Author: JDJPlocher

The Future is Smaller Than You Think

Eleven years and a season ago, I was in the middle of the best summer I’ve ever had. I had graduated from college, received enough graduation gifts to coast for a few months, and was dating the woman I’d eventually marry. I spent my days studying the early music history that had never made it into my music major and my evenings playing ultimate frisbee. My commitments were minimal. I had the rare luxury of choosing how I spent my time.

Most importantly, though, I knew what was coming next. In August I would move to Ohio and begin a master of music degree in composition. I had an apartment lined up (despite not meeting any roommates), an assistantship lined up, and hey, how hard could more school be? (It turned out to be hard, but that is a different post.) I was a 22-year old with a plan. The future spread before me like an ocean.

That was the moment I should have checked my boat for leaks…or perhaps invested in a set of maps to give me some idea of what the other side of the ocean looked like. But c’mon. I had love, ultimate, and leisure to spend reading about parallel developments in madrigals and motets.

The future is smaller than you think. It probably isn’t big enough to hold everything you would like to pile into it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not tiny. It’s just more along the lines of Heward’s Handy Haversack than a high-end bag of holding or portable hole. (Apologies to the non-geeks.) You cannot just keep dumping stuff there, hoping you will get to it later.

Still…seize-the-day posts and their cousin chase-your-dream wear me out. Days are slippery. Dreams move fast. Of course you have to sow before you reap. Sowing doesn’t guarantee a harvest. To sow is to sign up for endless days of weeding and shoveling fertilizer, of hoping for rain or digging your own ditches. And when you reap? As good as it might feel to heft your scythe, to cut the stalks and winnow the grain, even that doesn’t guarantee that somebody will be waiting at market to buy your harvest. Or that the miller won’t be an ass.

No step in the process can be dumped willy-nilly into the future. It is too small for that. This is what bothers me about “seizing the day.” If I spend the day writing, my kids will destroy the apartment (or one another). If I spend the day writing, I’m going to have a hard time staying in said apartment when rent comes due. I can throw myself wholeheartedly into chasing my dreams, but I’m setting myself up to trip over things in the now.

I am not against pep talks. We all need them. Sometimes we need the ones we give ourselves most of all. I just prefer to remember that we have only a short amount of time, and that, unlike the Doctor, we’re stuck experiencing it linearly. The future is smaller than I once thought it was.

It’s too small too hold all of the hopes I dumped there. The thing is, the now isn’t much bigger. I can worry about seizing the day, or I can get a fence around it to keep it from escaping. If my dreams are running too fast to catch, I can try to let them show me the best path forward. Most of all, I remind myself that a small future does not have to be a dark future. My future is still mine to fill. Yours is still yours. Think hard about what you stash there.

Reading Leaves that Don’t Change

Twenty seconds after I started the car yesterday, Charles Mingus’s “Better Git It in Your Soul” came on the radio. That is about as good an omen as one can wish for.

I have spent much of today trying to hold on, even a little, to the feeling I had as I walked out of BookPeople in downtown Austin last night. Big, independent bookstores are cool in their own right, but I’d made the drive downtown to go a reading by Steven Brust and Skyler White, whose new book The Incrementalists I mentioned in my author love letter to Mr. Brust. Mr. Brust wore the expected hat and the expected mustache. The reading itself entertained. I’m looking forward to my turn to read the book—what I’ve heard thus far reminds me of Zelazny. (My wife gets first crack at it, since it is something of a mutual birthday present and hers comes before mine.)

Mr. Brust was kind and clever. Ms. White was jovial and sweet. They handled the signing line with aplomb. In a cool twist, they had the people they were signing for sign their own copies of The Incrementalists. I mentioned to Mr. Brust that I had written an author love letter to him just after he’d finished writing “Happy Birthday” in my copy. (I knew he had seen the original post, since he retweeted the link.) He smiled and said, “That was very sweet. I wish you’d told me that before I signed it. I would have written something nicer.” Happy birthday and a dash of warm fuzzies were fine.

