Let’s start at the very beginning

A very good place to start

I start my blog week with Julie Andrews’ voice in my head. A very nice voice to hear. I’m also going to begin my blog week with beginnings.

Recently, I heard an aspiring screenwriter use the term inciting incident so reverently that I thought she had found the holy grail. Then I realized that she was just trying to sound writerly.

An inciting incident in a play or movie is the moment when the whole thing gets moving. The conflict is introduced. The goals of the protagonist are laid out. The inciting incident is all very precise and mathematical.

Aspiring writers are usually very good at having the inciting incident happen quickly then giving us a lot of pages of gobbelygook.

Gobbelygook is my term for time-filling writing.

When I went to writing school, we didn’t talk about the inciting incident. We just talked about the beginning. We also called it the start.

In sports, the start is very obvious. It’s the first pitch or the starting bell or buzzer or flag. The contest is happening. Action movies usually have a definite starting bell; then it’s on, and we’re in for two hours of some excellent sound editing.

However, not all plays are contests. To begin a play, you just gotta get some characters out on a stage. However, sometimes they don’t want to leave the backstage. Characters can be so difficult sometimes.

Wouldn’t it be great to start the play before the audience showed up? Just start in an empty theatre, then the audience shows up and has to figure things out.

However, in LA, the audiences would want to know when the start before the start is, so they can have access to the play. In LA, it’s all about the access.

 At lunch yesterday the subject of Seth Godin came up. My friend had read his book “The Dip.” He is quoted by J.D. Meier (who works at Microsoft and leads project teams on Agile project. He has authored several technical books.) He said, “Seth Godin is an author, an agent of change, a meaning maker, and an Idea Merchant.”

 The “agent of change” interested me.  I was reminded of  when Obama threw his hat into the presidential race; and the buzz word was “change.”  And when he finally got into office there was a collosal global rush of air that was released like a when you’ve held your breath for too long.

 It seems to me we are all agents of change when we consider the list of heroic acts of people who have changed situations:  Egyptians protested against the 30 year reign of Mubarak; 3 women are the recent recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for being full participants in peace building work in the most war-torn countries; and then there are the ongoing protests against the financial institutions across the world in support of the “Occupy Wall Street Movement”.

 “Do people really change?” I asked my friend.  He said, “Naw, some people do change, but the vast majority don’t. And those people that do change are never truly comfortable in their new skin. Even when people are like “Oh, you’ve changed”, it’s like “No, I’m finally able to be myself”. Like The Scorpion and the Frog.  This is who you are, deal with rock and roll.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog.

What brings about change? What would force anyone to change their direction and ways? Another friend described a questionnaire he had to fill out at a medical office and he was surprised at some of the psychological questions such as “Have you ever thought about suicide?”  Shocking at first, but after thinking about it I wondered if anyone can honestly admit they have not thought about death.  Yes to consider suicide is something deeply wounding, but considering suicide for the clinical and objective curiousity of it.  (The story line of the movie “Kissed”  is about a a child’s romantic ideals about death, and how it turns to necrophilia, and the study of embalming, and finally affecting her relationship with a man who kills himself so she could love him in his death state.)

 If there is any agent of change that is powerful and lasting I’d vote death as the winner. I wear a pendant made from a tusk of a Wooly Mammoth that was unearthed in the Northwest Territories of Canada. It has been carved into a skull. I wear it most times (even to work.) It’s a reminder to me of change, and acceptance of the nature of death and dying. My whacky point of view is that it is life that kills you. When I think about that pendant and its source I think that death brings me life, because it makes me aware of the finiteness of time as perceived in the living form; and how we cling to permanence such as our ideologies, practices, philosophies and our niches and fetishes that gives us identity.

 Our identity is perceived as valuable, and we attach idenfication cards as a means of giving us form: driver’s license; passports, social security numbers. There is now the crime of “identity theft”. I can name a few forms of identity change of hands: stealing dead peoples’ identity for collecting welfare benefits; stealing peoples’ financial data; FBI’s witness protection program; identical twins playing pranks on people.

