I suspect it’s because they’re afraid of other men – either that they’ll be seen as gay or that there may be violence.
And something about that thought made me want to go back in time to that first act of the show with Mr Knees and it made me want to punch him in the dick. Just – reach over and – POW! It would not be easy to do practically but something about the fantasy of it really thrilled me. (When I really thought it through, logistically, I think an elbow to the dick would be more ergonomic and simple – but for elegance of phrase, let’s stick with a punch.) Then I thought about how many young men it would be very satisfying to punch in the dick and I thought if the risk of pressing your knee into a lady’s knee at the theatre was getting punched in the dick by ladies who’ve just had enough of this shit – I don’t know – maybe they wouldn’t feel so comfortable letting their knees roll out into women’s bodies. I got kind of fired up – imagining how great it would be to take all the years of smallifying myself and pulling my knees in to make space for men and just roll it all up in a nice first and punch the next guy who couldn’t keep his knees to himself. I started to feel myself to be quite dangerous and I started eyeing all the young men who might be good candidates. It was invigorating.
Now – to be clear, the odds of me actually punching anyone are very low. I’m conflict averse. I don’t like making a fuss and I’d be very unlikely to make a disturbance in a theatre. I would not want to disrupt a show. It’s hard enough putting on plays these days. That’s my sacred space! Also, I’m fully aware that you’re not supposed to go around punching men in the dick and that I’d be in big trouble if I did. I’m just saying – I would like for this to be a viable enough threat that young men at the theatre would think, “Oh gee, I don’t want to get punched in the dick. Maybe I ought to pull in my knees!” That’s all I’m asking for. I ‘d like to invoke a similar fear to whatever is driving them to not do this to other men. That’s all I need. Or, fellas, if you can bring those knees in some other way – that’s good too. All I want is some nice bodily autonomy everywhere I go. Can you help me with that?
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, writing | Tags: Creative Process, ideas, nuggets
I had an idea. I was thinking about how funny Time can be. How an event can feel like it was just yesterday and ten years ago, all at once. I wrote to myself, Time Is a Tricky Witch and I liked it. It made me laugh. Then, a whole narrative emerged where Time was a tricky witch who’d enrolled a nice old man with a long beard to represent her – so whenever anyone had a complaint, they went to Father Time instead of her and she was as free to make as much mischief with time as she wanted.
I liked this idea. It felt really fun. I sat with it for a while, pulled it in a few directions but I quickly realized that it was an idea with nowhere to go. It doesn’t have much more to it, so it couldn’t really be its own story – and there’s nothing else I have going, into which I could fold it. It’s an idea nugget, a complete little something that is unlikely to become anything more.
It seems to me that knowing what KIND of idea I’m having is a useful distinction that I’ve only been able to really identify in later years. I feel like in my youth, I would think, “Oh, I’ve had this great witch idea and now I must develop it!” And then I’d bang my head against the idea for a few days, trying to get something out of it.
But some ideas are just passing ideas and some ideas catch hold of me and send me racing. Knowing that an idea is not one that is likely to catch fire means I can just have the idea and let it go. I can enjoy it for a few moments, develop it as far as I feel it can go and then let it be. If I find a place for it in the future, cool. That’d be cool but it’s fine to let it fade back into the idea soup.
I do think, though, that developing an idea as far as it wants to go is a key stage of it. When something bubbles up, you don’t know if it’s a little thing or a big thing. To find out you have to embrace all ideas with interest and enthusiasm and follow them all with dedication.
I have a lot of these sentence ideas. I write them down and think “One day this will be something” – but they almost never are. They are just nugget ideas that are more or less complete and did not demand further development. They are just as important as the ideas that turn into things, though.
It feels like, with creativity, you have to throw a lot of seeds into the earth to get one idea that can grow into a fully fledged project. The more seeds/ideas you have, the more likely that something will sprout out of the ground. Most ideas are seeds with no growth but you still have to cherish them all to get one to grow. I’ve almost never gone back and developed a small stray idea – but I do think it was important that I wrote them down and gave them some consideration. It taught my brain to how to nourish ideas, cherish them, regardless of whether I can see the end game for it.
And the Time Witch says, if you have any issues with all of this, just go ahead and take them up with Father Time.
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Filed under: Healthcare | Tags: disability, Healthcare, migraine, Risk, routine, The Gambler
When I was at the height of my Teaching Artist powers, I kept an extraordinarily erratic schedule. One morning I’d have to be in Jamaica by 8 am, the next day, I didn’t have a meeting in Manhattan until 4. The following day I’d be in the Bronx from 10 and some days, I’d have gigs in all three boroughs. Some days I’d have no gigs.
I woke up at a different time every day, ate at a different time every day and was rarely in the same place two days in a row. I loved that no two days were exactly alike.
The fact that I once lived and thrived like this is hard for me to reconcile with my current reality. One of the first things I learned about living with migraine is that routine would be my friend. The more predictable I could make my life, the fewer migraines might hit me. I began to try and find the best rhythm and schedule for my body – and while same-ifying my life didn’t stop the migraines entirely, it did make a big difference. I don’t like it. I liked the feeling of never being in the same day twice back when I used to do that. But it is very clear that any disruption of my routine is a trigger for migraine.