My way-back-ground is in English and writing, but most of the last decade for me has revolved around music. There is a feeling you get after a good show. Partly, it’s available to everybody—that feeling of having been moved, of having for a moment set aside the arbitrary limits of time and space. For musicians, there’s sometimes another level: the feeling that you can do something like that, that you want to do something like that. You can make something that will open others like you were just opened. These moments of clarity are why so many of us do art in the first place. That’s what I was feeling when I left BookPeople last night: I can do that. I want to do that.

Last night’s was amplified by my favorite kind of cool weather. It was clear and dark and the air was dry and held just a hint of edge. Perfect weather for walking around in short sleeves and appreciating the moment you step inside. That’s what fall should be like. The job hunt’s a slog, and we’re supposed to go back over 30 deg. C later this week, but for an evening, it was fall and I was happy.

WTF is Epic?

A Google image search for “epic” yields depressing results—mostly “demotivational” posters (“epic fail” and “epic win”), and most of those prominently featuring breasts. (Go internet?) A standard search yields only slight improvements: the primary results are Epic Systems, the movie “Epic” (loosely based on a book by William Joyce), and, eventually, Wikipedia’s epic poetry page.

That gets us closer to a working definition of epic for storytelling purposes. (Today, at least, I’ll spare you the detour explaining Bakhtin’s notion of epic and novelistic chronotope.) What makes for epic storytelling? Is it attitude? Does the fate of the world (or multiple worlds) necessarily hang in the balance? Can we legitimately call one protagonist’s descent and redemption epic if it doesn’t involve saving the world? They’re big questions, and off the cuff I’d suggest that the main ingredient is simply scale. There has to be some sense that the story’s action has far-reaching consequences, whether it’s a ring of power, finding the Buddhist scrolls far to the west, or some evil deity ready to be unchained. Sometimes, if the interior worlds of characters are sufficiently realized, the interpersonal can become epic in scale.

Scale is tricky. Concerning yourself overmuch with it can lead to forest/trees issues in which you constantly lose one or the other. What follows is a discussion of one particular way of mistaking the forest for the trees, the storytelling technique I call “epic by addition.”

Some of you have heard me talk (rant) about this before, and you know which author is soon going to be in my crosshairs. Epic by addition is the attempt to create scale simply by adding more stuff. People, places, monsters…keep adding them until your editor cuts you off.* You can simply introduce new characters out of the blue, or you can build up the supporting cast into stars. The more stars you have, the brighter the sky, right?

Yeah. Maybe not. If you put too many bright stars in the sky, picking out the constellations becomes a chore.

From J.R.R. to G.R.R.

The first author I read to really embrace epic by addition was Melanie Rawn. She had foreigners invade her continent, and chose to trace that invasion through the soap-opera members of convoluted family tree of magic people. The most famous purveyor of epic by addition, though, is G.R.R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire. The series’ narrative spirals out from Winterfell to the Wall to King’s Landing to Pentos to…well, pretty much everywhere. Along the way, Mr. Martin continues to give us new characters, not only including them in the story but featuring them as point-of-view characters. We get each character for a chapter, then jump somewhere far away to check in with the local haps.

I do not think Martin is a bad writer. His prose is generally crisp. Many of his characters are compelling (although few are likable). The books read briskly considering their heroic length. I just wish he’d get on with his story. I feel that I’ve lost track of what that is.

As a thought experiment, imagine The Lord of the Rings—usually acknowledged as the grandfather of epic fantasy—retold in Martin’s style.

The Fellowship of the Ring, I think, changes little. We start perhaps with Bilbo’s view of the party. Or begin (as Tolkien does) by gradually zooming in on Frodo. We might get some Samwise or Meriadoc or Pippin in the flight from the riders and into the Old Forest. Frodo again for the Barrow Downs. Aragorn, probably, for the misadventures in Bree and the hike to Weathertop. Frodo again there, then probably Sam up to Rivendell. We might get Elrond for the grand council, Boromir for Caradhras. Gandalf, almost certainly, for Moria, although you could excuse the Istari from POV duties and stick to Aragorn or Gimli. And so on and so forth until we end, similarly to the original, with Sam finding Frodo at the boats.