 How we change internally and externally changes our identity and how we relate to the external world and how we feel about ourselves; this incorporates a change in attitude towards ourselves, how treat ourselves and how others will treat us. It’s so reciprocative.  People go for hypnosis sessions to change habits. People pay lots of money to get nose jobs, boob jobs and lifts and tucks. People will still lose their advantage over their willpower and binge on sweets. When the masses overturn the oligarchy in Wall Street what “new” face will sit in the executive board room? Are we bound to repeat our history based on DNA and our conditioning?

  “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” – Steve Jobs

 But he did preview that with:

  “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.  Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs

Bringing it all home, what is it in practice for me? The smallest and simplest thing makes so much difference. I hate to say that I will probably still hit the snooze button tomorrow morning. But I’m still hoping not to, and that will be like letting out that breath of air I’ve held too long.  Follow my heart…  Do what matters…There is no formula…

I will close with a couple of Bruce Lee quotes:

• Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, soul and senses, but the opening of all human capacities – thought, feeling, will – to the life rhythm of the world of nature. So will the voiceless voice be heard and the self be brought into harmony with it.
• Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and nothing is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you’ll be flexible to change with the ever changing. Open yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the total openness of the living moment. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo. 

Working in an office there is the cycle of the highs, the lows and the flatliners during during the week. Some of you can relate to the mood patterns as it transitions from Monday Blues to TGIF – Happy Friday! Comic strips, I find, are best at depicting the reality of the workplace.

Credit to Tatsuya Ishida

So today is Tuesday, near the end of the day, and I’m between tasks. I can’t quite get up my excitement to start the next task, so I hang out with the mailroom guy for a wacky conversation to give me a fresh insight on life. (Pretending to “work” at my desk when I’m really checking my email or doing personal research can sometimes feel empty unless I can do it with full permission from my manager (not likely to happen.)) I walk into the mailroom and my buddy looks up. “What’s a five letter word for a mountain?” “Ararat”, I said. He plugs it into his “Nook”, and he’s happy, “Hey that worked!” I hung out a little longer as I too was happy to be doing something interactive with somebody, instead of being in my head doing “design work”.We get a few more words together doing team work. Then I take my leave as my conscience beckons me to go back to my desk and start the new task. Argh… resistance. I don’t want to go into the ivory towers yet. It’s too lonely. It’s too hard. I want fun.

I shake my myself mentally to wake up! “What matters now?” How does what’s happening outside these four walls affect me? I feel so insulated often working in my little world (which is actually scary because I swear I’ve become less intelligent that my skills and knowledge is like this solid single tap root about computer acronyms and methodologies that noone outside of my co-workers really care to know about. As an IT person I’m the one who makes the business users successful. I am like the elf that makes the toys so Santa can give them away and make the kids happy; or the the person operating the lights and sounds on the stage to hi-light the mood of the situation on the stage.)

Then I hone in on my sense of smallness and the fear of it, and it leads me to a discovery. “Wow, this is how Paul feels.” (Paul is a character in my play.) My curiousity and interest in working on the play again is re-awakened. I’m like a child again full of “Wow!” These characters are real. “Wow!” I can’t just design them like a stick figure. They have skeletons and muscles, a nervous system, and they get all gooey and sticky. Gee, I’ve had it wrong for awhile to think that I can manipulate these characters. I can only put them into specific conditions and circumstances and observe and record what they say, do and think.

And I know now why I was stuck for awhile, and I was afraid to get back into the ring to fight the battle. I was already trying to manipulate the outcome of the encounter.   And this is countered by another awesome quote from Bruce Lee:

 

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment. – Bruce Lee.

 

The tools being all my senses especially my heart so that I can write truthfully instead of from the head. I was trying to “figure out” the outcome of the play, when it’s an organic living story, because it is made up of real characters of my imagination and heart. Without the heart, the story will be like the manufactured “perfect” apple on display at the window of a furniture store. It’s not the beautiful smelling apple that someone wants to bite into.

