Category: Creative Process

When You Reach *That* Point

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 4 Comments

Have you ever had a really good story idea and just realized that you were not at that level where you can write it out properly?

I have. Many times. In fact, I’m facing something like this right now.

I suppose it’s rather like coming to a level in Legend of Zelda or Metroid where you discover a new chamber or the location of an item but you can’t get at it yet because you haven’t gotten the right tools. Of course, I would make this thought analogous to video games, but another way of looking at it is that you reach a point in your development–at least with regards to one project–where you find a block that you need to somehow get around or realize is a part of what you seek.

There are several different ways to deal with this conceptual challenge. First off, you can research it. You can research the hell out of it. This research can come from books, or the Web, but it can also come from talking with the appropriate people and even doing some journeying.

It can also take some time. I have probably said before that different stories have different requirements. Some stories need a little bit of work, and others have to start as notes, and then a variety of rough drafts until finally you get something that you are looking for. Each draft, even the notes that precede it, is a prototype and each builds the foundation for what you want.

I also find a few other issues to consider with regards to this challenge. The first is dealing with the fear that your idea will be taken by someone who is more versed in it if you don’t use it first. This sounds really irrational, but that fear can be there. The second issue is energy in the form of enthusiasm.

Both issues can be very interrelated. In fact, I don’t really have any easy answers to dealing with them. I suppose all I can say is that after you do the work, you need to find something new to work on, something doable, some small part to do–piece by piece–each day so that the task remains doable in your mind. As for the fear, I suppose I can tell you that no one will quite write something the same way that you will. And they won’t. No one can write like you.

You will also find that ideas can change depending on your creative circumstance and if they don’t work in one context, they can be adapted to another. It might also help to realize that no idea that you ever make is truly original, that you borrow it from someone or somewhere else, but it is how you execute it and how your “accent” or evolving style affects it that is ultimately you.

This post may seem more haphazard than the ones that I usually make and maybe more theoretical. In a lot of ways, it is my attempt to make a conceptual or mental framework for a challenge that I have been dealing with: an attempt to help me focus on a project or two. But at the very least knowing your own limits is very important so that you can either work with them–and perhaps see the block as another angle of a usable idea (I have a friend who liked to always use the infamous quote, “Think fourth-dimensionally” in role-playing)–or know them so that you can potentially surpass them.

I will finish this off, however, by saying this. When all else fails: when research, accepting that you will change an idea by working it, focusing on the doable parts of the project and eventually moving on to the more complex stuff fails then I believe that this–and the subject of this entire post–is all about your own mindset and the need to challenge it enough to simply write down what is in your head: no matter how rough it may be at first. Once you do that, the rest of it will follow, or you simply move on: having learned something.

Whatever that is. 😉

Sea Shells, See Shells by the Sea Shore: A Review of C. Anthony Martignetti’s Lunatic Heroes

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 5 Comments

I have been looking forward to reading C. Anthony Martignetti’s Lunatic Heroes: Memories, Lies and Reflections for some time, and now that I have finished reading it, I find I have a lot of different things to say. In fact, what I think I’m going to do is the following.

I am going to write two sections to this review. The first will be an attempt at a more literary perspective of Lunatic Heroes, while the second will deal with my own personal reactions to the stories themselves. Before I go on, however, I just want to say that I will be referring to Anthony by his first name due to the way that I was introduced to him. I will elaborate on that later, but I just want to say that it would feel weird after reading about him and his own work to call him anything else. It’s the not first time I have done this with an author and it probably won’t be the last.

Lunatia heros is a species of Northern moon-snail that likes to live close to the shoreline of bodies of water. They are large gastropods that like to eat clams and other snails: including members of their own species. They consume their prey by drilling holes in their shells, releasing digestive enzymes, and sucking out the partially digested contents of their victims from within those shells. In fact, the only thing left of their fellow snails are these empty shells. According to Wikipedia, these moon snails hunt other mollusks down by searching for those that bury themselves in the sand of the shoreline.

Of all the titles Anthony could have given his work, Lunatic Heroes is by far the most apt. This book is essentially a collection of fifteen short stories or, technically written recollections, of some of the major events in Anthony’s life. Even though the book itself is categorized as a memoir, which it is, each narrative is both interrelated and self-contained.

At least twelve of these stories deal with Anthony’s childhood with his Italian-American family in Boston, while the remaining three focus on Anthony as a developing independent adult all the way to contemporary times. I don’t want to make too much of a generalization, but each story is about the insanity of the human condition. After all, the word lunatic is derived from the Latin word Luna and it was once thought that someone suffering from madness was “moon-touched,” while at the same time the moon itself has always been associated with the other world of the night, creativity and intuition.

In this, the metaphor of Lunatic Heroes functions in a few different ways. On one hand, most of Anthony’s stories are about the dysfunctional elements of his own family and his 1950s childhood: about the way each character would attempt to devour Anthony’s extremely introverted essence, digging under the sand where his self hid in order to successfully–or unsuccessfully–get at it.

On the other hand, Anthony’s narratives also take many of these same characters and portray their other more relatable sides. It is no coincidence, after all, that the heroes of ancient literature–for all of their deplorable moral behaviour by contemporary standards–still possessed a spark of divinity and managed to perform great deeds. In a fiercely passionate and witty voice tempered with a nostalgic unsentimentality not unlike that of Will Eisner, Anthony manages to show that these characters from his own life aren’t always monsters, but are very fallible human beings with some moments of relation, levity, and downright comedy: even and especially in some of the worst situations that he depicts.

What drew me in as a reader were the very mutable archetypes that Anthony managed to identify in his life: specifically with regards to how they transferred and inter-lapped throughout each story that he gathers together into a strange whole. Sometimes each narrative doesn’t always fit in a straight-line–which is more than fair given how a life of human interactions is generally never shaped that way–and he occasionally repeats a sentence from a previous story. But the archetypes really drew me in. Certainly, the whole Scylla and Charybdis parallel childhood dilemma in “Force Fed” was made very uncomfortably clear, just as the figure of a Far Eastern form of enlightenment and a symbolic place of personal transformation is within “Swamp.”

So thus ends the very brief and relatively spoiler free part of my review. Now I am going to talk about my personal reaction to Lunatic Heroes. I will say that I particularly related to “Force Fed.” When I was a boy, I was a very fussy eater and after I started to lose weight at twelve, my family thought that I had some kind of eating disorder. I didn’t really see a problem: in that when I stopped feeling hungry, I simply stopped eating. I was also lactose intolerant and I didn’t know that until my doctor and a slough of very uncomfortable and embarrassing tests happened. I lost a lot of weight from simply no longer eating dairy and then having a growth spurt. It also didn’t help that I was a very nervous child and my stomach suffered for it. But I could definitely relate to Anthony’s account of being made to feel like there was something wrong with you just because you simply weren’t hungry enough by the standards of others or the fact that you didn’t want to become sick.