The Two Towers…that is where we start to lose it. The surviving members of the Fellowship all get their own chapters. We get one for Eomer, one for Eowyn as she leads the women and children away from Meduseld. Smeagollum gets his own chapter(s). Aragorn and Gimli and Legolas and maybe even Theoden. We get a chapter from Isengard by Saruman, maybe. Or perhaps that one comes from Wormtongue. We interrupt the string of Frodo-Sam-Smeagollum with a chapter from Faramir. (We also mix them all together rather than holding to Tolkien’s Orthanc/Barad Dur split.)

When the War of the Ring really gets rolling in The Return of the King? Can you imagine? We’d get chapters from all the remaining fellowship members. Eomer, Eowyn, maybe Theoden again if we’ve heard from him. Certainly several from Faramir. We’d probably get detailed accounts of battles that are skimmed over, like the ones leading up to Pelennor Fields. We’d hear all about Imrahil of Dol Amroth. If we’re hewing particularly close to Martin’s oeuvre, we likely have at least some politicking about who will lead Gondor. If we embrace epic by addition wholeheartedly, we skip back up to Esgaroth, Dale, and the Lonely Mountain to have a look at how they again fight off an invasion of orcs, and other material from Appendix B. It would almost certainly take two books to deal with it all…

…and it would drown Frodo’s quest. Among all those other momentary protagonists, the struggle of two small hobbits to cross Mordor would be difficult indeed to keep in focus. No matter how exciting it might be moment to moment, no matter how cool the characters, we would not have the same story. That is what bothers me about epic by addition. It muddies the shape of the story. You lose the forest in painstaking descriptions of individual trees.

Build your world. Set your characters loose in it. Don’t try to fill in all the corners.

*Related pet theory: authors hit a dangerous point when, on the covers of their books, their name is bigger than the work’s title. That seems to be about the time editors begin backing off.

Pulp Fiction: Howard and Moorcock

Elric, last lord of Melniboné, was a pure albino who drew his power from a secret and terrible source.
—Michael Moorcock, “The Dreaming City”

Here at Walking Ledges, I’m big into intersections, whether those are the liminal moments I mention in my “about” page, the collision of text and music that fascinated me as an undergrad, or the intersection of musicology and sociology that drove my dissertation. I’m also, as I’ve mentioned before, a gamer and fantasy enthusiast. Gamer, academic, writer, reader…those collide for me in an interest in “old” fantasy fiction and its relationship to both the newer stuff and to role-playing games.

Tolkien comes up a lot in these discussions, probably more often than he deserves. In The Hobbit and most particularly in The Lord of the Rings, the grand old linguist gave us a model “adventuring party” and established a template for worldbuilding. I’ll have more to say about the latter in other posts. The former is more salient to today’s discussion. Moving fantasy away from a single protagonist was a big deal. In the Norse and Anglo-Saxon epics Tolkien used for the bones of Middle Earth, heroes were singular, though they often had friends and companions. The Fellowship flattened those differences—Frodo is the ringbearer, but is he more important than Gandalf or Aragorn or Sam? Is the younger Baggins the center of the story?

I don’t think so. But I also believe that Tolkien offers only a small piece of RPGs’ literary ancestry. The bigger piece comes from flamboyantly singular characters: the heroes of pulp fiction. Cheap novels, serialized stories, heroes fighting impossibilities from the deep places of the world…there’d be no monster manuals without authors like Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock.

Howard gave us Conan the Barbarian. Swords, gold, princesses, exotic locations and dangerous (painfully ethnic) sorcerors and beasts…Conan took tropes from Weird Tales, twisted them, and turned them into adventure stories. They were repetitive, sure, and sometimes Howard  leaned on certain analogies a little too much. (I remember Conan being compared to a panther three times in the space of two pages.) The environments though, were inventive. And Conan was a badass. A male power fantasy, but a badass.

Howard also gave us Solomon Kane, the indomitable Puritan adventurer. He rescued damsels but fastidiously avoided despoiling them. He plunged deep into the heart of Africa chasing pirates. He befriended witch doctors and used their strange, skull-capped sticks. He fought the good fight for God and truth. And Howard wrote the stories nearly a century ago. (Attitudes toward race, class, and religion make that abundantly clear.)

