Abridged

When I was really sick a couple weeks ago, I finally watched Dragon Ball Z Abridged.

Not even sure why I did it. I can't remember how I landed on it. And you know what? It was really good.

I don't have a lot of experience with these abridged series. I've only seen clips here and there, and usually what I've seen is a bunch of chaos, memes, and non-sequiturs. And yes, while there was some of that, what surprised me was how the series really kept to the core story, only making modifications when it would speed things along , or to make a critical point about the original series. (I mean let's face it, DBZ takes forever. Even DBZ knows that DBZ takes forever, which is why they made Kai.)

What surprised me more than anything was the emotional weight it had. They understood the important beats of the storyline and made me manage to feel things about what was going on, even though it was a parody, even though I already knew what was going to to happen in the story. It had its own internal consistency, it's own modified world building, it's own characterizations. Maybe they weren't fully three-dimensional characters, but they were at least 2.5.

In some ways I almost feel like it was ahead of its time. Some of the same fourth wall bending humor and the characters not taking themselves very seriously reminds me of the current MCU style.

In any case, it was a pleasant surprise.

At the same time I was finishing up Dragon Ball Z Abridged, I also started subscribing to a service called Blinkist. Blinkist is a service that takes nonfiction books and podcasts and condense them down to their core ideas. It's like reading those non-fiction books, but they cut out all of the inspirational fluff and meandering stories. Which honestly, I don't really mind that part of it sometimes, but the frustrating thing I find about books like that is that I can never find points when I need to go back to them. I'm sure it's intentionally designed that way, to make sure you read the whole book, but Blinkist keeps everything organized.

I've even gone through some Blinks (that's what they call them) of books that I have already read and found them to be pretty accurate and useful. It's nice, because I'm always trying to get new ideas, new perspectives, new techniques on how to improve myself as a person and as a creative individual. But I definitely don't have time to read all of those books, and I definitely don't have a budget to purchase them all in audio form.

I'm not sure what lesson there is to gain out of any of us. It is interesting though that I seem to be surrounded in cutting ideas down to their bare essentials.

Clumsy

Everything I write right now feels really clumsy.

It’s an effort to get the words down and I’m mashing the backspace key like I need it to live.

Maybe I’m rusty, or maybe I’m about to grow. When I was a musician, I remember this feeling. My fingers moved when they felt like it. Chord progressions were suddenly an alien language.

It was like a physical manifestation of impostor syndrome.

But then a week or two later, everything would be BETTER than it was before. It was like my brain was just adjusting to improvement.

Really hope it’s the same thing here.

Rebellion

About 5 years ago I ran into a concept called “The Four Tendencies” by writer Gretchen Rubin. The idea was that each person can generally fall into a category of how we respond to external and internal directives. Her observations were that some people, for example, were really good at following directions when somebody else gave it to them, but really bad at it if they gave it to themselves. If you can figure out which of those tendencies you were, you could try to hack your own personality into being more productive, or happier, or well balanced or whatever.

I should note that this is not based in any sort of real psychological research. She's not a doctor or a therapist or anything like that.

Anyway, when I took the tendency test and read the articles associated with it, I came up as “The Rebel.” The idea of the rebel is that they have difficulty listening to the commands of anything outside themselves, and anything inside themselves. Basically, the moment somebody tells me something to do, I don't want to do it. At least, not in the exact way that I was told how to do it. According to Rubin, there's an independent streak in the rebel, so even if they're completely willing to do the task they are given, either by others or by themselves, there's always going to be a tendency to do one part of it just slightly different, or slightly their own way.

I was very fascinated by this angle for a while, but then I saw a real psychiatrist and started thinking about other things.

Still, I wonder if there's something to it. I've been trying to get back to writing my Persona 4/ 5 fanfiction story, and I just couldn't. I was in a part in the overall arc that I didn't really have a strong idea for when I first came up with the thing. It's a big gap in the story, and this happens sometimes to me while I'm writing novels too. When that happens, I just have to buckle down and outline a bunch of stuff until I figure out how to glue the previous sections in the next section that I already know how to do.