I could definitely relate to the moments of introversion and hyper-sensitivity from Anthony’s depiction of his childhood self and that paradoxical need to have your parents always in your life, but at the same time that need to keep that bubble of personal space around you from being violated by the rest of the world: sometimes in vain. That is why I particularly related to–and if anyone knows me and is reading this they will be laughing by now–the last story “Hate.”

I admit that I was actually concerned when Anthony ended his memoir with a story entitled “Hate,” but it made sense. The thing is, Anthony is a psychotherapist and there are some things he talks about throughout the entire book–mindfulness, being in your head and needing to be in your body–that is very reminiscent of what my own therapist has been telling me for quite some years now. In “Hate,” Anthony even mentions how he still has snap judgments and immediate–and sometimes unfavourable–superficial impressions of people. They can bring up various associations his life: not all of them pleasant. But he also mentions how by realizing that these same people have pain and loss in their lives, it makes them relatable as human beings. It is still a lesson I have to keep reminding myself of during some of my more misanthropic world-obliterating moments of glee.

I also totally understand where Anthony is coming from in “The Head,” when he writes about the darkness and anger that he is feeling in himself even while he is with his wife and dog at a peaceful retreat: the knowledge of this fact that just made him feel worse until he has one moment of mindfulness. I think Anthony really hit home for me that you can mentally and emotionally awaken many times in life: and for different reasons. In that, “Swamp” and the events with regards to the freak show in “Carnival” really come to the fore. In addition, the story “Nonno” made me really miss my own Zaidy while I can more than sympathize with the need to belong and centre yourself and finding a place like “Harvard Square” home.

I am almost finished this strange review. But to make it even stranger, I want to write down some very notable lines, or moments of text that just made this entire book for me:

Anthony writes about longing: “But this time I felt the ache you get when longing for something you don’t think you have, coupled by the fear that you’d blow it if you did” (107).

He also describes the process of maturity, stating, “I was pulling off the heist of the decade, stealing the truth about myself from every encounter” (108-109).

Finally, there is this: “I imagined eventually befriending the Devil and getting promoted to demon status, sharing the power of evil and control over an infinite number of she-devils who would hungrily do my bidding” (129).

These are just such universal impulses and feelings, and as a writer I kind of wish I had been the one to express myself in such a way. The metaphor of the Lunatic Heroes is even more ingenious because in addition to moon snails being predators, Lunatia heros always leaves perfectly preserved husks from all of its feedings. Think about that for a few moments: even though the snail is gone, like the imprint of a lost self or Virginia Woolf’s spot on a wall, its shell–the testament to its existence–is left unearthed in the sand. It’s left there for others to find and see and marvel in the patterns that they created. In other words, we are the predators and the prey of our selves, but by simply living we take the selves of others with us, and we leave a testament to their existence. It is an excellent extended metaphor for a writer, the act of writing, literature itself and the state of being human.

Now I am finally going to tell you the reason why I refer to Anthony by his first name in this review. Through reading Anthony’s book, I feel like I know him a little more. But that is only part of it. The rest of the reason has to do with how I discovered him.

It was mainly by accident. I was searching for Amanda Palmer’s Blog and I came across her entries about Anthony and just some of what he means to her. I will let you read that entry should you so wish. But what I will say is that Amanda wrote the “Introduction” to Anthony’s book and she said something that really got to me.

Amanda wrote the following, “I had a small glimpse into the act of writing as a direct escape from pain. For the first time, I experienced the physical truth of what it felt like to dwell in the act of creation as the only viable escape from an unbearable, unfaceable reality” (ix). I read this statement and I took a look at myself. I took a look at my notebooks around me in my room. And then I looked at the one hundred or so posts I’ve made on this very Blog. I took a look at what I try to do every single day now and I thought…

Yes. Just … yes.

Amanda also went on to talk about how she and Anthony delve into the uncomfortable, and awkward, and painful moments of clarity that is life. And you will find that and more in exquisite detail if you read this book.

Now I am going to end off now by doing something even stranger. I am going to give Lunatic Heroes a four out of five.

And here is why.

After reading “The Introduction” and Anthony’s “Acknowledgments,” and just hearing about him and some of his life from Amanda’s Blog, I wanted to know … more. Even though the way he describes his childhood, sometimes blatantly and sometimes tinged with hazy mythical half-memories is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Violent Cases, I want to know about the rest of it: the adolescent rebellion you see forming in the latter stories, what happened in the rest of his travels, what his other fights were about, and more about his exposure to other philosophies and other relationships.

When it comes down to it, I want to see more. And as one lunatic hero to another, Anthony, I sincerely hope to.

The Magic Killer Formula

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 7 Comments

I’ve learned that there is one thing that can kill magic.

You might think a few things to yourself at this point. First of all, what do I even mean by magic? When I talk about magic, I am talking about wonder. I’m talking about imagination and a variety of human emotional responses to that practically limitless power.

So with that working definition in mind, how can something like magic get destroyed? After all, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. But that’s just it: I’m not talking about something that can be completely obliterated: if such a thing is even possible.

Magic as I see it can’t be destroyed, but it can be killed. It can die and leave a corpse of some sort behind: an empty pattern or a shadow of what it once was.

But what can kill something like magic?

You might think it would be reality. Reality is gravity, social structure, obligation, physical health, and consequences for any action taken or not. Yet that isn’t enough. In fact, magic can complement and even thrive in such an environment: accentuating and making art from the mundane. It can even make you see reality in a whole other way if you let it, or empathize with what you see and feel.

No. Reality by itself can’t kill magic.

However, try injecting an amount of irony into magic. I don’t mean a little bit of it: that just adds some cleverness and some poetic justice to the flavour if you are good enough. Now, try adding a lot of irony to the magic on your Petri dish: to the point where it even needs one. Usually this is a particular substance distilled from reality and it is like an anaesthetic: capable of creating enough emotional detachment to remove any hint of sensation.

How about a little irony, Scarecrow?

All joking aside, the irony at that point is still small because it is a distillation, but it worms its way into magic’s heart: into the core of it. Very slowly, but surely you will get to the point where the organism mutates. It starts to shrink and shape into a more definite shape: like the aforementioned Petri dish or other container. If you didn’t put too much irony into the mixture, then it still has a chance. It can look at itself and laugh at what it sees. It subverts itself but still has the potential to expand out again and become stronger for it: more multi-layered. Parody is still magic and if you can keep it at a point where the irony allows for comedy and reflection as well as a certain levelheadedness, then it’s all still good. After all, a little bit of cyanide or Iocane powder over time supposedly builds some resistance to such within a subject.