Howard’s characters are impossible. Through sheer will and extraordinary ability, they topple kingdoms and survive cataclysms. They go places where natural law gives way to the supernatural. They settle disputes with their swords. They’re peculiarly American and spectacularly masculine. They exhibit their author’s distrust of civilization and longing for an imagined, wilder past. It’s no coincidence that Howard was an enormous fan of boxing, nor that he was a good friend of H.P. Lovecraft.

Michael Moorcock began in a similar vein, publishing stories in pulp magazines when he was a teenager. (It was not long before he was editing one of those magazines himself.) His heroes, though, especially the iterations of the Eternal Champion, are far more fallible. He tended to inflict creeping disabilities on them—a wasting sickness, or a magical jewel eating slowly into the skull. They were blessed and cursed to turn the wheels of fate. They quested for Tanelorn, a place of perfect peace and balance that they could never quite achieve. They brought death to their friends and enemies alike. Pyrrhic victories were the only kind they knew.

Elric is not my favorite Moorcock hero, but he’s the best known and most influential. The albino with the soul-drinking black sword, last emperor of Melniboné. He is a warrior and a sorceror. The black sword, Stormbringer, eats the souls of his enemies (and sometimes his friends) to feed him the power he needs to work his magic and defeat his enemies. He’s part demon, probably literally. He’s the first swords-and-sorcery hero I know of who wielded both.

As a character, Elric has as much in common with Hamlet as with Conan. He acts ambivalently until circumstances force his hand. He understands all too well that tragedy follows him and that, sooner or later, he will destroy what he most loves. He is almost as bad as his enemies. Almost, but not quite. He’s as much a product of mid-century Britain as Solomon Kane is of early the 20th-century U.S. Empires grow weak and crumble. In another of Moorcock’s series, “Granbretan” is a fascist-technological empire threatening to devour Europe. Hawkmoon, a German fighting on behalf of his French allies, must throw down the Granbretanian emperor.

So…what does any of this have to do with gaming? Conan and Solomon Kane and Elric lived in short stories. We might as well call them adventures. The heroes go to strange places—jungle temples, wizard’s towers, catacombs. They defeat monsters and henchmen on their way to confronting the evil master. After winning, the hero rides off with the loot and sometimes with the girl. In the next story, he does it again. And again and again and again. There isn’t epic storytelling, not at first. Moorcock later builds stories to the length of short novels and allows his characters to develop further, but in those early years there’s no more drive to save the universe than there is in Howard’s preceding work.

We probably wouldn’t have the adventuring party without Tolkien, but we wouldn’t have the adventures without the pulp authors.

Addenda: Edgar Rice Buroughs, with Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, belongs somewhere in this discussion too. I also find it interesting that Howard spent most of his life in Texas, and that Moorcock has lived here for the last 20 years or so.

If you’re interested in Howard, I suggest starting with the 2004 anthology The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane (ISBN 978-0345461506). It has all of the Solomon Kane stories, as well as an excellent introduction. Moorcock’s Elric stories have been similarly collected in a multivolume collection titled Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melniboné. (The ISBN of the first volume is 978-0345498625.) Most used book stores will have at least a smattering of Moorcock, too.

The 962nd Cut, and Signs of Regrowth

Yesterday I had a screening interview and took some tests on vocabulary, grammar and proofreading. It seems possible I’ll have a job, of a sort, next week or not too long thereafter.

Leaving academia is like pulling off a bandaid. I suppose it’s possible to do it with a quick rip—if the right opportunity presents itself and you know just what you want. For me, the bandaid’s coming off slowly. It started slipping with applications for tenure track jobs. It began to rip when the rejection letters arrived. Moving to a place just to live there, not because of a job? That was another tug.

Simply applying for nonacademic jobs hasn’t affected me all that much (though it’s not especially entertaining going through the standard early-career professional pains of  “four+ years of experience required”). I’ve had more practice than I like hurling cover letters and my resume out into the void. Getting to an interview, though, taking concrete steps to start a new job…that was an unexpectedly sharp yank on the bandaid.