And so it is with my office work too. Yes it can get dry with all that heady stuff, but if I design it with heart – with the intent of making something beautifully functional for my users then I’ve done my job right.  That’s what matters now (figuratively and literally for me.)  Back to work!

Connecting the dots can only happen by putting rubber to the pavement. For writers it means showing up and putting tracks down on the page regularly – every day, the way a martial artist trains wholly (mentally, physically and spiritually) for the encounter with an opponent. I am going to weave between two great thinkers and doers: Steve Jobs and Bruce Lee.  There are many common threads to their philosophies, and I am hilighting persistence and passion.

The original thought and words about “connecting the dots” came from the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford given by Steve Jobs.  He said,

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html)

I agree with what he said, and I’m adding: in hindsight it’s also important to only dwell briefly on the past, and to continue to improve on the past.

Last week in my activing class there were numerous times when I felt fed up with listening to the self-directed put downs an artist puts upon themselves for not putting in time into their creation work. I’m not so much fed up with hearing about their complaints, but how their words and the feelings resonate in my own life. I heard the stories of the woes spent on distractions such as eating, talking on the phone, surfing the internet, or cleaning the apartment instead of just sitting down and doing the work. “Yes, I know… I know…I do it too. Now tell me something I don’t know.”

I admire the resolute compassion the teacher has for dealing with the situation, because she had the experience and the vision to guide the student to a higher truth. The practice in the class is to have the mentality of “from this moment forward.” This means to get on with it, and stop flagellating yourself with self-defeating thoughts and words. In the quiet of my own thoughts I faced my own defeats. I felt shameful with thoughts of: Where is the authenticity of meaning what you say? Why is the realization of an idea so hard? What road blocks am I putting up over and over?

I scour books on Zen, Psychology, Philosophy, Drama Art, Anthropology, Archaelogy, and the answer is all there but I can not see it or I’m just not ready to see it.

The gap – that lag time between conception and birth. “When is it gonna be?” I ask like a bored and impatient child with the wild mind. Rather organize my life to accommodate as best as possible the art that needs to happen I have a tendency to run away and allow for distractions to trickle into the “important stuff”. Again I recall the practice at the studio (or the dojo in this case) – “from this moment forward”, and it means to let go of the past – the transgressions of not having done the work, and make re-commit to doing better next time. It is wasted energy to flog oneself for opportunity missed. I think John Little describes it pretty well in the book “The Art of Expressing the Human Body” (by Bruce Lee, John Little)

“Lee believed each day brought the opportunity to improve ourselves physically and mentally; we could choose either to seize the moment to take a step closer to maximizing our potential and progress, or to decline the opportunity and thereby stagnate and regress.”

To complain and rehash the past is stagnating. It can become a harmful and addictive pattern to touch that hardened scar over and over without the intention of healing within, and propelling forward. So as artists, we are all vulnerable to be very hard on ourselves when we miss the mark we set for ourselves. So today was not the best for producing any gems. In fact today may was only a hollow image staring back at me.

 (Credit to Authors:  Bruce Lee and John Little of the “The Art of Expressing the Human Body)

 As the martial artist shows up at the dojo practicing that kick 10,000 times so I too must show up at the desk exercising my imagination and strengthening my courage to create. There are many layers to why that is, but among the leaves that fall to the ground, one that reminds me of my purpose as a writer is ‘for the love of it.’ And with that thought I am back to the beginner mind which found joy in the journey I began with 5 years ago.

Charles McNulty, of the L.A. Times, in an article about Nicholas Hytner, the director of Britain’s National Theatre, said that he believes that much of our theater is a result of “the crabbed and cowering bottom-line mentality that is turning far too many of our theaters into the equivalent of generic shopping malls,” and although I think that’s harsh, I have often thought that if I had to see yet another production of The Odd Couple (“It’s Neil Simon. It will sell!”) I would think first about wading far out into the Pacific with a brick in my hand.

Community theaters, in particular, are accused of producing only chestnuts, farces, musicals and murder mysteries.

This year, Theatre Palisades decided to buck the trend. A community theater in the Pacific Palisades, it mounted an excellent production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning drama Rabbit Hole.