The problem with maintaining a regular schedule is life. Life does not follow a regular schedule. Sometimes there are shows I want to see – and they happen at exactly the time I’d normally be eating dinner. This means whenever I see a show, I’m risking a migraine.
I have found that I function best on a schedule where I wake up mid-morning and go to bed late. It suits my biorhythm. I know what times of day are the most productive for me and I’ve organized my life to optimize those times. Unfortunately, most of the world operates at a different rhythm so…when I, say, want to hang out with a friend, I’m probably disrupting my rhythm and so every time I see people, I’m probably risking a migraine. I’m a little bit choosy about seeing people because not everyone is worth the risk, you know? But a lot of people are. And I’m happy to risk it. But it is not uncomplicated.
For me, now, (I hope not forever) migraines are inevitable but this hypervigilance about schedule and routine, probably keeps me from sliding back into a daily migraine climate. And just because the migraines are inevitable doesn’t mean I don’t want to avoid them. I mean, death is also inevitable, but I do try to do everything I can to keep it at bay.
In a lot of ways, this attachment to routine is the most debilitating part of having a chronic condition. It’s hard to explain and it feels shitty to always be weighing the balance of risk and value. It’s hard to know when to hold em and when to fold em, I guess. That is, to just go out and have a few drinks with friend, is highly desirable but the risk is also considerable. It’s easy to make that choice for people I already know and love but harder for meeting new people, trying new things – both things I need and want to do since so much of my network has moved away. The isolation is considerable. But sometimes necessary.
This kind of disability is invisible because to the outside observer, it just looks like I don’t come around so much anymore. Most people don’t see of the ice band on my head or the grey look I can get when the migraine storm comes through. Pretty much no one knows what this really looks like but my partner. And I’m not super inclined to talk about it. I’m not actively trying to hide it but there’s just not much to say. In my case, the threat of migraine is probably as disabling as the migraines themselves. The threat keeps me close to home. The migraines themselves send me to bed.
The whole migraine experience has slowed me way down – and not just in keeping me in routine and at home. The impact on my brain is noticeable. I’m not as quick as I used to be. There is a lag time now where there used to be an instant response. As a person who has tended to rely on my wits, this has been distressing. I can sometimes have trouble pulling up the right word right away. It’s not that I can’t recall it, it’s just that it takes a bit more time to bring it up from the bottom of the sea. It’s not that that had never happened before – it’s just that more and more words seem to end up at the bottom of the sea. My brain feels like it is under water sometimes. I’m not too too worried about it; we have done all the tests and investigated all the things and it really is just migraines. And I guess I’ve come to appreciate that sometimes slower thinking can be deeper thinking. It’s possible I’ve shifted from a rabbit brain to a whale brain, which might be cool. But I certainly find myself mourning for a time when my brain was more able to quickly come up with exactly the right word in exactly the right moment. We might chalk this up to aging, I suppose – but given all the spots of white matter lesions on my brain images, I am more inclined to suspect it’s been the relentless migraine climate in here.
So far, it’s just a matter of speed. I know if I can’t think of a word, it will come to me before too long. If I’m talking with someone, I will usually just ask them for that word that means X and let their faster brains help me so I can finish my thought. When I’m writing, I just write the meaning I’m going for and keep going so as not to dam up my flow. I try not to get hung up on the word snags – the speed traps – but I do worry about it, of course. Choosing words is a lot of what I do. Those who aren’t around me all that much wouldn’t notice it, I don’t think – which is another way this disability can remain invisible.
Like my routine that I depend on, it’s not a thing I’m trying to hide, it’s just not that obvious. I’m not not hiding these things either. When I get hit with a migraine in company, I’m not trying to put on a brave face or trying to hide it – I just have always put on a brave face and I would prefer for the migraine not to be happening, so I tend to fool myself as well. In company, it’s very possible I’ll never let on – again – not because I’m hiding but because my social impulse overrides my own comfort sometimes. I do my best to honor my brain and my body’s needs in those moments but I don’t always manage it – so sometimes I pay for good social times after the fact. Like, I have a great time all night and then as soon as I get home, I crash hard. I’m trying to be more visible about all this since I realized that this is a real disability and sometimes activism can mean showing things that have been hiding in the dark.
Anyway – I say all this because I’ve been opening back out into the world a little bit more these days and I find myself feeling like kind of a drag. Like, I really want to be up for everything and do all the fun activities when friends come to visit or do things differently for a while but I do have to be careful. I have to find ways to explain why I have to be careful and I don’t have a pithy explanation just yet. It’s taken me over a thousand words to explain this migraine climate here. I’d love to be able to live the way I used to in that devil may care what time I go to bed or what time I wake up or if I got any sleep at all but until this migraine weather system changes, I think it’ll be this new routine for a while and if I’m a drag, I’m a drag. And I don’t take gigs that mean I’d have to be in Jamaica by 8 am, that’s for sure.
