Friday Flash: "More more more"

"More more more"
by Jen Brubacher
Once upon a time shopping malls were the center of culture in North America, and we worshipped and placed our trust in their halls, and installed works of art to display our appreciation and mark the time we spent there. In Woodgrove Mall there was a clock that was a fountain, with nozzles and spray and little tubs that filled up as the hour went on. Worshippers could throw pennies and try to hit the tubs. Not for charity--for fun. Every hour the clock would chime and the tubs would dump one by one, splash, splash, splash, splash, and the kids would love it and parents would tell them they had to wait another hour to see it again. But they could meet there in another hour because there was a lot to see and a lot to buy and many pennies to throw. Meet at the clock. Everyone knew that.

The motto of the place was, "More more more!" Which was the motto of North America generally in the eighties and nineties.

Around the time I went away to University and became an official adult the world around me changed. It wasn't me, I swear it. I was the same girl who had loved the splash of the clock and the "one more hour" walking from Body Shop to Purdy's and on to The Bay. I always owned at least three pairs of jeans and more t-shirts than would fit in my closet, and once a jean jacket, and once a leather jacket (second hand.) But at University I suddenly wore something other than denim, and stopping buying bras. This wasn't me, it was the world. It paled around me, it dried up. My focus went to Gary Oaks and endless stacks of white paper with blue Bic writing that said x to the second power and y to the third power and Percy Shelley drowned before his 30th birthday.

Now, the shopping malls are still out there, squatting at the center of acres of parking lot, if not the center of North American culture. Some of the malls still have their art installations, awkward and embarrassing as rusting statues outside brick office buildings. A show of wealth and appreciation. Something that was once a good idea, like More more more!, and has too many bolts in the ground to shift.

She drowned before my thirtieth birthday: the girl who loved the splash of the clock, the girl who did her math homework in blue Bic as if it was okay to be permanent even if I was wrong.  It was the world that changed. It became enormous. Me, the girl who survived, moved thousands of miles from Woodgrove Mall and wears a bra and buys organic and sometimes doesn't recycle plastic containers, but always turns the tap off when she isn't using the water, because wasting water is wrong.  Everyone knows that.

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A little creative non-fiction that came after my morning pages. I suspect I'll produce a lot of creative non-fiction while I work through The Artist's Way. I promise not to post it all.

Photo: Water islands by @Doug88888 on flickr

The Artist's Way: My inner dog

I've started The Artist's Way, a twelve week course by Julia Cameron about finding or restoring your creativity. It has been around a long time and many people have recommended it to me. I've never bothered with it until now because I rarely have trouble working on my writing, and I have healthy skepticism for any self-help system that claims to fix any part of yourself. I've usually found the best way to fix yourself is to look at yourself, not listen to other people. Lately, though, I've had trouble looking at myself, at my creative work, so I think this is a thing to try.

She spends some time at the start of the course explaining that while she uses the word "God" what she means is the creative force in the universe, however you want to define that: God, yes, or the universe itself, or mind, or whatever. I respect that she makes this point because I'm agnostic and a course that required the acceptance of God would not be useful to me. I do wish she'd chosen a different word, because "God" has such associations my brain grinds every time I see it on the page, but overall I see what she's trying to do.

What doesn't work for me is the way she repeatedly calls my inner artist "a child." We are to nurture and spoil this child, and in doing so we nurture and spoil our creative self. But my inner artist is not a child. It has never been a child. I'm not convinced I've ever been a child, either. I'm fairly certain I was born at ten years old and even then I might have actually been twenty in disguise.

You may laugh or scoff. I am absolutely serious. Never having been a child does not mean I never had the wonder and innocence of a child, of course, but it means those things are not connected in my mind with the idea of childhood, so what does youth have to do with creativity? I also hate the idea of spoiling children, because giving them everything they want never results in happy, healthy adults so much as entitled jerks. And the world has enough entitled jerks without my inner artist becoming one of them.

So calling my inner artist a child makes me dislike this idea of my inner artist. It removes it from me somehow, like it's a fake. This can't be useful. So as I've replaced "God" with "universe" throughout the course, I've started replacing "child" with "dog." I think this will accomplish the same thing: provide me with a way to envision my inner artist as something I want to care for, nurture, spoil, and get along with--without making it into a bratty teenager-to-be that has nothing to do with me and strains my imagination.

Bad writing: Speaking for characters

"I don't care that it's dangerous. I have to go after my brother. I'm supposed to take care of him! When he was sick, I gave up school, I sat by his bed all the time, I gave up everything for him. I have to find him!"

That's a paraphrase of a speech by the heroine of CW's new Revolution, a television show about the world 15 years after the electricity goes off. Although there were plenty of things wrong with the first few episodes, this was the speech that convinced me not to continue watching.

At first glance it seems straightforward. The character is explaining why she has to go after her brother, even though it's dangerous. She supports her argument with an example. But... does she? Because her argument doesn't sound like someone explaining how much they love someone, but instead explaining how much they've already done for them. It doesn't sound like the character, it sounds like the writer. The writer wants very much for us to understand that she has always put herself out for her brother. She probably could have just said it ("I've always taken care of him and I won't stop now") but the writer wanted to say more than the character would express, and so they put words in the character's mouth that don't fit.

This is the writer talking through the character.  It says, "The character isn't telling the story, I am." This is bad writing.

There's a related mistake in the recent phenomenon of jumping through time to move the story forward. Two good examples are Lost and Fringe. In one season of Lost we leave two characters alone for a while and come back to find they've been living together for months. We did not see the genesis of their relationship and frankly we don't give a shit about it, or what happens next. Fringe did this by revealing what will happen in twenty years time: these people are dead, these people have an adult child, this is the state of the world. Surprise.

If a story sets the scene by jumping through things this way, that's fine because no precedent has been set about our closeness to the characters. But with both Lost and Fringe we'd been following the characters day by day, caught up in the details of their lives, love lives, etc. To suddenly throw that out and say, "Skip to the end, and this is what happens," is the writer saying, "The characters aren't telling the story, I am." I can't think of an example where this doesn't come across as lazy and bad. Bad storytelling, bad writing, bad.

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Photo: In other words, you have a big mouth by Pedro Vera on flickr

Full stop

After years with a death-hold on my current job, I've voluntarily left. I quit my library job. Nearly a decade after starting my work in public libraries, with my Masters in Library and Information Studies complete and my love for the institution as great as ever, I have a good idea that I won't work in public libraries in Britain again. I won't rule out Canada, but the UK is its own sad story.

Oh yes, we have a longstanding tradition of public libraries in the UK. We have the British Library here in London. Throughout this country we have incredible archives older than the country of my birth. For example, the Reference storage area in the library I just left. A bomb shelter subbasement with shelves and shelves of material that is still relevant, still in demand from the public or otherwise irreplaceable. Whole shelves covered in cut and cellotaped garbage bags because the ceiling leaks. Has leaked for years. Metal shelves with a trickle of rainwater, the paper ceiling collapsing to mud on the floor. Books soaking it up, ready to dissolve back into so much pulp.

I'm not making this up to be some sort of analogy. It's fact. But if you want to take it as an analogy, you wouldn't be wrong.