Men in Trees

I started watching the show when it first came on. My first reaction was not an impressed one, but then I kept watching because I was home and it was on and it was far more interesting than whatever reality show it was scheduled against. Then it started to grow on me, and not just because I'm secretly in love with Alaska.

Last semester, my schedule kept me away from the TV when it was on, but now I'm catching up. I like being able to watch TV shows in rapid succession, it highlights things I wouldn't have noticed watching the episodes one at a time.

Mostly, these past couple of days, I've been struck by two things: characters and plot. You want archetypes? Men in Trees has got loads of 'em. Last night, I couldn't help but notice one in particular.

Ben is a character who's near and dear to my heart because he's a bartender/bar owner. He's also a nicely drawn bartender archetype-type character. I'm most impressed because it took me so long to notice what the writers were doing. In many episodes he's the one behind the bar who's subtly getting into everybody's business and acting as a foil for a number of the characters. As the show goes on, they develop this really great dynamic between him and Jack. Ben is the one who points out, to Jack, what the audience knows. Ben is the one who gives the "hey man, pay attention" talks.

Also, as the one who runs the one bar in the tiny Alaskan town, he's automatically a character who often fulfills the role of host in terms of bringing people together. His bar is something of a refuge (literally, even, in one episode) and sooner or later, everyone it town winds up there. For the sake of the show and getting plots moving, The Chieftain is essential. It's easy to see, from a writing perspective, why the bar and Ben exist. However, it's also easy to forget about the man behind the curtain and just have fun with the story.

Plotwise - they do a good job of building up relationships and making them unique. So, even when I realized they had two simultaneous love-triangle stories going on, I also realized that making that choice wasn't just a matter of laziness and that there were some interesting things going on by having the simultaneous plots. Cool.

So, while the show does certain things that are fairly easy to see why they were done and where they're going, the writers do a good enough job that the transparency doesn't bother me.

Pseudonym

For my Scottish Lit. class, we're going to have a blog. Since this blog will be out in the public realm, that means the comments of people from my class (and the corresponding undergrad class) will be visible for whoever wanders along. This is fuzzy ground, thanks to the university's policies about student privacy.

Ergo, Margaret has told us that we will all be using pseudonyms to do our postings. Cool, huh?

Of course, this creates a huge pile of possibilities. Should I pick a name which represents some homage to a favorite writer? Should I plug in the name of a character from something I've written? Should I use some kind of name pulled from my family? Should my name reflect my course of study for the class and come from a folk song? Or, given the subject of the class, should I pull my name from a Scottish book, or from folklore? So much to choose from, I just don't know. I get the chance here to call myself anything I want. Fun and intimidating at the same time.

"Come on," you say, "It's just a pen name for a class, it's hardly a major decision."

Yeah, I know. But the writer in me loves names. I love finding just the right name for a character, and if I'm going to be a character, I ought to have just the right name too. Oughtn't I?

I guess the real question here is: if I were fictional, what would my author name me?

How about you? If you were in a book, what would your name be? No, your given name doesn't count.

Don't Read That

So... March?

It's trying real hard around here to be spring. The trees are growing some buds, the weather's warming up, and there's even a new baby around. I guess this month's theme is pretty obvious, isn't it?

'Tis the season of new, and I'm going to latch right onto that and say that this is the month for doing something new. This is the month to break your routine, your habits, and that rut you've unknowingly fallen into.

"Um," you say, "That was last month, wasn't it?"

Okay, we're operating under a similar theme. It's the specifics, you see, that are different. Last month was all about shaking up your writing routine. This month is all about shaking up your reading. We've all got our reading stand-bys, whether they're a specific genre, author, or genre (I love how there are two meanings for "genre"). We've also got those that we haven't ventured into yet. Now's the ideal time to do just that.

I hardly ever read poetry. Mostly, my poetry reading experience has been limited to Lit. Survey classes and poetry workshops, i.e. limited. I've decided that I'm going to work on broadening that experience and picking up some poetry books the next time I'm at the library. In the meantime, I'll revisit my old class books. I feel an itch to re-read Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter."

So, whatever you usually read, I'm going to encourage you not to. Read something else instead.

What's your reading comfort zone? How are you going to go outside of it?