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Filed under: Uncategorized
This Part Two of a Two Part Series on my viewing of The Power. You can read Part One here. Here’s Part Two:
Since I started writing this, I’ve watched more episodes – which hasn’t really improved my opinion of the show, though I am grateful that it has shifted out of exposition and into stuff happening. But as stuff happens, characters keep saying, “This is going to change the world.” And while I understand that people really do say that in the midst of crisis, as I’m sure we all heard a lot of it in 2020 – it is actually really irritating to hear in a show. Don’t tell me this thing is going to change the world; Just show me the world changing or changed, as the book did. Maybe it’s having lived through these last years but hearing that the world is going to be changed by a thing that some writers made up just rings sort of hollow somehow. “Hey everyone – in this universe we just made up, everyone is growing a tentacle out of their chest! It’s going to change the world!” I hope so! That’s why I’m watching this show, to see what a world where people grow tentacles would look like. I don’t need to know why they grew them. I don’t need to watch them figure out how it happened. Just show me tentacle world, okay? That is the joy of speculative fiction.
The book does explain the science and mechanics of the Power in such a way that it all feels very plausible but it is also very gradual. There are just glimmers of it for a while. It’s not a global event right away. It’s a secret for many of the girls, where they think they are the only ones who possess it and they’re not talking. One of the characters has had the Power for six months when we meet her and it’s a secret that she’s been keeping from her family. There is a single day in the book where it becomes clear this is a global event and it’s not the first day of the book.
The TV show by contrast, starts with a global crisis. And it somehow feels excruciating to watch the early stages of a rapid mass global event in the TV show. I can see why they wanted to add this to the story. (Though I’m not sure why they needed to add a catastrophic plane crash that seemed to recall the beginning of Station Eleven.) I guess it feels like there’s something we know now that we didn’t before the pandemic began. Maybe they feel this will help us process our recent experience – but it turns out I’m not so keen on watching a global catastrophe unfurl.
The early stages of the book were exhilarating. The Power seemed to be a liberating force, offering young women defense and equality and the downsides were not so bad.
In the TV show, the downsides are clear, right away, and the response is instantly fascistic and totalitarian. Liberate me before you cuff me, please!
Lesson for Me: If you ever use the sentence, “This is going to change everything” – cut it immediately and then show the world changed.
Since putting out Part One of this look at The Power, I have learned many things. (Thank you for the link and your comments, Markko!) One of those things is that this show has had multiple show runners, has had a change of casting after a full shoot and has had a re-write and a re-ordering. Part of that was due to COVID, apparently. So, you know, forgiven on that count. But I was never less surprised to learn that too many people were steering a ship. It feels like a story being pulled in 7 directions and it seems that was, in fact, the case.
Another thing I learned was that Naomi Alderman (the writer of the book and a producer on this show) got stuck while she was writing the book and explained that she got herself out of it by writing the book like it was scenes from a TV show. Maybe that’s why the actual show is so frustrating. The book was a better TV show than the TV show! Why why why did they have to mess with it?!
An answer seems to be that each new person leading this ship felt she needed to put her own personal stamp on this. Apparently the retrograde “panties in a bunch” line came from the life of the last showrunner. And of course sexist TV writers still say dumb retro sexist stuff, color me unsurprised. It sounds like a lot of the mayor’s narratives are the personal stories of the writer. But the writer is also someone who spent quite a few lines of her interview declaiming how much she loves men, which just reeks of someone who only worked out recently she might need a feminist movement. We have talked about this sort of thing before and it explains a lot about why the tone is so off in this show. The book is just unadulterated “burn it all down” radical feminist rage for a while. It’s just…what if vengeance rolled across the world? There are no Serena Joy type characters, yearning to support the patriarchy like they do in Handmaid’s Tale. The world tilts very quickly in the book and there’s no stopping the rage. It takes a turn into misandry and that journey of going too far is one of the things that is interesting about it. I’m not sure I like where it ends up but I appreciate the questions it’s asking. The TV show isn’t asking; it’s trying to play both sides and it just makes it dumb.
Lesson for Me: Ask questions with your story instead of giving answers.
I feel like the over-riding flow of the show is its need to explain things – either the Power itself or why all these girls and women might be angry enough to need it. And sometimes the desire to teach Feminism 101 shines through in the stupidest ways. In a later episode, the other Nice Guy™️ character (Tunde, the journalist) gives the clumsiest (and wrongest) explanation of intersectional feminism I have ever heard. He says something like, “Yeah, I never realized how my identities intersected before.” Uhhhhh. First of all, this character has all the privileges but one – so it would be hard to call this an intersectional character – and second of all, this is not how people talk, especially not about intersectionality. It’s dumb to try and teach something in a single line from a character. It’s even dumber when you clearly you don’t know anything about the thing you’re trying to reference.
I feel like the show has been made for people who “just don’t get it” – to teach them or show them the reason the rest of us read this book and thought “I’d be interested in having this power, actually, even with all the downsides.” And so in the end, in trying to serve everyone, it serves nobody.
And you could reasonably say to me – “hey, you know, TV is a medium for the masses. A certain level of appealing to more than the twenty people who already get you might be in order.” But the problem with that is that if that process kills the spirit of the work, it runs the risk of appealing to no one and wins you no new converts. I have probably bought ten copies of The Power over the years. I was a one woman promotion machine for it in its novel form. If the TV show had managed to meet it in any way, I’d be doing the same for the TV show. I’d be evangelizing it instead of breaking down all the ways it has failed so far. I would have helped promote it if I felt it was even CLOSE to the spirit of the book. But it isn’t. So. Just read the book.