It’s when the cynicism in the cyanide develops that you have to watch out. At first, it all seems very well and good. The mixture you’ve made seems even more clever, even more biting, even more … cold. And then, even when it goes out of control it is so incredibly casual and smarmy that you don’t even see that anything is wrong.

The fact that it breaks things down, and takes things apart isn’t in itself bad. There are plenty of essential acids that do the same thing. However, it never stops and it rarely stays in its container if you keep feeding it. Pretty soon it begins to roll its eyes at anything it can find. It likes to “make fun” of any kind of enthusiasm, any form of passion, any vitality or life that it can find. The reason I put “making fun” in quotation marks is that this form of cynicism–the corrupted remnants of magic–doesn’t even remember what fun actually is, never mind the fact that it no longer has the capacity to make it.

It reaches a point where nothing is good enough for it anymore. It calcifies and stratifies into something with a hard outer shell and, pretty soon, even the most valid forms of expression or emotion are worth nothing more to it than objects of derision. Think about that for a few moments: a valid emotion as a human being means nothing–not even spit and garbage–to this form of cynicism that calls itself “sophistication.”

However, “sophistication” has a secret. Behind its calcified armour and its twisted barbs is the place where its heart used to be: a brittle core. You might think it is empty now, but that isn’t true. Instead, at the core of what this irony-infected magic has become is shallowness, immaturity, and above all else: fear.

Late-stage cynicism or sophistication need not be a terminal condition however. Take just a tincture, a small drop really, of a really strange natural marvel (which even now I hesitate to call an antidote) known as hope and you will see results of some kind. Of course, it might be too late and if you don’t add enough hope, the substance will only invert into its own hole and it will not really come back from that. In fact, it will pretty much die.

But–but–if you mix hope with wonder, enthusiasm, and general interest, then perhaps those barbs will soften, the carapace will begin to fall away, the mass of it will expand again, its temperature will rise, and it will be more malleable, more … open to suggestion. Of, if you’d like, dead magic is just like some kinds of dry flowers I once saw. If you submerge them in clear water, they will at first sink and then rise to the surface again as whole and vital as they once were.

Also, and more than coincidentally, the magic resulting from this form of rejuvenation is reported to be exquisite, if not outright extraordinary.

Still Trying to Go Beyond Myth and Legend, Novels and Short Stories

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It was in 2002 that I wrote my first complete “adult” novel. I put the word “adult” in quotation marks specifically because I was twenty years old at the time and I barely had any living experience. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that I had no living experience at all.

What I did have, however, was the opportunity to absorb a lot of academic experience. I had always been a pretty good student (in fact, I thought it would be the most sensible thing to do with my whole life) and I believed that University would just expand on my knowledge. And it did. I learned many more obscure ancient Greek and Latin roots of words, some mythology, and even more philosophy. To be honest, I had been learning of these elements back in Grade Twelve and the now-lost Canadian Grade OAC (or Grade 13 for those who might not be familiar with it).

Read Between the Realities: Beyond Myth and Legend was essentially a bildungsroman–or a “coming of age”–novel of 136 double-spaced computer pages. This was the point in my development as a writer where things began to really change for me.

Now, I’ve discussed a little of the background behind this novel’s creation, but there are a few more specific things I have to mention. Before this point, I had mostly been working with purely the fantasy genre: in as much of a way as someone at my skill level and knowledge at the time could. In fact, even in my first year of Undergrad I was still working on my fantasy series Deceptions of Nevermore before the change began.

First of all, I’d heard of York’s Creative Writing Program. It was–and as far as I know is–a program where you had to submit a portfolio of poetry and prose in order to be selected for a small number of spots. The Program also discouraged, if not outright rejected genre writing in its courses and, instead, wanted to focus on “realistic fiction.” Now, I was very interested in developing my writing skills in those days and I could only apply in my second year. But that was only part of what helped to create my novel.

The second crucial element in the creation of Read Between the Realities was my discovery of a book called American Gods made by a man named Neil Gaiman. That book, which only in retrospect I realize was Neil Gaiman’s own transition from the format of comic book script writing into solo novel writing, changed things for me in a very big, very real way.

I realized that there were things beyond the confines of genre as I understood it. Then I remembered the film Finding Forrester and how I wanted to write “the great 21st century novel.” So I did something new. Before I even entered the Creative Writing Program, I decided to create my first experimental “adult” novel: a great Canadian novel and all of the grandiosity I still haven’t quite grown out of even in my very early 30s of now.

In Read Between the Realities, I created a pastiche of different stories and attempted to sew them together into an open-ended patchwork reality where you could interpret the novel almost any which way you’d like. I worked on this sucker for a long, long time. I worked on it at home, in parks, on mall benches, at friends’ houses, during sleepovers, when I visited my girlfriend at the time or when she visited me, and even when I moved with my parents to our new house then. Some more marked developments in this novel was how I actually actively incorporated many of my own experiences and thoughts into the work. This was partially influenced by my interest or obsession with philosophy, but also from insights I was having from life.

I was really bad at explaining what my novel was about and I firmly believed that the only way someone could understand it is if they read the damn thing. It also didn’t help that I had the paradigm-shifting magic concept of Mage: The Ascension on my brain too, and I delved into that voraciously.

My book was essentially a story about different realities inter-lapping and how personalized they are. It was about a writer and his relationship issues with his life, a fragmented being seeking something for a demanding master in a labyrinthine subconscious world of ruin, a viciously sadistic monster hunting this being down, and two people on an Internet chat room who bickered all the time. The writer and the two chat room people both believed they were making the story, while the seeker and monster both thought they were living a reality. And none of it was real. And all of it was real.

Of course it all combined, or exploded together–because I always loved epic moments of spectacle–and I played at being profound. Yes, it was a meta-narrative: complete with the characters knowing they are characters or finding out they are and all that fun stuff.

Ten years ago, I thought it was the best thing I had ever written in my whole life, and I actually feared that I could never surpass it. Ever.

Years later after showing it to some friends, I found out that I could indeed “surpass” it. A lot of my characters were two-dimensional archetypes, I didn’t write female characters well, I certainly couldn’t write sex scenes worth a damn then, and I rambled: a lot. And when I tried to simulate experiences I never learned about or experiences I never had, it just fell flat. Also, I wrote combat and adventures as if they were video game levels: though that in itself makes sense given my interests then and now. So yes, I can safely say that I have done better since then, though …

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I actually haven’t really written any, at least official, novel-length works in a very long time. They take a lot of commitment and unique formulas to keep up. I also can’t just write anywhere at anytime anymore. Part of this is that I realized I had more of a life beyond my craft, but I also find that novels can be trapping. They can really take your time and energy. They always get on your mind all the time.