Feb. Post Game

For all that January whooshed by, February has seemed to crawl. Funny, that. I like the irony.

My main stated goal for this month was to shake up my writing routine. I got a fountain pen and made a point of hauling myself out into the world at least once a week to do some writing in a place that had fewer distractions than my home. Consider my routine shaken. Well, then the pen started getting ideas and my pattern further changed when I started writing poetry instead of short stories.

Later on, it got even worse when I decided that this month would be the month that I pulled back from having an audience. I didn't submit to the group. Again, with the funny timing - after making that decision, I was propositioned to do a poetry/fiction reading (which was fun) and I made the decision to enter a poetry contest. The best-laid plans, right?

With all this shaking and contradicting, this month really ran with the changing my routine idea and exaggerated it to the point of general anarchy (but not the hurting kind).

Shaking up the writing routine, first times, and trying new things. It only seems fitting that the tail-end of the month featured the debut of baby Bronwen. Infants, yeesh, talk about anarchy...

So, what have I learned? Dunno yet. Thus far, most months have been pretty easy to sum up, but this one's being contrary about that, too. From this month I got: two poems that I know I like; sorta started on a new routine of setting time aside (though helping out with the University faculty search monkey-wrenched that up a few times); an idea about scrapping my previous ideas about organizing my thesis (again); and I got a fountain pen.

Na Na Na Na Na Ne Na Na Na

Look, It's Tuesday!

Between this post and the last there was a weekend somewhere. I think.

I'm behind on stuff, trying to catch up, and I missed some of my primary goals for this month. Whups. Of course, this month had a bit of an anarchist theme, so I'm left with a quandry of whether or not missing those goals was actually part of reaching my overall goal. Hrm...

Right, busy now. More later.

Bleed: Dialogue

I've talked a bit before about the ways things tend to bleed over into other things. Practicing poetry bleeds over into my fiction writing, watching movies bleeds into telling stories, etc. Everyting somehow relates to everything else.

Today, in Comp. we talked about a great essay by Rosina Lippi-Green titled "Teaching Children How to Discriminate: What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf." The main idea is an analysis of animated Disney movies and how they stereotype characters with accents. For instance, female romantic leads speak American English, baddies often have foreign accents. Coincidence? I think not.

So, we talk about this essay, which bleeds into a conversation about cinema, which bleeds into a conversation about building characters, which bleeds into... and at the end of the line, we're really just talking about stories. You don't hear a character's voice when you're reading a novel, but the way that character's speech is written makes it possible for you to imagine their voice.

Huck Finn, anyone? Exactly.

I love dialogue. I am enamored with the way my characters talk, and it's something I spend a lot of time thinking about. In Oracle, particularly, I have a couple of specific traits for some of the characters - like the one who hardly ever speaks with contractions, except for when she's talking to certain other characters who are the scruffy types.

Joss is an excellent example of character through dialogue - read anything about the Buffy writer's talking about the topic, and it's very clear how that show worked in this regard - and has mastered the art of building characters within the first few lines they speak onscreen.

Listen to the commentary of Blood Diamond where he's talking about Leonardo DiCaprio's use of accent.

There are plenty other examples, but you get the idea. It's got my brain wheels turning today.

And All I Got Was a Snickers Blizzard

Thursday pages were crap today. I went to Dairy Queen to bribe myself with ice cream, but got nowhere.

I tried poetry, nothing. I tried to think of something fiction-y, nothing.

Not writer's block. I still hold to my principle that "writer's block" is synonymous with "cop out." What happened was a day that got eaten up by other obligations and even when I sat down for my designated writing time, those obligations intruded. I wasn't able to slow down enough to focus on stories becuase I was too busy thinking about everything I had to do to prepare for Comp. 101 tomorrow morning, too busy thinking about getting ready for writers group on Sunday, too busy thinking about...

Most of the time I'm pretty good at shutting that stuff out, but I wasn't able to manage today. This past week or two I've been in a writing slump, too much peripheral stuff going on. Fortunately, things on campus are getting ready to slow down a bit, which will be helpful.

How do you deal with focusing on your writing when there's so much else in your life needing attention? Do you have any proven techniques for shutting the peripheral stuff out? How do you get focused?