This prospective job isn’t glamorous. It is vaguely in my new field (words). The pay is worse, on an hourly basis, than most adjunct jobs. On the other hand, I’ll be getting paid for all the hours I work, rather than 20% of them. I’ll only have to go to one site. When I leave work, it will stay there. It’s just not the kind of thing I imagined doing at any point during graduate school. Even though I made plenty of noises about plans B when the job market came up, I’d always imagined something more than contract-to-hire proofreading. Funny how they don’t invite those folks to the “nonacademic careers” panels at the big conferences, huh?

By most of society’s metrics, I’m taking a step down. That is not fun, even though my reasons are good. PhDs aren’t “supposed” to schlepp, even if they’re schlepping words. Years of studying discourse provide me many ways to talk about that step down, about social constructs and material circumstances, about freedom and necessity…but they don’t really change my feelings. I get by by reminding myself that this is a step. It’s motion. I’m not sure yet whether it’s progress, but I’ve been in a holding pattern for a long, long time.

Even holding patterns yield occasional surprises. The most recent surprise for me is that I’m feeling the urge to write music again—snatches of melody, bits of orchestration. Aside from some occasional pieces and a handful of incomplete songs, I haven’t composed anything since leaving Ohio. I thought that part of me had withered, killed by seven years of too much scholastic sun and not enough artistic water. It must have had deeper roots than I thought.

I think that when I get a paycheck, I’ll invest in some nice manuscript paper.

Missing Characters

I am juggling a good number of projects right now. Writing cover letters, tweaking resumes, writing for games, thoroughly reworking some old stories to get them ebookified as quickly as possible. It’s all taken time away from my novel (working title “The Fairworth Chronicles”). When I woke up this morning, I missed it. I missed the characters. I keep wondering what they’re up to, what they will be up to when I can get their activities out of my head and onto the page.

Missing fictional people is odd. If they’re other writers’ characters, they’re seldom farther than your bookshelf (or e-reader, if you swing that way). I’ve missed others’ characters sometimes, especially the ones who have grown and changed. Brust’s Vlad Taltos is a fun one to miss, because he’s easy to revisit at various points over his development. The Vlad books are also short enough to plow through one in an afternoon. Zelazny’s Corwin is much the same. Others take more work to visit: Gaiman’s Shadow, Le Guin’s Ged, Chabon’s Kavalier, even Moorcock’s Hawkmoon. They don’t live quite as close to the surface of their stories. (There might be something about first person narration lurking in there, although Gene Wolfe’s Arthur Ormsby is not the easiest to visit in spite of the way he colors the narration of The Knight and The Wizard.) At any rate, even if they don’t live next door, other writer’s characters live on familiar roads, and getting to them is more a matter of time than of work.

Missing your own fictional people is harder. Even if they’ve thoroughly established residence in your head, as Maedoc and Zahra have in mine, getting to them takes work. Oh, sometimes it’s easy. It feels like your characters are sitting right next door, with a full pot of coffee and an extra cup. Usually, though, it’s a cross-country hike. Often it is painfully uphill. Sometimes there are giants at the top, playing you for a pin in a game of downhill boulder bowling.

Regardless, it is exciting to get there. You’re not quite sure what the characters are going to do, whether they’re going to cooperate, whether they’re going take your story and run with it so hard you’ll have to chase it. Or maybe your characters don’t want to run at all. They just want to sit there and leave you feeling very much like you do trying to get your three year-old to put on her shoes so you can go grocery shopping. When it’s been a slog to even get to them, this is inordinately frustrating.

The hard thing is also the cool thing: you don’t know until you get there. That’s what makes missing your own characters more exciting than anything else. There’s risk. We know, all of us, that adventures do not always end happily. We also know that unhappy endings might better resemble a hospital waiting room than a rubble-strewn battlefield. When you miss your own characters and go looking for them, it’s an adventure. That’s the important thing to remember, even if other clutter is blocking your front door. Go out through a window if you have to. The adventure is worth it.

Author Love Letter: Steven Brust

(The first in a series.)

Dear Mr. Brust, 

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I first got interested in you when I saw you in a magazine. Well, not you. Vlad. You know, Vlad. Of course you do. (That moustache!) Vlad and his buddy Loiosh in the pages of Dragon Magazine, all statted out for an edition of Dungeons and Dragons that went out of print a couple presidents ago. I picked out Taltos a little later at the only bookstore in my small town. In hindsight, I’m impressed they had it. 