Lesson for Me: Write for the 20 people who really get it. The others will have to catch up on their own. If you write for those others, you may imperil the essential nugget of your work. Maybe this show will get better as it goes along. I doubt it. But. It’s possible. There are excellent actors in it, the source material is good, the international storylines are refreshing to see on American TV. I keep watching it, even though it’s driving me crazy. I don’t think the show is a lost cause. I just want it to be better. It could have been amazing. It should have been amazing. It should have been electrifying. ⚡️
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Filed under: feminism, TV, writing | Tags: adaptation, back story, John Leguizamo, Naomi Alderman, Nice guys on TV, The Power, TV
For years now, I have been hotly anticipating the TV version of the novel, The Power. I would occasionally search for it on IMDB or Google, just to see when we might get a televised version of this book that kept me going in some difficult years. I was advised to read The Power by a friend around about the time dragons came into my life and I feel a kinship with Naomi Alderman and the world she created in her book. In case you haven’t read it, it’s the story of a power that teen girls develop which allows them to generate electricity from their hands. It changes the world and how it changes the world is illuminating. ⚡️ I bought a lot of copies of this book for many of the women in my life. It’s been an important book in recent years and I hoped the TV series would only further electrify me. ⚡️
I’ve only seen two episodes so far and so far it has not electrified me 🚫⚡️ and I’m writing this now to try and understand why and also give myself some notes, in case I ever get the chance to write a TV series.
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The first episode was written by the author of the book so I’m baffled by how it could be so disappointing. She wrote such a great book! How could she write such a bad TV episode? It was pretty much ALL exposition. Almost everything that happened pre dates the events of the book. It was just one back story after another, with no real sense of what was to come. It was set up, set up, set up, no pay off. Not much happened. A character, who isn’t that important in the book, accidentally set a couple of things on fire but those events were equally weighted with the posting of some Instagram comments. Another character (Roxy) gets dressed to go to a wedding, then she goes to the wedding, gets in some arguments, goes home and then her mom is murdered there. (This is pretty much the only thing that happens in this episode.)
And by contrast this murder scene is the moment that the novel really begins. There are a few preliminary literary prologues but then the novel opens with Roxy locked in the closet as the home invaders are killing her mo m. It is an inherently dramatic way to start a story. When it begins, we don’t know why this person is in a closet but we learn pretty quickly that she will get out and even more dramatic things will happen. It’s funny to me that a novel would be more dramatic than a TV show but it is, in fact the case. The author has undercut her own drama with “dramatic writing.”
Lesson for Me: Start in the middle of the action. The audience will catch up and it is much more exciting for them to not know things.
The first episode, aside from the murder, was pretty much all backstory. Maybe Alderman got excited to write it because it was the new stuff for her or maybe TV execs gave her “we need backstory” notes or maybe, given that there are quite a few playwrights in that writer’s room, they all got a little high on backstory. I don’t know what happened in this writer’s room but backstory is absolutely a trend in TV writing in these last several years. I haven’t read The Foundation books but I have it on reliable authority that the TV show is mostly invented backstory for the first twenty pages of the first book. That show, too, is stacked with playwrights. I don’t know why playwrights are so enamored of backstory these days. Maybe it’s something they get drilled into them MFA programs? But I am not a fan of the back story. Aside from slowing down the dramatic action, it kills a lot of mystery and intrigue. I don’t need to know why someone does something. I don’t need to understand why their childhood trauma made them stab someone or whatever. Just have them stab and let me wonder why they did it. If Othello were a contemporary American TV series, it would open with Iago as a child stumbling upon his mother’s affair with a “moor” or some shit. Can we not just let Iago be a villain who hates Othello for no good reason and goes too far?
Can we not have everything explained? If you absolutely have to put backstory in, please wait until we’re much further along in the series when I might at least find it an interesting explanatory flashback. But, truly, I’d be happy to have it disappear altogether.
Lesson for Me: If you feel tempted to explain why someone is the way they are – with backstory or a speech – don’t.
On a related theme, the TV series has already failed to do something that the novel did beautifully and that is, create mystery. The first thing in the novel (after an epigraph) is a letter from its “author” – a man whose name is not the name on the front cover of the book. That’s Mystery #1.
Mystery # 2 is the letter in response to that letter from someone with the first name of the author on the front cover (Naomi) and a reference to “this world run by men you’ve been talking about.” This Naomi is titillated by “male soldiers” and “boy crime gangs” and we have to wonder, “what is this backwards world?” Then when the narrative begins – its title page says “Ten years to go” and as the novel goes on that number counts down. We don’t know what happens in ten years but we have the whole novel to wonder about it.
The TV show opens with Toni Collette at a press conference and then flashes back with a title card that reads “Six months earlier” – which is not a particularly curiosity-inspiring title card.
Lesson for Me: A little thing like a title can create a whole lot of mystery and continue to drive curiosity through a whole experience.
Sometimes I feel like I can see the TV executives’ notes as I watch a show. In the case of The Power, when John Leguizamo showed up as the Mayor’s husband, I saw the TV execs’ note that said, “We need at least one more good man in this. We need a man who’s doing the right thing. We just need a little balance. We’ve got a lot of bad guys. We need a good guy we can root for.” So we get this nice guy dad and we like him because he’s played by John Leguizamo, and he’s a doctor who cares about teenage girls, like his daughter – and he’s a good husband who wants to help his wife express her rage. Where would this mayor be without her nice husband? (Well, in the book she’s already divorced when the story starts, so we can see where she’d be. In a much more powerful position, truthfully.)
