Block

I’m really bad at dealing with writer’s block. That’s the primary reason I started this blog, after all, that and dealing with actually ending pieces I start. For the most part, the latter has since not really been an issue for me; I think last year’s Write What You Know is a good example of that, given the goals I had set out for it. But I don’t really feel the same way about that incessant issue that is the former.

Now, to be fair, it’s not like I haven’t tried the various cure-alls that circulate the internet. And a lot of them do work. A particular favorite of mine is the “do nothing but” approach where the author dedicates an amount of time to either writing or “doing nothing.” It’s one of the more extreme methods, I’ve found, and I don’t always have the willpower for it, but when I do manage it, I tend to enjoy the results. Another one is changing scenery, which I like not specifically because of the explicit change, but because of the time it takes to make it, giving me time to think about the approach I want to take on a piece.

Time is a key factor in both of those methods. Maybe that’s the reason that, despite knowing about them, I still feel I’m “really bad” at them. There’s still a part of me that wants some sort of magical solution that fixes my problem, even if the rest of me knows there never will be.

The word “angst” gets a bad rap, I think, though it’s not like it doesn’t deserve at least some of it. Being associated with terms like “dark”, “teenage”, and “brooding”, will do that to a word. But I still think it’s the best way to describe how I feel in this instance. “Writer’s block” might as well be “writer’s angst” for me. That’s why the most popular solution, “Do whatever it takes to get words onto a page” never seemed to work for me. There’s that niggling self-doubt that it’s never going to be good enough. So things get retread on and deleted or left open in a tab that I never seem to get back to no matter how many times I say I’m definitely going to finish that. There’s a whole hierarchy at the top of my browser screen for which projects need finishing first and which are just pieces of wishful thinking.

Am I spreading myself too thin? I never feel that I am, though maybe that’s because I just never go back and look at some of these tabs, so the fear of unfinished-ness never fully develops. I do get posts here finished on a regular basis, not to mention, you know, actual schoolwork. But there’s also the wonder of what happens when those deadlines are stripped away and I’m left with a blank Word doc and not much else.

-F

RicerCAR

Well, this is actually something I hadn't really encountered yet. I've been pretty happy with my output so far on this blog (the less said about NSS Reviews the better, but I think I made peace with that a few weeks ago), but this last week I had a particularly acute case of writer's block. Fortunately, I have backup plans in place for such an occasion. For example, here is a story of mine I don't think many of you have read before:

"The Biopic Problem"

I’ve been trying to avoid complaining about so-called “predictability” in films. I’ve found that that sort of thinking is generally reductive. Like, when someone asked Roger Ebert what film had the least cliches, he responded with My Dinner With Andre, a film that consists entirely of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory having a dinner conversation, and even that has a TV Tropes page. But at the same time, I’ve started to have a negative view of what are commonly called “biopics,” and the simplest reason I can give when pressed on this is, to put it simply, that they’re too “predictable.” I promised over on NSS Reviews that I was going to try and resolve this little hypocrisy, so here I am.

In a typical three-act structure, there’s generally some sort of climax in the second act with the intention to meet two quick goals. The first is, loosely, to let the characters demonstrate how they’ve changed since the beginning of the story, and the second is, on a meta-level, to keep the audience from getting bored. Apollo 13, for example, has the “square peg in a round hole” sequence, while another space biopic, Hidden Figures, features the main characters slowly breaking down the institutional racism that surrounds them.

There’s a little trap there, however. The second act climax isn't the only climax in the film. To paraphrase the fictional Robert Mckee from Adaptation., the last act is going to be fresh in people's minds, and can even get people to forgive earlier mistakes, so make sure it's a good one. So if the movie's climax isn't as good as the second act's, it just comes across as poor pacing. Wonder Woman (which isn't a biopic but I've found superhero films can fall for similar traps, probably due to their mythological inspirations inspiring more stock story structure), for example, has a rather intense sequence where Diana leads a trench run on the way to taking back a French town, while the final act has a three-part battle to raid a German stronghold. On the surface, this seems like a fine escalation, but when the film throws a misguided twist at the viewer, followed by lasers that weren't especially well set up, it runs the risk of breaking the audience's immersion.

(In regards to “the misguided twist”, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'm of the opinion the film had one villain too many)

How does this relate to biopics specifically? Well, accuse me of judging films by their trailers if you must, but I've found biopics are more likely than not to be “safer” experiences, which means they are much more likely to fall into this kind of trap. But there's another reason as well. A reason related to the whole selling point to biopics in the first place.