Vlad blew my mind a little bit. I was a teenager, I know, but I’d been voraciously reading anything with a sword or a dragon on the cover. Lots of very mediocre books that were busy trying to figure out where Tolkien and D&D could meet. And here came Vlad. He was the hero, but he was an assassin. A criminal. He killed people for money! I couldn’t decide if it was dangerous or evil or just cool. It was funny without being a comedy, dramatic without being heavy, full of action that didn’t seem like it was playing out in combat rounds or being scripted for a movie. Vlad was like Indiana Jones and Sherlock Holmes and maybe a little bit of Batman. I couldn’t even make those comparisons back then, and now I’ve read more and have better ones. But damn was Vlad cool back then. And Morrolan and Aliera and Sethra and the rest. They still are.

A year or so later I tried running my first play-by-e-mail game. It was a very loose homebrew set of rules, and I set it in Adrilankha. It was called Scaled Shadows. There was an Athyra with a gambling problem. An Easterner who I think was a barber. And there was a low-level Jhereg thief. I didn’t get very far with my players, but it was such a cool sandbox to go play in. I wonder what I’d do with it now, having learned so much more about both GMing and slick bits of Dragaera’s development like the Serioli’s “not yet.”

I read chapter six of The Phoenix Guards three times before I went on with the rest of the book. The captain’s incredulity and the friends’ shrugs…it was just too perfect. (Many years later, in a cave where the walls between worlds were weak, I cried with them.) Paarfi  is as finely crafted an alter ego as I’ve ever seen an author ‘fess up to. 

The first non-Dragaera book of yours I read was The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. It hit me, as we’d say now, “in the feels.” I’ve re-read it often, and though it doesn’t pack the punch for me it once did, I still appreciate it. Right down to the narrator’s Zeppelin cassettes. It wasn’t too long after that, I think, that I read To Reign in Hell. I liked that one, too. And the fairy-tale patina on Brokedown Palace. And I still think The Gypsy is one of the most perfect exercises of storytelling I’ve ever read—it’s certainly my favorite instance of the “old magic in the modern world” trope. Fiddling in the last firefight in Cowboy Feng’s. The typewriter and the attic in Agyar…

I know we haven’t always been tight—there was the time where I took an excerpt from one of the Vlad books in to my college creative writing class as an example of stuff I liked, and then discovered that the particular passage was a little clunky. There’s no way I could stay away, though. You’re too clever with your plots and your dialogue, too good at shifting voices and keeping things lively. Also, I’ve spent a lot of time with music and grew up in the restaurant business. Plus, I just moved from Minneapolis to Austin and I like knowing you’ve lived in both places and that you’re a real human with real experiences of some extremely real weather.

Yours,

J.D.J.

I’d planned to start with somebody else, but Steven Brust has a new book coming out soon, The Incrementalists (co-authored with Skyler White). I’ve been hanging out at his blog in the last few weeks—far ranging and mostly civil discussion on everything from postmodernism to socialism to which character Felicia Day would play in a Taltos movie. I’ve also been doing extensive revisions to some stories I wrote a few years back. The protagonist in those stories, and their tone, are heavily indebted to Brust’s Taltos books. That was plenty of reason to send him my inaugural author love letter.

Brust is one of the few authors that my partner and I both read enthusiastically. We’ve given each other his books as birthday and anniversary presents, and sometimes quote bits at each other. The gentleman knows his way around a story. He fills his books with vivid characters. More impressively, he can put a fistful of those arrogant, sardonic, clever people in the same room and not have their personalities or dialogue blur: when Aliera’s snapping at Vlad, it sounds different than Vlad snapping at Aliera. That’s harder than it looks.

If you don’t know Brust, I’d start with the Taltos books. There are some trade omnibuses available–the first is The Book of Jhereg, not to be confused with Jhereg, which is a single novel. If you like Dumas, start with The Phoenix Guards and follow the Khaavren romances through to their conclusion at the end of Sethra Lavode. If you’re not into swords-and-sorcery fantasy, but like magic, try The Gypsy or Agyar. To Reign in Hell is great but defies easily classification. I want to say it’s Biblical materialism, and that’s almost right. But not quite.

