Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

I stumbled into the New Year in an antihistamine haze, zoning out to historical Korean costume dramas with honey lemon ginseng tea and a packet of saltines. I dimly noted the coming of 2012 around 10pm, but forgot about it until Sweetie suddenly came in and planted a big kiss on me for no apparent reason.

Since I've been spending most of the past week watching things written by screenwriters who must literally open up the Big Book of Clichés and pick at random to hobble together successful movies and TV shows, I've seen a lot of kisses. Given the general kissing theme of the New Year, I thought I'd start off my posts this year with a short advice column on the variations of these kisses, and how to use them effectively in storytelling:

"Shut Up" Kisses
Characters can't resolve their issues properly, or your dialogue just sounds weak? No problem...just cut it all out and go straight to the heavy petting. The Shut Up Kiss is an all-purpose device that can be employed in both cutesy and dramatic situations, and instantly fixes any irritating lumps in relationship dynamics. I've personally seen several couples communicate with this strategy, and they lasted almost up to half a year.

Angry Kisses
A variant of a Shut Up Kiss, an Angry Kiss stops an argument or rant (often tearful) with passionate lip-locking. It is the final snap of the tension in the sexual rubber band, if you will. TVTropes.org dubs this the "Slap-Slap-Kiss", though I would expand it away from mere affection-induced hostilities to also include cheap shortcuts used to hook up characters who pop up out of nowhere. In most cases, the slaps are figurative, but if the female lead is a supermodel detective, secret agent, or sword-wielding princess a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you should also throw in a couple of literal ones as a five-minute work up.

Rape-Is-Fun Kisses
I would consider the Rape-Is-Fun Kiss as an excellent S&M derivative of an Angry Kiss for situations involving especially pretty villains or anti-heroes. Simply pin your heroine to a wall, floor or couch and force her to submit to your hero's pure love to set modern audiences' hearts aflutter. For tips, see the international sensation Hana Yori Dango, in which the heroine is bullied, stalked, kidnapped, and ultimately chased terrified through the dark halls of an empty school by her hot, rich tormenter. Yet, she still has the admirable spunk to observe that while being crushed physically and psychologically was a bit rough, his kiss was warm and tender. Happy endings abound.

Comfort Kisses
Character A is hysterical with grief, which Character B fixes instantly by coming on to Character A. Think about Spock in the 2009 Star Trek movie. Obviously, since Vulcans have the repressed passion of a thousand Heathcliffs and Uhura belongs on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine, the first thing he would want to do after his home planet implodes in a time-paradox-inducing tragedy is to make out with her in an elevator. If you're writing a horror movie, your couple should also start taking their clothes off for a romp minutes after lunatics/ghosts/flesh-eating-viruses have dismembered their friends.

Otherwise Uncomfortable Kisses
If tears streaming down your face makes for a bad round of tonsil hockey, turn them into torrential rain for maximum discomfort. Better yet, tumble down in frostbite-inducing snow, perch atop a windy mountain with hair and skirts whipping everywhere, or get sticky substances all over you first. Mud, potter's clay, exploded Coca-Cola...all fair game. Nothing makes you want to touch other people more than seeing them covered in germs and goo.

In sum, you can make your kisses exciting by following these three simple rules: 1) Consent is boring. 2) Comfortable is boring. And 3) If anyone would want to follow your scene through in real life, you're doing it wrong.

Happy New Year!

I consider myself a pretty smart person. I can spell most words I know without looking them up. I'm mildly proficient in three or four different (though all C-based) programming languages. Free tests around the Internet tell me I have an IQ in the 140s because I can unscramble words and perform basic math. Of course, they also tell me that if I were a Pokémon, I would be a Bulbasaur, which is patently ridiculous. I am obviously a Torchic.

Despite my indisputable brilliance, I regularly do dumb things. The other day I used the wrong tool to open a bottle of sparkling apple cider. I slipped into the sharp aluminum cap and cut myself. A better, more stable bottle opener lay on the counter next to me, so what did I do? I tried to use the wrong tool again, and again, until I had three now-infected gashes on my forefinger.

There's no symbolism to this mundane anecdote; it is simply an illustration of my surprising propensity for stupidity. And it doesn't stop at temporary lapses of judgment in my choice of kitchen utensil. Even if I work very, very hard on something over many months, I can make errors that, in retrospect, were so glaringly obvious that I would have laughed if someone else was responsible.

For my big semester project in Human-Computer Interaction this year, my group designed a game to teach college students about cooking healthily on a budget. I was in charge of the central game play, in which the player would buy ingredients and practice recipes in a virtual kitchen. To obtain ingredients, the hypothetical player would open the magic refrigerator, select and "purchase" foods with limited funds, much as they would any e-store in real life. To place ingredients into a bowl or appliance, the player would click and drag icons around the screen. It was all very intuitive...until they had to perform actions on those ingredients.