But because this Nice Guy character is not at all necessary to the story, they have to come up with nice guy stuff for him to do. They get the mayor mad by having the governor tell her to not get her panties in a bunch – something no one has actually said directly to women since the 80s, I think, and then they have Nice Guy™️John Leguizamo encourage her, a forty something year old politician, to express her rage.
First, you’re asking me to believe that Toni Collette (age 50) doesn’t know how to express her rage?! Sorry, no. And then you’re asking me to believe that it takes an especially enlightened nice guy doctor to teach her how to break a plate? That she’s never been mad before in all her 50 years? Did this character miss the entire Trump administration? Believe me, she’s broken plates before – and she did not need her nice guy husband to release her somehow. But they surely added this scene so Nice Guy™️ had something to do that shows he’s not like the other guys.
It feels like this whole character arc is remedial feminism – like, “Hey fellas, did you know women could get angry too? Sometimes it takes a little while or some help from a friendly man to express it but those ladies have a lot of anger stored up if you know how to see it!”
Lesson for Me: If anyone ever insists you put a Nice Guy™️ in your work to balance it out, please break a plate and tell them to go fuck themselves. ⚡️
The other note I can practically hear from the execs is to appeal to the young people more. They beefed up the part of the Mayor’s teen daughter and created some of the dumbest conflict between mother and daughter because somehow they thought it would be interesting to have the teen express her anger on an Instagram-like platform. (Don’t they know kids don’t use Instagram? That’s a Millennial platform! Kids are maybe still on TikTok. Even I know that and I don’t even have kids.) So – they’re, like, trying to appeal to teens – because I guess the two working class teen girls weren’t enough? They needed a weird argument where the privileged teen is mad her mom doesn’t spend enough time with her? What sort of teens are those? I know kids these days are closer to their parents than my generation was – but still? Do these writers not know any teens? They are not generally wishing their parents were MORE on top of them.
Also, they’ve weirdly added a teen boy to this family, seemingly so they can explore the ripped from the headlines’ madness of Andrew Tate and have some conflict between these kids! Cause kids like conflict? And they like to see stuff they saw on TikTok on TV shows? I don’t know. Seems dumb.
Lesson for Me: Has someone asked you to appeal more to teens? Don’t just write your idea of a teen, go talk to some teens, see what actually appeals to them (it’s not necessarily characters their own age) – and if you’re going to include social media, please use what they actually use.
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Believe it or not, I’ve got another thousand words to say about what I’m learning from this TV show so I’m going to do this in two parts. Meanwhile, I’m in the process re-reading the book, just so I can be accurate about the differences.
Short version of my re-reading experience so far: The book is still good. The TV show is still not. More to follow.
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Filed under: art, theatre, writing | Tags: art, artist opportunities, Arts Justice Officer, cheating, Crete, fee, Gournia, Greece, Harriet Boyd, Mudhouse Residency, residency
My friend suggested we both apply to this artist residency in Greece. When I looked at it, I noticed there was a fee to attend and I almost didn’t apply – but then I thought about how much I’d love to be on Crete with my friend so I went ahead and submitted for it, hoping to maybe get one of the few fellowships they offer.
About a month or so later, I got an email saying I was accepted to the residency and then another saying I had not received the Fellowship. And the worst part, my friend had not received an acceptance email. I was wondering if maybe I shouldn’t go, even though these acceptances are rare. (Those of you who read this blog regularly probably have a sense of how rare.) Then I looked more closely at the details of the residency and discovered that it included a visit to an archeological site, excavated by a woman I’d done a ton of research about. I also discovered that we’d have an evening of learning Cretan circle dances – something I’d been looking for an opportunity to explore for a few years now. Suddenly, it felt like I really HAD to go. For my art, for one thing. These two things relate directly to the play I proposed working on there. I had no idea when I applied – and neither did they. It’s the kind of synchronicity that makes art feel magical sometimes.
But there’s something about paying a fee to do it that feels like getting away with something. Like, if I have to pay for an experience or opportunity then I am somehow playing this game unfairly. It’s not just that I’ve generally not had the money to pay for these sorts of opportunities. It’s also that I have a belief system that says I shouldn’t pay for these sorts of opportunities. I heard an internal voice say, “That would be cheating” as I considered whether to accept this invitation (“The invitation to spend a lot of money,” says the voice.) But I know how things work now. I know that these kinds of opportunities are the kinds of things that can push a career forward. I think of all the internships and apprenticeships and unpaid gigs at reputable theatres that I did not even consider pursuing because I couldn’t and felt I shouldn’t do unpaid work. That was partly because I couldn’t afford to not get paid, sure, but also this belief that those kinds of gigs would be cheating. Why would I pay to go work grunt gigs at Williamstown Theatre Festival just to get celebrities’ coffee or whatever? I wanted to play the great Shakespeare roles, not cater to famous people!