So I spent about an hour and a half one morning going through all the lead up, figuring out where I wanted to go next, and then outlining it. That was exactly what I needed to get back on track, and I've been regularly posting on that story again.

And then this morning, I wrote a portion of the story that was not something I outlined, or something that I had planned for. I was struck with the idea at a whim, and just started typing it out.

I'm happy with what I wrote, and I totally posted it, but I still found myself going “Why am I like this?” Why did I spend all that time carefully outlining every single step, only to throw it completely off by the third time I sat down to write?

Now, as I'm walking the dog, I started thinking about that Four Tendancy thing again, and wonder if there is a part of me that has to rebel against what I'm told, even if I'm the one that told myself. It's an extremely annoying habit , and one of the reasons, most outlining systems don't work for me. The minute I've decided how a story supposed to go, I feel compelled to not do it in that way. Sometimes that's a good thing, resulting in a really interesting, creative twists from what I was going to do. Or sometimes it just results in me not doing anything on that project at all.

There's always been a piece of me that loves the improvisational. I mean I was a jazz major after all, and the podcast is basically a large exercise and improvisation. I used to be a 100% "pantser” as a writer, but then I got frustrated with how long it took me to get anything done. I've tried to become more and more outline base, more on schedule, on track, productive.

But maybe I'm just delaying the inevitable. If I'm just going to buck every outline I make, is there a point in doing it? I don't know.

The Creative Pep Talk podcast the other day was talking about Taika Watiti’s tendency to write something, then leave it behind for a few years, then go back and tackle it again. I used to write like that. My rule was right, a novel, write another one, then go back and edit the first one. Heck, Heart and Soul Fist was the result of me going back and finding a story I had written 7 years prior.

So is that the true methodology of who I am as a creative person? Output output output whatever comes to mind, toss it in the metaphorical drawer, and then bring it back to life later?

Is it better to embrace your natural tendency, or train and mold yourself into something different?

Unrealistic Characters

My Guardian of the Two Worlds series is about a girl named Jane who is caught between trying to be a normal teenager and living a “secret” life of her family’s clan of fighting dangerous spirits.

But the most unrealistic thing about my books isn’t the anime-like martial arts and superpowers, or the Miyazaki-Last Airbender-esque spirits floating around. It’s that the teens communicate with extreme clarity and emotional vulnerability.

And it’s not just to “that one person who gets me” - Jane is open, vulnerable, and direct to her family, her friends, her romantic interests, and even her enemies. And whenever she isn’t, there’s some sort of issue or fallout that arises from it that is usually only able to be resolved by returning to open and honest communication.

I know it’s not “accurate” or “realistic.” I’ve been working with teenagers for years. But it is an intentional choice for them to do that because I want the characters to model what we should all strive to do in our relationships. I mean heck, let’s be honest, most adults don’t even communicate like that. But it would be better if we did.

My hope is that Jane - or at least how she handles her relationships - can be aspirational.

Refinement: Chris the Author

Some of you know the story: I wrote my first “novel” when I was 15. 118,000 words, most of it just a jumble of Star Wars and Final Fantasy 7.

When I think about why I did it, I can never come up with a conclusive answer. I think saying “I was compelled” or “I had to do it” feels a little disingenuous, since it makes it sound like a mystical calling. But the reality is, I didn’t have a reason to do it other than I wanted to. Took me about 9 months.

I started writing in earnest in 2007. I had some query interests in 2009 and 2010. In 2011 I was fired from my publishing job and ended up going back to school for teaching. I didn’t do a lot of writing post 2012, which was my first (and most difficult) year of working in education and the year my son was born.