Anyway, go read his stuff. If you’ve already read it, keep an eye out for his new book and think happy thoughts.

Stories+Tells=???

A story is like the wind: it comes from a far off place, and you feel it.
—proverb of the Kalahari Bushmen (one I first heard from Terry Tempest Williams)

What makes a story? I spent a lot of time as an undergrad trying to answer that question. I read epic poems, novels, myths…I probably should have spent some quality time with Joseph Campbell, but he was so much in the air that I was satisfied with the commonplaces. I read Bakhtin. I tried hard to learn from the “mistakes” of others—mostly the authors we read (and sometimes picked to pieces) in my literature seminars. I worried about how to tell stories right, rather than how to tell stories well. I felt a constant tension between what I knew about reading critically and what I knew about writing.

That tension is especially obvious in my honors project, The Storyteller, for narrator and orchestra. Musically, the piece has all the flaws one could ask of a first orchestral work: it’s over-written, full of bits that muddy the overall sound and make it occasionally impossible to hear the narrator. After hearing the orchestra read-through, it was obvious that I needed to dramatically strip down the score to fit it more smoothly with the text. That text, though? It has some great moments. It also has moments that make me cringe—bits of faux-beatnik and occasional flings with exoticism. I started with the idea of re-parsing epic poems. Now, we’d call it a mashup, but this was the early Aughts and YouTube didn’t exist yet. (One of the earliest images, for example, was Beowulf’s Grendel emerging from the Trojan Horse.) The poem ended up being about storytelling itself, about the anxiety of influence and how hard it felt to tell stories that hadn’t already been told. In my notes and brainstorming, there’s a constant back and forth between the academicism of my references and my desire to write from the gut.

I’m dealing with some of the same questions here: how do I balance commentary and storytelling? I have to remind myself of John Cage’s words: “Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.” In terms of storytelling, writing a blog can be like “writing” a TV reality show. So many of the things that happen every day aren’t that interesting to me, never mind to you. Some interesting things that happen still don’t fit here. This has become particularly true as a few of my posts—notably Of Dreams…—have been distributed around the internet by others. That’s cool. On the other hand, it’s forced me to consider my audience in ways that I hadn’t when planning this blog. How do I keep the analysis out of the creation?

And what makes a story for me, now? I think that the Kalahari proverb is probably the best answer I know. To keep you coming back—and, more importantly, to keep me coming back—I need to write things that we feel. This story, the story of Walking Ledges, isn’t out of its prologue yet. There is so much more to do and to write and to figure out. It is the story of leaving academia, but also the story of a 33 year-old taking a chance on a 16 year-old’s dreams. It’s the story of me letting myself dive back into the world of stories, to think again about how we write and read, how we tell. “Tell” is so much more vital than “write” or “say.” It’s a declaration, but also something that’s not entirely under one’s own control. A tell at the poker table is the unintentional betrayal of a secret. Good stories are the same way. They hint at secrets, tell us more than their plots and words do. I hope that the tells here will be worthwhile for all of us.

I could have picked a few different lines from The Storyteller to close with, but this is one from the middle of the piece that I particularly like:

“Tell the wind. Tell games. Tell journeys. Tell motion and tell the future. Never tell emptiness.”

You can find my honors project in the Macalester College library in St. Paul, Minnesota (http://macalester.worldcat.org/title/storyteller/oclc/52113087).
I’ve added the complete poetic text to the new “Works” page. 

Good Wil Wheaton

I struggled with many questions. Was I ready to admit defeat? Was I ready to admit that I’d given it my best shot, but I really was a washed up has-been? Was I willing to say out loud that I was . . . That Guy?
—Wil Wheaton. Just a Geek (Kindle Locations 3050-3052)

That passage comes near the end of Wheaton’s Just a Geek, as he ponders accepting the infomercial job that would, he believed, kill the acting career he’d been chasing since childhood. He needs the money. His family needs the money. That struggle—between dreams and realities—is the constant, beautiful thread through Wheaton’s book. A mixture of reflections and selections from the original wilwheaton.net, Just a Geek is a Bildungsroman without the “roman,” a story about a grownup working hard at growing. Wheaton’s got a remarkable ability to take his raw early blog posts and turn them into the foundation for a compelling narrative of what Neil Gaiman calls “creat[ing] his own second act.”