Well, it turns out, catering to famous people in unpaid internships is how you get further opportunities. It is, in fact, very smart to take gigs like this if you can. Because, you know, you get Sigourney Weaver’s coffee enough for her, she might help you get that audition to play one of those Shakespeare parts later. This sort of thing is true in almost every art form. In one’s youth, you pay for opportunities (or labor for free for organizations) that translate into connections that translate into future success. Dig into a successful artist’s career and you are very likely to find some opportunity that I might once have thought of as cheating.
Is this just? Absolutely not. It means it becomes harder and harder for working class artists to make a go of it. But it is the way it has tended to work. Even more so now. This would have been useful information to have had in my youth but I just didn’t know. And the people who knew weren’t saying. And if they had said, I’m not sure I’d have believed them.
So here I am, something like three decades later, worrying that paying for this opportunity might be cheating. I heard some part of my brain say, “What if this opportunity gave you an unfair advantage?”
And that’s when I laughed. Because – uh…..what if I DID get a leg up now? At age 49? What if I paid some money for an artistic opportunity and it helped turn some things around for me? Would there be some kind of arts justice police to come seize any future success and say, “Nope, nope. This doesn’t count – she paid for those connections!”
Hey! Emily! There are no arts justice police! And if there were, they would be so busy with all the unfairness out there, they wouldn’t even notice me paying to go to a residency. But there is, I guess, an Arts Justice Officer in my brain.
I really should seize any chance I get. And honestly, at this stage in my struggling artist career, I might not even be opposed to a direct pay to play scheme. Like, if someone reputable came to me and said, “Pay me X amount of dollars and I will get you a life changing rave review in the New York Times,” I’d start fundraising to pay for X immediately. And I would let the one in me who worries about cheating shout until she was hoarse. She’d be right, of course – but her concerns have done me no good so far.
What’s funny is, my standards for myself are somehow different than those I have for others. If a young artist came to me to ask if they should take an opportunity like this residency or Williamstown Theatre Festival or Tanglewood or whatever the equivalent might be in various other art forms, I would not hesitate to encourage them to do it. Nothing is a guarantee of success in an arts career but some opportunities move the needle further than others. Some odd idea of fairness or the right way to do things is no reason not to give yourself the boost. Life in the arts is not fair. My inner sense of justice hates this but it’s true. It’s not a meritocracy and the Best Person doesn’t always win. In fact, they rarely seem to win.
This is part of the reason a lot of artists are especially vulnerable to magical thinking and things like MLMs. We see that success is unpredictable and sometimes unjustified so we can fall prey to the “I just need to believe harder” game. We think, “I don’t need to buy my way into opportunities, I just need to have faith and my chance will come!”
And of course, there are many who would prey on the desperate thirst of artists so we can also get pretty skeptical of any chance that comes with a price tag. But of course, things like Graduate School come with an enormous price tag and some of them pay off and a lot of them don’t. But my brain doesn’t think of training as cheating somehow. Even though, in many cases, it is as big a scam as anything. In fact, while I was in graduate school, my advisor told a room full of students that he’d lied on his resume in his youth – that he gave himself credits he didn’t actually have and scored himself a fancy directing gig. He advised me to do the same on my resume during a business coaching session with me. I recoiled – but maybe I shouldn’t have – as this guy managed to have a fairly reputable career before getting the six figure job as chair of that department and his puffed up resume was just a funny story he tells now. I could not imagine bluffing my way into a career like that, not with my inner Arts Justice Officer – but it sure worked for him.
I do think there’s a line, sure, and bluffing about your previous jobs feels like it’s across that line for me – but otherwise, I think this arts life is a grab any opportunity you can situation.
I mention all this because I was so surprised to see this justice officer in my own brain somehow thinking that there was a fair way to chase down artistic opportunities. I suspect I am not alone in having one of these cops in my brain and I just want us (me and anyone else who has one of these in their brain) to recognize that they are not very helpful.
It is possible that this residency to which I just got accepted might just be a way for the folks who run it to make some money. (It started to feel that way when I got the invoice.) I mean, maybe it will do nothing for my career. Maybe I’m just raising money to go sit by the sea in Greece for a couple of weeks and have some Cretan adventures. But if that’s the case, there are definitely worse ways to spend a couple of weeks and a bunch of money.
But even if it’s not all I imagine – not a magical time with fellow artists, getting inspiration by the sea, finally cracking open this Cretan play that I’ve been working on for years – it will actually be helpful for the career even if there are no direct links. This residency may lead to other ones, in that residencies are like grants, in that people like to give to proven artists and projects. One residency does tend to lead to another. I pay for this residency now and maybe down the line I have a better shot at a McDowell, a Millay or a Yaddo. Is it cheating to buy my way into opportunities that may lead to opportunities? There is no cheating in this game. You just have to keep playing however you can. That’s something I wish I’d learned years ago.
Anyway – this residency is a small group of artists from multiple disciplines (something I always love) in a small village on the coast of Crete. I’ll be working on my play, Kephala, which is about the hill in Knossos (also Crete!) where a lot of archaeology and history have happened. I wrote a circle dance into the play and apparently we’re going to learn three there, outdoors by the sea. I mean….
If you’d like to help me get to this residency, you can contribute to my Ko-fi campaign to help me pay those fees. I somehow think it will feel less like cheating with some community behind me.