Short stories are explorations into more tightly-knit, self-contained worlds. You can spend less time on these than on a novel, though they take their own toll given that you really need to focus on tying them up all neat-like. On the other hand, sometimes I find short stories to be like little tidbits–even the more complex “four-course meal ones” that some of my friends like to call them–and not as satisfying as the meaty feel of an entire world in a novel. That is, of course, when the short story ideas aren’t overwhelming your bodily and mental limitations to write them all out.

So sometimes, despite my best intentions, I have found myself writing novel-length works because the ideas behind them are either too similar to be placed in anything other than an overarching structure, or they just too big to contain in one short story. And for now, that is all I will say for the others that came after Read Between the Realities.

What is notable about my twenty-year old writer’s novel was that this was about the point when I was also consciously playing with mythology and archetypes in addition to ideas and philosophies. I attempted to combine academics and creation together. I also very reluctantly put more of myself into the work, and–like I said–I went into meta-narrative and irony: which for someone who had just done generic well-meaning fantasy novels before was a big step. And Joss Whedon taught me to be more flippant and referential about popular culture and life too.

I would never have admitted that I created a coming of age novel. I always wanted to make other worlds and other people to get away from the ones I was experiencing–or not experiencing–but I can admit that this was what it was. And for something based on a whole lot of theoretical knowledge, incomplete understanding, video game and pop culture influences and a small if not sheltered, somewhat self-repressed and stagnant amount of personal growth at the time, I did pretty well. It was like building a small Star Gate from the scrap-metal in one’s basement. It did what it was designed to do.

Read Between Realities was made at a time where I went as far as I could go with what I had then–with what I was then–and now, whatever else, I know that I have and definitely can go farther.

Looking Outward

Credit: Beth Ann Dowler, the photographer of this image.

The Rise of a Geek or How Video Games Made Me Want to Write Novels

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

I wrote my first novel in Grade Ten.

In high school, I carried around a clipboard with a manuscript’s worth of lined paper in my backpack along with a book. I would sit in the front entranceway of Thornhill Secondary, outside the door of a class,  in the cafeteria, in the quad, on one of the chairs in my Drama class, and in classrooms before class began scrawling onto that paper with a black or blue pen.

Almost everyday, someone would see me sitting there: in my strange clothes that I mostly wore because my Mom got them and I had to wear something, my Blue Jay baseball cap to keep me hidden from people, blue jeans (because I was bullied over wearing sweatpants in Grade Nine), and my backpack with its many compartments and my handy-dandy pencil case with all my utilities: colour pencil crayons, pencils, pens, erasers … all of that fun stuff. I even had an Art Kit back when I fancied myself a graphic artist: a large bag with an ink pen that I loved, various sized pencils, a grey puddy eraser and a sketch book.

And yes, I did draw characters from my novel.

My novel was called Order and Chaos. It was seventy-five computer pages long with a glossary at the end. It was about a man named Derem who was born in the future after humankind colonized a new Galaxy and created a brand new Empire. There was a war between the human scientists and mages: and the mages lost … their territory disintegrating into an unstable vortex of space known as the Xarion Region. It was thought that magic had died out, as it had once before back on Earth millennia ago, but there were survivors and people still born with the gift.

My world was ruled by a secular humanist technocracy (which my younger self would have loved to have the words for) that was the Empire: composed of different noble Houses that each had a particular division of labour. This same Empire also made the acquaintance of other alien species who stayed out of the whole conflict, and they have differing relations with them.

Derem was a young man who discovered that he was a mage and a Chronomancer: someone who could manipulate time itself. There was an evil villain named Jagan D’Karos, leader of House D’Karos, that wanted to take over the Empire from House T’Jal: that was dying out. D’Karos was a borderline madman who secretly wanted to rediscover magic in order to essentially dominate existence and there was a rebellion against him, and all that lovely stuff.

There were supposed to be two more books. I created outlines for all of them and tried to fill them out. Book One was the only one that truly lived in its way. I also recall holding the entire stack of paper together with one multi-layered bad-ass paperclip. Yeah. Pretty much.

I know for a fact that people noticed me in my school and when I worked on it at summer camp. In many ways, it was my constant companion in addition to the books I read. I wanted to be the next Tolkien obviously. I also wanted to look busy and to focus all of my imagination in a world of my own creation that no one else could really see as of yet.

I had my influences: the Dune II video game my friends were so interested in and which inspired our own role-playing games, Final Fantasy VI (which I knew as III) where magic was a terrifying lost weapon that even helped make Magitek Armour and where there were Espers and epic moments, and I was probably also influenced by Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms.

But essentially, I was inspired to write my first novel by video games.

I would have once been ashamed to admit that: that video games are just for fun and are not real literature. Of course, by the same token, I was all like “screw real literature,” this is is what really does it for me. Basically, I just wanted to tell a story and Final Fantasy VI and Dune II pushed me to do it. They pushed me to go beyond my limits and keep working on something: something beyond me, but was still a part of me.

They influenced me in other ways. I went from the Dune game to reading Frank Herbert’s books and–in addition to Star Wars–got really interested in human political machinations and manipulations. Final Fantasy VI on the other hand showed me the majestic beauty of soundtracks, the utter diabolical power of evil, story lines, character development from a seemingly simplistic 16-bit sprite model, a great depth of humanity, and a variety of different ways to interact with things.

It was not the last time games would influence me to that extent either. As I went up through the Grades, and people watched me–as I would learn directly later–I discovered Chrono Trigger and really changed. Order and Chaos was, to put it charitably, a novella in length. Deceptions of Nevermore was even longer: though it was supposed to be a Trilogy that didn’t survive past the first book. And the title may have been influenced by Secret of Evermore: that I never actually played.

That one was a story that took place in a high school: in a small town called Eldara. There was a great evil buried before the founding of the town and the last survivors of a civilization of virtually immortal mages try to keep it from awakening. But there is one mage that wants to wake it up. Centuries later, a girl named Rachel stumbles onto all of this with her Wicca friend Chara, a borderline obnoxious half-demon named Karnak and so on. I also admit that Joss Whedon’s Buffy played a large role in the development of this story.

I also recall there being a story I called The Epic Project with the working title Revelation’s Saga. I vaguely recall working on it after Order and Chaos but before Deceptions of Nevermore. In any case, it was a post-apocalyptic world where an empire called The First Technocracy cloned and resurrected different species of magic-using creatures called Psytans as slave-labour. As the First Technocracy fell and became the Second, many lands had free Psytans or some that actually tried to coexist with humankind. The term Psytan was a blanket bastardized term that defined dryads, goblins, elves, and other creatures as an entire species. They were cloned from something older and I made a whole world with different cultures.