Elizabeth Marcellino of the Palisades Post gave it a rave review. Under the headline, Theatre Palisades Delivers Great Drama, she wrote “Theatre Palisades took a risk in staging the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole, but that daring paid off as early as opening night, when the cast delivered an astonishingly strong ensemble performance. …Rabbit Hole is cause for celebrating the fact that Pacific Palisades has a local theatre able to put up such a great production, charging only $20 for the privilege of watching terrific theatre. Go see it.”

But people didn’t come. The theater advertised in the community and online. It offered half price tickets, twofers. Members of Sold Out Crowd and Theater Extras didn’t come. It didn’t pull Goldstar and LA Stage Alliance customers. People from the community stayed away. Theater members didn’t come.

Subscribers said, “Can I use my ticket for the next show?” One said, “Tell me this is good. My husband is in the car and doesn’t want to come in.” Several women said that their husbands wouldn’t come.

And everybody tried to figure out why.

Some thought it was because the economy is in such bad shape. People are struggling and they want to be lifted out of reality, want to hear about happy times. They want to laugh. It’s not a new thought. Last week, I heard actors rehearsing the next show, a comedy, Moonlight and Magnolias, by Ron Hutchison. One character was shouting, “People go to the movies because real life stinks.” There’s some truth in that.

I think that the subject matter kept people away, a subject that has nothing to do with economic hard times. As soon as people heard that it was about a family’s recovering from the accidental death of a four year old child, they balked, saying “We have enough sorrow in our lives. Why look for more?” “That’s too intense for me.”

Initially, I didn’t want to see it. I’d read it and thought it was very well written, with great parts for actors, but I didn’t know if I wanted to watch people in such pain. When I did attend, I was very moved, sometimes to laughter as well as tears, and went to see it again. In fact, most who saw it liked it very much. One audience member said, “Keep doing this kind of theater.” Subscribers who did attend also wrote to say how glad they were that they had come.

Go figure.

It was a tough morning today, I alternated between crying and trying not to cry. In the scheme of things, this is fairly small, but still.

A few years ago I wrote several articles for eHow.com, which is owned by Demand Media. I was paid a modest weekly amount and expected to churn out 10 articles a week. After cranking out 70 articles, I and another writer complained. We proposed paying us per article instead of a flat rate because to make the rate be better than minimum wage, you really had to whip out the how-to article in half-hour – and that was REALLY tough. The company’s response? They let both of us go (and kept the non-complainers).

The upside of all of this was I would get royalties (hooray) on each article, depending on how many people viewed it. So for a few years, I was getting a bit of cash deposited into my PayPal Account from Demand Media (I’m talking $25 – $40 a month, but still, it adds up).

A year and a half ago, I got a letter from Demand Media stating they were ending the royalty program. I could get a one time payout (a modest amount) and leave the articles up on their site or take them elsewhere. I chose to take the payout and figured I could still enjoy the whoo hoo factor of having my by-line out there.

Imagine my surprise / dismay / rage / betrayal today when I happened to look up one of my old articles and there, instead of my byline, was someone else’s. Apparently this other writer (who goes by the moniker “Brainiac” – really??) had “updated” the article this past May and now his or her byline is on MY article. I looked through the article, it’s still mine – I’m not even sure what the heck Brainiac changed. I’m sure in the piece of paper I signed I gave up the rights to my articles, but this is still wrong.

I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the heart by some thief’s pen. Yes, I’ve written a complaint to eHow. Their email address is [email protected]. I’m not feeling very zen about this at all.

The LA Times featured a brief interview with theatre director Michael Matthews on September 21st. He’s the director of the current production at The Celebration Theatre, What’s Wrong with Angry?

This caught my eye:  he said in college, he and his classmates were given this exercise to do for every show they directed –

1. Describe in 10 words or less what happens in the play
2. In 10 words or less tell what the play is about
3. Then in 10 words or less tell what the play means to you

I thought these were great questions for writers, too.  Enjoy!