I have a lot of future blog posts penciled in about my favorite writers, about what they’ve meant to me and why I admire their writing and storytelling. Wil Wheaton is not exactly one of my favorite writers, but I don’t think I’d be doing this blog without Just a Geek. I stumbled across it in a Humble Bundle shortly after I received my last batch of rejection letters for academic jobs. It was the first book in the bundle I read, and I devoured it in one of those clock-defying binges word-lovers know well.

The book works for many reasons, but I think the vital one is Wheaton’s ability to get through the heaviest moments with a light touch that isn’t simply crying coming back around to laughter. There’s funny throughout the book, don’t get me wrong. But when Wheaton (I’m still too much an academic to call him ‘Wil’) talks about the bad times, he doesn’t let himself become self-indulgent. He’s unflinchingly self-critical and leavens stories of his past self-indulgence with gentle self-mockery. He lets us know how bad things were without just telling us how bad things were. All of this is a fancy way of saying that I liked the book as a book, even if it fell my way because Wheaton has carved himself out a space as a geek culture hero.

I’m posting about it, though, because it’s as close as anything is ever likely to get to the intersection of my two previous posts. I didn’t have anything like Stand by Me or Star Trek: The Next Generation in my background to “live up to” or “grow beyond,” but I did have 30 years of people telling me I was awesome and could be whatever I wanted to be. I was really good at school. I paid attention to my work and, whether in front of a keyboard or a classroom full of undergrads, I believed I belonged. I had a long way to go, but I knew my craft and consistently worked to improve it. I was supposed to be serious business.

Of course, all of my friends were also serious business. The bigger problem was that institutions of higher learning were even more serious about conducting a certain kind of business. They didn’t want me for that one. As with Wheaton’s string of unsuccessful auditions, good work was an imperfect defense against rejection. After my lightning read through Just a Geek, one of the anecdotes that stuck with me was Wheaton’s story of meeting Sean Astin at an audition. They’d been friends but fallen out of touch, and they happily caught up with each other in the waiting room. And they were competing for the same job. Neither of them got it. Welcome to every academic conference in the fall hiring season. No matter how happy you are to see your friends, you’re all on the hustle to meet the right people, try and be memorable (good memorable!) to anybody who might be on a hiring committee or a reviewer for a journal. There’s no more money in being an underemployed academic than an underemployed actor.

Wheaton took the infomercial job. He put his family ahead of the ambitions that had led him to quit TNG in the first place. That dream had stalled out, and he had others that were going somewhere. Slowly, through his writing, he was finding other ways to be the person he wanted to be. And as this was happening, he was also finally coming to terms with what TNG meant to him. He allowed himself to be comfortable with it, to take joy in the friends he’d made and the work he’d done. He let himself geek out about the things he wanted to geek out about. That’s worked pretty well for him—in the nine years since Just a Geek came out, he’s been featured everywhere from The Big Bang Theory to The Guild to more webcomics than I can count. He’s become that guy, but not the one he dreaded when he pondered that infomercial.

I knew him as that guy when I read Just a Geek, but it didn’t matter as much as it should have. It was easy to put Wheaton’s subsequent success aside and see the reality of his struggles. That is why the book means something to me, something important. I don’t feel like my struggles are so different as I let go of something I’ve wanted for years to keep my family fed and housed, to do the things I feel I should be doing. I didn’t need Wil Wheaton’s permission to do this, and there isn’t anything in Just a Geek that says “go out and make art.” It isn’t a self-consciously “inspirational” book, which is what makes it inspiring.

Trouble shared is trouble diminished. Reading about Wil’s struggles (and here I’ll break tone and go to the first name), knowing what he’s accomplished since—it made the darkness a little less dark. So thank you, Wil Wheaton, for writing a book that’s meaningful for me, for coming to peace with Star Trek, for sending Aeofel into a pit of acid in the name of role-playing. Thank you.

You can keep up to date on Wil Wheaton’s geek career at http://wilwheaton.net. If you’re interested in his more formal writing, you can find his digital works—including Just a Geek—at http://wilwheatonbooks.com/. Go check it out.