How the humans treated the Psytans reflected a lot on the different cultures. I remember the Sor’cerin Imperium: where women ruled because I reasoned that more women than men would be magic-users and thus have more power. Psytans there would be fellow Bond-Mates to the sorceresses and the Empress. Whereas the Technocracy was more or less equal in that they wanted to mechanize and control all life.

I was definitely influenced by X-Men, and Final Fantasy–especially since my main character was a young woman named Amnah–but also … Pokemon. All right, that last revelation was a little more reluctant on my part even now, but back then I had a whole system figured out. This book went on for hundreds of lined pages. It was my first insanely long novel. I remember working on it everywhere and I mean everywhere … even in some places I no longer go to.

Like I said, I felt a combination of shame and defiance for video game inspiration with my first novels but they helped me make all of this. They helped me deal with the realities of high school and adolescence. You know, once I showed an excerpt of my Epic Project to the Del Rey Writer’s Workshop when it was a free online community. One person said I should have made it a children’s story and I got really offended by that. But looking back, I was essentially a young adult writing young adult stories. They may not have been very good, but they were mine and the product of my time.

For a while, like some people, I thought that our time had nothing more to say. But what I like right now is that everything from our childhood and onward has a meaning and isn’t as fragmented or diluted as others might claim. I do read classical literature now, but I also read comics and sometimes I even play video games. It has changed and it is still changing me to this very day. It’s also clear that there were and are many more people like me to this regard: upraising the things we love and even when we make fun of them, still see them and make them beautiful.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That said, I’m still working on fulfilling that prophecy from my last Yearbook:

High School

A World Coming Together, A Possible Paradigm Forming, and Other Stories That Find Themselves On Their Way

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

This is Red-One. She is the protagonist of the comics collaboration that Angela O’Hara and myself are undertaking. One day, to inspire herself, Angela decided to create this digital art piece. It is a conceptual drawing of Red-One at about seventeen years old or so, and she is definitely quite beautiful.

So, I did end up naming the characters that we are working on. That might seem strange given that it is supposed to be a silent comic, or a comic without words, but it is a point of reference for us to work from and it adds more character and background to work with too: to bring across onto the page through facial expression, body language, and action.

We have also decided on a structure for the comic. It will be about twenty-four pages and it will have panels. There is just too much, even with the basic story structure that I’ve already made, to dedicate a page each to a different action. Panels will actually give us more room by giving us more pages to work with in expressing the narrative. Like I said, I do have a basic story outline finished and I am going to attempt to do at some point is take a scene from what I wrote, expand on it a bit, give it to Angela and experiment with panels and the page layout.

Panels and page layouts are diabolical in that they both seem to be the same thing, but they’re different. For instance, you can make one panel and then have to decide what goes on in that panel, whereas the page layout is actually how more than one panel–or lack thereof if you want to get experimental about it–is arranged as an overall pattern on paper or screen.

I have attempted with previous works to include panel breakdowns and detailed layout structure for each page into script form–this without an artist partner–and I have to say that it is challenging at best. Luckily in this case, I can hopefully communicate the essentials of what I want to see to Angela, talk through it, see a few versions, and come up with a happy medium. Angela has also been working on a few more conceptual drawings and eventually things will be coming together.

So there is that.

Another thing I have been doing lately is that I am looking into published other works while this collaboration continues. That is to say, I am going to now actively–again–send out stories to electronic and material magazines in order to get more things published. I have a few candidates and a few ideas with regards to what I am going to send. I think I’ll go into that a little now.

I’ve had at least three Lovecraftian story ideas that I have been building on in a purely note-written or scribbled way for a little while now. When I’ve finished one or more, I might send some to Innsmouth Free Press, or Weird Tales (which right now is closed to Fiction Submissions, oh well). I love the fact that Lovecraft is not only public-domain, but there is so much potential to his ideas. His stories are mainly “congeries” (he loves that word, among others)–or connections–of seminal ideas: of things that have informed so many other works long since his time.

Lovecraft’s mythos is not the only thing I am focusing on however. I’m also contemplating sending a science-fiction story of mine to Strange Horizons. There is also a story of mine that I meant to finish long ago, set in Toronto, which I may send to Broken Pencil’s Death Match Contest or directly to the magazine itself.

In addition, I have a few stories I’ve already finished that I realize may be tapping into a niche that is emerging or has been emergent for quite some time now. The niche, paradigm, or Zeitgeist (the “Spirit of the Times”) I’m thinking of is the 1980s-and onward geek nostalgia that is becoming more prevalent every day as well as the usage of allusions and literary references to video games and comics. I have actually been experimenting with this for a long time and I have been polishing off what I have.

I guess the danger is whether what I relate to in this regard will become obsolete sooner than I can do anything with, or even in the future. I mean, will years from now someone know what Google is if it is referenced into a story or will it be some small obscure technical footnote somewhere? Or is our society changing so much with regards to technology that Google and other programs, and even video games will become part of a historical documentation: if only an electronic one? I’m pretty sure cultural shifts celebrating “retro” elements come in cycles, but you can never really predict these things. Sometimes, you just have to go with it.

As for me, the reason I am making strange stories like these–tapping into this–is because I can relate it and it interests me. I can’t tell the future (which is probably for the best) but I’m doing my best to express the forces that have influenced me in the way they have influenced me: if that makes any sense.

So these are my goals along with a few others. I hope to be able to Blog more about these other developments and also be able to keep up with the challenges that I have set myself.

Worms and Bicycles Or How People Make For Strange Stories: Menocchio and Igor Kenk

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been rereading Pop Sandbox’s Kenk: A Graphic Portrait and I kind of wish that this comics work had been published when I worked on a previous assignment of mine.

In one of my previous Graduate courses, our class had to read Carl Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. It basically dealt with the idea that an individual can not only embody the culture that they come from, but that that person can represent different kinds of culture and actually interpret cultural information differently for themselves. Really, what I got out of it was that an individual can create their own world or mythic reality from information they have access to from their own culture.

As for why the work is called The Cheese and the Worms, it’s due to the fact that it focuses on the record of a man named Menocchio who compared the world’s creation to be not unlike that of rotten cheese. I’m not making this up: the Roman Inquisition that interrogated and took testimony from him apparently got this account from the man. So obviously, I felt compelled to do a presentation on this and focus my course paper on it because, well, look at the title and the subject matter. Really: how could I not?

