Thursday! 3-29: About All That Stuff...
V3, I29
A couple of you suggested you might like a little bit of “behind the scenes” to the stories and poems I put in the e-zine editions of Thursday! every other week. That seems fine to me, so let’s just do that. The next “off-week” edition of Thursday! may be more or less of this, depending on how you like it (and how I like writing it!). We’re playing this shift by ear. Let’s see how it works.
“Star Light, Star Bright” came out of a challenge I gave myself to tell a story with several viewpoints in a very small space. I ended up at 250 words, because that was the smallest space I could tell a coherent story with three different locations and at least two “emotional moments”1. If you squint hard enough, you’ll see a twisted version of Men in Black if The Bug was a steely-eyed rocket man, Edgar had been inside his truck, The Bug’s ship had exploded on impact, and there weren’t any Men in Black. What? You can see that, right?
I think “Star Light, Star Bright” would make a really cool short film, perhaps animated in the semi-realistic style of Ralph Bakshi. One day, if I ever have a budget to do something like that…2
Speaking of daydreams and such, “Morning of the Roo” is what happens when I have a little too much time and can wander into the fields of “What if…” You know my strong tendency toward werewolves, yes?3 One afternoon, I got to wondering what other lycanthropes might make for good stories and I landed4 on werekangaroos. I got a very clear vision in my head of a woman walking out of a pond after changing back into her human form and wincing as the last couple bones snapped back into place. From there, her voice and what she had been doing while she was “The Roo” fell right to me. I know “The Roo” is a crazy idea all by itself, but a werekangaroo as a gritty vigilante protecting the outback from poachers? And the poachers using cybernetically-enhanced dingoes to hunt her? That’s pretty cool. And there it was! Also, that one’s ripe for expansion and animation. Another movie? Why the heck not?
I wrote the graveyard poem during one of the Friday write-alongs Sarah Werner used to host on Twitch. I’ve a friend who does live right next to a cemetery and does take walks among the graves. She also has a hat with a pom pom she likes to wear. All that is true. I can’t directly attest to how evil the pom pom is5.
The only thing I’ll say about the final poem is I wish I had taken more time to sort it into rhyme and meter. I don’t dislike free verse, but the more I write poetry, the more I think it ought to be structured, otherwise it’s simply fancy prose cut up into lines. Please don’t tack me down on this believe — it’s far from dogma at this point. I still like to write free verse, but experience is teaching me that endless fields of play are not better than fields with borders. We need borders to find our real freedom and running around in boundless creative vistas does not make us better creators. There are ample examples of how free verse has made poets lazy and hackneyed, given to lots of flowery words, odd exclamations, and lazy affirmations. I’ll include a lot of popular modern poets in this as well. They don’t do the world of poetry any favors by making poetry seem less lovely but more…them…being real…speaking truth to whatever.
Sometimes you need to slap some words into a beat and a stanza to make them truly sing, then you keep slapping them until their beat rings louder than your own voice.
Come to think of it, stories work the same way. I like self-imposed limits6 on creativity. I think you get stronger when your wild creativity gets turned back and you have to consciously shape it. You learn and you keep learning. That’s when the really cool stuff happens, the intricate filigrees that make your art your art and distinguish you from the increasingly mechanical crowd.
You may differ. Do you differ? Tell me how you differ!
Fancy more stories and poetry? Read all you want at JimmieWrites.
Buy my picture book of poems about werewolves and atomic monsters!
Read “The Paper Swans of Ellendell” in Postcards from Mars!
ONE LAST THING! See the buttons down there? Click them and join in the shenanigans and tomfoolery. If you only want a little, click the heart. But if you click the comment button, you might find yourself adding real value to this crazy little community we’re building here, and wouldn’t that be grand?
Or whatever you call them. What do you call those emotions and author tries to elicit from you? Emotions? Manipulations? I have no idea.
Fade out to hopeful daydreaming.
Wait, you don’t? You must be new here. Okay, let me explain. I’ve noticed, since I started writing again a few years ago, I tend to go back to werewolf stories when I get stuck for what to write. My first book started as a single counting rhyme for kids about werewolves taking over the world. Today, if I’m not careful, I’d write about werewolves all the time.
HA!
At least moderately, would be my guess — 40 percent or so?
Call them challenges if you like. They work the same way.