writing

If you are like me - and I know I am - then you know that when the creative urge strikes, it doesn't always come hand-in-hand with ideas. You know you want to do...SOMETHING... but have no idea what that thing is. Much like the adrenaline high of a sudden scare which leads nowhere, the creative juices which were so powerful in the morning sit unused, and gradually sour into an afternoon of sitting fatassedly on the couch, watching television.

While browsing through Wikipedia the other day in the grip of post-urge ennui, I realized that the "On this day..." link on the right side of Wikipedia's main page is a treasure trove of disparate events, united by the theme of having happened on this particular date, offset by a certain number of years. What if someone was to take a random-ish handful of the events which happened on a day, and from them construct a story, or a poem, or the plot to an adventure game? I tend to look at things through the lens of a semi-practicing Buddhist, so the idea of cycles and recurrence appeals to me, and the filter of requiring a specific date makes the data set manageable - it provides the constraint which helps stave off the onset of option paralysis.

Putting this idea into practice, look at the page for September 25. A lot happened on this date in history. Here is a (very) small sample:

275-Tacitus becomes Emperor of Rome.
1513-Balboa reaches the Pacific Ocean.
1775-Ethan Allen surrenders to the British.
1789-Creation of the Bill of Rights.
1972-Norway rejects membership of the European Union.
2008-China launches the spacecraft Shenzhou 7.

Fletcher Christian was born in 1764, Lu Xun in 1881, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1969.

Johannes Secundus died in 1536, Pope Clement VII in 1534, and George Plimpton in 2003.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT!!!

But you can see where I am going with this. Narrative frameworks could be constructed which follow specific threads or sub-filters of the information on that page - say, only the events which are political in nature, or only the deaths of artists, or only the births which happened in years evenly divisible by 10. Start with a set of disjointed data. Apply an arbitrary filter. Come up with a loose narrative which allows for a significant number of the events in the filtered set. Apply a second filter. Tighten the narrative. A third filter. Now the narrative either falls apart, or contains within it the seeds of a story.

While it can be difficult to pull a complete story out of such an exercise, it can provide the seed of something much more complex. Or, perhaps there is a poem somewhere in the mix. Or the framing story of a game. Or even a film script.

At its simplest, constructing a coherent story from such an arbitrary list of data is a good thought experiment. With National Novel Writing Month starting in a few days this could be the seed of something amazing.

Today I wrote my first movie review.

One of the big, ongoing projects at work is development on Spout.com, a movie discovery and discussion website. Several of my friends are regulars, so I finally bowed to peer pressure and created an account for myself. My user name is “Grasshopper”.

The first thing I did was to rate all of the movies I had seen. Simple enough to do…find the movie, and assign it a number between one and five. Before I knew it, I had rated over five hundred movies, and I am now up over a thousand. And that isn’t even counting all of the TV series’ and individual television episodes which can be rated; those would probably push me into the 2000 range.

Normally I try not to shill for the projects I work on, but this time something unexpected happened: I had fun. I went through and found movies I hadn’t thought about in twenty years or more. Some of them were good, many more were mediocre or bad. Some of them made me feel quite nostalgic, accompanied by an odd sense of deja-vu wherein I could remember where I was and what I was doing when I watched the movie. Poltergeist with my brother and step-brother in Louisiana. Robocop with my brother, at home laying on the living room floor. The Crow with friends immediately after I returned from Russia. Star Wars with my Mom and brother in a movie theater in Jackson. The Razor’s Edge, sitting home surrounded by stacks of books.

Martial Arts is the only film genre I watch with a seriously critical eye, and I watch a lot of martial arts films. If I post a review of which I am particularly proud I will announce it here. In the meantime, browse around and see if you rediscover any old favorites.