I think that I found the most interesting about Menocchio himself was the examination of how he possibly came to the conclusions about the world that he did. He was not born of nobility or the upper-class in Italy, but rather came from a merchant culture. As such, while he was literate and he had the means to buy books, he also grew up with an oral literary tradition: a culture that passes on lore through the ages and word of mouth.

Ginzburg seemed to really like to point out the strangeness of this figure of Menocchio: how he was almost an intermediary between the oral and the written as well as peasant and “higher culture.” Menocchio himself lived during a time of transition between oral culture and the development of the printing press and written literacy: a revolution of sorts. Menocchio existed during the time of Martin Luther’s Reformation: where the ideas of Catholicism and Christianity itself were being challenged by the new Protestant movement using said printing presses. It is also worth mentioning that Ginzburg liked to examine colportage–cheaply printed chapbooks detailing songs, tales, and the lives of saints–as a backdrop of Menocchio’s literacy as well.

All of these traits and more are eerie parallels with Richard Poplak’s observations about Igor Kenk. Kenk grew up during a time between socialism and capitalism in Slovenia of the former Yugoslavia. One thing that Richard Poplak likes to point out is that it was also during this time period that common citizens in Slovenia were allowed access to photocopy machines: mechanisms of distributing information that were originally in the charge of the State. The counter-cultural Theatre FV 112/15 group– also known as the FV movement–used photocopiers to create a collage art known as FV Disco: a form of which–thanks to the artist Nick Marinkovich–Kenk also utilizes. This was the time and conceptual place where Kenk developed as an adult.

KENK_CHAP-00_07-08

As such, Kenk also possesses a very unique world-view based on the transitional culture of his time: the idea that all things can be recycled and that you need to choose to struggle in life in order to survive as a person: which is part of what he seems to call “The Monkey Factor” or survival. From what I understood of this book, his notion of “recycling” also seems to mean reselling stolen bikes as well as hoarding. As an aside, the fact that Kenk believed the system of debt, borrowing, and capitalism to be doomed is also linked to his philosophies and it’s only now, years after I read the first time, that I wonder what he would think of the Occupy movements back in 2008 before his arrest, and what they might think of him now.

Igor Kenk came from a social order that was radically changing and between extremes. He was considered to be a Math prodigy and did well in his education. For a time he was even a police officer in Slovenia–surviving their harsh regimen–until he was discharged, and then proceeded to cross the border into other countries to get goods as Slovenia’s political alignment and its economy changed. Then he eventually came to Canada and became something of a merchant himself by selling and fixing bicycles in Toronto.

What I’m trying to say is that both Kenk and Menocchio are products of their time and culture, but at the same time how they chose to interpret their changing cultures was very idiosyncratic to them. In other words, they created some very unique world-views. And both of them arguably paid for it by the powers that be: Menocchio with his life for not recanting his beliefs to the Roman Inquisition and Kenk doing jail time and losing his Bicycle Clinic for the thefts he was charged with.

KENK_CHAP-09_18

All of the above can arguably be considered gross simplifications, of course. In my paper that dealt with the implications of Menocchio, I pretty much say the same thing more or less. But I think the reason I’m attempting to compare two men from entirely different time periods, cultures, and countries is due to a greater issue: namely, why are they important?

I mean, come on: neither Menocchio nor Kenk would traditionally be considered important in a historical sense. In the grand scheme of things, someone might say that, while these parallels are interesting, who the hell cares?

The reason that I care, and one of the reasons why modern historians, journalists, and–in some ways more importantly readers–find these accounts so important is because they are narratives that deal with real people. It’s true that neither Menocchio nor Kenk are politicians, or artists, or even popular cultural figures in themselves but they are people that–while arguably normal or common in terms of class or historical significance–symbolize greater historical and cultural shifts by just being who they are.

They are ordinary people with very un-ordinary perspectives and there was a time where we would never have even known about them: or at the very least we’d only get a summary of them in passing … or at least we’d get something like this from a dominant or “higher cultural” narrative. Because there is one thing I keep coming back to in my head: it is the idea of oral history.

What is oral history? We know that oral culture or literacy is something that is passed on verbally from one storyteller to the next throughout many generations. But history, as Westerners, understand it is derived from the ancient Greek word historia: which is something along the lines of scientific inquiry or observation. Oral history, from my understanding, is thus something of verbal origin that is written down for other people to see.

Menocchio’s “worm and cheese world” survived through the written accounts of his interrogators, whereas Kenk seems to have actually been interviewed by the book’s producer Alex Jansen and filmed by Jason Gilmore as he espouses his world-view of “Monkey Factors and recycling” in that context.

KENK_CHAP-08_16

Oral culture in our world is very different in that we have sophisticated image and audio technology to preserve and record the spoken word, and where that spoken word comes from. There is a scholar named Walter Ong–who I looked at in my own studies for my Master’s Thesis–who looked at oral culture and degrees of orality.

Ong believed that there is something called “secondary orality”: in which spoken word is preserved through technological means like video and radio. But I’ve always wondered if he would have included illustrated images in this definition as well, and how problematic it would be if these images were accompanied by written words. Can the visual be considered part of the oral or the written, or is it something by itself? Obviously I’m talking about the medium of comics and what kind of literacy that would be defined as but–this tangent aside for now–right now I’m thinking about the idea of oral history being a historical narrative that records down what life and reality is like for “the common person”: if there is any such thing as a common person.

I actually think that this conception of oral history has led to the idea of journalism: of interviewing and recording down what a particular person or witness has to say, and then researching the environment in which this person came from for a greater perspective. Is journalism the child of oral history? And then you take something like Kenk into consideration too: something that is written down but also given a sequential FV Disco style is that is both an illustrative and video collage aesthetic.

It’s fascinating to think about Kenk as an artifact of not only “comics journalism”–a medium that some comics creators like Joe Sacco have already developed–but also written literacy, oral culture, history, and mass-produced art. I look at Kenk and I wonder if this is our contemporary version of the colportage of Menocchio’s time, or the pamphlets and photocopies of 1980s Slovenia. Because in the end, it’s not just Menocchio and Kenk that have a lot in common, but also the media used to try and capture what they are … and what they are not.

When I started writing this article, I thought it was going to be easy: like it was all fully formed in my head. In a way I’m doing what I said I would not do by delving more into the academics I’ve tried to put some distance from: at least with regards to jargon. My train of thought tends to drift and it has been a struggle to communicate and even cohesively perceive all of these parallels here.

But if this were a paper of mine, if this were some rough form of the Graduate essays I would write, I would end this post in the following manner. As someone who has studied mythic world-building, I believe that art is an engagement with different parts of the world around you, and an expression of who you are as a result of what you choose to accept of that world. In that, the man called Menocchio and Igor Kenk–specifically in how their scholars and artists portray them–not only made their own art, but actually lived their art, and allowed for the creation of more of it.