“Based on a true story” is one of those phrases that can get people rolling their eyes. It's frequently meaningless, relying on names that might be recognized even if the true stories aren't. The Wind Rises, for example, takes very large liberties with its main character, Jiro Horikoshi that it's easier to read that particular film more about the nature of art and those who make it than a serious look at an engineer's life as war approaches (it also does the thing people decried Patch Adams for, introducing a fictional love interest and then killing her off, though Patch Adams had other problems as well). These “true stories” are naturally placed at the climax of the movie; people don't want to see Apollo 13 land back on Earth and then NASA faffing about for another forty-five minutes, they want to know if they landed in the first place. But with enough public knowledge, the tension of these movies is killed in the scripting process. People know how the story ends, so when movies like First Man ask, “Does Neil Armstrong land on the moon?” the audience knows they're in for a waste of time.

The solution, therefore, is to move the goalposts a bit. Again with First Man, the goal of the third act is to provide closure for Neil Armstrong's two major relationship conflicts: he and his wife and he and his daughter. It doesn't particularly work, as the daughter subplot is more or less dropped for over an hour until the final scenes make it relevant again, but it's a good try. Movies like Hidden Figures miss this, so when John Glenn finally goes up, the movie wastes ten minutes pretending he might not come down.

Look, I get it. I get why people like these movies. They can be really sweet stories and my heart's not entirely black just yet. Heck, I enjoyed a lot of these movies I mentioned here, even some of the ones I disparaged. But to get fully into a picture, I want to see some spark of creativity shining through, and it's very easy for biopics to not, so I tend to avoid them.

-F

Late

Yeah, that promise to get a post out on Friday over at NSS Reviews didn’t really go so well, did it? There are excuses I could give, reasons that I only managed to get a review of Roma up four days after I said I would, but what I’d rather look at is my mentality going into that weekend.

I kind of alluded to this last week: there was always a “this is probably going to fail” mentality with regards to NSS Reviews. All the reasons it might have failed in my head haven’t happened yet, but I the fact that it was my opening mental state was probably not the right headspace to be in. There wasn’t a good solution to the obstacles that came up that particular Friday, but there certainly were opportunities between then and a few hours ago in regards to getting something, anything, written up.

Deadlines are important to me. I mean, they do make nice wooshing sounds as they fly by (thanks, Douglas Adams), but if they’re hard enough -- that is, if I’m not the only one holding myself to them -- then I can be disciplined enough to keep them. That’s why this blog has lasted as long as it has, my brother blog, Secret Asian Man and I have continued to trade off days and sometimes I get to lord it over him when he misses a day or two. And because I know how bad I get when that happens, I definitely don’t want that happening to me in return.

But on the other hand, I do like how my Roma review eventually turned out, and it’s certainly because of that extra time that I managed to put it together. I mean, I’m sure I’ll hate it eventually as I develop my structure and its flaws make themselves more apparent, but right now I’m happy with it. So I don’t know.

I’m still going to try for Friday, but hey, maybe a few days here or there won’t hurt anyone. But like I said last week, it’s always going to be Tuesday or bust over here.

-F

Introduction (Part Three)

So.

I said in my last blog post that I had a resolution in mind for this coming year and now, a week later, I guess I have to actually put it in action.

NSS Reviews

It’s no secret that I’ve been trying to enjoy films where I can this past year, but this year I want to make a more concerted effort at it. I’ve also found myself wanting to talk more about the movies I’ve been seeing and sometimes that can be difficult days or weeks or months after my initial viewing, so I also wanted to try my hand at formally reviewing them.

I should note here that I’m not saying “formally” like I’ll be trying to wade through academia to try and produce a reading. The style will probably be similar to my Raindrops and Roses posts, maybe mixed with some sort of outline I’ll crib from somewhere else. “Formally” is just a single word for “Instead of talking everybody’s ears off about them, I’ll just write about them here and then talk everybody’s ears off about them.”

I don’t expect posts there to go at the same weekly rate that posts here do. Like, they’ll probably start that way just to get myself into the rhythm doing them, but if something goes south in other parts of my life, watching movies is probably going to get cut from a list of activities, and after that, well, so would the blog. So maybe this is less a “dare” like I alluded to before and more that classic resolution style where you make it to the end of January and never do it again. But I did want to give it a try. 

I’ve scheduled the first post to appear on Friday. After that, who knows?

-F