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You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Filed under: American, TV | Tags: Brazil, bus, Cable Girls, Crash Landing on You, friendship, Germany, International TV, Italy, kindness, Norway, South Korea, Spain, travel, Turkey, TV, Velvet
For a while, I thought my interest in International Television was coming from a desire to escape, to be so far from my own world that I couldn’t even understand the language or the norms. That may still be a factor, but lately I’ve found that watching these things has revealed things about my own culture, the patterns that were underneath that were previously invisible to me because they were just the air I breathe.
Of course a TV program is not the culture itself. A TV show tends to reveal things about a culture that it wants to be seen doing that aligns with its values or pushes them in illuminating ways. American TV is not American culture but it is how we like to imagine ourselves – and there a lot of things we DON’T do in our TV that reveal as much as we do.
I’ve talked about Men Crying before. Men don’t cry much in American media and I thought it was just Spain where men cried beautifully on TV. Since I wrote the piece, I have also enjoyed men crying in Korea, Turkey, Poland, Norway and more. Some of the countries have a reputation for machismo – and yet seeing so many men crying for a wide range of reasons, I gotta say, we may have some of the most screwy tropes of masculinity going here in these United States. Given our recent (and current) political situation, this is probably not a surprise.
We also don’t do a lot of kindness and consideration in American media, I’ve realized. I’ve been watching the Korean mega-hit Crash Landing on You and the thing that moves me over and over about the main characters’ relationship is how considerate they are of one another. Sure, they save one another’s lives by shielding each other from gun shots, that’s pretty usual in American movies, but the stuff that touches me is, like, thinking about what their partner would like or what would make them more comfortable. The male lead, who is very tall, bought some groceries for his beloved and he put them on an empty shelf – but then squatted down to his partner’s height to place them where she could reach them. The grand gestures are very American but the small ones are things I can’t think of ever having seen in an American show or film.
There was a whole sequence of this character making coffee for her before they get together and it was almost erotic, the way the camera lingered on the process. First there was a scene of him searching for beans in the market, then boiling the water in a cauldron, grinding up the beans by hand, pouring it into the cone. It is not a short moment.We know he loves her by the way he makes that coffee. Which just points out for me the way American romantic leads will take a bullet for you, but make you a cup of coffee? Only if you’re both cops at the station’s machine and it happens to be convenient. American media loves a big gesture and cares very little for small acts of devotion. Because of my exposure to American media, I feel like it took me way longer than it should have for me to work out how important kindness might be in a partner. The most kindness an American partner might demonstrate is pulling a blanket over a sleeping person, which, you know, is nice – but not, like….exceptional.
Another thing I find myself moved by in a lot of International TV is friendship. It’s not true of every country’s TV I’ve seen (I’m looking at you, Norway and Germany) but a lot of countries have incredibly powerful groups of friends who are as devoted to one another as romantic partners. I first noticed it in Cable Girls but I’ve seen it in many Spanish programs since (Morocco: Love in the Time of War, Valeria, The Time Between, Velvet) as well as Brazilian shows (The Girls from Impanema, Maldivas) and of course Italy (My Brilliant Friend). You don’t see this kind of camaraderie in American Media – unless it’s a war film or a heist. Pretty much you can’t enjoy one another’s company unless you’re killing people or working together to steal things. American media has a lot going for it but there are a lot of gaps in how we represent relationships and given the influence of the American media on our culture (and other people’s culture). I wonder if the gaps are reflective of gaps in our actual relationships
I have a lot of great friends but they are scattered across the globe so I haven’t enjoyed the joy and power of a strong friend group in ages. I find myself very jealous of these groups on TV when I see them and wonder if our media had shown us more of them in your youth, if we might have held together more. Prioritizing one’s friends is a little unusual in these United States. That’s probably clear in the way we present to the world.
One of the most interesting things about traveling, like, real-in-person get on a bus in a foreign country type traveling, is how much it can reveal about one’s own culture. I have never felt so American as when I am far away from home. I have come to appreciate aspects of my culture that I might have previously never considered. It is fascinating to be identified as American, not because of my accent or appearance but because of some aspect of my behavior. The smiling will often give me away. Or some effusive expression of enthusiasm.
Watching a lot of international TV seems to have a similar effect as real life traveling can but on a broader cultural scale. I feel and understand my culture’s Americanness in a new way. I can see some things we’re missing and the impact that might be having on us, as a nation. Like, maybe if we weren’t such rugged individualists, we might value our friends more, we might cry more freely, we might show love, not just to our romantic partners but to the world at large in acts of service or devotion. I feel like it would be good for us as a nation – which might be good for the world, too. Like, if we stopped romanticizing men who shoot bullets (or take them for us) and leaned into men who make coffee and kindness, well, maybe we’d stop sending bullies to govern us. Or something like that. I know other cultures have their troubles and issues, too, and sometimes I can see those peeking out beyond their engaging works of television – but it’s the things that showcase our differences, our cultural contrasts that really teach me something. And maybe, someday, if I get to travel for real, someone can show me how to ride a bus in those places.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: art, community, Creative Process, dreams, economics, theatre | Tags: academia, graduate school, NYC, sustainability, theatre, theatre company, theatre making, toxic
Once upon a time in New York City, my friends and I started a theatre company. We’d have readings and rehearsals at our apartments. We made molds for masks in my kitchen. We had snacks and drinks and a generally lovely time. We wrote our first fundraising letter at Yaffa Café in the East Village and rubbed one of their buddha statues’ bellies for luck. The bumps in the road were quickly smoothed and we threw some fun post show parties. We also made some pretty kick-ass magical shows, if I do say so myself.