I also believe that when you take all of this into account oral history, journalism, comics journalism, or whatever you want to call it reveals one more truth. Writing about an individual not only reveals that there are no “ordinary people,” but that it never makes for making any “ordinary stories.” Ever.

Again, I’d like to thank Alex Jansen and Jason Gilmore for lending me these pages of Kenk to place here in my article to make both point and emphasis.

If you are interested in this topic, you might like my What is FV Disco article as well. They both deal with similar subject matter, but in different ways.

Artistic Progress Goes Boink!: The Refinement of a Heroine, the Formation of an Antagonist

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

When we last left off, our intrepid heroes were continuing to work on the formative phase of a silent comic. Much of Angela O’Hara’s pictures in the previous Project entry are of our female protagonist and as you can see here, she has been busy with her.

Notice the eyes. They are not only how I thought of them–pure blue–but Angela even went one further by giving them the detail of actual sclera and pupils while also keeping them the same colour. Angela has also been playing with facial expressions, some dimples, and conveying certain kinds of emotion with every facial image that you can see here. There is something very serene, sometimes sad, but ultimately determined in this heroine who is questioning herself as she continues on her path through the strange little world that we are making for her.

While our heroine is getting more detailed, we are also working on fleshing out our antagonist as well.

Like our heroine, I provided and talked with Angela about certain details. He is supposed to be an older man and he is obviously different from our main character. It’s been a challenge to figure out what he’s supposed to look like as of yet. What I find works for me is looking at these conceptual drawings with Angela and picking certain details from these already made illustrations that can be incorporated into a figure closer to what we both want to work with.

For instance, I really like the idea of an X-like scar on his cheek: an aesthetic very reminiscent of the protagonist in the manga Rurouni Kenshin. In fact, as we talked about this online, I figured out exactly how he got that scar even though I didn’t originally plan on having this “X” on his skin. I was more thinking of having it on his costume, but Angela’s initiative worked out well.

So basically I decided he would look older, but not grizzled or ancient. The mask has also been a challenge too because I had been thinking of having it cover his whole face and making him look more mysterious as he watches our protagonist at work. Of course, the advantage to the half-mask–aside from the fact that it plays with our theme–is that it shows more facial expression and therefore more humanity. There is a part of me that does wince at it seeming too much like a stereotypical comic book hero or villain’s mask, but at the same time this is definitely something that want to play with as well.

We are still  working on what the suit should look like. I do like some of these designs in these latter pictures. I like, for instance, how Angela puts the “Zero” symbol at the lower-hand corner of each costume. That was one issue I was having when I was envisioning how to fit the “X” and “Zero” symbols together on his person. I mean, he’d not be very intimidating if his sigil was something derived from a  “Tick-Tack-Toe” game. In terms of the clothing in the latter set of pictures, I can definitely see at least the lab coat becoming a basis for another costume. In fact, we’ve talked about giving him different costumes depending on what environment he’s in and what he is doing. I mean, he has the resources. He has the technology. 😉 We just need to see where he goes from here.

And now to the Boink! part of our creative progress.

This Calvin and Hobbes reference aside, when I was much younger I fancied myself something of a graphic artist as well. The thing is, I had difficulty imitating basic shapes. At the same time, I liked to create monsters. To this day, it’s safe to say that I create better monsters than I do humanoids. I knew that in addition to the heroine and antagonist, we needed to have some other creatures and enemies in our developing environment. Now I could have simply described these, and to some extent I did describe them to Angela on email but pictures speak louder than words and so I unearthed these images.

(No, my blurred face is not one of the monsters … I think.)

See, those three pod-constructs were robot minions that I created for a primitive high school comic about a stick-man from a cartoon dimension who gets crippled and reconstructed into the Styx Demon by aliens. These were supposed to be the aliens. I used to have drawings of these with ink pen and pencil crayon colouring, but they are sadly lost to time. When I sent these to Angela, it was like an archaeology of my drawings: taking pictures of and documenting glyphs from my old high school art kit.

There is more.

These two kinds of beings in particular, from what I remember, were created as creatures for an old RPG game I had planned: something that people could scroll through a Paint Program to interact with. To this day, I still love that Cairn Grass. These drawings sat in my closet for years, just as the ideas that made them have rested in my mind. The idea is for Angela and myself to use some of these as templates to … make things that our heroine can interact with.

Sometimes, I feel like my part in our creative process is very ad hoc. I don’t have a script ready as of yet though I have created a rough outline of the events that I want to depict along with some notes on character personality and a little bit about how their abilities work. A lot of the interaction between Angela and myself has been exchanging ideas. I admit that sometimes I feel bad for not having a detailed enough script as of yet, but there are still some decisions that need to be made and I’m glad that it is not a case of me dictating to another person. Much of our creative decisions so far have been the result of a mutually creative exchange of ideas, shared enthusiasm, and just throwing stuff out there. I’m given to understand that each comics–and creative–collaboration works differently and so far, our works just fine. 🙂

Angela has just told me that she has some special pictures planned for next time: something that may or may not have been influenced by talking about old video games. I look forward to seeing where this goes from here.

Building a Character to Make a World: Our Project Continues

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

About a month ago, I said that Angela O’Hara and I would working on a comics collaboration together. So here is an update on our Project thus far.

I gave Angela a whole list of comics artists to research in order to get the right aesthetic for our world. The following inspirations were Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown, Chris Ware’s “The Super-Man” stories, Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, the rugged elementalism of the anime Gurren Lagann, Sarah Howell, and Neil Gaiman’s run of Miracleman.

At the time, Angela was not completely sure how to go about this: which was fair given the fact that all I had seen of this world I’d envisioned were a few scenes and figures inside of my own head. It’s amazing how something in your mind cannot always be so easily translated into real life.

After a summer of proposing this Project, I was galvanized into action when Angela said she was going to be pursuing her drawing career full-time now: which is excellent because she is a gifted illustrator and a comics-creator. This was when I realized I needed to give her what I had and, once I did, I realized I gave her more than enough to work with at that point.

In the end, I created a fairly detailed back-story (or at least something far more detailed than what I thought it would be), some character outlines and descriptions, and even some notes on the minions that I’m keen on including in this strange new world of ours. So armed with artistic inspirations as well as character descriptions, names, a background story, and a rough idea of the main plot Angela began drawing.

It was when she sent me these first pictures that the challenge really began. As you can see, they are all excellent illustrations of the main female protagonist. Usually, I could have just selected a few and suggested some details here and there, but her features were not as distinct in my mind as I would have liked. Then I started to think about what the world would be like: specifically what we wanted our aesthetic to be.