I stopped writing for a while, figuring I didn’t have the time or energy anymore. I started the podcast in 2014…or 2015, I can never remember (and the date on the podcasts are wrong because it changed when we moved servers.) In 2018, a student of mine read my novel and was angry at me that I had stopped writing and demanded i resume. I wrote what would be the first draft of Heart and Soul Fist in March of 2018 in about 30 days flat, though it would take much longer to rewrite and revise it to where it is today.

In 2020, I published Heart and Soul Fist, I wrote I Summoned a Ghost to be My Girlfriend. I wrote Spirits of Summer after that and published it in 2021.

I’ve joined classes, read newsletters, subscribed to communities. I’ve paid a lot of money to people to get my writing analyzed, critiqued, and improved.

I’ve written millions of words.

I obviously like doing it.

So why does the idea of “being an author” make me uncomfortable?

—

Earlier this year, I read a book about Self-Publishing for Money. I’ve read like three of them, so I can’t remember which one I’m thinking of right now. It honestly doesn’t matter, the content of all these books is basically the same.

In order to be commercially successful, you have to write what sells, not necessarily write what you want.

Of course, there’s a compromise in there. You can write things you want to write in an area that sells and have the best of both worlds. Then, the advice goes, you can write that weird thing you wanted to write once your audience is established.

This advice always gets me tied up because while I love Heart and Soul Fist and the characters and world and the stories, I know it’s “too weird” to ever hit commercial success in a way that I would want to. It no longer fits in the current YA mold, and honestly I think post-COVID the story feels…disconnected. Like the story is out of time and old. Irrelevant.

So maybe I should drop it. Or at least, postpone it.

This then rubs against the advice that you should finish a series. But do you finish a series that isn’t commercially viable? Isn’t that just sunken time when I could be writing something else that would bring me closer to the dream of “professional creative”?

Maybe all of this is just fear. Fear that if I try to write something that fits more clearly into genre conventions that it’ll fail, and then I won’t have an excuse as to why I couldn’t make a career. I would just be a bad writer who has spent 23 years thinking he was better than he was.

—

I’m working on something more genre-convention. It’s very Mandalorian-inspired, with a touch of Elden Ring. it’s basically the story of a Knight slaying dragons - both literal and figurative. I’m currently using EVERY SINGLE TOOL I know to prep it.

I think I just have to do it. I have to try and write it and see what happens when I do.

What do you think?

Refinement and the wisdom of Qui-Gon

During one of my recent day-job trainings, there was this quote about stating a mission that’s really clung onto me. The gist of it is that you need to repeat what your mission over and over in order to refine it and make it clear to yourself and to everyone else.

I guess it’s kind of a less “woo woo” way of thinking about “manifesting” something in the universe. If you’re at all familiar with the concept of “The Secret,” apparently you’re supposed to just “put what you want out there” and the resonance of the universe somehow materializes a million dollars or something. I don’t put any faith behind that idea, but I do think that there’s truth in the idea that what you’re concentrating on is going to cause you to achieve goals because…well, you’re concentrating on them.

I think this can be best summarized by my favorite bit of “Star Wars wisdom” which comes from a throwaway line in Episode I: The Phantom Menace when Qui-Gon says to Obi-Wan “your focus determines your reality.”

This post feels a little rambly, but what I’m trying to get at is that I need to start refining what the mission of my creative “career” is. What I do right now is really fun - just doing whatever the heck I feel like whenever I want to. But in reality, it’s not going to generate any more money or influence. Not that anyone reading this needs to always feel like their creative works or journey should be in that constant elusive pursuit of “professionalism” but…I can’t let it go. I’ve tried, but I can’t.

So if I can’t let it go, then I should try to take it a little more seriously. I have the skills, but I don’t have “the mission” which determines the focus. I once wrote a Medium article saying that my mission was “writing positive things for teens” or something, but I don’t think I’m there, anymore. I think COVID took that out of me, though I’m not sure why (something worth thinking about, I suppose.)

So…who do I want to create for? And why? What benefit is it to the world?