Imagine standing in your kitchen, looking at a bowl of dough, and shouting, "Rise! Rise!" Because that is essentially what I was asking the player to do in this design. But despite hours of group discussion, tweaking the prototypes in AI, and reviewing basic HCI principles to produce this idea, I didn't realize how ridiculous the approach was until I put printouts in the hands of college students and asked for feedback. Obviously, you don't make dough rise by telling it to rise. You don't flatten it by telling it to "Roll Out," either. You seize a rolling pin and wrestle with the dough until it assumes the shape you want. Any five year-old could tell you that.

Now this mundane anecdote does have symbolism: it's analogous to the review process in writing. Even in my light, slang-laced adolescent trifle, I have some iota of pride about representing realistic people and scenarios. I finished my first manuscript, read it over for typos, and packaged it up to show to "beta-readers." Within a few hours, Sweetie had isolated a half-dozen typos and plot holes I thought I had sewn up water-tight. He had a very negative reaction to a love interest I had intended to be cute and charming, who upon reflection would make me run screaming for the police instead of giving me the warm fuzzies. Full scene rewrites were obviously required.

But the flaws would never have been obvious if I hadn't briefly considered the possibility that I am not perfect. After all, I'd spent half a year on this thing. How many times had I pored over it with a fine-toothed comb for errors? I was even confident enough to send it off to my PhD-holding mother for a stamp of approval (or at least a stamp of: "It was okay; you'll get better with time and maturity").

Everyone makes stupid mistakes sometimes. Fortunately, I have people to catch those mistakes before I broadcast them to the rest of the planet.

Edit: Upon reading this post, Sweetie informs me that the last line sounds cheesy. I am changing it to read, "And they lived happily ever after. The End."

A lot of people participated in the writing marathon in November dubbed NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The "challenge" is to write a 50,000 word book in one fell blow—no stopping to think or edit, no catering to your daily moods, just devoting yourself to putting words on the page each evening no matter what. Now the blogs are ablaze with tips for the NaNoWriMo "hangover:" how to edit, how to deal with burnout, how to wrangle your giant brainstorming session into something somewhat decent.

Maybe some people work best this way, spitting out whatever enters their heads without worrying about grammar or quality until they've put their ideas in black and white. Personally, I think it's a terrible way to go. Why? Because we humans are a try-it-and-see-what-happens type of species. We almost never make the best decisions the first time around.

Think about how other products are made—a software program, for example. Imagine what happens if a development team comes together with a grain of an idea and says, "Here's the premise, and here's the deadline. Now let's sit down and code code code. Don't waste your time testing as you go along; we'll worry about that after we're done." Well, you don't have to do much imagining, because I can tell you what happens: the company turns out an application so riddled with bugs that a gallon of Raid would do just as much good as the overwhelmed programmers' attempts to fix them all. Then millions of dollars sink down the tubes as a swell of laughter follows the developers out of Silicon Valley.

Now imagine you have forced yourself to write a central chapter, simply because it was November 10th and you had to be at the halfway marker by November 15th. Imagine you had a bad day, or a fight with your beau, or you were just plum out of ideas. Consequently, this chapter sucks. It might not seem like it sucks as you write it, but the next day you find that seminal event that sounded deep and poetic in your head just looks trite on paper. Or worse, you go along in that vein for two weeks of more harried writing before you realize it was a crucial mistake with far-reaching consequences you hadn't anticipated, and you're better off scrapping the whole thing.

"Oh, don't judge yourself yet," your forum friends admonish supportively. "It's against the spirit of NaNoWriMo! Clear your head and just focus on writing, writing, writing." Now you're stuck with it. Your next 20,000 words have to work around that dumb, hasty decision, so you can post to all of your Twitter followers that you "finished the challenge!"

Now, what if you weren't constrained by an arbitrary deadline, and you had allowed yourself to go back and reflect on your work before pushing on? You might have caught your mistakes before they blew up in your face, and you wouldn't have ended up in mid-December with a pile of scrap paper ripe for Christmas kindling.

A good sculptor doesn't just start chipping off marble any which way the spirit moves him, planning to "work out the kinks later." A good chef doesn't just throw any old thing into a pot and send it to the table, assuming he can just add more salt if it doesn't work out. And a good comedy group doesn't just stick to the first gag that enters their heads and schedule the opening night, with the intention to trip on a banana peel for laughs if it falls flat.

But for some reason, writers are encouraged to sink an entire month into dashing off some dribble without critical evaluation. Writing is supposedly "different" from those other professions because we can edit later. But if you blaze through a project with no plan, little tweaks to the wording here and there are not going to salvage it. We're talking massive rewrites, to the point that you might as well have simply started over.

So I believe you're better off, both immediately and in the long run, if you take the time to reassess where you are and where you're going after each burst of production. Challenges like NaNoWriMo might make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but if your goal is to produce 50,000 good words, I would listen to the tortoise over the hare.