It went like this for a few years but then issues of sustainability started to become more serious. There were the questions of how we could sustain the work as the city got more expensive – and the questions of sustainability in our personal lives, in the things we did for money, or our relationships got very loud. I could see that my career as a teaching artist was not going to be sustainable either so I decided I needed to go to grad school so I could bring myself and my company to the next level.
But what WAS the next level? Was it a particular marker of success? Was it financial stability? I hoped those things were possible. I thought they would be – but I think I was looking in the wrong place.
I went to graduate school thinking that a credential might offer me the possibility of a life in academia where I could bring my company along with me. Part of why I chose the program I did was because one of our teachers was doing just that there. She ran the dance department and her company, in residence, performed there at least once a year. I was interested in that model. But then I went there and saw what was happening and a couple of months in academia killed that dream fairly quickly. It was not for me. Somehow I’d imagined that making art in a college would be intellectually rigorous and artistically supportive – instead it was lazy, petty, toxic and insular. And hardly anyone was having any fun.
If there’s one thing that I relied on heavily and enjoyed pretty consistently when I first started making shows in New York, it was the abundance of good will. We didn’t have a lot of money to pay our people but we worked hard to have a good time and we really had a good time. We generally really liked and admired one another and lived in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
In graduate school, every decision I made was challenged and not in an artistically interesting way – more like everyone constantly questioned my judgment and respect was in short supply. I had to fight for even the smallest things. There were power struggles – like when faculty members accused me of “stealing” their actors. There were issues with the shop. There were issues with the teams. I heard that the entire design department discussed if I “knew what I wanted’ because the costume designer had given me capes and tights in her designs, over and over again when I explicitly reiterated that I wanted no capes and no tights, over and over and over again, every time we met. I was open to a lot of things but if there was one thing I knew for sure it was that I did not want to see any tights or capes. Despite my best efforts, my actors were in capes and tights in a terrifying array of rainbow colors for their fittings. None of us were happy about it. I let the designer have a couple of capes in the end because I was so sick of fighting. Every good thing begun there turned rotten eventually.
I’d gone there hoping to figure out a way to make my life and my company sustainable and I came out ready to quit theatre entirely. I didn’t.
And in the intervening years, I have made a lot of things I’m proud of but it’s been a long time since the spectre of toxic theatre-making hasn’t haunted me.
When I first started in NYC, I really felt strongly that enough good will could over come any hardship. We had issues here or there; they weren’t a big deal. But my immersion in toxic methods and patterns in grad school and beyond made it hard to create with any kind of genuine optimism. Even with the nicest, safest people, I was braced for disaster.
It’s taken a long time to clear my system of all the disorder that my time in grad school created. The program was only two years but it has taken fifteen to sixteen years to re-set all the damage it caused. If I had it do all over again, I wouldn’t go. The degree has done almost nothing for me. It gave me a handful of underpaid college courses as an adjunct and that’s about it. It did nothing for my personal sustainability and almost killed my company entirely.
But I didn’t set out to write about why going to grad school was a bad idea for me. I’m here to tell you about those magical first years when we were awash in possibility and confidence and love and hope and how this year, for the first time in a while, I could remember what that felt like.
I know from this side of things how incredibly rare sustainability in theatre is. I know a lot more about the business of theatre making and what it takes to make a living wage from it. The landscape for the arts has changed a great deal over the last 20+ years. I have a much clearer sense of how all of it fits together and where there is space to hope and dream and where there is opportunity to advance and where there is not.
I have become wildly less ambitious than I used to be – at least, less ambitious in the usual way. I no longer dream of a big Broadway debut. But I suppose I have become more ambitious in that I am striving for a kinder, warmer, more human and more fun way of doing things.
When I started, I really thought that the way it worked was – you made something really cool and a big shot (or a big shot’s assistant) came to see it and then good shows would be magically transported to Broadway. It was a very sweet naïve sort of dream. But not harmless, though – because I kept feeling like I failed when I made things and they didn’t “go anywhere.”
The thing that I’d like to go back in time and tell myself was that the thing itself was the gold. The process, the fun, the parties, the rehearsals, the hanging out and making something we were proud of – THAT was the miracle. I’m sure the me of twenty years ago would have rolled her eyes at a future me coming to tell her to enjoy every minute. But it’s not so much that I’d want that earlier version of me to enjoy it while it was happening, because I WAS enjoying it while it was happening. It’s more that I wish she could have continued to enjoy it while she was on a roll, to have continued to make work with people she liked in an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation, even if it meant giving up some of her ambitions or getting a different kind of day job. If I had it to do over again, I’d have let my hopes for sustainability and professionalism drift away and just luxuriated in our process. It’s possible that might have actually led me to the success I’ve found so elusive. But if it didn’t, I’d have had a lot more years of very pleasurable art making. That’s the dream for my younger self now. And maybe this self too.
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