For two days, I thought about this and luckily Angela and I managed to talk about it. She told me that she wasn’t completely sure what aesthetic–of the inspirations I chose–that she was supposed to use so she decided to draw different pictures of our character in various styles. I felt really torn: because I wanted to see this world as an elemental place of basic shapes but some very realistic elements, but Angela drew all of these really good illustrations. It made me question the fundamental substance of what I wanted our world to look like.

But Angela has a good way of asking the right questions. Not only did I manage to answer some of her questions, but I started to add some details of my own. Another question that really got me was how old our protagonist was going to be and what she would be wearing before she got her costume. These were definitely questions that I needed to answer and in the end we decided on her being twelve or so, with rudimentary clothing that she had been forced to create herself.

Angela was also curious about what costume our character was going to have. She experimented a bit and showed me this:

This is what prompted me to tell her the idea I had with regards to the main character’s costume: and how that was going to fit into the plot. Let’s just say: it’s less than she chooses the costume, but rather that it chooses her … and in unexpected way.

Finally, Angela had an “Aha!” moment and after I chose a few of the profiles that she created and made some suggestions, she managed to mix together something of Saint-Exupery, and something very reminiscent of Mark Buckingham’s drawing style in the illustrated story section of Miracleman #20: Winter’s Tale. As you can see, our protagonist looks like she is painted and has very bright colours. And yes, you’ve seen it right: she is red. 🙂 As of right now, this is the closest working illustration and aesthetic that we have and Angela is still working on it: along with drawing out a few more of our characters. It is just so beautiful, lush, and artful.

Another excellent advantage to having this working model of our whole aesthetic is that I have inspiration. There is nothing more buoying than seeing something you envisioned becoming as close to a tangible image as can be made possible to really encourage you to keep creating. The added bonus of this feeling is that with our last Project, Thebes was supposed to be based off of our re-interpretation of mythology: of stories and characters that already existed. With this Project, we are making something relatively new: something that didn’t exist before quite the way we see it.

I mean, I know: I understand that all superheroes are archetypes and variations of Superman or older mythical figures, but the characters in this story have their personalities and I try to look at the basics of what they can do as much as possible … of which I am now figuring out. It is also very helpful that, right now, Angela and I are on a very similar wavelength in figuring these details out.

In fact, all of this is a process of figuring things out: as though Angela and I are spying on another world and trying to translate it into ours as much as possible. When we’ve done more work on this–and I create at least a rough outline of the booklet–I will start calling the characters and our Project by name. Until then, both will be as silent and as wordless as our comics work itself.

The Power of the Original, the Creativity of Change

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

In The Source and Its Creative Feelings, I wrote about the emotions and energy that can power inspiration and ideas. In this article, I’m talking about the material and the quality of it that can fuel that kind of inspiration.

So I was watching the classic 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts last night, and it occurred to me just how much it was tangentially in there in the culture of my childhood. It wasn’t so much the movie itself as it was the aesthetics and the attitude of it. In fact, the only film that really comes to my mind with that same spirit is Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

Whenever I thought of the ancient past or mythology as a child, I used the imagery of these movies and others like them to inform myself of how both should have looked like. Then I fast-forward this concept of mine by a few years. I used to think that the fantasy genre were all stories like The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, followed by Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, and I tried to write exactly like them: especially the latter two series.

I thought that some of my more weirder story ideas–including an alternate storyline with The Ten Commandments–were silly and a waste of time, or at the very least beyond my means and personal faculties to create at the time.

This was before I realized that there was original source material.

Every story ever made is an echo of another story that exists before it, or coexists alongside of it in another form. But every story as a source: a prototype or “Ur-Text” (Ur being a term for the mythical first of something, such as the first ever human city-state) or place that is tapped into.

I believe that every creator taps into that source. However, I also think that the strength of a creator’s link to that source all depends on where and how they tap into it. Originally, I was going to say that a creation inspired by an original source–or the closest known or accessible thing–depends on one thing, but after thinking about it a bit more I realize there are two elements involved.

The first element is, like I said, finding the earliest myths or art-forms that you can read, understand, or learn to understand and take inspiration from them. They are the closest things to the source, or what the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell called “the mono-myth”: the supposed first story that all sentient human stories come from. I feel that once you learn to understand the spirit of the earliest story or source that you can find with regards to your work–and specifically use it to gain your own personal creative slant on it–then you have gained something powerful and you are more than on your way to augmenting or discovering your own creative voice.

But then there is the second element that I thought of very recently: which is that once you gain an idea of the original source material that created the story or story-type you are working on, you must make it timeless in a way that everyone can relate to, and therefore make it relevant. Take what you have learned or understood and apply it to your time and the issues and themes that are important to you as a creator, a person, or even both.

Think about it: before DeMille’s Ten Commandments, or Jason and the Argonauts, all there was to determine how the ancient world was, and how their myths functioned were books, broken sculptures and fragments of art. The creators of both films had to go through all of that material and decide what they were going to use or change. I won’t even go into Ten Commandments, because there have been many other films and stories created from that Biblical tale at different points in time, and even the ancient Greek myth of the Argonauts has changed throughout time and culture as well.

But what I am saying is that the creators of both looked at the original sources as much as they could and made something, and added character and motivations that audiences could relate to. Even J.R.R. Tolkien looked at ancient Nordic tales and history in the creation of his Middle-Earth: which in turn informed how a lot of the fantasy genre derived from it would be for a time.

Like I said, I do think that knowing the original source of something gives you a special insight into that thing and in making something that is either a homage to it, or a unique derivation. This is what I have adopted for a lot of my writing and creation process. It gives you more to work with and more to change should you choose to do. And that is the key here: knowing the closest source gives you more choices … especially with what you want to reveal what is important to you about them and other people.

When I was growing up, I took films like Jason and the Argonauts with its stop-motion clay animation less seriously than I did the developing CGI graphics coming around then. But now, looking back I realize just how much of that influenced the creation of CGI and what film-making could be: as well as storytelling. Maybe it’s because as a culture now almost everything that is “retro” or considered old is popular and new again. Of course, as some other popular cultural articles suggest this could be all be just part of a cycle that happens with every decade or era.

My era of the 80s and onward, as well as the things that inspired them in earlier years, has become a lot of my source material and now I am starting to realize that I can express it. This is a good thing. The possibility that some of the quirky weirdness in some of my stories may have been inspired by Joss Whedon’s irreverent flippant dialogue in Buffy and other shows is an added bonus: from my perspective anyway.

Really, I just like creatively messing around and reading and watching old, good things and good new things for universal and innovative storytelling ideas. I probably could have summarized this whole post into that one sentence, but there you go. 😉